Editing Greater Austrasia (section)

==='''Ganras Galleries, Vies'''===

[[File:Pganras.jpg]]

This is a good place to get a painting done or have a glass of tea or wine with really pretentious art critics in the earth world of 19th century Vienna/Vies in the Principality of Austria in the Kingdom of [[Greater Austrasia]]. This empire-nation spans the globe of a world where Napoleon and France conquered the world by 1840, leaving a strong imperial monarchy and several generations of able rulers. As has been commented on before, in shadow anything is possible.

For details on Napoleons impressive career visit the Addendum

A type of endless discussion group lives in this garret. It rests above a very fine café so it can be ranked amongst the Diners of Amber if you so choose. There is even a fair gambling club next to a brothel where fancy French women do naughty things to fancy Austrian women while fancy Nubian and fancy confederate women wait and warm each other up.

The garret itself though is a running debate. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week people come and go, sitting, talking, painting , primping, complaining, stargazing, planning, lying, wooing, and otherwise entertaining each other.

Six people dominate this circle of people. They are nearly always here. Pierre Renoir, Lewis Carroll, Vincent Van Gogh, Karl Lueger, Henri Toulouse-lautrec, Sigmund Freud.

Sigmund Freud is the father of psychoanalysis.  Enough said.

Lewis Carroll is an English author and mathematician, and an exiled criminal. The writer of Alice in Wonderland was imprisoned in 1870 for sedition against the French government, after serving 5 years he fled England to live in Vienna. There he lives beneath the level of perception of the government, a general among the underground. 

He said something i have always liked, caught my atttention and made me seek him out when i found out he lived here.  "Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."  I know the feeling.

Vincent Van Gogh is, well, Vincent ''Friggin'' Van Gogh.  Now i have run into many artists that were Vincent Can Gogh.  But this ine is the most Vincent of Vincents i ever met.  He speaks eloquently on the value of madness for an artist and speaks in worshipful reverance of the ittinerant war-medic who saved his life when he attempted suicide.   

Karl Lueger is a government employee in the Austrian Principality of Austrasia. A brilliant, anti-semitic, opportunistic, and driven man keen on the newest type of technology to improve the city. He is also a rabid anti-French Austrian patriot. This man is... interesting to argue with.

Renoir is a painter.  A pretty good one too.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec is the prototype of the eccentric artist.  An interesting man in any shadow one find him, it seems the people of Ganrus helped him through his own despondency and helped him find useful medical treatments.  

There is a cacophony of other renegades and roustabout artists and such here.  It seems circuses are often in town and .  

I'm told my brother Pierre can be found here with some regularity.  Someday i should visit to meet him.

 
<span style=color:darkgreen>Oh, the things that I could say about this place! Let us just say this is a very chatty place, filled with very chatty people, who have sources of information from Budapest, to Peking, to Los Angeles, to Johannesburg. They also have contacts from Amber to Avalon, Mandalay to Chaos.

<span style=color:darkgreen>Since most Amberites are familiar with earth history, being frequent guests there, it happened like this in this one.

<span style=color:darkgreen>Napoleon demolished Europe by 1805. Ignoring Russia he sent armies and embassies to take Scandinavia just to get people used to the cold. After this every soldier in his army learned to deal with cold weather and eventually were able to invade Russia, from Finland, if you can believe it, and conquer Russia in 1812.

<span style=color:darkgreen>This meant that by 1815 everything in Europe from the Orkneys and Ireland to Italy and the Low Countries, Russia to Spain and Portugal was now France. Not subject nations, they were provinces of the France Empire with new, or at least, renamed aristocracy. England, as a subject of the Empire, has never been comfortable.  A new aristocrasy was laid on top of the old english one in the way the Normans were dropped on top of the British.  London and York are hotbeds of rebellious activities in their world and it almost seems like thats by design.  Every 4 or 5 years the opposition suffers a few deaths and a lot of setbacks.  

<span style=color:darkgreen>Africa was never very organized anyway so all it took was some missionaries, some assassinations, and a judicious use of patronage and military might to take Africa from Cairo to the Cape of Good Hope. An impressive act of barbarism paired with the acquisition of an impressive Grand Duke made short work of Africa. Napoleon met a young Shaka Zulu in 1807. Soon the young man was a colonel of the French Army, fighting in Algiers and Egypt. In 1816 when Shaka's father died he went to take control of the Zulu nation. He took along about 20,000 seasoned French/Algerian instructors and enough weaponry to destroy any stone age people that reared their ugly heads. Within 15 years the Zulu, loyal French citizens everyone, had conquered Africa and Shaka Zulu was not only a Marshal of France but a Prince of the Empire.

<span style=color:darkgreen>With Europe, Africa, and Russia to draw troops, China, southeast Asia, and Australia had little hope.  The Edo shogunate in the early 1800s had been dealing with the intrusions into this waters by American and Russian whalers and when the French conquered Russia began discussions of alliances. Feudal Japan began trading directly with French merchant shipping and gained western military equipment and supplies. Japan had roundly trounced most of China, Southeast Asia, and had nearly exterminated the Australian aborigines by the time Russia/French/Zulu troops had conquered the Indian subcontinent.  

<span style=color:darkgreen>By 1830 three distinct spheres of influence existed on this world.  French, American, and Japanese.  American influence in the southern hemisphere was unorganized and ineffective.

<span style=color:darkgreen>By 1830 dissident movements had been squashed, transportation issues dealt with and the standard of living in Europe, Africa and Asia was uniform and high.

<span style=color:darkgreen>From 1806 French spies had been fomenting disunion in the United States and with French support the Confederate Army rose in 1842. This death blow to the United States meant that Canada, Mexico, and the United States were divided into 8 separate regions and were completely subjugated by 1849.

<span style=color:darkgreen>South America fell piecemeal throughout the 1830s. Moving troops around and visiting all the new provinces there took Napoleon 2 years between mid 1837-1839. It was in Panama, July 4, 1839, after laying out the plans and digging the first shovel full of dirt on a future canal, that he caught malaria and died.

<span style=color:darkgreen>It didn't matter. He had a son ready, a grandson in uniform, and a great-grandson in diapers.

<span style=color:darkgreen>It especially didn't matter that he died because he didn't. He merely rejoined Benedict's General Staff. The fix was in from the start.

<span style=color:darkgreen>Polynesia is still a hold out but so little government lives there than it is not worth mentioning. Besides, they need some place to send troops for practical experience.