History in Books

[illrede]

20 hours ago, Jaxom 1974 said:

I do too. I don't think I'm qualified and/or smart enough to make the actual leap of supposition...but, for me, I do believe it would be different today of it happened then...

Keep Tsar Alexander II alive, and all I've got is "probably better". For royal marriages, Louis Bonaparte and Hortense de Beauharnias being childless may already be technically accurate *boom tish*.

Edited May 25, 2023 by illrede

[Zorral]

@illrede  How would you deal with the historical facts that Alexander's brutal policies and sheer stupidity had the people so miserable, so starved, so oppressed that they had come to hate him and found the idea of ridding themselves of him to be more attractive than keeping him?  So many were already dead from his policies, and he committed torture and murder as much as anything that came after -- though what came after had a coherent ideology.  What he had was:  God has chosen me and I can do what I want and if you protest I have the right to kill you.

You have some serious conflict there when it comes to making a case that keeping him was better.

And what there was in place at the time was the Russian Empire fantasy that Putin keeps believing and propagating to do what Alexander and the czars before him did. After all, for a single instance, Crimea wasn't a part of Mother Russia until late into Catherine the Great's reign.

Edited May 25, 2023 by Zorral

[illrede]

It has to do with Nicholas II not being in command of the instrument. The foreign policy of Alexander II was set by the Crimean War (which orientated it towards Balkan Irredentism, Eastern Expansion, setting up the perfect Ottoman killshot, and France). As for the revolutionary critique (as much as I like Alexander Herzen), it doesn't signify. Your options are between internal security services running amok (to the point of pretty much running the revolutionaries) under an unready Tsar who never got ready, and internal security services under Alexander II and his not-untimely-determined successor. Same thing with the Army. Same thing with the Foreign ministry. Same thing with the judiciary. Russia was a Great Power- being an unfocussed active mess of fiefdoms (with the left hand not only not knowing what the right hand was doing, but strangling the neck and while trying to blame it on the right hand) set up catastrophe.

(re: Crimea. Well, Peter had it for a bit. Then he trusted a hospodar.)

 

 

(EDIT: Gah, the judiciary. Nicholas II once decided not to commute a death sentence for Blood Libel that he knew to baseless because 'everybody knew' the crime was being committed and somebody might as well die for it. His own security services and their forgers being the ones then running a domestic propaganda campaign to those ends. The man was a country-squire bystander in charge of an empire that was at its own throat, and everyone else's)

Edited May 25, 2023 by illrede

[Zorral]

3 hours ago, illrede said:

not being in command of the instrument.

So ... how does someone as impotent s the czar suddenly get control?  There is nothing in the background history* to indicate there were hidden depths of skill, competence, and smarts to suddenly emerge and change or re-route the zeitgeist.

Unlike the biography of Catherine Great which shows how deeply and carefully -- carefully! -- working to create the conditions by which she could take power. She worked for years.  Whereas the czar ... was a fool and divorced from realities of all kinds.

 

Edited May 25, 2023 by Zorral

[illrede]

1 hour ago, Zorral said:

So ... how does someone as impotent s the czar suddenly get control?  There is nothing in the background history* to indicate there were hidden depths of skill, competence, and smarts to suddenly emerge and change or re-route the zeitgeist.

Unlike the biography of Catherine Great which shows how deeply and carefully -- carefully! -- working to create the conditions by which she could take power. She worked for years.  Whereas the czar ... was a fool and divorced from realities of all kinds.

 

A bomb.

More usefully, assassination by a non-regime actor at a time his rule wasn't vulnerable. Czars got rubbed out and set aside all the time! Better than even odds, I think. Just never completely out of left field.

[Zorral]

1 hour ago, illrede said:

A bomb.

More usefully, assassination by a non-regime actor at a time his rule wasn't vulnerable. Czars got rubbed out and set aside all the time! Better than even odds, I think. Just never completely out of left field.

No details -- this ain't gonna work for an alternate fiction. Like history, fiction needs specifics. 

[illrede]

2 hours ago, Zorral said:

No details -- this ain't gonna work for an alternate fiction. Like history, fiction needs specifics. 

Darn. The incapable grandson of a Tsar getting passed over in favor of another grandson?

EDIT: You know, now that I think about it, it is very strange that Wilhelm, Nicholas's and Franz Ferdinand's fathers/cousin all died before they could reign for long or at all. Franz was saner than Rudolf, at least.

Edited May 26, 2023 by illrede

[Zorral]

Well, since April 2021, we have now gone over 400 fruitful comments/discussions in this thread.  Slow but steady!    

Maybe time for a moderator to lock it, and we begin thread History In Books 2?  I'll do it, if it's OK?

Edited May 26, 2023 by Zorral

[Zorral]

12 hours ago, illrede said:

it is very strange that Wilhelm, Nicholas's and Franz Ferdinand's fathers/cousin all died before they could reign for long or at all. Franz was saner than Rudolf, at least.

Have you read histories of the house of the Romanovs?  15th-16th Century Italian City States, from Naples, to the Vatican, to Florence, have nothing on the Romanovs' love of poison, and their viciousness with each other (as well as others)!  Nor did they have anything on the decadent Caesars like Tiberius, Caligula and Nero, comes to the paranoias, cruelties and excesses of every kind, and performed in public.  Catherine was much more restrained, very much more, in comparison. Simon Montifiore's The Romanovs is one of the very best written and very readable -- very long also!

Edited May 26, 2023 by Zorral

[illrede]

16 minutes ago, Zorral said:

Have you read histories of the house of the Romanovs?  15th-16th Century Italian City States, from Naples, to the Vatican, to Florence, have nothing on the Romanovs' love of poison, and their viciousness with each other (as well as others)!  Nor did they have anything on the decadent Caesars like Tiberius, Caligula and Nero, comes to the paranoias, cruelties and excesses of every kind, and performed in public.  Catherine was much more restrained, very much more, in comparison. Simon Montifiore's The Romanovs is one of the very best written and very readable -- very long also!

The breadth of the leadership vacuum that just suddenly opened up, I mean.

[Zorral]

43 minutes ago, illrede said:

The breadth of the leadership vacuum that just suddenly opened up, I mean.

Alas, I still don't know what you are referring to here.

[illrede]

47 minutes ago, Zorral said:

Alas, I still don't know what you are referring to here.

Frederick III, Alexander III, Crown Prince Rudolf (not for himself, but the fall of the Taffe ministry). All hitting at the same time, and scrambling things in the same way.

[Zorral]

Which scrambles what and leads to what and why?

After all, these horror shows as leadership in the Romanov regimes are built in functions, not aberrations.

Which again is why for me what ifs are not only purposeless but not particularly interesting! 

That there are different tastes out there, is true, which is why generally people seem to prefer to kibbitz over half-baked what ifs rather than do the research into what took place -- which almost always is far more interesting than any what if.

For instance, the biography I'm reading at the moment of Cardinal Richelieu's niece, the Duchesse Marie de Vignerot is at the very least as exciting and interesting as anything Dumas came up with in his magnificent godfathering of historical fiction of the period. No imagined court equals those of either the Valois or the Romanovs.

P.S. How about the second History in Books thread expand just a bit from history in fiction and non-fiction books to "History in Books and On the Screen" -- or would that muddy waters too much?

 

Edited May 26, 2023 by Zorral

[The Grey Wolf Strikes Back]

@Zorral

I would just keep the thread going until a moderator decides to lock it.

Edited May 26, 2023 by The Grey Wolf Strikes Back

[illrede]

I think we might be conflating things. I would like Alexander II not to have been assassinated in 1881, meaning there is a good chance that his son, who became Alexander III, would pre-decease him by a few years. (Also he wouldn't have been assassinated, meaning his reforms, half-measures that they were, stand not to be rolled back.) Even if he didn't make it very far into his 70's, Alexander III would be doing different things- the man wasn't stupid, he was emotional. 

The untimely leadership turnovers in the monarchies in the later 18th century all by hook and by crook led to the eclipse of the liberal wings of their domestic politics, while also opening up a free-for-all in political networking.

"Not Day-Zero Nicholas II" as Tsar would be the improvement. It was a perfectly awful situation.

[Zorral]

 

1 hour ago, The Grey Wolf Strikes Back said:

@Zorral

I would just keep the thread going until a moderator decides to lock it.

OK.  Advice appreciated! 

Edited May 26, 2023 by Zorral

[Zorral]

McShea, Brown (2023) La Duchesse: The Life of Marie de Vignerot, Cardinal Richelieu’s Forgotten Heiress Who Shaped the Fate of France.

Judging by the titles of her previous books, McShea appears to have specialized in going granular in various aspects of the history of the Catholic Church, with a strong emphasis on the Jesuits, as well as aspects of the Order of the Inquisition. 

Marie de Vignerot, as beloved niece and heir to everything of Richelieu’s, provides a perfect screen through which to sieve so much of this era’s French Church history as entwined with that of the French state.  His niece grows up under Louis XIII, and has her maturity through the reign of Louis XIV, once he’s able to wrest his divine right  royal power from that of his mother and Cardinal Mazarin, Marie's uncle’s successor. 

There is never any implied criticism or askance at anything Richileu does (much is literally just referred to as off stage, which Marie can’t know about!). Keep in mind, these are the decades in which the first volumes of Dumas's The Three Musketeers take place; when the author allows it to be, i.e. drifting from the Church's grandeur and greatness, it gets as exciting as the novels, with as much action, betrayal, and intrigue -- and (evidently the author believes -- unearned hatred of Richileu.  Then there is slavery, which is astonishlngly essentially brushed off, except for the Barbary Pirates who enslave French people, and for whom the Cardinal and his niece do good works.

Within the author’s argument is always that Marie, having inherited all her uncle’s vast properties, possessions, and money, plus the peerage title King Louis XIII award her himself via Richeliu's suggestion – very few peers in France, and no females ones – she has her own empire. 

The imperial designation is entwined in the author’s descriptions of all Marie’s actions, once she administers Richileu's previous estate solely, not having, needing or assigned any oversight or overseer, all receiving glowing approval and approbation.  Yet, somehow, author misses that France itself was an empire, and maybe not so good for her possessions, particularly the slave and the indigenous – though those of other European nations may be criticized? 

Whether or not the author understands this, how Church/religion and Empire building and retention are inextricably entwined is very much centered here, and without criticism.

 

Edited June 2, 2023 by Zorral

[Zorral]

@SeanF The latest installment of the Sebastian St. Cyr Mysteries, Who Cries for the Lost (2023),  takes place on the eve of Waterloo.  What might interest you as an historian of the Peninsular War, is that plot points include the Battle of Bailén, and the English refusal to allow the Spanish to abide by the surrender agreement by which the French troops were to be repatriated. Instead, as you know, 25,000 French pows were sent to horrific imprisonment on the island of Cabrera, w/o food, clothing or shelter. 5 years later ... how many were still alive -- between 3 an 5 thousand.

[SeanF]

On 6/3/2023 at 11:10 PM, Zorral said:

@SeanF The latest installment of the Sebastian St. Cyr Mysteries, Who Cries for the Lost (2023),  takes place on the eve of Waterloo.  What might interest you as an historian of the Peninsular War, is that plot points include the Battle of Bailén, and the English refusal to allow the Spanish to abide by the surrender agreement by which the French troops were to be repatriated. Instead, as you know, 25,000 French pows were sent to horrific imprisonment on the island of Cabrera, w/o food, clothing or shelter. 5 years later ... how many were still alive -- between 3 an 5 thousand.

Many thanks.

And no.  The ill-treatment of the French prisoners was very much Spanish policy.  The Spanish had *a lot* to pay back, at this point, such as the sack of Cordoba, which DuPont’s army carried out after the city surrendered peacefully.

The prisoners were in Spanish, not British, hands, and had tried on several occasions to revolt, at Cadiz.  The Spanish were not in the mood for mercy.

Edited June 8, 2023 by SeanF

[Zorral]

31 minutes ago, SeanF said:

The ill-treatment of the French prisoners was very much Spanish policy.  

The research the author shows at the back of the book says rather ... otherwise.  Britain most certainly didn't want those men to be shipped back to France to fight them again.

Though, yes, the average Spaniard was not happy with French soldiers, but there were others, who had a whole lot more power, with other agendas.   Fogs of war.