Map of the Fortnight 288: Exotic Exile

[CourageousLife]

Exotic Exile

The Challenge
Create a map of a former penal colony.

The Restrictions
There are no restrictions on when your PoD or map may be set. Fantasy, sci-fi, and future maps are allowed, but blatantly implausible (ASB) maps are not.

If you're not sure whether your idea meets the criteria of this challenge, please feel free to PM me or comment in the main thread.

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The entry period for this round will end when the voting thread is posted on Monday the 18th of March.

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THIS THREAD IS FOR ENTRIES ONLY.

Any discussion must take place in the main thread. If you post anything other than a map entry (or a description accompanying a map entry) in this thread then you will be asked to delete the post. If you refuse to delete the post, post something that is clearly disruptive or malicious, or post spam then you may be disqualified from entering in this round of MotF and you may be reported to the board's moderators.
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[Texas Bulldog]

Napoleon's victory over the forces of the coalition was a shock to the system. With the seemingly promising Admiral Nelson now sleeping with the fishes in the Caribbean, Trafalgar annihilated the British fleet, and for the first time in over 700 years, the British Isles fell to a French invasion force. In the wake of the Treaty of Bordeaux, Britain saw her burgeoning colonial empire torn away from her in a heartbeat. Among these were the lonely islands of Autiaraux, near to Australia. While Australia was seized by the remaining British convicts and a republic proclaimed, the islands became a French protectorate in 1852.

Widespread cutbacks in the army saw thousands of soldiers on the streets in search for work. Shipped to Autiaraux in a similar way to that of the British "transportation", they became the driving force of settlement. Of particular note was the fourth son of Napoleon II, Jean-Baptiste, exiled to Autiaraux (After reportedly a string of embarrassing incidents involving a Parisian prostitute) and made-Governor General. This, in effect, made the islands the Party Prince's very own fiefdom, which his line inherited rather uneventfully for many years.

The European powder keg was smashed in an instant by the grips of revolution. The Turbulent Thirties saw an ironic revolution grip the Continent, deposing House Bonaparte and establishing the Union of Council Republics. As the last Imperial banner was toppled from the Versailles Palace, the great-grandson of Jean-Baptiste was crowned (to great confusion) Jean-Luc I of Autiaraux, the French Empire in exile.

Autiaraux today is a rather odd place. A mix of classical French, Mauré, and Southeast Asian influences, her wine country is one of the finest in the world. Calls for nativization fall on deaf ears, for as long the tourists keep flowing, as long as the sauces are rich and the wine is sweet, as long as Charles I lies upon his Antipodean throne of silver, Autiaraux shall keep on going as it always has.

Damn! I wish I could write this much for my own timeline.

 

[Madras]

OKAT FREE TERRITORY - 1936
(Sourced from the ''Little Observer'', Prague, 1935 (translation by Enrique Novak, 1938)​

Originating in the absence of a Red-Black split among the First International, a reactionary cascade begins to spread across the world, especially in the autocratic empires of Japan and Russia. Using the frontlines of the ongoing brushfire conflicts as means to corral growing waves of radicalism, the sea of Okhotsk became a '' Prisoner's Triangle'' as agrarian socialists, reformists, and anarchist and syndicalist elements were moved in masse to work the frozen mines. But it would not last, for the Sino-Russian war, which soon became only a front in the Great War, spurred on the radicalization of the peasantry surrounding the prisoners, who soon turned to riots. Beaten down during the war, the cataclysmic outbreak of civil war in Russia only strengthened further resistance, and with a weakened Japan looking to consolidate their own borders, the former prisoners broke down the bars and the chains that held them and made themselves masters of the islands. In the two decades since, a heavily atomized and equally militarized society has grown on the fringes of the ailing empires, and time may only tell how long the East's first experiment in Liberationist theory may last...

(If the double maps break any rules, I can simply keep one of them as my entry.)

 

[Prince di Corsica]

The Paris Communes Lives On... in the Pacific?​

What a curious coincidence that I should post this on the anniversary of the founding of the Paris Commune! Anyway, I don't want to miss out on the contest, so I'll have to keep myself short here.

The overall idea for this came from reading about the life of the Communards in exile in New Caledonia. Apparently, Louise Michel got along quite well with the natives and some Communards supported a native uprising in 1878. So, naturally, let's just have a Kanak-Communard alliance in 1878 throw out the French, and proceed to build a socialist state in the island. Is it plausible? Not really, but it is a fun enough idea. One that I wish I had had more time to expand on, but alas, here we are.

What to say... I really hoped for a more complex map than this, but I am at least happy the demographics got in. I like the separation of French descendants into different "ethnic" groups based on their family's condition at arrival - either political prisoners, common law prisoners or honest colonists. It implies that those differences matter so long after independence. I like to imagine the Communards taking some monopoly in political power, giving the country a strangely hypocritical regime, based on popular power, but held in the hands of a small minority of political radicals. Really wish I had found a more interesting and evident way of expressing that into the map, though.

I also would have like to have done more with the minorities, especially the Arabs. The Arabs of the Pacific seem like such an interesting group to me. I'll have to explore further what to do with them, in some other project? French Australia colonized by Algerian prisoners? Well, that's an idea for another time.

The flag, although not very original, it was somewhat rushed, ended up looking good.

Now - as to what I wanted to include, did some work towards it, but couldn't find the time - the politics of the country. I wanted the Council of the Communes to be divided between two main parties, perhaps with smaller parties, perhaps with very prominent factions within. Anyway, the two parties would be, on the one hand, a Federalist-Libertarian group, essentially based on anarchist principles and wanting to keep the island more decentralized, while the other would the Democratic Socialists "The Mountain", based on Jacobin and more communist principles, wanting further centralization. I wanted to show how delegates from each commune were split and all that but, again, time and, honestly, even that seems somewhat boring to show.

In essence, while I think this is a very interesting scenario, this map is not as complete or as interesting as I would have like. But it is a fun scenario, and it is a decent map - I actually used Manet's painting about Communards fleeing New Caledonia as the ocean background. I think that looks cool, no? Yeah, this map is somewhat odd in what it has and what it lacks, I suppose. But I'll let you folks be the judges of that.​