[OOC] Precipice of War - We Write Under The Sign Of The Goat

[The Grey Warden]

I am stuck on how I should do the whole political collapse. Should there be another French Revolution or does that seem overboard?

Why do I always question what I am going to do?

[Vilageidiotx]

That isn't a bad model to work off of, actually. It wouldn't be at the same scale, since tossing a weakened Republic overboard is different than tossing out an entire Ancien Regime aristocracy, but the people marching in the streets of Paris tearing out paving stones and barricading the roads is pretty par for the course as far as French uprisings go.

Don't get too freaked out. Read up, ask questions, and be willing to make mistakes. We'll help you out.

[Dinh AaronMk]

@The Grey Warden @Vilageidiotx

May 1968

[The Grey Warden]

@Dinh AaronMk, thanks for that. I will add it to the folder that I have on information about France.

Since I have taken a good look at it, I have come up with a list of things that I want to add on my history:

The French Revolution of '26 and '27

• Civil unrest surfaces after the war over the losses of soldiers, cost of it, and the long war.
• People are waiting in line for food, soldiers upset at the state of France.
• Women and the elderly now have to work for poor wages, due to the amount of losses.
• A small number of prominent poets and musicians occupied an administration building at Paris University and held a meeting.
• The university's administration called the police, who surrounded the university, and the students left the building without any trouble.
• After that event, conflicts between students and authorities were still going until the university was shut down.
• This causes students at another university to meet to protest against the closure and the threatened expulsion of several students.
• The national student union, the Union Nationale des Étudiants de France (UNEF), and the union of university teachers called a march to protest against the police invasion of the university.
• 20,000 students, teachers and supporters marched towards the university where they met the police force. The police held off the protesters as many were either running or setting up barricades. Hundreds more students were arrested.
• High school student unions spoke in support of the riots and joined the students, teachers and supporters who gathered at the Arc de Triomphe to demand three things.
  
  • All criminal charges against arrested students, teachers, and supporters be dropped.
  • The police leave the universities.
  • And the authorities reopen them.
• False reports that the government reopened the universities surface and the students returned to their campuses only to found out that the police still occupying the schools. The students now have a near revolutionary fervor.
• Another huge crowd congregated on the Rive Gauche. When the Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité again blocked them from crossing the river, the crowd again threw up barricades
• Police attacked the crowd at 2:15 in the morning after negotiations once again floundered. The confrontation, which produced hundreds of arrests and injuries, lasted until dawn of the following day.
• The events were broadcast on radio as they occurred and the aftermath was shown on television the following day.
• The government's heavy-handed reaction brought on a wave of sympathy for the strikers. Many of the nation's more mainstream singers and poets joined after the heavy-handed police brutality came to light. Artists all over the word also began voicing support of the strikers.
• The major left union federations, the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) and the Force Ouvrière (CGT-FO), called a one-day general strike and demonstration.
• Well over a million people marched through Paris on that day; the police stayed largely out of sight. The Prime Minister personally announced the release of the prisoners and the reopening of the university.
• However, the surge of strikes did not recede. Instead, the protesters became even more active.
• When the university reopened, students occupied it and declared it an autonomous "people's university". Public opinion supported the students.
• Workers began occupying factories, starting with a sit-down strike at the Sud Aviation plant. Similar to the students.
• Workers had occupied roughly fifty factories on the first day, and 200,000 were on strike by the next. That figure snowballed to two million workers on strike the following day and then ten million, or roughly two-thirds of the French workforce, on strike the following week.
• The CGT tried to contain this spontaneous outbreak of militancy by channeling it into a struggle for higher wages and other economic demands. Workers put forward a broader, more political and more radical agenda, demanding the ousting of the government and the president attempting, in some cases, to run their factories.
• The Ministry of Social Affairs provided a deal for an increase of the minimum wage by 25% and of average salaries by 10% to the workers. These offers were rejected, and the strike went on. The working class and top intellectuals were joining in solidarity for a major change in workers' rights.
• The meeting of the UNEF, the most outstanding of the events, proceeded and gathered 30,000 to 50,000 people in the Stade Sebastien Charlety. The meeting was extremely militant with speakers demanding the government be overthrown and elections held.
• The Federation of the Democratic and Socialist Left declared that "there is no more state" and stated that they were ready to form a new government. Other parties soon followed.
• The president then suddenly disappears for the public and people said that he left France.
• The national government had effectively ceased to function due to the president's disappearances. The Prime Minister was the whole government as other officials went into panic mode.
• Prime Minister demanded to the military that the president must be found. But, he was found in Germany as he was getting ready to escape there with his family in case revolution does happen.
• 400,000 to 500,000 protesters (many more than the 50,000 the police were expecting) led by the CGT marched through Paris, chanting that the President must leave. The head of the Paris police tried to avoid the use of force; but, he had to as the protesters were attacking the police.
• The movement was largely centered around the Paris metropolitan area, and not elsewhere.
• Soon, they started to occupied a key public building in the heart of Paris. The government had to use force to retake it.
• The resulting casualties started a revolution.
• The Socialist Party and French Communist Party gains public support quickly as the revolution starts.
• Two months of fighting until the president and his family were capture by students, who saw them at one of the airports.
• Soon, more government officials are captured and killed. The president is killed, while his family watches in horror his death.
• Elections are called. The Socialist Party and their president win the election, beating the Communist Party.
• The new president introductions reforms and programs to help out the country.
• The revolution ends when the president gets killed.

This is what I have for now; but, I am going to add in more things. How is it so far?

[Vilageidiotx]

Febuary 1936

Come on everyone, post a French revolution, successful or not!

[Dinh AaronMk]

2005 riots

[Byrd Man]

Also this one.

[Vilageidiotx]

The French Revolution of 1930

@The Grey Warden

If it were me, I would probably move it to '26 or '27 and build it around the immediate effects of the war itself. People waiting in breadlines, soldiers coming home frustrated at the state of their country, a massive drop in the youth population forcing women and the elderly into the workforce for pitiful wages, and a general dissatisfaction at the state of the country. Communists and nationalists carve out large chunks of the population and support for Republicanism falters. Those sorts of things. All the student stuff fits in as well though, just build around it.

This is another thing you might steal ideas from.

[The Grey Warden]

Alright, but what party do you think should of won the revolution?

[Dinh AaronMk]

Not the Communists since that'd disrupt the general image of Europe with Spain. It'd be a pain in the ass to have to explain it too.

I'm sure they could win one turn-over in government by popular demand, if sometime later there's agitation over how inept they're perceived and they're cast out. Another thing to image is that with things like the May 1968 the results of the rioting and the uprising ultimately builds solidarity and support in the then ruling party. It might bring about reforms, but the actual rule hasn't changed.

[Vilageidiotx]

Being 1926, it could be anything. Like Aaron said, the communists shouldn't still be in power in 1970+, but early communists could still work.

The important thing is what type of government you want to RP. Think of what you want to do, and then work that into the current history.

[The Grey Warden]

Boom. Done. Not such if it's good or not, but it's a start.

[Vilageidiotx]

updates

The Grey Warden

Looks good. Just remember that by 1970, they probably shouldn't be leftist or it will confuse the Spain storyline.

[Dinh AaronMk]

<Snipped quote by The Grey Warden>



Looks good. Just remember that by 1970, they probably shouldn't be leftist or it will confuse the Spain storyline.

@Vilageidiotx

I'd suggest that the progressive/socialist/community government shows signs of colonial negligence that'd piss off the right-wing and the nationalist colonialists. But that major era of French colonial loss was in the 1970's so it'd be stomping close into that era of Spanish militant anti-communism. So he might need to talk to Googer if that's the case, or coincide their government transition out around the time the Spanish shifted out of the monarchy in the sixties.

[Veoline]

I don't know if The Grey Warden has settled on the events of the French uprising, but I'd like to add a few things:
-French university and indeed high school student numbers didn't balloon before the 50s in real life. So in the 20's you'd have at most a few tens of thousands of university students in Paris, mostly bourgeois upper-class. Of course you'd have quite a sizeable artistic and political avant-garde, but they could never muster the support of the majority of students. What I want to say is that a student uprising in the 20's is impossible.
-Under the 3rd Republic, the head of the government was the President of the Council, much like in Italy today, the President of the Republic being only a figurehead.
-Television didn't exist, or at least was extremely rare in the 20's/30's.
-The army is a staunchly conservative force (like in most places), and would support the government. In 1870, when the Commune took over Paris, the government retreated to Versailles and then proceeded to lay siege to Paris.
-In that regard, the rest of France, much less prone to revolution than the capital, would certainly be quite resistant to a complete regime change.
-Since the Haussmanian reconstruction of Paris in the late 19th century, the city has been crisscrossed by wide, open avenues which are simply too wide to be barricaded. Thus the police would always have access to most sections of the city unharmed, leaving only a few neighbourhoods whose streets had been untouched, namely the Quartier latin, really off-limits in the event of an uprising there.
-In the early 20th century, the main French political party was the Parti Radical de Gauche, a very moderate center-left party representing the progressive middle class, the bar-owners, the small shop owners, etc. It favored social reforms, but was violently anti-revolutionary.
-In the event of snap elections following social strife, expect the right to gather the support of the law-and-order middle class across the country.
-By the early 20th century, the bulk of the Parisian working class actually lived outside of the city proper, in the "banlieues rouges", the ring of suburbs outside the city limits.
-The SFIO (Socialist Party) was a pretty moderate governing party. The leaders were marxist, but by the early 20th century didn't really believe in Revolution anymore. In the event of an uprising spearheaded by the PCF (Communist Party), it might furthermore be wary of the PCF gaining dominance.
-The PCF had the support of around 10-15% of the electorate, and was widely shunned by the rest of the political spectrum (that was in part due to its perception as a foreign force under the command of the USSR, which it obviously wouldn't have in PoW)
-Arguably, the most significant threat to the French Republic in the 30's was actually rightwing antiparliamentary, proto-fascist militias, the Ligues, made up in large part of former soldiers fed up with the incompetence of the government. It's possible that due to the duration of the war, nationalistic, violently xenophobic forces might have gained in popularity. In that case, however, expect an extremely strong reaction from the Left, which, bar the PCF, was very attached to the parliamentary republican form of government. The PCF, on the other hand, would be the ideological polar opposite of the Right, so it would be even more opposed to it than other leftwing parties. A civil war, rather than a revolution, would actually be more plausible.

@Dinh AaronMK In France, the colonial question actually cut across party lines. Members of some leftwing parties supported it, as in their opinion colonization brought civilization to the natives, and members of rightwing parties opposed it as they thought it lead to negligence of the development of France itself, as well as focusing the country's attention away from its fight with Germany, the "hereditary" enemy.

[Dinh AaronMk]

Anyways, it's been a while. But RP art.

Hider

deviantart.com/art/Imperadora-548274308

[Vilageidiotx]

vury purty. We always need more art.

[Dinh AaronMk]

It's also wallpaper size.

[Wilted Rose]

ah yes, a PoW wallpaper to always remind me of my neglect on posting

[Chapatrap]

Someone should make a 'Post fggt' wallpaper.