My Empire Lies Over The Ocean

Steve Brinson

Steve Brinson

My Empire Lies Over The Ocean
or, Mon Empire Est d'Outre-Mer

From PEOBE (Publicly Editable OmniBus Encyclopædia)
Bookman's Revolt[1] was a short-lived slave revolt in Saint-Domingue, between 1791 and 1793, though isolated fighting continued until 1794. It was led by Dutty Bookman and fully ended with his capture and execution by the colonial authorities, though many stopped fighting after the abolition of slavery in Saint-Domingue. It directly led to the abolition of slavery in all Republican French territory, which was a measure by the colonial government to prevent a combined British-Spanish invasion of the colony from taking advantage of the revolt.

[1]In OTL, this was the first part of the Haitian Revolution. TTL, it's less successful, due in part to the deaths of Louverture and Dessalines, ensuring that there would be no second part of the revolution, and in part due to butterflies.

NOTE: Second version.
 
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Huehuecoyotl

Huehuecoyotl

Monthly Donor
Ah, now this is off to a promising start. Is the major change of this TL going to result from the Cap-Haitien fever spreading abroad, or simply from the deaths of Messrs. L'Ouverture and Dessalines?
 
Steve Brinson

Steve Brinson

For now, I'm only planning for the PoD to be the deaths of Louverture and Dessalines, plus maybe a few others, but I may well have have it spread.
I'm not 100% sure where to go from here. I have a vague idea (have the Napoleonic government forced to evacuate to its colonies), but I'm not sure how to get there, past a few vague ideas.
 

Dathi THorfinnsson

What is this fever? If it is real, what is it called iotl?

If its not, inventing a nasty nasty disease simply to kill off two people, when there are SO many existing ones that could do the job....

Canebrake fever, iotl, was apparently a term used for a nasty form of malaria. But that wouldnt have travelled with rodents.

2) you used Google Translate to get the French version of the title, right? 'Cause your Empire is on the ocean, not across it, im afraid.

Never, never trust Google translate.
 
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'Ezana

Dathi THorfinnsson said:
What is this fever? If it is real, what is it called iotl?

If its not, inventing a nasty nasty disease simply to kill off two people, when there are SO many existing ones that could do the job....

Canebrake fever, iotl, was apparently a term used for a nasty form of malaria. But that wouldnt have travelled with rodents.

2) you used Google Translate to get the French version of the title, right? 'Cause your Empire is on the ocean, not across it, im afraid.

Never, never trust Google translate.
Click to expand...

1) According to his footnote, the disease he mentions is this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leptospirosis. I'm not sure how widespread the disease was at the period though (the disease was not actually observed until the 1880s), so there still may be potential for spreading it beyond its otl boundaries.

2) You might want to use "Mon Empire est d'Autre-Mer" (My Empire is across the sea), or "Mon Empire est de l'autre cote de l'Océan/Mon Empire est en face de l'Océan." The latter two mean "My Empire is across the ocean", or literally "My empire is on the other side of the ocean." While my latter two translations are more direct, the first translation seems more suited to what you were going for with the English title. In addition I usually see "Mer" or "sea" used more than the word for ocean, so it seems more French to me.

Anyway, I'm interested to see where this goes, especially being Haitian myself.
 

Dathi THorfinnsson

'Ezana said:
1) According to his footnote, the disease he mentions is this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leptospirosis. I'm not sure how widespread the disease was at the period though (the disease was not actually observed until the 1880s), so there still may be potential for spreading it beyond its otl boundaries.

2) You might want to use "Mon Empire est d'Autre-Mer" (My Empire is across the sea), or "Mon Empire est de l'autre cote de l'Océan/Mon Empire est en face de l'Océan." The latter two mean "My Empire is across the ocean", or literally "My empire is on the other side of the ocean." While my latter two translations are more direct, the first translation seems more suited to what you were going for with the English title. In addition I usually see "Mer" or "sea" used more than the word for ocean, so it seems more French to me.

Anyway, I'm interested to see where this goes, especially being Haitian myself.
Click to expand...
Oops. Missed the reference to Lepidospirosis.
But the Wiki article you linked suggests that only 10% of people who come down with the disease even get the severe form, let alone die. Moreover, since there's no human-human transmission, I cant see the fatality rate being within an order of magnitude of the 30% of the OP.

Given the death rates at the time having one guy die in a duel, and the other in of dysentry, say, would be a lot more believable. Imo.
 
Steve Brinson

Steve Brinson

Dathi THorfinnsson said:
Oops. Missed the reference to Lepidospirosis.
But the Wiki article you linked suggests that only 10% of people who come down with the disease even get the severe form, let alone die. Moreover, since there's no human-human transmission, I cant see the fatality rate being within an order of magnitude of the 30% of the OP.

Given the death rates at the time having one guy die in a duel, and the other in of dysentry, say, would be a lot more believable. Imo.
Click to expand...

The wiki article states that 10% die of the Weil's disease form (which this one is), even with treatment, and I fudged the numbers a bit.

But I do think I'll change it. The butterflies are a lot less severe that way.
 
Steve Brinson

Steve Brinson

Original version, including only for historical purposes.
wolfram said:
My Empire Lies Over The Ocean
or, Mon Empire Est d'Autre-Mer

From The Atlas of Epidemic Diseases:
Cap-Haïtien fever [1], also known as Canefield fever, is a disease caused by the Aurugus genus of parvitia [2].
...
Section 3: Haitian Outbreak
In 1787, a group of infected rodents arrived in the Cap-Haïtien area, probably by ship. Soon after, people who came into contact with the rodents - first slaves in Saint-Domingue's Plaine du Nord, but later it spread: both up through the gens de couleur, and, later, the blancs, and geographically, over the rest of Hispaniola.
The epidemic had a high mortality rate, approximately 30% of all infected. Overall, during its eighteen months between beginning and tapering off, becoming a minor endemic disease, it had an estimated death toll of 130,000.[3]

[1]: IOTL, known as leptospirosis or Weil's disease.
[2]: IOTL, bacteria: TTL terminology from Latin words parvus, or small, and vīta, or life.
[3]: Not mentioned in this article: the deaths of Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, two Haitians who will never influence history again...
Click to expand...
 
Steve Brinson

Steve Brinson

'Ezana said:
Well this is embarrassing. I was trying to work on a paper while responding to this thread and misspelled the phrase "Outre-mer." Sorry for the confusion...
Click to expand...
Well, thanks for correcting it.

UPDATE TWO:
1794:
Maximilien Robespierre was a man with many enemies. His primary method of preventing those enemies from killing him was preemptive action: arresting them and executing them.

On Germinal 4, police, under Robespierre's orders, attempted to arrest leading members of the Cordeliers Club, including Georges Danton. But Danton and his allies had been tipped off[1], and had fled the city the previous night. Many, including Danton and his lieutenant, Camille Desmoulins, were hiding in safehouses around the city, but Charles-Philippe Ronsin had a plan.

Ronsin was a general. He believed that what liberty in France needed was a general "better than me, better than anyone else in the world", as he bitterly told Jacques-Louis David, in whose house he was hiding. That general, he thought, had to have enough charisma to rally radicals and moderates, sans-culottes and former bourgeoisie, behind one banner. He also thought that that general would have to have complete loyalty to France.

As Harry Kovalski would say two centuries later, "He eventually came across Bonaparte, and presumably thought, 'Two out of three isn't so bad." He set off to Italy, and found Bonaparte arguing with his superiors about whether or not to attack Sardinia. As Bonaparte exited the room, Ronsin said something to him.

Historians can only speculate on what it was. Whatever the words, the effects were unmistakable: on Floréal 15, Bonaparte and Ronsin returned to Paris...

[1]TTL, Danton's wife did not die in childbirth due to butterflies, and thus he was more generally on-the-ball about things, leading to him having one or two more loyalists in the police who could inform.
 
Steve Brinson

Steve Brinson

UPDATE THREE:
From PEOBE (Publicly Editable OmniBus Encyclopædia)
The Ver-À-Soie Revolt was an incident often called the "pivotal moment" (by who?) of the French Revolution. On May 4, 1794, Napoleon Bonaparte led parts of the French Revolutionary Army, incited into rebellion by the pamphlets of Antoine-François Momoro, to storm the offices of the National Convention, the Committee of Public Safety, and the Jacobin Club, killing Maximilien Robespierre and Louis de Saint-Just[1], among others, and installing Bonaparte as the first President of France[2].

[1] According to urban legend, their bodies were disposed of in the Seine. That was, in fact, an invention of the artist Jacques-Louis David: the bodies, in fact, were buried, if not very well.
[2] Not intended by Ronsin, or anyone else but Napoleon, but nobody opposed him enough to stop him.
 
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