Imperator Francorum: A Napoleon II Timeline

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I. The Aftermath

With the death its Emperor, the administrative and military structures of the Empire and its various political arrangements, and networks of allied and dependent states were left decapitated. Without the personage of the Emperor to unite the various disparate factions and peoples he ruled, the Empire was now rudderless and began to come apart at the seams. The remaining Bonaparte Loyalists and French patriots seeking to keep the Empire together lacked the means and the legitimacy to do so with the Grand Armee scattered and in shambles following the defeat at Leipzig. Now in the face of the Coalition's advancing armies, Europe was now free to be shaped in the vision of the Old Reactionary powers.




In Italy the ever Loyal Eugène de Beauharnais stayed loyal to Bonaparte dynasty where he proclaimed himself as Regent and Viceroy of the Napoleonic Kingdom of Rome in the interests of Emperor Napoleon II. But with the Austrians invading from the North, and the combined Anglo-Sardinian invasion from the South, Eugene's position looked untenable. While many of the Napoleonic client state and dependencies surrendered in the face of the advancing enemy armies, Eugene de Beauhrarnais refused to go down without a fight. Eugene was Emperor Napoleon's stepson, and with his biological father executed by the Revolutionaries because of his aristocratic heritage, he and his sister looked to the Emperor as a sort of fraternal/father figure. The death of Emperor Napoleon threw Eugene into a manic fit of rage of grief where he decided against the advice of his advisers and his own family and go down fighting seeking to avenge the man whom looked to almost as a father.




In the battles for Italy, Eugene proved his martial skill by repelling the Austrian invasion north of the Alps near Venice. The Austrian troops high on their victory at Leipzig and their near bloodless reconquest of the Illyrian provinces were caught unaware by the ambush and fervor of Eugene's troops, many of whom were those who joined under Eugene's command after fighting alongside of the Emperor. The Emperor's death in battle against the Austrian troops enraged many in the French army who wanted an opportunity to avenge their fallen Emperor who had brought them and France glory with his many victories.

Seeing his position in Rome as untenable, Eugene withdrew his Franco-Italian forces from the region and withdrew into his core territories after having Pope Pius VII released and reinstalled as Rome's ruler. Through the use of the Sardinian and British fleet, a small Anglo-Sardinian force landed in Genoa where they were fought to a stalemate by Eugene halting their advance in its tracks. While Eugene was talented on the field of battle, he knew his days were numbered with his limited numbers, and him being cut off from French support with the Empire now fallen and him nearly surrounded on all sides by the enemy. Eugene knew that any chance he had to ensure the Kingdom of Italy's survival, he had to coordinate with his other fellow Napoleonic veteran: Marshal Murat Napoleon's flamboyant cavalry commander and brother in law to Napoleon I and Uncle by marriage to Emperor Napoleon II.




Eugene's downfall came with the treachery of Murat, the King of Naples whose betrayal is burned in the national consciousness of every Frenchman. Murat seeking to secure his throne had turned on Eugene siding with the Coalition going as far as to formally declare war on Eugene and opening Neopolitian ports to the British fleet facilitating Anglo-Sardinian troops in their invasion of Italy from the South. Now surrounded on all sides by the enemy, Eugene formally surrendered to the coalition seeing that his situation was hopeless and after his family beseeched him to give up fighting. He was allowed to flee to the Court of his Father in law King Maximilian of Bavaria where he would retire and was bestowed with the titles of the dukedom of Leuchentenberg and the Principality of Eichstätt.

The vile traitor Murat had secretly opened negotiations with the Austrians in exchange for allowing him to keep his throne as far back as Emperor Napoleon's fateful decision to fight at Leipzig where he decided to abandon his Emperor and friend betraying his fellow Frenchmen. This notion was put in his head bye the Emperor's own sister Caroline Bonaparte whom Napoleon II later referred to as "Murat's whore" after excising her name from the House of Bonaparte. Caroline's and Murat's betrayal had shocked the other Bonapartes and the other prominent Bonapartists and had kicked off the fierce rivalry and blood feud between the House of Bonaparte and the House of Murat which would reach its climax during the Wars of Italian Unification.


With the Emperor now dead, and its various allied states and client states now overrun by the combined might of the Coalition, Europe was now free to molded in the vision of the Reactionaries and the Ancien Regimes of Europe seeking to overturn the legacy of the Revolution and its ideals that Napoleon was an embodiment of. This took place at the Congress of Vienna where the various nations of Europe sought to forge a lasting peace in Europe that would be tempered by the principles of the balance of power where no one nation would be strong enough to dominate Europe in the same way Napoleon I or the Sun King Louis XIV did. Of course to a modern reader this notion seemed ridiculous when looking at the rise of Eaglet and the future waves of Revolution and spreading violence and chaos all throughout Europe, but to the people living in that era, it genuinely looked as though the old powers had won with the Revolution crushed and the Bourbons restored to their thrones.




The diplomatic summit called the Congress of Vienna was composed of the Coalition member states' heads of state and other various dignitaries from other various dignitaries from other minor allied nation states and principalities. This was the largest diplomatic congregation Europe had ever seen at this point in history. With the Revolution seemingly crushed, the various monarchs of Europe sought to rest its clock to the days before the Revolution where notions of Divine Right and Feudal rite and authorial fiat were unquestioned concepts in Europe. In accordance with these principles, the Kingdom of France was restored with the French people once again placed under rule by the House of Bourbon under King Louis XVIII or Louis-Stanislaw Comte de Provence. Louis XVIII referred to by both Bonapartist and Republican historiographers as the Bourbon pretender was the brother of the late King Louis XVI who along with his wife Queen Marie-Antoinette was infamously executed by Revolutionaries during the French Revolution. His son the titular King Louis XVII died imprisoned at the under the Revolutionaries.




While France after the Revolution had expanded into the Rhine River and the Alps securing ancient objective of the Kings of France, under the Coalition, but with the 1814 Treaty of Paris, its hard fought conquests were stripped from stripped from it with the nation reduced it its borders in 1792 borders. While these territorial losses were quite large France's core military and economic strengths were preserved with France allowed to keep strategically important regions like Saarbrücken whose coal mines gave France greater access and resources to industrialize later in the 19th century. France still remained a Great Power irregardless of these concessions. This was largely maintained thanks to the efforts of the Prince of Talleyrand Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord who along with Klemens von Metternich, were the greatest diplomats of their generation. Through Talleyrand's diplomatic posturing France was spared from the wrath of the Coalition unlike other allied states like the Kingdom of Saxony who unfortunately took its full brunt.







Talleyrand despite the fact that he turned traitor to Napoleon when he sabotaged the Emperor's attempts to ally with Tsar Alexander, managed to gain France a seat at the negotiating table as another fellow Great Power: a rare instance of a defeated power being granted a seat at the negotiating table. One of the Congress' objectives was to keep France powerful, but contained so that it would be strong enough to serve as a counterbalance against Russia and the United Kingdom, but not enough so that it would be able to conquer and impose its hegemony over Europe like it did under Emperor Napoleon and the Sun King Louis XIV. Conversely by not treating France as harshly as it could have, it reduced the obstacles and opposition to the re-imposition of the Bourbon ensuring the smoothest possible transition of power from the Provisional Government to the rule of the more moderate King Louis XVIII.

In regards to Germany, the question remained of what to do with various new German state-lets, principalities, and Kingdoms which once made up the Holy Roman Empire: the millennium old polity that once dominated Central Europe beginning with Emperor Charlemagne's (Karl der Große in German) coronation on Christmas day in the year 800. After the Empire fragmented with the various wars and subdivisions following the end of the Carolingians, the Empire was finally reconstituted under Kaiser Otto I "The Great" after he repulsed the Pagan Magyar [3] incursions Europe and took the Crown of Italy from King Berengar II. He was the King of East Francia the ancient forebear to the Medieval Kingdom of Germany. Being an ancient polity stretching over 1,000 years, the nature of this realm, and its power and institutions varied with the Empire fragmenting and the Emperor losing much of his powers and influence following the end of the Hohenstaufen Dynasty. After a long interregnum filled with infighting and civil strife among the various German princes, the Habsburgs managed to take control dominating the Empire with its many strategic marriages, and clever use of diplomacy which allowed it to assert its hegemony over the Empire's core of Germany.To many at the time, it seemed as though Austria would unite the various Germanic realms into a sort of federalized Holy-Roman Empire, as after the loss of direct control over Italy, the Empire's official title became the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation under Emperor Maximilian I von Habsburg. Few at the time could have anticipated the Rise of Prussia with the reign of King Frederick II "The Great."




But now the Holy Roman Empire was officially dead with the Empire being dissolved by Emperor Francis II in the face of Napoleon's onslaught and conquests within Germany and Italy which he organized into the Confederation of the Rhine and the Kingdom of Italy. The dissolution of the HRE at the time was seen as controversial and illegal by some of the lesser German Princes and the Pope as there was no real precedent for such an action by the Emperor in its history. This however had the effect of Austria crafting one unitary state out of its various dominions into a single unitary state with Emperor Francis II proclaiming himself as Emperor of Austria uniting the Crowns of the Apostolic Kingdom of Hungary, the Kingdom of Bohemia, and the Archduchy of Austria. However with Napoleon now defeated, the questions of how Germany wold be reconstituted in accordance with the principles of the Coalition and the Congress of Vienna loomed over everyone's heads.

The Old Emperor Francis I of Austria was in favor of restoring the moribund HRE and resuming his ancient and ancestral titles that once belonged to his ancestors. Some of the other minor German principalities and states were also in favor of this so they would have a means of preserving their autonomy and territorial integrity without fear of being subsumed or dominated by a larger political entity like Prussia or the Kingdom of Hanover. Though there was opposition from other parties as well like the Prussians who didn't want to be under Austrian dominion especially in its weakened state following the many defeats it suffered under Napoleon. There also remained the question who the Emperor would be in this instance as many did not want to seen another Habsburg resurgence in Europe, and there was the issue of Protestantism and Catholicism which also served as dividing lines among the various Germanic realms. One of the purposes of the historical Holy Roman Empire was to provide order to Europe as the Universal Christian Empire like what the Western Roman Empire of antiquity was, but with the Protestant Reformation occurring, Europe's religious unity was shattered with the Empire's rai·son d'ê·tre ceasing to exist, and the Empire carrying on due to the historical and cultural inertia it had over the geographic region which we now consider modern Germany.

There was also the issue of German Nationalism, which called for one unified pan German State. The Holy Roman Empire while being a loose confederation near the end of its life, still had its own institutions that carried some weight. With the dissolution of the Empire, and the unification of Austria’s various possessions into one Habsburg Empire, the question remained of what would happen to the non-German parts of the Empire. Hungary was never legally part of the Empire and was administered separately alongside Bohemia. Including such a massive realm inside the HRE would threaten the other smaller German states.

It was for these reasons that the German Confederation was created at the Congress of Vienna. While functionally similar in the role that the Late HRE played in Central Europe, but unlike the old Holy Roman Empire, this new Confederation of German states had a more secular and pseudo-Republican character with the confederation's nominal leader's title being mere President rather than Imperator Romanorum, or the Germanic equivalent: Kaiser. This implied that the Confederation would be more of an egalitarian character rather than having monarchical overtones with Emperor being the nominal feudal overlord of the various member states. One of Napoleon's lasting contributions to Germany was his mediatisation of the various scattered and fragmented German principalities, fiefdoms, and other states into the Confederation of the Rhine providing order to the various German states. Seeing this mediatisation as useful, the Congress resolved to have 37 new member states emerge in this Confederation which was a marked improvement from the well over 300 individual states and state-lets that made up the HRE, and keeping with the Germanic nature of the Confederation, only the dejure lands considered part of the Medieval Kingdom of Germany was included in the Confederation.




Though one of the main issues that manifested itself in the Congress of Vienna was the Polish Saxon Crisis and the issues of the other Napoleonic successor states. Prior to the Revolution, the once great Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had been partitioned by Austria, Prussia, and Russia. But with Napoleon's army marching into Central Europe where he crushed the armies of the three nations the Polish people saw a chance to regain their independence. Napoleon thus created the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, making it a client state in a Personal union with King Frederick Augustus of Saxony anchoring both to the French Empire. To the Russians, the idea of an independent Poland was intolerable as it would serve as a springboard for any invasion into their Empire. Not to mention that it would spark unrest among the various Polish minority groups within the Russian Empire. As such when the Sixth Coalition started moving against Napoleon, the Grand Duchy of Warsaw came back under Russian occupation while the Kingdom of Saxony fought fiercely against its historic enemy the Kingdom of Prussia. The Prussians wanted to annex all of Saxony to gain access to its wealth and to fulfill the ambitions of the Great King Frederick II, and to punish it for fighting nearly to the end along with Napoleon. The Russians wanted control over Poland as concessions for its involvement in the war seeking to impose a balance of power. The Austrians wanted to check Russian expansion, and to keep one of their historic allies: The Kingdom of Saxony from being subsumed into Prussia. To mediate this dispute, a compromise was negotiated where Saxony ceded much of its territory to Prussia while Russia was given a theoretically independent Polish State informally known as the Congress Poland ruled in a Personal Union with Russia with Tsar Alexander I as its King due to his more liberal views. The Austrian Netherlands was granted to the Dutch to provide a buffer and veritable check on French expansionism. Austria was granted compensation by being made the effective overlord of Italy with it being granted control of Venetia and Milan which made up the sub-kingdom known as the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia.




While many traditionalists wanted the House of Bourbon restored to all of its de Jure holdings, due to duplicity of the Murats turning cloaks on their French brethren, the Kingdom of Naples was kept from the Bourbons much to the chagrin of the Sicilian branch and the other senior rulers of France and Spain. This arrangement suited both Austria and Britain as it would serve to limit French influence and hegemony from re-emerging through the dynastic connections between the members of the House of Bourbon.

With the main issues plaguing the Congress settled, the main powers sought to create a precedent to diplomatically resolve the varying issues between nations while working together to crush any lingering embers of Revolution that may try to spark new flames once again. This accord between nations is often referred to as the Metternich System after its chief architect working to create a peace hailed as monumental as the Peace of Westphalia as it led to the creation of the Holy League between Austria, Russia, and Prussia to protect the traditional old world ideals by crushing any sign of Revolution. Indeed to many at the time, it seemed as though lasting peace was forged with the "little Corsican" as those hostile to Emperor Napoleon refer to him, thrown along with his legacy into the ash heap of history. But as history shows us, the flight of the Eaglet would destroy this system.
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Footnotes:
[1] The Savoyard Kingdom of Sardinia and the Bourbon Kingdom of Sicily depicted on the map were not part of Napoleon's Empire, but states opposed to him.
[2] France should be bigger on here because there was no Hundred Days Campaign, and there would be no Kingdom of Two Sicilies as The House of Murat would be ruling Naples while the Italian branch of the House of Bourbon rules just the Kingdom of Sicily-proper (aka Trinacria).

Author's Note:
I hope you guys enjoy this timeline! Please feel free to comment. Any form of feedback and/or constructive criticism are welcome.

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