Chapter 1633: The People of the World Love War

The Hongxing Emperor of the Great Ming, Zhu Jianyan, was an emperor with an extraordinarily long reign, almost comparable to Zhu Cilang! Because his father did not live long, and his eldest son by his primary wife was likewise short-lived — before Zhu Jianyan reached the age of sixty-five, the son died of sepsis after accidentally shooting himself in the foot with one of his own new-model pistols during a military exercise. So this emperor simply had to reign a bit longer, all the way until his grandson Zhu Dichuan had fully grown up.

And this Great Ming emperor and sovereign of the world, who later took "Jisheng" as his reign era, during his expedition to Europe to attack Emperor Napoleon and Napoleon II, went and did another foolish thing that pained Zhu Zhongshu to the core!

Together with four European monarchs who were in fact descendants of the Zhu Ming line — Russian Crown Prince Konstantin, King Karl III of Hungary, King Henry III of Austria, and King Ferdinand I of Wallachia — he hatched a conspiracy to "sleep the world into submission"!

That's right — not conquer, but "sleep into submission"!

That is to say, learning from the "Lower Body Fortress," using exported princes and bedroom politics to seize the crowns of Europe. Striving to inject the paternal bloodline of the Zhu Ming royal house into every royal house in the world!

That way, the Great Ming Empire, as sovereign of the world, could rest easy... By then it would be a case of "brothers within the four seas, neighbors at the ends of the earth"! If the emperors, kings, grand dukes, sultans, and emirs of every country all bore the surname Zhu, then wouldn't the Great Ming emperor be the eldest brother of them all? Wouldn't Great Ming be the eldest brother of all the world's nations? Wouldn't all the world's nations be one family?

Once they were all one family, unification would naturally be guaranteed!

To be fair, one cannot say Zhu Dichuan's line of thinking was entirely without merit... but it was certainly outdated. Because this whole feudal-monarch approach, after the upheavals of the Roman Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire, no longer held sway in Europe. The foundation of Europe's feudal monarchs was the feudal aristocracy that controlled land and population; only when the aristocrats pressed down from below could the monarch sit secure. But after the Napoleonic Wars, the aristocrats of most European countries had lost their land and population, transforming from feudal aristocrats into court aristocrats.

Without these feudal aristocrats, the various feudal dynasties had their foundations shaken and lost the ability to suppress the lower classes.

At the same time, because the laws and institutions favorable to capitalist development promoted during Napoleon's time in power had long since taken deep root, the restored feudal dynasties did not dare abolish them. Thus in the thirty or forty years after the collapse of the Napoleonic Empire, nearly every European country had stepped onto the express lane of capitalism. On one hand, capitalist industry and commerce developed rapidly, factories sprang up from the ground, and cities expanded ceaselessly; on the other, peasants went bankrupt in great numbers and flocked into the cities to make a living. And the majority of the bankrupt peasants who massed in the cities inevitably sank into utter destitution...

The proletariat, too, began to appear in great numbers upon the soil of the continent of Europa!

Every feudal dynasty in Europe faced an unprecedented challenge. Under these circumstances, Zhu Dichuan's "sleep the world into submission" policy not only drew the internal contradictions of the European countries onto the Ming dynasty itself, but also artificially accelerated the pace of exchange between Great Ming and Europe, and likewise accelerated the speed at which the "revolutionary contagion" spread toward the Ming homeland.

A fine piece of bedroom politics, and it went and conjured up the specter of revolution... Truly a case of "there are risks in getting into bed, and one must be cautious about marrying into another's house"!

So by the later period of Zhu Dichuan's reign — that is, the 1850s and 1860s — when economic crisis and revolutionary storms bore down together upon this great commander who had once "defeated Napoleon," the aging Zhu Dichuan was at once thrown into frantic confusion.

Because this Great Ming emperor who had come up with the muddled scheme of "sleeping the world into submission" was in truth also a man left behind by the times, his head full of nothing but dynastic wars and dynastic marriage alliances.

When he read the telegrams reporting that the "brother dynasties" of Europe were falling into crisis one after another, all he could think of was to ask Konstantin II of Russia to send troops to help suppress them!

But Konstantin II himself was also facing a revolutionary crisis. Just as he had ascended the throne, a group of Russian Guards officers who had fought in the anti-Napoleonic wars suddenly rose up, launching an uprising in Petersburg, attempting to overthrow the rule of the Romanov dynasty, establish a republic, and abolish serfdom...

So Konstantin II likewise did not send troops at the first opportunity to stamp out the revolution, with the result that the flames of revolution burned ever hotter across the European continent. Apart from the United Provinces of the Netherlands, which had been a republic all along, the Kingdom of Austria and the Kingdom of Bohemia, which had long since begun developing capitalism, and the Russian Empire, which lay off to the east, every other country fell into crisis.

And Konstantin II's hesitation quickly produced extremely serious consequences. The fragile Bourbon dynasty of the Western Roman Empire was the first to be submerged by the torrent of revolution. Napoleon Bonaparte's son, Napoleon II, made a comeback from Corsica, and amid the support of the revolutionary masses, donned the purple in the city of Rome and restored the Bonaparte dynasty!

Afterward, this son of Napoleon swiftly advanced on Paris, and amid the cheers of the people and the army, returned to the Palace of Versailles and once more became Emperor of the Western Roman Empire!

Seeing the Western Roman restoration and stricken with fear, King Henry III of Austria, King Karl III of Hungary, Louis III of Bohemia, and Ferdinand II of Wallachia simply kicked aside the half-dead Eastern Roman Empire and organized a Central European Federation on their own. They also announced the establishment of a unified market, a unified parliament, and a unified federal government.

Shortly afterward, Konstantin II of Russia finally came to his senses when revolution broke out in Russian Poland, dispatching 300,000 Russian troops into Poland to carry out a great slaughter! After suppressing the Polish revolution, he also signed a treaty of alliance with the Central European Federation.

At the same time, Prussia, which had gradually grown powerful after the Napoleonic Wars, emboldened by the Russians' great slaughter, put down its own internal unrest on its own, and in passing put forward a North German Federation plan to revitalize Germany. Moreover, it gained the support of the Central European Federation and Russia — an alliance aimed at opposing the Western Roman Empire began to take shape.

The Western Roman side, for its part, gained the support of the Republic of England and the United Provinces of the Netherlands, and began actively preparing for war.

Almost at the very same time, trouble broke out again on the North American continent. The province of New Spain, which belonged to the Western Roman Empire, this time did not continue its loyalty to the exiled Bourbon royal house, but instead launched a war of independence and formed the Mexican Federation.

And the Mexican Federation, the American Federation, the United Kingdom of New England, and the Great Soviet Khanate thereupon formed the Grand North American Alliance, aimed at opposing the United States of the New Continent and the Qing State.

The war in the Americas had reached the point of being ready to erupt at any moment!

With the situation developed to this point, it could be said to be completely out of control; a new world war was already on the very brink of breaking out.

But the Ming homeland at this time was likewise beset by economic crisis and revolutionary currents; even the Imperial Guard in Yingtian Prefecture had begun to show signs of unrest. With the spread of compulsory education, these soldiers raised from poor youths of the remote frontier regions now found it harder and harder to find a way out beyond military merit — originally, educated Imperial Guard soldiers could easily pass the examinations to become officials after leaving the service. But after the general level of education among the common people had risen greatly, passing the official examinations had become more and more difficult.

And after the unification under the Hongxing reign, the world situation had been stable for many years, and there was no more military merit for the officers and men of the Imperial Guard to earn. So these Imperial Guard soldiers with no way out were easily infected by the revolutionary currents arising from Europe or the homeland.

Using the pretext that Zhu Dichuan had "violated the ancestral system by remaining on the throne past the age limit," they launched a military remonstrance and placed the twenty-year-old Crown Prince Zhu Jinglei on the throne!