@Asalto: Well that is true to a limited extent. While it isn't the wild card that Russia is in the same timeline, National France is to a great extent, one that has much to gain and much to lose if they were to fall apart.
@Everyone else: Thanks for the wishes of luck, here is the Prologue, as promised.
Prologue: Through the Fall of a Nation
The History of the French Fourth Republic can be traced back to the French Third Republic, founded in 1870 after the collapse of the Second French Empire at the hands of the North German Federation and its allies in Sedan.
The Weltkrieg (known by its contemporaries as the Great War) began in 1914 for France when the Germans declared war, fearing encirclement and seeking to avoid fighting a long and protracted conflict on two fronts, a deal which failed spectacularly at the Battle of the Marne in September 1914. Over the course of the next four years, France fought diligently in a protracted war of attrition alongside the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and the rest of its Empire, as well as the remnants of the Royal Belgian Army against the German Empire.
The Second Battle of Ypres in which the Germans captured the Belgian sailent town.
However, for the Republic, it suffered one setback after another. The Germans achieved a major gain after the 2nd Ypres Campaign in April 1915, as well as causing significant and devastating casualties despite losing at Verdun and fighting to a draw in the Somme Offensive. This added to the continuing setbacks when Russia collapsed, and Czar Nicholas II abdicated and the Bolshevik Revolution overthrew the Transitional Government, plunging the state into Civil War in 1917-1918.
The Entente decided to launch a massive offensive in the west before the Germans could commit its troops from the Eastern Front to crush them. To this end, the Entente’s “Great Western Offensive” began in March 1918 which would involve a simultaneous offensive on what was considered to be the five weakest points of the Hindenburg Line, intending to outflank and crush much of the German Army, and retake as much land as possible, maybe even forcing the Germans to capitulate.
However, the offensive failed, largely due to three reasons. First, the surprise attack was too large-scale to achieve, and with the use of airplanes for reconnaissance, the Germans were able to figure out the plan. Secondly, the Germans focused on consolidating its gains while preparing for their own offensive against the Entente, and they had the time available to develop sufficient counter-measures against the tanks employed en masse by Britain and France. Finally, the “Great Western Offensive” lacked strategic goals. No clear objective was established before the start of the offensive and as a result, the strategic objective of the offensive changed with the changing situation.
In the end, the 1918 Offensive ended with only the British taking one area with high strategic value, Lille, at the cost of over 800,000 troops.
The majority of Entente casualties were the result of large scale charges against heavily defended territory, whilst gaining ground in areas with little to no strategic importance.
For the French, sentiment at home was not too kind. With the rise of radical Syndicalist sentiments arising in France due to the conduct the war has played, a fact proven later in 1918 with the fall of Salonika and the official surrender of the Entente’s Balkan members, Greece, Serbia, Montenegro and Romania.
Finally after a year of planning, the Germans launched an offensive of their own. Using tactics used in the Salonika Offensive, the Germans broke through the defensive lines, and seized various strategic points. In the span of the month of March 1919 when the offensive started, the Germans took Saint Mihel on the 7th, Nancy on the 16th, Rheims on the 26th and Chateau-Thierry on the 29th. The Entente Armies were far too overstretched to defend their lines and as such the front lines were in total collapse. As was in 1871, Paris was besieged by Germany, whilst Britain was forced to pull its forces out of France. It’s only other ally in the area, Italy, surrendered on August 6, 1919.
Meanwhile, the French Syndicalists launched their own revolution. Paris was now the sight of conflict between the French Government, the Confédération Générale du Travail (General Confederation of Labour) and the German Army. In the end, it was the Germans who assumed victory, the government retreating to the port city of Marseille, and eventually to Algiers in French Algeria. Both governments eventually signed a peace with Germany, confirming Germany’s annexation of Lorraine and recognizing the German Puppet state in Belgium headed by a now branch family of the House of Hohenzollern.
Algiers, circa 1921. Algiers, originally the capital of the French province of Algeria, became the capital of the French government in exile after being forced to leave Metropolitan France.
The French government in exile proclaimed the start of the Fourth Republic, but by 1921, it was clear that the Fourth Republic’s government was run in a matter all too similar with the Third and was either authoritarian or nationalists aligned with those against the state. As a result, the French military seized executive powers and established a military junta headed by Field Marshal Ferdinand Foch.
Upon Foch’s death in 1929, the role as head of the Junta was given to Philippe Petain, the hero of Verdun. However, the French Nationalist government is fractured, divided among the various factions, the military junta, as well as the Young Guard and the royalists and the republicans.
Now the French Nationalists stand alongside the British monarchs in exile in Canada as well as many former British colonies turned independent states in a quest to wrest control of their homelands from the Syndicalist Horde.
The Fires of Liberation has begun.
STATE OF THE NATION: 1936
Nationalist French territory. The government in exile holds control over Algeria and Tunisia in the Maghreb, as well as the territory of French West Africa, in itself divided into 8 provinces: Côte d'Ivoire, Dahomey, French Sudan, Upper Volta, Guinea, Mauritania, Niger and Senegal)
The Cabinet of National France. Petain, at 80 years old, stands as one of the oldest heads of state in France, whilst François Coty, a stanunch anti-Semnite and opponent of the Syndicalists, was also a member of the royalist faction. Many of the cabinet members were on the far-right, in contrast to the extreme-left tendencies of the Syndicalists running the mainland.
