Azerbaijani wine is the worst I've ever had. It's incredibly sweet, worse than Jewish wine. The first time I had it I thought it was possibly antifreeze since I had heard you need to watch out for bad alcohol in Azerbaijan.
History questions not worth their own thread III
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In my experience there's no such thing as good wine.
Apologies for the double post, but I just remembered to ask a question I've been thinking of for days.
How did Austria wind up in Russia's orbit after the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars? I've been reading up on the immediate post-war period recently, and it seems that Britain was the nation to which Austria naturally leant on for support. In fact, Prussia and Russia seem to come across as Austria's natural rivals - in Germany and the Balkans respectively - whereas Britain and France, with no borders with Austria and both wishing to curb Russian and Prussian excesses, should be the nations Austria looked towards for a military and economic alliance. I'm wondering why Austria's policy, which was directed as I suggest, changed in the period between the Second Treaty of Paris and the Crimean War.
How did Austria wind up in Russia's orbit after the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars? I've been reading up on the immediate post-war period recently, and it seems that Britain was the nation to which Austria naturally leant on for support. In fact, Prussia and Russia seem to come across as Austria's natural rivals - in Germany and the Balkans respectively - whereas Britain and France, with no borders with Austria and both wishing to curb Russian and Prussian excesses, should be the nations Austria looked towards for a military and economic alliance. I'm wondering why Austria's policy, which was directed as I suggest, changed in the period between the Second Treaty of Paris and the Crimean War.
Louis XXIV
Le Roi Soleil
They were both conservative monarchies that stamped out nationalism if that helps explain it at all.
Because Metternich correctly realized that, if one must deal with "rivals", better to harness their ambitions with a grouping alliance than let them simmer out on the outside, plotting and scheming where it's impossible to control them. So he abandoned antagonistic policy against Prussia over Germany - something that had died out under Leopold II anyway - and brought the Prussian government into partnership; his attempt to do the same with the Russians in the Balkans was slightly less successful, but still fairly effective (and ended up only being submarined, temporarily, by Ottoman bloody-mindedness). Anyway, Metternich was ahead of his time; he was one of the smartest diplomats, bar Bismarck, between Leopold II and the foundation of the United Nations, and honestly, only Castlereagh was anywhere near his game in terms of both tactics and mindset. Yeah, the Holy Alliance was partially founded on a genuine fear of revolution, but antirevolutionary policy didn't take the foreground until several years after the Napoleonic wars ended.
This is not to say that the Austrians didn't cooperate with the British if they so desired - they obviously did. Metternich attempted to keep the British and Russians 'grouped' over Greece but ended up failing spectacularly (the Ottoman intransigence, like I mentioned, although Canning's own bloody-mindedness certainly played a role), with Britain and Russia joining together on an explicitly anti-Austrian policy. He did much better in the face-off over Belgium in 1830, when he successfully got everybody except the French to fall into line (including the British; Metternich even let Palmerston think he was the one responsible for the whole thing), upon which the French themselves quickly backed off. Indeed, I think you'll find that if there was any conflict between the British and the Austrians in the Congress period, the British were usually the ones originating it, most famously with Palmerston's ridiculous pronouncements of a Holy Alliance conspiracy in Iberia during the Carlist crises and his lunatic claims that Europe was divided into two armed camps, East and West. (You could usually rely on Palmerston to ruin anything good in European diplomacy.)
It's worth noting, too, that the Holy Alliance wasn't really a "military and economic" alliance. There was nothing "economic" about the alliance; indeed, the Prussian Zollverein never included Austria, and that wasn't a happy accident. Prussian economic relations with Russia were hardly better, because of the issue of Russian grain (which exploded in the 1870s and 1880s, but was always in the back of any Junker's mind). This was, after all, the early nineteenth century. Diplomatic relations and economic ones didn't always go hand-in-hand - in fact, it usually worked the opposite way. Economic interests could theoretically be used to inflame tensions, but rarely, if ever, to soothe them. And it wasn't really an explicit military alliance, either. It was theoretically a framework for collective action in response to revolution, it was ideally a basis for good-faith negotiation between the three powers, and it was realistically a statement of intent and a starting point for policy which was only intermittently unitary.
You can see this Austrian grouping policy come into play in 1852-3, as well. The problem in 1852-3 was much more difficult to surmount, though. Austrian policy was divided, with Franz Josef's counsels being dominated by Bruck and Buol, each proposing a contradictory course. Napoleon III, unlike previous French leaders, was unwilling to consider peace a superior alternative to war. Stratford Canning was impossible to control, by anybody. And Ottoman bloody-mindedness reared its head again. But the basic outline of what the Austrians ended up doing to try to prevent the war - especially the so-called Vienna Note - harked back to Metternich's grouping alliances, trying to draw everybody together into a "common" front where disputes could be kept under control.
Thanks for the info Dachs. I suspected you'd be the guy who'd know this.
I must admit, my recent readings have given me far greater respect for Castlereagh (and Talleyrand, for that matter) than I had previously. I still think Metternich might have been right when he was actually pushing for war with Prussia and Russia - with Bourbon France and Britain backing him up - in early-1815, but obviously I have the benefit of hindsight. It's easy to make different choices when you see what happened to the Austrian Empire down the road.
I must admit, my recent readings have given me far greater respect for Castlereagh (and Talleyrand, for that matter) than I had previously. I still think Metternich might have been right when he was actually pushing for war with Prussia and Russia - with Bourbon France and Britain backing him up - in early-1815, but obviously I have the benefit of hindsight. It's easy to make different choices when you see what happened to the Austrian Empire down the road.
Virote_Considon
The Great Dictator
Erm, Dacks, what are you talking about? Everybody knows that economic interdependence = global hippie peace, exactly 100% of the time. That is why there will never be another world war.
p - seriously, though, good post, from a period I know relatively little about!)
I don't know how to phrase the question more concisely: can someone tell me something about Vichy France? It seems to be often glossed over in accountings of WW2 (French revisionism?), so I know next to nothing about it.
How did it come to be? Did the Germans install a puppet regime there, or did Petain became their satellite on his own volition? What kind of guy was Petain, anyway? Did he sympathize with the Nazis, was he merely a pragmatist who thought it was in the best of France's interests to play along or did he just take the chance presented to him to create a more authoritarian government? How was Vichy France received by its inhabitants?
How did it come to be? Did the Germans install a puppet regime there, or did Petain became their satellite on his own volition? What kind of guy was Petain, anyway? Did he sympathize with the Nazis, was he merely a pragmatist who thought it was in the best of France's interests to play along or did he just take the chance presented to him to create a more authoritarian government? How was Vichy France received by its inhabitants?
Virote_Considon
The Great Dictator
I don't know much about Vichy France either, but what I have heard is that they were so antisemitic that when Germany was asking its allies to ship them their Jews for the Holocaust, the excited Vichy administration shipped all theirs off to Germany before the Germans were even expecting them.
Eh. I've never been particularly clear on what people see in Talleyrand. He was a man who was historically very good at taking credit for things other people did. His role at Erfurt was inflated beyond any resemblance to what he actually did there - in reality, the tsar's mind had already been made up - and his role at Vienna was rather similar. His main tangible contribution to the proceedings at Vienna - the publicity over the near-war with Prussia over Saxony - did little but embitter the Prussians, who were already being forced to back down by the Russians anyway. It was a transparent attempt to fracture the Chaumont alliance and it deservedly failed. And in 1830, Talleyrand was the odd man out.
As for the Saxon crisis, I don't see what Austria would have got out of a war with Prussia and Russia. Allying with France and the UK would basically mean that Austria would take all of the risks in such a war - a war that would be incomprehensible to most of the Austrian government. (There was never much danger of a war with Russia, anyway. Russia's demands - the Wielkopolska - were pretty much acceptable to all parties, and once Russia had those territories, the Russians switched tacks and put pressure on the Prussians to limit their own demands, to the point of threatening war. The danger was that Prussia might try to escape its dependence on Russia, and the Prussian government toyed with such a course for a few terrifying weeks before letting go.)
It's not as though the Austrians would have been able to destroy Prussia, either. Keeping Prussia weaker would make little sense as far as the security of Germany went: a weak Prussia was a splendid target for France and Russia. A Prussia that was not too strong, but definitely not weak, and reasonably friendly to Austria was the best-case scenario, and the Austrians managed to get such a Prussia out of the Saxon crisis.
What made Prussia dangerous to Austria was the time between about 1840 and 1866, especially the first few years of the 1860s. One can hardly censure Metternich for failing to foresee industrialization, the Dreyse needle-gun, the Crimean war, the Generalstab, and Ludwig von Benedek.
Fight the good fight, bro.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
Then a role model for some, at least?
carmen510
Deity
I'll try to answer with the basic knowledge that I have about the World War Two period.
Vichy France came into being after the 1940 armistice; northern & western France were to be German-occupied, with the southern part remained under the control of the French government. Petain was something of a right-wing reactionary, who was worried over the decay of France, both morally and militarily. I don't think he sympathized with the Nazis, considering that he was somewhat of a French patriot, but he certainly was more conservative than the "ordinary" Frenchman. Vichy France was probably well-received by French conservatives & fascists, and reviled by the left. Since France was essentially economically dependent on Germany (especially with regards to coal), Petain didn't really have much of a choice besides collaboration.
Oh, sure. I think he's the patron saint of deviantART.Then a role model for some, at least?
Just, you know, not the transcendently amazing diplomat and figure of world-historical importance that he liked to claim he was.Napoleon's regime in particular seems to have been afflicted with this disease. Napoleon himself managed to rewrite the terms of history in his memoirs, just like Talleyrand, and Soult did something similar. Makes me wonder how we'd view the Hitlerites if a bunch of them had managed to skip the war-crimes trials and turn out best-selling autobiographies.
ParkCungHee
Deity
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Acquire Women.
Disregard changes of government.
Thanks so far. I don't really know much about the armistice either - what motivated both sides to sign it?
French revisionism is indeed a major reason why there hasn't been enough study of the Vichy regime. After the war the French clung to the romantic tradition that the victorious Charles De Gaulle had been the true leader of France during WWII - something which is debateable, for reasons I'll discuss later - and that the Vichyites were an abberation best swept under the rug. It's only recently that the French have begun to acknowledge this, much in the same way that Germans have long-denied that the Wehrmacht was ever responsible for war crimes, preferring to pretend that it was all the SS. Fortunately, Vichy is one of the few things I feel myself to be more knowledgeable about than even the mighty Dachs, god of history tm, so I'll do what I can.
After the success of the Manstein plan in routing the French army and capturing Paris, the French cabinet was split. One faction, led by Prime Minister Reynaud and the newly-promoted General Charles De Gaulle, favoured continuing to fight on in one way or another. Reynaud was in favour of evacuating the government to Algeria and fighting on from the French Empire, whereas De Gaulle favoured falling back on Quimper in Bretogne, forming a redoubt until reinforcements could arrive from either Britain or the Empire. The other faction, led by Henri Petain, a renowned hero of WWI, who, like De Gaulle, had recently been called up to the cabinet, believed that France had already been beaten and that it was time to sue for peace.
Unfortunately for the French, Petain's group (referred to by Chruchill, even at the time, as the "defeatists," a brilliantly perjorative term) had numerical superiority, and Reynaud was forced to resign with Petain taking his place as Prime Minister. Petain immediately sued for peace, having already entered into surreptitious negotiations with the Germans through Pierre Laval, a French Nazi - in terms of ideology he was a Nazi through and through, though obviously the Nazi Party did not exist in France, despite what Laval might have hoped - who was on good terms with Germany. So Petain was not established by the Germans; he chose to be their willing puppet.
Regarding Petain's sympathies, he was certainly no Nazi, unlike Laval, who was to serve several times as his Prime Minister and Foreign Minister. But he was very authoritarian - though, to be fair, this was hardly uncommon among the military - and reactionary. He used his newfound place as head of the French government to attempt to foist his own political ideals - which were eerily similar to Germany's "blood and soil" ideology - on the part of France under his control. This led to a split in the loyalty of France's colonial empire. While Petain had legally been the head of the French government when he surrendered, he began acting unconstitutionally almost immediately. Charles De Gaulle, who was the sole member of the French Cabinet to escape France before the armistice, had already called upon the French to resist German occupation. With Petain openly commiting treason by acting unconstitutionally, even though he was the legal head-of-state, De Gaulle was able to believably claim that he was France's true head-of-state.
Several colonies which had been sitting on the fence, particularly those in French Equatorial Africa, took the opportunity to declare De Gaulle the leader of a provisional French government, with Felix Eboue, Governor of Chad acting immediately. De Gaulle quickly established himself, with British help, as the provisional leader of French Equatorial Africa, Eboue as his agent. He also attempted to seize Dakar as his capital, but the raid on Dakar was a miserable failure due to bad planning from both the French and British. A stalemate developed with De Gaulle in control of French Equatorial Africa, the French possessions in the Americas neutralised by an agreement between their governors and the United States, and the rest under Vichy.
So, in a way, Petain was both a pragmatist who genuinely thought it was in France's best interests to play along and a manipulative little weasel who seized the opportunity to become a tyrant. The fact is, De Gaulle even offered to serve under Petain as head-of-state, as well as Weygand, the head of France's armed forces, if only either one of them would fight on in some fashion. The opportunity for a redoubt in Bretogne (De Gaulle's plan there was truly brilliant, but it's too detailed to go into here) had already passed with Reynaud's evacuation of the government to Lyons rather than Quimper, but the opportunity for guerrilla resistance or fighting on from Algeria still existed. Petain, who even in WWI had shown himself to be prone to cowardice and surrender, simply chose the easy way out instead. He was sentenced to death for treason after WWII, and the only reason he survived was because De Gaulle personally intervened to get him imprisoned instead. A bullet would have been the better way to go, since he died, senile, a few years later, issuing orders to his orderlies in the apparent belief that he was in a bunker during WWI.
Vichy's inhabitants mostly despised the regime, though many agreed that itt was better than the alternative of German occupation. De Gaulle was widely seen as the true leader of France, and when the country was liberated in 1944 there were celebrations in the streets whenever his Free French troops marched. Still, there was a great deal of anti-British feeling in France - still is - and even many people who hated the Germans didn't trust De Gaulle, who spent most of his time in Britain, and believed that Britain was their natural enemy, not Germany. It led to a few fanatics plotting De Gaulle's assassination in 1944, though none came close. For the most part, the inhabitants of Vichy were secretly in favour of De Gaulle, though few of them - led by Jean Moulin, one of De Gaulle's closest friends and his liaison with the French Resistance - openly resisted Vichy. This number increased after Operation: Torch led to Germany's occupation of Vichy though.
Neither had I, previously. I also think he's overrated. But he did a positively excellent job of getting Francwe a position at the bargaining table: a position that the Four had originally denied it. He also managed to do so without giving Spain the same position, which is an impressive feat of diplomacy considering his initial objection had to do with both France and Spain being denied a voice.
For a whiole there it appeared as if Prussia and Russia were pushing for a war over Poland and Saxony. It would have been in Austria's best interests then to weaken Russia's expanding influence in Germany, even if it resulted in a weak Prussia. As it was, the problem solved itself, and Metternich didn't need to risk a war. But if Alexander hadn't come around and Prussia continued to act belligerently, Austria would be very badly threatened by a Russo-Prussian alliance.
That was another problem, even after Alexander backed down about his needless support of Prussia and brought it into line. But the Prussians knew they couldn't win without Russian help, so they also backed off.
They certainly didn't want a Russian-dominated Prussia dominating North Germany though. That was what Metternich and Talleyrand were concerned about, at least according to my recent reading. Frederick William III was far too dependent upon Russia for anyone to rest easy until the dependence was broken peacefully. Especially not with hotheads like Blucher running about.
Since Metternich was just a time-travelling Henry Kissinger, he should have known the threat.
There was Speer.
Sounds like a code to live by to me.
Between Vichy France and Germany?
Vichy signed because by that point mainland France was gone; even less territory than what was assigned to Vichy in the armistice was actually still under French control when it was signed, meaning that more than two-thirds of the country was already under German control, with the army routed and the remaining third there for the taking. Facing the choice of continuing to fight a guerrilla war in France, evacuating the government to Britain or the French overseas empire or surrendering to the Germans, the cabinet, led by Petain, elected to surrender. Those who proposed continuing to fight in one form or another, such as Prime Minister Reynaud - who stepped aside in favour of Petain when it became obvious that he'd lost the support of the cabinet - and Charles De Gaulle were sidelined in favour of the defeatists, such as Petain and Weygand. So, in short, Vichy agreed to some very harsh terms in order to avoid losing all of mainland France.
Germany signed the armistice because it had already achieved its immediate goal, that of knocking France out of the war. Any continued military operations in France at this point merely took time and resources away from Hitler's next target, Britain. With the French army routed and defeated after the Manstein Plan the British were the only player left in Western Europe who could threaten Hitler, so he sought to bring about their capitulation, much as every nation the Germans had invaded thus far had capitulated. When Britain refused to capitulate - Operation: Seelowe was never taken seriously, it was always intended as a bluff - he turned his attention to his ultimate goal, Russia, hoping that the British were too badly wounded to cause him any difficulty.
Continuing to occupy the rest of France would only have taxed Germany's logistical capabilities unnecessarily. It was far more cost-effective to have a French client-state do Germany's job for it, especially since an armistice allowed Vichy to exercise a degree of control over French colonial possessions - those that didn't declare for De Gaulle's rival government in London - which wouldn't have happened if Germany had occupied all of France, since a Petainist or Gaullist government-in-exile would arise, and even a traitorous coward like Petain wouldn't have given in to German demands if the French weren't allowed even a part of France itself to govern. Even Laval would be unlikely to make such an agreement, and he was a Nazi himself.
Why did Hitler decided to occupy Vichy France in 42 then?
LightSpectra
me autem minui
I remember during the pre-World War I period, de Castelnau was skipped over for a lot of promotions in the French General Staff because he was a conservative and devout Catholic. Was there just a resurgence of conservatism after the war, or was Castlenau an aberration?
It's because he needed German troops on the southern border of France in case an invasion came from North Africa, since the Allies had reasonably secured Algeria and Morocco after Operation Torch (which started on November 8, 1942, three days before German troops moved into Vichy). This actually happened, too; in August, 1944, Operation Dragoon landed two armies in southern France, though it's less well-known than Overlord because it happened a bit later.
Random question: was the Battle of Madagascar the only operation in World War II where the Japanese co-operated (with a substantial military force) with the western Axis powers?
Until 1942 the Allies had no way of striking at France from the Mediteraenian. With the British driving West from Egypt and the successful landings in Torch, an invasion of Southern France was a very real possibility. And Vichy would be horribly unreliable at holding the German flank. If the Germans relied on French defenses, the Allied probably would have walked onto the beaches with minimal resistance. Note that Germany occupied the entire Northern and Western coasts of France rather than letting Vichy hold them for the same reason.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
How did Churchill put it? "I know that history will be kind to me, because I intend to write it"?Oh, sure. I think he's the patron saint of deviantART.
Napoleon's regime in particular seems to have been afflicted with this disease. Napoleon himself managed to rewrite the terms of history in his memoirs, just like Talleyrand, and Soult did something similar. Makes me wonder how we'd view the Hitlerites if a bunch of them had managed to skip the war-crimes trials and turn out best-selling autobiographies.
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