Chapter 1632: The Crisis Must Be Shifted Away!

The first impact Napoleon brought was sounding the death knell of the feudal system!

Although Napoleon himself established a dynasty and became Emperor, the Bonaparte dynasty he founded was not a traditional feudal dynasty, but a centralized bourgeois constitutional empire — although there was an Emperor, and he appointed some kings, there was no layer-by-layer downward feudal enfeoffment. Whether provinces or kingdoms, all were administered by popularly elected parliaments and bureaucrats!

Moreover, when Napoleon established his constitutional empire, he also carried out a purge of the feudal aristocratic forces within the Western Roman Empire. He not only stripped the old nobility of their power, but also expropriated their properties on a large scale, and sold these properties — mainly land — at low prices to the small farmers within the Western Roman Empire.

The foundation of the Western Roman Empire's feudal system — serfdom — collapsed as a result! And the wealth gap within the Western Roman Empire also shrank dramatically, and social contradictions were comprehensively eased.

At the same time as dismantling serfdom, civic education, laws protecting the interests of the bourgeoisie, and various policies encouraging the development of capitalism were all formulated and promulgated for implementation by Emperor Napoleon and his Senate.

In other words, this new Emperor of the Roman Empire not only seized the fruits of victory of the Great Revolution, but also preserved and consolidated the achievements of the Great Revolution.

Before the empire he established collapsed, the foundation upon which feudal dynasties and feudal aristocrats existed had essentially disappeared from the soil of the Western Roman Empire, and could never be restored.

The second impact brought by the Napoleonic Empire was making Europeans believe that "unification" was possible! Whether the unification of the world or the unification of Europe, both were achievable.

Because Napoleon not only promised to first unify Europe and then go to compete with the Great Ming Empire, but he actually set out to realize this ideal, and came within a hair's breadth of unifying the European continent!

Before Napoleon assembled an army of 600,000 and marched on Moscow, he had already unified the entire European continent except for the Dutch Republic, the Kingdom of Sweden, and the Russian Empire!

And faced with the aggressive Emperor Napoleon, the originally neutral Republic of England and Kingdom of Sweden, in order to protect themselves, had no choice but to join the Celestial Alliance led by the Great Ming Empire, and together with the Russian Empire and the royal houses of the various European continental states driven from their homelands by Napoleon, they sought aid from the Celestial Alliance's hegemon, Great Ming.

The Hongxing Emperor of Great Ming at that time did not realize what difference there was between Napoleon's empire and the Bourbon family's Roman Empire. So he very naturally regarded the requests for aid from England, Sweden, and Russia as a heaven-sent opportunity to realize the "dream of unification."

Thus he made "submission as vassals and offering tribute" the condition for sending troops to aid Russia, and England, Sweden, and Russia, eager to defeat Emperor Napoleon, had no choice but to agree to Zhu Jianyan's conditions. In 1812, together with the Eastern and Western Roman Emperors of the Bourbon dynasty, the Ottoman Sultan, the Emperor of the Timurid Empire of India, the Emperor of the Li dynasty of India, and other rulers, they sent envoys to present oaths of submission and symbolic tribute to the Great Ming Emperor, establishing in legal terms the suzerain-vassal relationship with Great Ming.

Having gotten his wish and collected a batch of thoroughly unreliable junior partners, the Great Ming Emperor Zhu Yanjian ordered the Celestial Alliance expeditionary force, commanded by the Imperial Grandson Zhu Dichuan and long since arrived at the Volga River basin, to advance westward immediately, link up with the Russian army commanded by Kutuzov, and join the war of resistance against Napoleon's invasion.

And the outcome of this war was no different from the War of 1812 in another time-space... Napoleon's grand army suffered a catastrophic defeat under the combined blows of the Ming-Russian allied forces and Russia's General Winter. Of 600,000 men, only 30,000 withdrew from Russian territory.

After losing the 1812 invasion of Russia, Napoleon's Roman Empire fell from its peak. However, in this time-space Napoleon possessed more capital, so he did not collapse like a landslide after defeat, but under the attacks of the allied forces he grimly held on for another eight years, until Napoleon died of illness in 1821, when his empire had still not finally collapsed...

But his empire was still, after his death, crushed by the allied forces commanded by Constantine I, Zhu Dichuan, and Kutuzov. His heir, the young Napoleon II, was forced to abdicate and became the Grand Duke of Corsica of the Western Roman Empire. The Eastern Roman, Western Roman, and various other kingdoms and duchies destroyed by the Napoleonic Empire were all restored.

The United Provinces of the Netherlands, the Republic of England, the American Federation, the United Kingdom of New England, and the Great Soviet Khanate, which had at one time or throughout stood on the side of the Napoleonic Empire during the war, also joined the Celestial Alliance somewhat later and submitted as vassals to the Great Ming Empire.

At this point, the Great Ming Empire became, at least nominally, the suzerain of the entire world... The world, at least on paper, had been unified — later historical researchers did discover some tribal chieftains or kings of some indigenous kingdoms who did not know who the Great Ming Emperor was. But these tribes or small kingdoms could not obstruct the great trend of the unification of all mankind.

"He really did unify it..." Zhu Yaofei was somewhat speechless upon seeing this result.

He had not expected the inertia of Great Ming's glorious golden age to be so great! It had even unified the world... But "unifying the world" was probably the peak of the Great Ming dynasty, right?

With the world unified, what room for growth was left?

Become a galactic empire? That would be too science fiction!

Moreover, the unification forcibly pushed through by Zhu Jianyan was really just for appearances, with no substance at all — merely a hollow bustle, no different from the suzerain-tribute system Great Ming had engaged in years earlier. Everyone made a lively show of going through the motions and that was that. If some truly major event occurred, then one would learn just how hollow this "world unification" was.

Zhu Yaofei shook his head and continued reading.

In the following chapter, Zhu Zhongshu also analyzed this "world unification." In the view of this great historian, "world unification" was merely a delusional and somewhat absurd dream. If the Hongxing Emperor's nearly "farcical" experiment had met with failure, perhaps the Great Ming Empire's dynastic lifespan might have been even longer. But unfortunately, because of the Roman Revolution and the rise of Napoleon, the monarchs of Europe were forced to choose between the Emperor Napoleon close at hand and the Hongxing Emperor far away... After all, the Hongxing Emperor only wanted an empty title, while Napoleon, that revolutionary emperor, truly wanted to overthrow everyone's thrones, so they inevitably chose the Hongxing Emperor!

And the success of the Hongxing Emperor and the struggles of Napoleon turned "world unification" into a goal that could be seen and touched.

For many powerful monarchs or other rulers after the Hongxing Emperor, it seemed that only by following in the Hongxing Emperor's footsteps and unifying the world once more could they demonstrate their greatness and correctness.

Therefore, after the "First World Unification War," there would inevitably be an even more destructive "Second World Unification War."

Of course, the Second World Unification War would not break out immediately. Because the Napoleonic Wars had exhausted everyone, and the productivity advances brought by the Industrial Revolution could still temporarily allow the people of the Great Ming Empire to scrape by and continue their neither-good-nor-bad days.

And over in Europe, the "dividends" of the Napoleonic Empire and the Roman Revolution had not yet been fully released. The European states benefiting from them had not yet grown to the point of being able to challenge the authority of the "world suzerain," the Great Ming Empire... More precisely, European industrialization had not yet grown to the point where it could confront the Great Ming Empire head-on.

So they still needed the Great Ming Empire, this "world suzerain," to serve for a while as the world's policeman and maintain the world's trade order.

And this period when the world was superficially unified was also called by later generations the "Great Unification Period."