Prologue - The Fraying Thread
Prologue - The Fraying Thread
The twelve months from January 1905 to January of 1906 was an almost unprecedented year of turnover within European royalty, one which would begin to destabilize the Concert of Powers even as the continent shifted more firmly to a model of Parliamentarianism. Denmark's Christian IX passed away as the dean of European royalty and the Empress Elisabeth of Austria died too, ending her long and strange marriage to the Austrian Emperor who was hopelessly, madly devoted to her even as she seldom reciprocated. It was three deaths, all within six months of each other, that would shape Europe moving forward though.
First of course was Crown Prince Gustaf of Sweden, whose assassination in Norway at the height of negotiations and elections to exit the Union of Sweden-Norway badly inflamed tensions and triggered the brief War of 1905, in which the large, wealthier and better-equipped Swedes invaded Norway and won a decisive victory despite encountering credible and creditable resistance along the Glomma as they pushed towards the capital at Christiania; the affair short-circuited the push towards liberal parliamentarianism in both states and reimposed not just Swedish authority in Norway but royal influence (though a far cry from absolutism, whose days were over in Scandinavia) over government in both sides of the border even as Norway was tentatively granted new privileges. When Gustaf V Adolf came to power upon his grandfather's death in December of 1907, it was as a young man deeply shaped by his father's murder and the three-month war to crush Norwegian resistance, and as a King perhaps more profoundly skeptical of modernizing liberalism than any other in Europe.
The second to go was Spain's Leopold I, who finally succumbed after years of decline and in his place appeared his son Charles Joseph I, who was like his Swedish counterpart fairly hostile to mass democracy but not so bold as to eliminate parliamentarianism entirely; what may have happened had the Spanish right not been utterly inept in its five-year hold on power is an open question, but the 1910 elections in Spain delivered a renewed National Liberal government under Jose Canalejas that moved with rapid speed to modernize Spain's most decrepit institutions and reinvigorate liberal governance and popular support for the establishment, even once-tepid opinions towards the King, who in time came to begrudgingly respect his statesman Prime Minister.
The third and most important passing though was at the end of 1905, when Napoleon IV finally died after a long pulmonary disease aged only 49. His steady hand for three decades gone, and at such a young age, was profoundly negative for France and her neighbors. With him went a commitment to the policy of the Great Detente upon the European continent, particularly between Paris and Berlin; with him also went a French reputation for competent rule and pragmatism, as his son Napoleon V rapidly showed himself more interested in prayer and consulting with archbishops than statecraft (or even his Bavarian-born wife, Helmtrud, who before long struck up a torrid affair with her chief bodyguard at her private villa in Annecy, Lieutenant Charles de Gaulle) and the indecisive but demagogic Georges Boulanger soon found himself outflanked in ambition by his protege Raymond Poincare, who wasted no time charting a considerably more aggressive course both home and abroad mere moments after Boulanger's body was cold following his February 1912 death by engaging in ill-advised brinkmanship over, of all things, the succession in Monaco.
The Monegasque Succession Crisis was one of several of the Revolutions of 1912, which were not entirely actually revolutions but rather massive social upheavals that suggested that the old status quo could no longer be sustainable across much of the Western world. In Britain, the so-called Great Unrest struck at both Ireland, now a flashpoint again as demands for Home Rule rose under the dogged leadership of John Redmond, and in industrial cities such as Liverpool or Birmingham, flummoxing the government of Richard Haldane as it struggled to juggle a weak minority government having taken power back from an inept gang of Tories. Social democrats advanced in elections across the continent, zealous liberals took power in the Ottoman Empire, Hungarian nationalists won elections and threatened to totally destabilize Austrian stability as Vienna was forced to intervene in a bizarre, farcical civil war in neighboring Serbia, and Russia's young new Tsar Michael II was forced to introduce an authoritarian constitution that nonetheless formalized modern systems of governance and delineated some rights reserved to the people. Most notably in China, wreaked by years of civil war between Qing loyalists and the Republican oligarchs that had destroyed much of the Central Plain, the First Republic collapsed after a coup by General Li Yuanhong and introduced that country's first-ever written constitution, conceived largely by former Imperial confidant Liang Qichao, though it was a constitution largely on paper; rule remained arbitrary based on local governors, nowhere more the case than in little Yunnan in the country's south, where French-backed warlords soon had total control of the province's levers of power and looked with intrigue to its vast poppy fields.
On the surface, then, the years before the eruptions of 1912 - which were punctuated by an explosion of violence in Ireland as the Haldane Liberals introduced the first Home Rule act, less Redmond bring down their government, just as Lord Hardinge, India's Viceroy, was killed in a bomb attack by the separatist Ghadar Movement - seemed placid at first yet were anything but. 1912 thus marked the turning point, where the long 19th century seemed to come puttering to an end, and the world seemed to take in a deep, nervous breath.
And that was just in Europe and Asia.
