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France without the Franco-Prussian War

Yokai Man

Well-known member
Let's assume that Bismarck is successfully assasinated in 1866 and the Franco-Prussian War doesn't happen. Let's also assume that the Bonapartes continue to rule France til,say,the First World War or sometime during the 20th Century.

How does France change along the years in this scenario? Does it stagnate socially and culturally or only politically with a continued Bonaparte rule? Would some reforms happen after Napoleon III's death or would Napoleon IV run France the same way as his father? And how volatile can things get after awhile? What will follow after the possible fall of the House of Bonaparte in the 20th Century?
 
Let's assume that Bismarck is successfully assassinated in 1866 and the Franco-Prussian War doesn't happen. Let's also assume that the Bonapartes continue to rule France til,say,the First World War or sometime during the 20th Century.

How does France change along the years in this scenario? Does it stagnate socially and culturally or only politically with a continued Bonaparte rule? Would some reforms happen after Napoleon III's death or would Napoleon IV run France the same way as his father? And how volatile can things get after awhile? What will follow after the possible fall of the House of Bonaparte in the 20th Century?
You have to wonder how far the butterflies would flap their wings, and how much the geopolitical landscape would be altered, with a POD like that. And I'd wager that France'd be one of the European countries which'd be least affected by it. For instance, getting rid of von Bismarck in 1866 also effectively butterflies away the Prussian deportations of 1885-1890, which he personally championed and initiated, as well as eliminating the Prussian Settlement Commission which he personally established, and greatly lessening or potentially even butterflying away the anti-Polish post-unification Kulturkampf policy which he enacted, owing to his own personal belief in the existence of a widespread Catholic conspiracy, plotted by what he called the "Coalition of Catholic Revenge" (France, Austria, and the Catholic Church itself), which posed a threat to both his German and European policies.

As a result of Bismarck's efforts to ethnically cleanse Germany of its Polish (and Jewish) minorities, combined with growing Nationalist and Pan-Slavic trends in Russian politics, the formerly good relations between Prussia/Germany and Russia greatly worsened in the 1880s, with the backlash increasing negative sentiments against German minorities in the Russian Empire, including Baltic and Russian-born Germans as well as recent German immigrants. With that in mind, the German ambassador in Russia, Schweinitz, advised Bismarck to abstain from further expulsions, anticipating that they would only provoke the supporters of Pan-Slavism and trigger repressions against all German settlers in Russia.

Soon afterward, the Russian government imposed legal restrictions on acquisition and lease of land by Germans in Russia, thus limiting the German colonization movement in the Russian-controlled part of Poland, which had previously been their primary destination of choice (and was subsequently overtaken by colonization of the USA instead, with the Russian German mass migration to the USA directly triggered by this, and with the 1880's seeing the largest flow of German immigrants to the USA ever, which had previously been steadily decreasing from its prior peak in the 1850's, but more than doubled from the previous decade, from c.718k to c.1.453M German immigrants, which amounted to 2.3% of the US population at that time).

Contrary to Bismarck's original intentions, the expulsion contributed to the worsening of German-Russian relations and the erosion of their long term cooperation – resulting in a shift in Russia's external policy which finally led to the creation of the Franco-Russian Alliance, soon transformed into the Triple Entente, which fought the German Empire during World War I in 1914–1918 IOTL. So then, without Bismarck, and the policies which he personally championed and enacted from this point onward IOTL (which set a direct precedent for Hitler and the Nazis' anti-Polish, anti-Slavic, anti-Jewish and Lebensraum policies), you have to wonder- how radically different might the world wind up being ITTL?

And couldn't this well wind up being far more advantageous to the Germans in the long run, with the Prussian-Russian Alliance remaining strong and intact, and with Prussia and France winding up trading places in TTL's equivalents to the Triple Entente and Central Powers? Combined with more manpower to call upon that IOTL, and a significantly less populous, poorer and weaker USA (for the lack of the contribution of all those Germans, Russians and Polish Americans who immigrated to the USA in this era, as a direct result of Bismarck's ethnic cleansing policies, and the retaliatory measures imposed in response to them), I know which side I'd be putting my money on to win, if and when TTL's equivalent of WW1 kicks off...
 
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