Bergonian History:

1780 to 1930--
the Bergonian Republic

Summary

After independence, the new republican central government in Ceiolai started off weak, in contrast to the strong local governments dominated by the landed gentry (iregemi) and urban trading elites.  In the Republic's first decades its leadership consisted exclusively of French & Portuguese speaking whites and associated prosperous Catholic atrei (native Bergonian).  

However the native peasantry were rapidly reconstituting their numbers.  The proportion of atrei to whites and the proportion of Miradi to Christian all began to shift.  This rift often manifested as a contest between the coastal regions and Bergonia's interior.  The growing native population fueled industry and long-term economic growth.  The early 1800s saw a resurgence of atrei  and Miradi culture and ideals.  

This resurgence was accompanied by atrei political radicalism, which crystallized in Zaomitan, a strong, disciplined political party rising up in the interior highlands where European influences were weakest.  Whites reacted to the changing tide by arming themselves and forming militias.  Ethnic fighting raged from 1834 to 1839.  Though the Bergonian Army showed itself worthy, the government collapsed.  A revolution occurred in 1840 when urban elites of both white and atrei communities reached a liberal consensus.  

At first the Republic consisted only of Bergonia's northern half, with Britain hanging onto the southern half, but after a series of wars and transactions the British ceded to the Republic all their Bergonian territories. 

The 1840s was the "Liberal Decade," when the vote was given to all adults males, and when states began building public schools.  But expectations exceeded reality, especially in the countryside where the Iregemi still treated the peasants like serfs.

1763-1777--  Bergonia totally under British Rule

After the last French garrison disbanded and the last French ship left Bergonian ports in 1763, Britain controlled the entire island.  Five independent states (four Nacateca and one Minidun) and innumerable local strongmen were allowed to exist in the island's interior. 

In tune with mercantilist doctrine, Britain immediately decreed that Bergonians could no longer trade with  French or Spanish or any other Europeans.  Only British ships could visit Bergonian ports, and only Britain could export Bergonian silver, iron, wood, sugar, cotton, wool, linen cloth, and paper.  

In reaction many cities of the former French colonies organized resistance.  These cities were largely dominated by a wealthy class of French White colonial traders & planters, and a conjoint upper class of Catholic natives.  Many of these men joined with the guilds of craftsmen to organized committees of resistance against British Rule.  The committees of the various cities corresponded with each other, and as a result the various city governments in 1766 formed a union of free cities-- the Companie de Libre Cites-- to assert their interests collectively against the seven new Crown Governors.  

During the late 1700's the atrei (native) population rebounded with rapid growth.   Most of this growth occurred on the Ifuno Plateau, a region penetrated by only a few thousand European colonists.  By 1766 the Ifuno was home to perhaps ten million people, nearly all atrei, and about 40% of Bergonia's total population.  Here atrei, not Europeans, comprised the upper class of Iregemi planters and traders (though most of them had adopted European dress-- copper-brown faces under tri-corner hats, and powdered wigs in some extremes cases of affectation ).  They were about evenly divided between Catholic and Miradi, though the bulk of the Ifuno peasantry who labored under their domination were Miradi.  They generally had little regard for the British, and had generally preferred the French, who generally offered better terms.  This development paralleled French alliances with Indians against the British in North America.  During the Seven Years War the French had given arms to some of the atrei warlords, and other warlords had hired their own gunsmiths to make arms themselves.  After the war many of the Iregemi planters maintained their own militia forces.  Armed militias under control of local strongmen in the Ifuno would plague the next one hundred years of Bergonian history.

1777- 1787-- Birth of the Bergonian Republic

In 1766 the British army established a garrison of 600 regulars in the fine stone fort built by the French on the southern edge of Ceiolai, along the lakeshore.  They furthered their control over the teaming city of 300,000 with a militia of atrei to police the city and surrounding countryside, an arrangement they inherited from the French.

In 1777 the militia commander ordered one of his officers, a major named Michel Peislei to escort some visiting British officers around.  Peislei refused this rather demeaning task and retired to the fort where his regiment was stationed.  "I have had enough of Europeans," said Peislei, who had served under the French as well.  When the militia commander came to arrest him for insubordination his men rushed to protect him.  He and his regiment defected en masse, marching out of the fort and retreating into the countryside.  The militia commander did what he was supposed to; he summoned the British.  British cavalry and infantry pursued Peislei's regiment of 1,200 native men, but Peislei broke his men up into small bands and melted away. 

At the same time and in the same city a Nacateca man named Nuronia Chaladoni ran a Mindun language newspaper that attracted readers with sarcastic lampoons of the British and indignant condemnations of the generally sorry state of Bergonian affairs.  Peislei also wrote enthusiastically about the rebellion of the 13 American Colonies and had the previous year published the Declaration of Independence.  He publicized Peislei's desertion, openly endorsed it, and hinted that young men should get horses and go join his ranks.  Many did.   The British closed Chaladoni's paper, and Chaladoni fled into the countryside himself to join Peislei. 

Peislei's army grew larger and stronger.  On 20 April 1780 he put his entire force of 6,000 on the field to oppose a combined force of British Army and Ceiolaian Militia.  Peislei's army outflanked, overran and massacred them.  The next day his men marched directly into Ceiolai, with cheering crowds.  The British Governor surrendered the city to Peislei's second-in-command after accepting a written promise that all Crown subjects could leave the city.  

On 23 April Peislei rode into Ceiolai in an open carriage, drawn by four fine stallions. as part of a grand procession.   Marching drummers preceded him. Along the parade route he stopped and gave short speeches, repeating each time that he would form a government independent of Britain and that he would make war on Britain until there was one independent Bergonian republic.  The crowds cheered.  

On 24 April Peislei broke his word and seized 24 Crown citizens, several traders and officers and some wives and children.  He locked them up in the municipal jail, and he gave the remaining British subjects three days to leave the city.  The British Governor, himself subject to the order to evacuate, angrily protested, and refused to leave the city.

On 30 April 1780, now celebrated as Bergonia Day, the chief national holiday, Peislei and Chaladoni appeared together and proclaimed five principles: (a) total independence from Britain and all other European powers, (b) tolerance for all whites who wish to live in Bergonia and give loyalty to Bergonia, (c) equality of all citizens, groups and religions, (d) a ban on foreign (especially British) traders.  Then Peislei read a "Call to Bergonia" (written by Chaladoni), asking all men to rise up against the British "Snapping Turtles" and form a republic.   Peislei the general and Chaladoni the writer formed an unbreakable partnership.

The Companie du Libre Cites responded enthusiastically to the call.  At the northwest port city of Sonai in 1783 the Companie organized a successful revolt against the British.   Delegates from all the Companie cities came to Sonai and formed a Congress.  Here they intended to get a jump on Peislei in the organization of a new independent state.  They intended this Congress to be representative of all pro-independence forces, and they invited Peislei to send delegates.  But they also intended to dominate the Congress.  The First Congress convened on 18 May 1782.

Peislei and the Companie Congress agreed to an alliance, as each recruited volunteers for enlarged forces.  The Companie forces liberated the Coninipati region in the northwest and Pasiana in the northeast.  Militias throughout the Ifuno plateau openly declared themselves subject to Peislei's command.  The militias in Cuecha rose up and marched on the city of Cationi where the British had inherited the French naval fort and placed a large garrison.  The British held the central northern coast and the crucial port of Comleta, and thus managed a wedge that separated the independence forces.  But on 11 October 1785 Peislei joined the Compagnie forces and together they decisively defeated a British army (with atrei soldiers) near the Compagnie city of Eleanor, just 60 miles east of Comleta.  Soon a great swath of northern, central and western Berg were utterly free of the British.   

Prime Minister Pitt concluded that half a defeat now was better than a protracted, costly war, so long as Britain could still trade with Bergonians and buy the gold, iron and wood produced by northern and central Bergonia.  He invited the rebels to negotiations, and on 28 October 1787 the Treaty of Lisbon was signed.  The treaty terms indicated the relative strength of the British, preserving for Britain all southern Bergonia (where the English colonists lived and where cotton and sugar were grown).  The treaty also allowed for British traders the same rights to Bergonian ports as Bergonian traders, with preferential tariffs for imports from Britain.  Here Peislei had failed to keep one of his promises, but he had achieved enough of a victory as to win adulation from all over Bergonia.

The first government of the independent Republic

That same year Peislei and the Congress agreed to a constitution for their new republic.  It split power between a presidency (using the Minidun word Pacunot, which meant Emperor) and a unicameral congress.  

The constitution recognized seven states: (a) East-Land (Ceiolai), (b) Amota, (c) West-Land, (d) Goninbad/Coninipati, (e) Comleta, (f) Pasiana, and (g) Cuecha.  The constitution required that each state have its own constitution, and allowed the national congress the power to veto any state constitution.  Each state had a congress, some bicameral with a restricted senate, and most had an executive council.  The constitution gave to the states all basic law-making powers, with largely concurrent powers with the national government.  The constitution established the national government as a government of limited powers, like the American Constitution of 1789.

The seven states largely reflected colonial entities, but conveniently also reflected the balance of interest between the emerging factions, and to a certain extent this constitution was a ratification of the division of the spoils among the independence coalition.  The Compagnie leaders would have the provinces of Pasiana, Coninipati and the rich West-Land, where there had been less enthusiasm in independence or for politics in general.  Comleta was also regarded as a Compagnie state, but everyone understood that this was the one state where there might be struggles for control, The assignment of so much central territory within the boundaries of Comleta was a painful compromise, and rather rediculous as a practical matter, yet many of the local powers in the Ifuno highlands remained Pesislei's partisans.  Peislei and his partisans would have Ceiolai and Cuecha.

The national Congress was unicameral, consisting of delegates elected from local constituencies which the state congresses delineated.  Congressional elections occurred in September every three years.  

The constitution explicitly confirmed Peislei as president for life, after which Congress would elect the president for four year terms.  The President was commander-in-chief.  With Congress' approval the president appointed the prime minister and the other ministers, but he had no veto power except in matters respecting foreign affairs and the military. 

The Republic's constitution prescribed elections, but elections were novel to the great mass of Bergonians.  The local gentry quickly acted so that elections would assure, not challenge, their power.  The constitution left it to state and local governments to decide who could vote in elections.  This created a variegated electorate, but in every state the franchise was limited to a select few.  The most conservative of the French whites totally dominated the process in Pasiana and Comleta.  In those two states they defined the electorate by the amount of taxes paid, which was generally in the range of 200 Bergonian Francs per year, which excluded nearly all atrei.  The only atrei wealthy enough to pay that prohibitive amount were either traders in cities or Iregemi in the country, and nearly all these privileged atrei were Catholics.  In the other states the French idea of "estates" influenced the concept of voting, so that the franchise was class-based.  This meant that the vote was reserved for (a) landed males (individually, with absolute rights over the land, per European-style law) with estates worth so much, and (b) members of selected professions (e.g. law, medicine).  Some local governments added a poll tax (at least 80 Francs a year), which permitted any wealthy person to buy the privilege of voting.  Thus, only about five percent of the male adults could vote in any state.

A bare majority of the first Congress was French-speaking whites and sherei.  The Compagnie group was very well represented from Coninipati, Comleta and Pasiana, and quickly developed alliances with the Portuguese ruling class in the state of Amota.  Most of the atrei elected to the first Congress were Catholic and spoke or knew French.  They were nearly all either iregemi from the countryside, rich off the sweat of peasants, or traders, bankers and professional men from the cities, rich off the control of money.  Only about a tenth of the delegates were Miradi, as well as can be determined from the historical record.

As president Peislei worked hard to coalesce all the militias he had under his command into a national army, and he largely succeeded.  Chaladoni served as prime minister, and he worked well with Congress to organize several important national institutions, including a mint, and a corps of toll masters who collected tariffs at ports.  He and Congress also created five national universities, an intercity postal service, and a "transportation corps" that sent engineers around the country to hire the local boys and build roads, bridges and canals.  But many of these efforts were no more than good starts, and many parts of the hinterlands saw no evidence of a national government, other than the appearance of the new currency.

In fact the first national government was weak.  It did little work that had any direct effect on the average family.  For the masses the national government was far away, of little consequence.  Local governments and strong men were instead the immediate presences in people's lives, and collected all the taxes save for tariffs.  Town and city-dwellers looked to the mayor (sometimes a brutish strongman, sometimes a skilled compromiser and politician), the magistrates and the tribunes, and the councils, offices usually filled by the second-born of the local gentry.  News of a president and congress meant nothing to the peasants when the Iregemi took a quarter of their harvest and then charged them for milling the rest.  

The three political parties

First came the Conservative Party, formed by men of the Compagnie.  It attracted other traders (atrei as well as French & Portuguese-speaking), men eager to develop the island's resources (iron, silver, minerals, grains, cotton, wood) for export to Europe.  This party advocated decentralization with strong local government (which they controlled), a lassaiz faire approach to everything, low tariffs, and a national government largely limited to defense, orderly customs, weights and measures, courts for enforcement of commercial law, and maintaining the currency.  In a word, they were quite bourgeoisie in their outlook.  Though thoroughly European and Christian, they adopted for their symbol an ancient Bergonian ideogram which meant "bountiful harvest" and "prosperity."  For their flag they rendered this symbol in white against a red background.  This party was really just a coalition of local political "clubs" and associations.  Its conventions tended to shadow the actual Congress, and many men attended both as delegates.  The Conservatives often received the support of delegates sent from the interior, usually representative of the iregemi (native planters) who lorded over the millions of peasants.  The Conservatives dominated the states of Pasiana, Comleta, Coninipati and West-Land, and thus dominated Congress until 1820.  

The second party was the Liberal Party, which evolved from a coalition called "Chaladoni's Heirs."  These included those who benefited from the growth of national institutions, including the army.  These people supported higher tariffs & duties in order to fund the national government and protect domestic manufacturers.  Some of them openly discussed universal suffrage.  Many of these men were men who had risen up along with Peislei.  They dominated the new state of Ceiolai, and did well in Cuecha and West-Land.

Peislei died in 1793, and the new president, a Frenchman named Jean-Pierre Lacanne, reappointed Chaladoni.  But in 1801, when Chaladoni advocated setting a national standard for who could vote, the Conservatives who dominated Congress booted him out.  President Lacanne refused to defend him, and so the co-founder of the Republic was exiled to private life.  He reverted to his original occupation of publisher and worked for the rest of his life in Ceiolai publishing a very noisy newspaper called Ceiolai Voice.   His supporters organized the Liberal Party.  Most people within the national government, including the commanders of the Army and Navy, supported the Liberals.  His followers, now the Liberal Party leadership, included many more natives than the Conservatives.  The Liberals were concerned with building national institutions and protecting native industry.  This was a progressive, secular, fully bourgeoisie party.  One of their immediate demands was for extension of the franchise to military men.

To form a third force in Bergonian politics, atrei living in the cities of the interior (mostly Miradi, mostly engaged in local commerce, crafts or professions) organized the Mountain Cat Party in 1812.  The mountain cat symbolized the highland interior of the country, the native culture, that which is "untamed" (by European culture).  Moreover, throughout Bergonia, even in the coastal cities, the preba mountain cat had become a popular symbol for Bergonia, as the dragon represented China, the lion stood for England, Ethiopia and Iran, and the eagle became symbolic of America and Germany. 

Though many of these middle-class city-dwellers wore European dress, lived by the european clock, and usually spoke a European language (often badly), these men were usually just two or three generations removed from the purely atrei peasantry, and still sentimentally attached to the "rolling fens and fields," peasant drum and fiddle music, the temple pageants for the children, Solstice bonfires, and the comforts of "Old Man Sun and Brother Rain."

The Mountain Cat Party was the first party to advocate public education.  It supported expansion of the voting franchise and growled about the rich taking advantage of the little man.  The Mountain Cat however pronounced their agreement with the Conservatives on strengthening local government. 

The Mountain Cat and the Conservatives contested most elections in the interior of Bergonia.   Most Miradi natives supported the Mountain Cat, while most Catholic natives supported the Conservatives.  Most of the rich planters who supported Conservative candidates also secured their power with bribes and with gangs of armed men.  The Mountain Cats organized their own militias.  

The Mountain Cat was of course more popular among the unfranchised classes than the franchised classes.  But many franchised Miradi atrei wanted to expand the franchise, because doing so would tilt the balance of power toward their kind.  Most whites had sufficient land, wealth or professional status that they could vote, while the vast majority of Miradi believers could not.  

In the coastal regions and the bigger cities (and wherever the Army had influence) the Liberals were strong, but so were the Conservatives.  Most but not all French gave their allegiance to the Conservatives.  The French Huegonots in Pasiana tended to vote for the Liberals, in opposition to French Catholics.  The Conservatives were the only party with a strong presence in every part of the Republic.

The Mountain Cat was on the tip of a broader cultural development-- the reassertion of the atrei-- the purely native, non-European people.  By 1810 a quasi-romantic movement had engulfed the atrei upper & middle classes.  It idolized Pre-Columbian Bergonian civilization, particularly the Tan Era, the most recent era that Christopher Columbus interrupted. After 1800 native painters, sculptors, and craftsmen across the island were imitating Pre-Columbian Bergonian forms, a neo-classicism of a sort.   Poets and writers portrayed a world of balanced order, beauty, urbanity, and wisdom (and prosperity!):  Linen clad men of color sat and convivially deliberated in councils, bound by group loyalty, exquisite manners and thorough education. Austere brave banda warriors, ennobled by the honor of the clan system, fought each other chivalrously, and guarded over a pastoral landscape of happily pious peasant villages and sanctified temples.  Native authors retold the old mythology in new accounts.  The increase in the native publishing capacity made these books wildly popular.  There also came the ability to publish cheap magazines.  As the population grew, and as printing improved, publishers paid for translations of European classics into Minidun and Nacateca, and for editions of the Bergonian classics into English, French and other European languages.

The Army and Navy

By 1820 the Republic had established a substantial army and navy, with a unified command under a Minister of Arms.  These became the first national institutions.  The commanders were overwhelmingly French-speaking whites, but they (perhaps alone from among the white community) understood the importance of building integrated national institutions.  They recruited many atrei.  The military reflected the social realities of Bergonia at the time-- French-speaking whites commanding atrei enlisted men.  French was designated the sole language for use by Army and Navy command.  The US military has been credited with advancing the status of blacks after WWII, and in similar fashion the army allowed an avenue for atrei to gain power in Bergonia.  This was so even though French remained the sole language for the officer corps. 

1820-1825-- The presidency of Edouard Mansour and the war of 1824 with Britain

The conservatives dominated the government until 1820, when the Liberals managed to win a plurality in Congress and elected their first President.  He was Edouard Mansour, a recently retired general.  His father was French-speaking white and his mother was Nacateca-speaking Catholic atrei.  He had been educated as a physician and a zoologist.  He was six feet five, spoke five languages (including Latin), had a sense of humor like a whip, and tried to attend Mass every day.

In 1822 tensions between the native Pasan and the French populations in Pasiana boiled over into violence.  Pasiana's population was divided into four groups: Huguenot French, Catholic French, Catholic Pasans and Miradi Pasans.  The French upper class solidly controlled the governments, and French planters lorded over both Pasan and French peasants growing wheat.  Non-Catholic Pasan peasants rose up and set fire to mansions of the planters.  Pasan farmers also struck out against the neighboring villages of French farmers.  It turned into an ethnic conflict.  Mansour unhesitatingly sent the Army in to quell the fighting.

In 1824 a border skirmish allowed Mansour an excuse to attack the British colonies in southern Bergonia.  Three columns advanced from north to south, one through Lampanira into Incuatati, one down the Serofi River to Alai Arsai, and one coming down the Bergoli into Balupic.  It was in this bold campaign that the Bergonian Army first used mounted infantry in large numbers.  At the same time the Navy commenced a relentless series of attack and run operations against the British Navy.  The Bergonian aggression utterly surprised the British.  It turns out that Mansour and the generals and admirals had started planning for this campaign two years before.  

The subsequent treaty surrendered to the Republic all the British colonies except the southeastern territory called Serpei (Serpia by the Brits) and the islands of Bruntaigo and Urthin.  The huge and very excellent ports in Harler and Midway allowed the Royal Navy two last redoubts in Bergonian seas.  This treaty also abrogated all privileges accorded to British traders in the Treaty of Lisbon.  A great many English speakers picked up and moved to other British colonies.  But a great many more took solace at how well the French and Spanish speaking whites had done under the Bergonian Republic.  They decided to stay and test Mansour's lavish assurances of safety.

Mansour earned great popularity for himself.  But the restricted franchise resulted in Conservatives regaining control of Congress in 1825, and they elected their leader, Gerrard Pinchon to replace Mansour as president.  This created outrage in almost every sector of the population, even among the ignorant and usually apathetic atrei peasants in the interior, as the news slowly percolated across the Ifuno plateau.  Mansour in a sense had the last laugh, because his popularity has lasted.  Almost every city and every town has a street named Mansour.  On the other hand hardly anyone recalls much about Gerrard Pinchon-- he is as well known to today's Bergonians as Martin Van Buren is to Americans.  

1825-1834-- the debate over the franchise

Renewed demands were made for expanding the voting franchise.  The Liberals and the Mountain Cat united on this issue, but they did not succeed in winning back Congress from the Conservatives until the election of 1831.  They immediately fell out over who to elect president.  They met to negotiate the matter.  But in the middle of their talks the Liberals suddenly betrayed the Mountain Cat and reached an agreement with the Conservatives to make the Liberal candidate, Sefe Cialuea, the new president.  He replaced Pinchon.  The price extracted by the Conservatives was for the Liberals to defer on the franchise issue.  This deal outraged Mountain Cat supporters.

Some states, however, expanded the franchise without waiting for the national government.  This happened usually when it suited the Liberals, usually to appease the local Mountain Lion.  In states like Pasiana, Comleta & Amota, where the Conservatives dominated, the franchise was kept tightly restricted.  In most states the Liberals had won the vote for all army and navy officers.

1820s & 30s-- a time of atrei resurgence

The 1780s' Rebellion against the British had two prongs, the first a coalition of French settlers and the second a new educated class of atrei, mostly but not all Catholic, in bourgeoisie occupations-- mill owners, merchants, city government officials, doctors and the like.  The resulting Bergonian Republic had a government dominated by Catholic French and Catholic natives, but in time the Miradi atrei and other ethno-religious groups asserted themselves.

During the 1820s a group called Zaomitan (Min., pron. "Zow'-mi-tawn," So-Amichitei in Nacateca) attracted thousands of supporters from among young native Miradi men, robbing critical support from the Mountain Lion.  Zaomitan took the native resurgence another step by preaching the superiority of native culture and religion.  Arguing that Europeans had enslaved the native people and attacked native religion and ways, Zaomitan condemned Christianity vehemently.  Yet Zaomitan did not advocate suppressing Christianity or otherwise harassing whites.  Instead Zaomitan advocated legal equality of all races and universal male suffrage. Some of its leaders even advocated women's suffrage as well.  Zaomitan began as a political movement, largely for the disenfranchised peasants who were just beginning to awaken politically and form associations.  Zaomitan represented something new in the Republic's history-- it was the first well organized mass movement-- with national, regional and local officers functioning in a hierarchy from a central command. 

At the same time publishers were printing-- for the first time-- the ancient classics of Pre-Columbian Bergonian civilization.  Artists and designers started aggressively imitating and adapting ancient Bergonian forms in painting, sculpture and decoration.  Writers and printers produced a flood of  novels, poetry and histories in the atrei languages.  It was all part of the process of the atrei rediscovering themselves after the long night of colonialism.  It was also the beginning of serious European interest in Bergonian culture.  The classics were translated into French, English and Spanish editions.

This tendency was reinforced by the explosion of Bergonian nationalism after the War of 1824.  The victory came handily.  The British suffered a rather stiff humiliation at the hands of a bunch of dark-skinned heathens.  The years after 1824 was a time of great chest-thumping.  For the first time a conscious sense of Berg patriotism was widespread. 

When native non-Christian members of the enfranchised middle class turned to Zaomitan, it started winning elections.  Zaomitan became something of a hysteria, sweeping the interior regions where European influences were weakest.  Even many of the rich atrei Iregemi swung toward Zaomitan.  This was so, even as the Zaomitan affiliated with the new peasant associations.  All over the Bergonian Republic, atrei were flying the Zaomitan flag.

1834-1839-- bloody ethnic civil war

In the 1834 Congressional election Zaomitan upset the Liberals and Conservatives and shocked everyone by winning 38% of the seats and thereby a slight plurality.  All Miradi atrei who could vote voted for Zaomitan.  This new Zaomitan strength came at the expense of the Mountain Lion, which was left with only 5% of the delegates.  The Liberals were also decimated.  In the new Congress the small delegations of these two parties joined with the Conservatives to elect a Conservative president.  But then they then joined with the Zaomitan to pass laws expanding the franchise.  The Zaomitan, lacking a majority, were smart enough to effect whatever compromise they could.  They crafted a measure to set up a minimum franchise for the entire country.  They enfranchised anyone working in the enumerated bourgeoisie professions, all individual owners of land, all army and navy officers and sergeants.  They also enfranchised anyone who paid 100 Francs in taxes.  This was, from the Zaomitan's point of view a rather sorry compromise, even though everyone understood it would triple the size of the electorate and thereby increase the proportion of atrei and Miradi voters.  

A day after the legislation was enacted someone assassinated the Zaomitan leader, and people rumored that Army commanders were conspiring with the Zaomitan to overthrow the government.  The new Zaomitan leader, Capateron Iteia, was less accommodating than his deceased predecessor.  He and his comrades were angry, bitter and eager to avenge their fallen leader.  When Congress met in special session to honor the assassinated leader, Iteia, known as the "Fat Priest" for his girth and his sanctimoniousness, gave the keynote eulogy.  In it he let everyone know that Zaomitan intended to push again the next year for a real republic with universal franchise.  It was a clarion call, a bold announcement that time had come for Bergonia's European minority to let go of the reins to the resurging majority, that time was coming for Bergonia to admit to its non-European soul.  The speech was published a hundred times over, from one end of Bergonia to another.  It inspired and excited the atrei of all classes.  Even though Iteia spoke of tolerance, of  "secure communities of settlers" and an "absolute guarantee for all Christian practice," the Europeans reacted with dread.  They understood their numerical disadvantage was finally catching up to them, and the recent ethnic tension everywhere convinced them that the Zaomitan and the atrei were going to persecute them.  

In the autumn of 1834, for reasons rather unrelated to the national political consternation, Pasiana exploded in sectarian violence when the Mirai Pasans attacked the French.  The Mirai Pasan leadership was allied with the Zaomitan (which like nearly all Bergonian parties was a federation of local groups), and the Zaomitan rather unfairly got blamed for the attack by its enemies.  

The attack on the French in Pasiana launched a great wave of anxiety across all the European peoples in the country.  In early 1835 French and Spanish Europeans in northern and eastern Bergonia hurriedly formed militias, fearing some form of oppression.  They formed roadblocks against traveling atrei and refused orders from provincial and national authority.  They took over a number of fair-sized cities, including Barcelos, Ceveron, Columbie, and Comleta.  A tit-for-tat, eye-for-an-eye pattern of attacks between the ethnic communities in Pasiana and Amota powered this first wave of violence.  Actual casualties were low, but the degree of tension and hostility was quite palpable everywhere. 

It was hoped that the communal violence would stay confined to the eastern third of the country, but in June 1835 street violence flared up in the west-coast cities of Paietri between Christians and non-Christians.  As the unusually hot and dry summer wore on, communal violence afflicted virtually every part of Bergonia.  Both rural areas and major cities suffered.  

The national politicians in Ceiolai all sang a chorus of accusations against Britain for arming the ethnic rebellion.  Indeed the militias sent secret appeals for aid to Britain and France, and Britain apparently gave the militias' foreign agents access to both arms purchases and ships to bring the arms to Bergonia.  The traditional politicians, for the most part Christians, accused the Zaomitan of having it both ways, by overtly opposing and condemning the communal violence and covertly aiding and even coordinating the atrei militias in various parts of the country.  While there is little use denying that the Zaomitan aided the atrei militias, especially the fierce "Brothers of the Yellow Banner" and the "Union of Fighting Brotherhoods" in Amota (whose yellow fist symbol struck fear in hearts everywhere), it remains a question of whether the Zaomitan leadership could do more than make suggestions to the atrei militias.  But increasingly the atrei of more moderate inclinations-- a rather large majority of atrei to be sure-- came to believe that only the Zaomitan could deliver the peace.  

In early 1836 urban mob violence and murderous feuding between European and native communities broke out in every part of Bergonia.  By no means were there outbreaks in even a majority of cities or places, but it was nevertheless the worst wave of island-wide violence in centuries, perhaps ever.  And it was no doubt fueled by the telegraph and newspapers, the beginnings of the modern mass media.  There have been hundreds of surveys of the record of the false news accounts and incendiary accusations in the newspapers of the times, and how the violence flared up as "news" of certain events spread across the country. 

In most locales the Christians were the insurgents, waging the initial rebellions, and the atrei militias sprang up in opposition.  There was popular feeling among the moderate atrei that the army should go after the Christian militias, and that the politicians in Ceiolai would not let it.  The pattern in Pasiana was the reverse, the atrei Pasans having initiated the fighting.

This crescendo of violence included the deliberate destruction of churches and temples by arson, the ultimate insult by one community against another.  Many Catholic natives supported their Catholic European brethren, especially since Zaomitan had explicitly identified the divide as religious and cultural, not racial.  In the summer of 1836 a full scale rebellion by European (mainly Portuguese & some English) militias ripped the Amota region apart.  But violence was nowhere as bad as in Pasiana.  While perhaps the violence elsewhere claimed five or ten or twenty lives at a time, the Pasans & French were killing each other by the hundreds.  Militias there slaughtered women and children in a way that anticipated the Yugoslavian atrocities of the 1990s.

The army made some attempts in 1836 and 1837 to suppress the fighting.  But only in a few places did the militias directly choose to attack the army, and so the army was hardly ever provoked.  The nature of the problem required a police-like solution.  It did not present a ready-to-fight opponent for the military.  The military was rather a failure at attacking militia strongholds.  Whenever it went after one militia, it was accused of favoritism, and by defeating or diminishing one militia it often did nothing more than make another militia stronger.  So the military was rather ineffectual in suppressing the violence.  Fortunately, by September of 1836 most conflicts had calmed down, while Pasiana was divided into a hundred armed enclaves.

The 1837 election was a catastrophe.  War and election day violence disrupted the elections so badly that a full 22% of the Congressional seats were not filled in the regular balloting.  Zaomitan won a incredible 45% of the seats, provoking united opposition from all the other parties.  Zaomitan hotly argued that the other three cheated them in the rules on how to fill the vacant seats, allowing them to take an oddly disproportionate share.  Of the 22% unfilled seats, 8% were never filled, so bad was the violence in certain areas, mainly in the east.  Therefore Zaomitan was denied an outright majority.  Atrei anger was fueled by the belief that the Zaomitan might have actually won an outright majority of the votes actually cast.

Angered by the rebuff of the three other parties, Zaomitan and its allies in the Army attempted a coup d'etat in Ceiolai before Congress could convene and elect a new president.  The coup was led by General Jisan Amitron, a big bear-like, pipe-smoking, whisky-drinking man, gruff and unrelenting, who commanded Army units loyal to Zaomitan.  All throughout the 1837 election campaign General Amitron loudly echoed the Zaomitan claim that the government was not sufficiently deploying the armed forces against the militias.  He claimed that the Liberal-Conservative cabal had "leashed" the army.  He ignored orders by the Army Chief to quit speaking out.

The Conservatives, Liberals and Mountain-Cat delegates reconvened Congress in the city of Lefitoni and gave the presidency to a tall, trim, reserved, bespectacled general named Jorem Vetrom, with an unblemished reputation.  Amitron ironically sent Vetrom, who had been his friend in military circles, a congratulatory telegram.  At the same time he got control of the railroads and stranded all the delegates in Lefitoni, keeping them from getting back to their constituencies. 

It looked like a real civil war would break out between the parties and their supporters.  Troops clashed in the southwest suburbs of Ceiolai, just outside the sprawling campus of the University, causing fires that destroyed many campus buildings.  However the Zaomitan leaders had an epiphany.  Some of the participants later wrote about how, during a Festival of Light Third Night Dinner, on 23 December 1837, the leaders and their wives sat together and, after the plates were cleared and wine was poured, they all discussed how the slide to violence would weaken the state, benefit the Christian militias, frighten the people, risk the disintegration of the unified Republic, and invite British interference, even if they won in the short run.  Therefore, then and there, they decided to sue for peace. "Peace is a good strategy," they said, and it turned out that they were quoting from a letter they had received that very day from General Amitron, in which he assured them of his support in a civil war for total power. 

The leaders of all the parties met behind closed doors in the congressional solons and worked out a deal.  Zaomitan acceded to the election of Vetrom (a Miradi) as president, and Vetrom gave his word that Amitron could command an aggressive offense against the Christian militias.  The other parties agreed to Zaomitan's essential demand, which was the universal franchise, and they also allowed Zaomitan to form the new leadership of Congress.  This deal was enacted in January 1838.

In the Spring of 1838 the Army, under Amitron's command, won impressive victories against militias in the west while he mobilized alarge force in the east.  In the summer of 1838 he tuned his full attention on Amota and virtually invaded four states.  The militias there relinquished control of all cities and fled into the countryside. 

But blood continued flowing liberally in Pasiana.  The Army only succeeded in occupying the major city of Columbie and the coastal towns.  In October 1838 Amitron traveled to Pasiana and besieged the town of Kulca when the occupying Christian Pasan militia, assisted by a French artillery unit, refused his demand for surrender.  In December he created a gap in his cordon where women, children and unarmed men could pass through, while his artillery pounded the city.  Those pitiful survivors who escaped through the gap were turned out into the countryside with no help, while Amitron's soldiers swept through the rubble shooting the remaining militiamen, which was to mean the remaining adult male population.  All in all, between 7,000 to 12,000 people died, mostly civilians.  Afterwards, local factions across Pasiana started negotiating cease-fires with Amitron's representatives.

General Amitron was prepared to press on against the remaining independent militias, but the Liberal party prevailed upon Zaomitan to negotiate with Cardinal Mireau of Comleta for a way to end the fighting.  So in February 1839 the Cardinal issued a pastoral letter suggesting to all Catholics to negotiate directly with Zaomitan and other such groups.  The Church helped bring the militias to a round of negotiations with the government.  The leaders of the political parties, including Zaomitan, at the request of the Cardinal, traveled to Comleta and started a round of negotiations concerning national policy.  At Zaomitan's insistence, the leaders of the eight branches of Miradi appointed a delegation of archbishops.  In the middle of the negotiations they sent invitations out to Huguenots in war-torn Pasiana, other Protestants, and the Neo-Christians, and expanded the Miradi delegation.

Curing ethnic strife-- the Covenant Agreement

On 13 July 1839 this conclave of political and religious leaders produced y negotiated a compact they called the "Covenant," a statement of principles that

(a) called for a guarantee of borders between local ethnic communities wherever necessary, which each side would protect,

(b) a pledge of non-interference between communities, delineated or not, and a guarantee for the safety of people of different groups to walk the streets and highways through each others communities,

(c) a pledge to refrain from violence as a way of settling disputes, and a pledge to go to arbitration or court over disputes instead,

(d) a state guarantee of title to the land of all temples and churches, and equal treatment of all religious institutions by the state,

(e)  A provision that no militiamen or other armed men could enter a church or temple ever, not even to pursue criminals.  The Liberals got a lot of credit for this.

(f) a pledge to keep churches and temples sacrosanct, even if violence breaks out,

(g) a commitment "by every church and temple, by every priest, minister, deacon, religious, or other agent and practitioner, and by every man and woman of faith and belief, to tolerate the presence and right of every other religion and church and temple and faith to its practice, and to its buildings and schools and properties, and also to respect the person of every religious person, and for each to countenance his own colleagues, subordinates and associates toward the necessary attitude of peaceable tolerance, with the twin universal imperatives that each man should respect and walk around each other man's church or temple and ignore his practice, and that each man in the practice of his own religion, as well as his other affairs, shall be mindful and considerate of the peace, quiet and dignity of the next man, and further to allow each other's churches and temples to have their observances and festivals, each to have its turn in the streets through the town center and through the neighborhoods of its adherents, to respect each others' images, inscriptions and artifices, and to refrain from public taunt or insult or provoking words and comment of any kind, and show respectful silence instead."

(g) a commitment to amnesty, that if every group joins in, then the nation would exercise a legal amnesty and a moral forgiveness of all wrongs committed during the fighting.  

Virtually every organization in the country rushed to endorse the Covenant.  Copies were published and distributed everywhere.  Every copy displayed a four-pointed star, and the four-pointed star, reflecting both the Christian cross and atrei elements became a symbol of the Covenant.  Congress adopted the Covenant by a unanimous vote on 13 October month, and the same day enacted a general amnesty. 

All the state congresses endorsed the Covenant and enacted general amnesties as well, as did even the legislatures in the English Crown colonies.  But when the Pasiana Congress met to debate the resolution to endorse the Covenant, one delegate's long-winded recital of Catholic abuses against both Huguenots and Pasans prompted a punch in face by a displeased Catholic delegate, whereupon a brawl among twenty or so delegates broke out on the floor.

Pasiana Reconstruction

The horrible outbreak of sectarian violence between French speakers and Pasans had nearly wrecked sections of Pasiana.  Throughout early 1839 independent militias still prevailed in about a third of the state, and ethnic quarrels still produced sudden outbursts of rioting or rampaging militias.  The  cycle was starting to show signs of burn itself out, but Amitron waited until he could raise the total number of troops to 120,000.   Then, in the summer of 1839, as the rest of the nation was all enthused about the Covenant, he ruthlessly succeeded in obliterating or dispersing those armed groups that had not surrendered. 

Congress had charged Amitron with power to set up a martial law government, which he did during his final campaign of pacification.  He convened a council of leading pubic figures and acdemicians that quickly resolved to engineer an end to the "custom" of ethnic strife.  Influenced by French idealism, they proceeded with utmost confidence in their own ability to change social norms and customs.

His Martial Law Council made it its first job to sow some badly needed trust between the different ethnic groups.  It appointed in each county a commission whose agents went into every city and town in Pasiana to mediate disputes.  These agents, many of whom were from other parts of Bergonia, many of whom worked with translators, worked to earn the trust of both parties, and then encouraged the parties in small steps to extend their trust to include the other. 

The commissions labored under the explicit assumption that all the antagonists needed and deserved the same things-- security, prosperity and self-rule.  The commissions' agents sought solutions to every little quarrel that popped up between the ethnic groups (property disputes, commercial practices by French-speaking merchants, water rights) that might spark violence.  "Arguing should first replace fighting; in time conversation will replace arguing," said one commission chairman. In that manner, the agents presided over long meetings to keep the parties in dialogue.  In the old Bergonian tradition, meetings did not take place from different sides of long tables, but while seated in circles in comfortable chairs, over tea, with a break for dinner.  "Men who dine together will not likely fight."   The agents were prepared at any time to come into a town to mediate and broker settlements. 

The commissions themselves met with the parties over large maps of their territories to draw new boundaries for communes and cantons to allow self-rule to each group.  The army, with regular patrols, enforced a policy of "open roads," which prohibited any group of closing the roads and pathways to people of different ethnicity.  The Army quickly went after any group that obstructed the roads, attacked a village, or retained an arsenal.

The martial law regime, while working to separate and secure the various  ethnic communities, also worked to bind them together with infrastructure and tax structures.  All tax monies were deposited into county-wide treasuries and shared out among the towns, wards and communes on the strict basis of population.  Every ethnic community was thus made dependent on the same communalization of taxed resources-- mainly land taxes, property taxes, and franchise taxes, in addition to poll taxes.

1840's-- the short-lived Second Commonwealth and the "Liberal Decade"

In the 1840 elections, ironically the first elections held under the Zaomitan's achievement of universal suffrage, the Zaomitan utterly collapsed, and the Liberal Party won an outright majority in Congress.  A sea change had occurred here-- the Liberals were the only party than included both natives and Europeans.  The Liberals won big support in the quickly growing cities.  The only other party to pick up support was Mountain Lion and new radical atrei parties.

The Liberals used the new-found peace and power to effect a political revolution.  In 1841 the Liberals wrote a new constitution, which 

(a) increased the number of provinces from seven to twenty-one, with borders from which the present-day borders have evolved.  The increase in the number of states had the effect of strengthening the urban vote in congressional elections.  Under the old seven-state system, the  rural areas were combined and thus could outnumber the urban vote.

(b) instituted universal suffrage, with every male over the age of twenty getting the right to vote.  

(c) establishing an electoral college of 7500 delegates from 1500 districts to select the president, instead of the Congress.  

(d) a declaration of local autonomy for ethnic communities, and the first effort to draw local boundary lines so as to separate and protect ethnic communities.  This was to protect minorities, such as the Europeans who were seeing their traditional power eroding in the face of surging atrei numbers and assertiveness.  In a sense the commitment to local diversity was to counter-balance the grant of the franchise to all male adults.  This was in accord with the Covenant.

(e) a guarantee of religious freedom, and a guarantee of the sanctity of churches and temples.

This new constitution ushered in what became known as the Second Commonwealth.

Journalists of the time and historians ever since dubbed the 1840s the "Liberal Decade."  There was a move to establish public schools.  Many city and town governments sponsored and organized schools.  Atrei activists vowed that all native children should learn to write the native languages..  The new men at the top adopted the view that no man was a proper Bergonian leader unless he spoke an atrei and a European language.  The new national view was to condemn both the exploitation of native workers by French and other rich land-owning Europeans, and the violent backlash by natives.   "Hope, mutual accomodation and industry" were the virtues now extolled across the land.  

The Liberal version of history blamed the Zaomitan for inciting the fighting of 1834-39.  General Amitron was disgraced and forced to quit the military.  After purging the Army of Zaomitan sympathizers, the Liberal government bolstered it and the Navy with increased outlays.  It was time to disband the militias, and the Army quickly took up the task.  Since the times of the Plagues in early colonial times, there had been armed militias in many parts of rural Bergonia, but now it looked like the militias' end had come.  It looked like that for the first time that real order would prevail throughout the country.  

The Liberal Regime was in essence a bourgeoisie regime that supported industrial capitalism.  The Liberals made it a point to establish binding, reliable commercial law.  Congress established a commission of jurisprudence to draft a model code of laws.  The Commission imitated the Napoleonic Code and English property law.  Almost all native legal concepts, including the native concepts of communal and shared property, were rejected. 

Congress raised tariffs to shield the new native industries from foreign competition, and strengthened the national bank. Congress established the National Railroad Commission and the National Waterways Commission.   Congress was well disposed toward the banks and encouraged capital formation.  

Marx regarded this a first-stage liberal bourgeoisie revolution, and regarded the Bergonian bourgeoisie as reasonably well developed.  An urban industrial proletariat was forming in many cities.  A substantial shipbuilding industry grew in Glen and Comleta.  The states of Cuecha, Zeinran and Halemarec became iron and steel producing centers.  Textile mills proliferated in the Amota region, Pueoi and Paiatri.  (see states for map.)  Bergonia was by 1850 manufacturing all its own locomotives and telegraph equipment.  Peasants migrated en masse to the cities for the industrial jobs.  

Ugly tenement neighborhoods sprang up in every city, the two most famous being the  notorious "River-Town" in Ceiolai, when the prostitutes hung around just off the Heavenly Promenade, and the hugely squalid "Chuchoi" in Piatlani, Cuecha.  The name Chuchoi was shortened from something meaning "Shit-Dirty-Town."   Men working in the iron mills lived there with their families in one or two room apartments stacked four stories high in hurriedly constructed wooden buildings.  On 5 November 1853 a bar fight upset a lamp and started a blaze that grew into a holocaust.  Most of Chuchoi was destroyed, and the best estimates have placed the dead at 21,000 and the injured and ill at almost 200,000.  This was a greatly traumatic event for the entire country, making everyone acutely aware of conditions in the new city slums.

1854-58-- "Uprising of the Interior" and the Mountain Cat Revolution

The Zaomitan had an egalitarian platform to accompany its chauvinistic ranting, but unfortunately the latter smothered the former.  Now the Zaomitan was virtually dead.  The 1840s was a time for the flowering of European Liberal ideas, and the nativist impulse went into a hiatus, sublimated into support for the Mountain Cat.  As a result "the Cat" started nibbling at the big Liberal vote.  As capitalist expansion and feudal landowners conspired to keep down the growing masses, egalitarianism made a comeback in the 1850s.

The Mountain Cat party continued to press for public schools.  It also took up the peasants' perennial cry for relief from iregemi privileges.  The Liberals had courted the native planters (the Iregemi) who still welded much power, and in 1849 the Liberals formed a coalition with the Conservatives.  In 1852, the Mountain Cat and the new, radically egalitarian, semi-socialist Lance & Pen Party each increased their strength in Congress (35 % and 7% respectively) and forced votes on (a) public schools, (b) elimination of oppressive voters registration fees and poll taxes, and (c) the right to organize unions and peasant associations.  But the Liberal-Conservative coalition, still holding a majority, defeated all their bills. 

A peasant revolt broke out in spring 1854 in the inland provinces of Letlari and Sefaieri.  The peasants demanded an end for all time to Iregemi rents.  They raided police stations and iregemi properties to acquire arms.  Thus began the violent "Uprising of the Interior."  Lance & Pen immediately sided with the rebellion and encouraged the Mountain Lion to do so as well.  In a decisive moment, the Mountain Cat congressional caucus in October 1854 voted narrowly to walk out of the government and join the rebels.  Then so did a number of Army generals and colonels-- and the Army, which had behaved with such solid cohesiveness in the 1830s, now suddenly fractured.. 

Civil war got rolling with rebel victories.  Fighting was light, but decisive, with local authorities quickly switching allegiances in the face of approaching rebels.  The rebels organized into the "Allied Popular Militias," disparate groups all demanding the same bundle of radical reforms.  The Allied Popular Militias were initially organized by "committees of correspondence" and "committees of armed actions."   As the APM troops moved across the land, masses of peasants demonstrated and forced Iregemi to renounce their rights to the crop. 

Then in January 1855 a fifteen-man junta was formed in Crisitoni by an assembly of APM officers, Army officers, a federation of peasant groups, and radical republicans such as the Lance & Pen and the Mountain Cat.  The Allied Popular Militias and about half the Army and navy placed themselves under its strategic direction. 

Voting occurred in some areas in the 1855 elections, as fighting occurred in others.  In areas dominated by the rebels, rebel candidates won, and in status quo areas the conservatives won.  During the first half of 1856 the rebel generals split into two factions, and it appeared that the loyalists might counterattack and prevail, but the rebels regained their unity and very swiftly won the war by midyear 1856.  As part of the settlement between differnt factions, the junta decreed new balloting for congress in constituencies the rebels were taking over, and certifying the results of the previous year's elections in other constituencies, thus putting together a new Congress.

At the very end, in July, while the junta was organizing a new government, the rebels' best general, John Rarsa, abruptly-- and without any provocation-- invaded Britain's Harler Colony with 12,000 mounted infantry, invading from the north.  Suddenly the Navy turned on British ships in Bergonian waters.  It was obviously a conspiracy by senior military commanders. 

Rarsa's invasion was not enough to cause the surrender or collapse of the Serpei colony, but he did occupy the city of Atlrashot, where he collected supplies and recuits, and his invasion prompted disturbances in every city in the Colony.  Bergonian commanders, with acquiescence by the Junta, quickly organized action against the British colonies.  A force of 10,000 poorly armed but enthusiastic militia men crossed the border from Pueoi and marched into Soleinia.  Stevedores and longshoremen in Midway and Harler-Bathilocon walked off their jobs.  All the city halls in Bruntaigo, including the local constabularies, revolted against the colonial government.

The "Patchwork Congress," dominated by the Mountain Cat, convened in Ceiolai on 1 September 1856 and lasting until the next cycle of elections in1858.  The Mountain Cat immediately endorsed the invasion.  Congress elected Osaria Camiparoa, former governor of Cuecha who ended up leading the junta, became president, and his foreign minister-- whom he had kept on from the former government for his skills-- quickly negotiated a treaty.  Britain agreed to vacate all its remaining Bergonian territories on 31 December 1858, in exchange for Bergonian assurances that the British territories would immediately become states and that former British subjects would immediately attain all civil rights and protections. 

1858-66 -- Mountain Cat Government

In the 1858 election the people rewarded the Mountain Cat with huge majorities in both Congress and the reconstituted electoral college.  Mountain Cat leader Sesanol Burani became president and guided his comrades in Congress with a strong hand.  Likewise, the Mountain Cat dominated governments in almost every state, with notable exceptions being Pasiana, Bun-Vosuget and Bunamota.

A revolution ensued in the countryside.  It was the death of formal Iregemi feudalism.  The Iregemi planters' last legal privileges were swept away, and the peasants got title to their land and crop.  The legislative building in Piatalani, capital of Cuecha, was set on fire by protesters when the state congress postponed a vote on the bill to strip away Iregemi land privileges. 

Local voting officials who prevented peasants from registering were hamstrung by new streamlined voters registration procedures.  Congress still kept tariffs high to protect domestic producers.  The government created the highly popular grain commission which regulated prices.  A national commercial code was adopted in 1861, and a not-so-popular national roads and railroads property condemnation act, as were standards for new forms of simplified  pleadings in all courts in the country. 

Historians generally are agreed that the Mountain Cat Revolution completed the process of creating a liberal bourgeoisie state, the process begun with the Liberal Revolution of 1840.

Change in the Countryside and the City

The planters in the countryside quickly reasserted a more subtle power over the peasants by monopolizing the mills, making usurious loans, and setting the price for the peasants' grain.  They also often hired gangs of thugs.  The peasant associations themselves did not shrink from violent counterattacks. 

With population rising, thousands of peasants migrated to the cities, swelling them with new slums and squatter camps.  Big industrial concerns emerged in the 1850s, as did large coal, iron and copper mines, and thousands of men from the fields relocated to take these hard, dangerous and underpaid jobs.  Bergonia was rapidly developing an industrial proletariat, and the 1850's saw the first major attempts at unionization.  State governments controlled by Conservatives outlawed strikes, and police attacked labor organizers, although the Burani regime tolerated unions and even had good relations with some union leaders.

A new upper-class-- the owners of railroads, steel factories and banks-- accumulated incredible wealth and power.  These men were disproportionately of European descent, but a sizable minority had darker skin and worshipped occasionally in a Miradi temple.

1866-1879--  the dictatorship of John Rarsa

Burani ran for a second term in the 1864 elections.  Three months before election day, Burani attended a reception at the French Embassy.  An atrei employee of the embassy pulled a pistol and killed Burani.  The stunned Mountain Cat nominated the famous John Rarsa as its candidate.  Rarsa won handily, but the Mountain Cat lost its absolute majority In Congress.  The Liberals and Conservatives both increased their delegate numbers.  Lance & Pen and other radical groups which represented the urban classes also elected more delegates.

As president, Rarsa displayed the same unpredictability that he showed during the civil war.  He turned on his Mountain Cat allies over the issue of strikes.  He became friendly toward the new industrialists.  The rancorous bickering in the new Congress irritated him.  With new labor unrest, the temperature heated up across the country, and people feared another slide into violence.  In 1866 he and the Army conducted a coup d'etat.  The radical delegates of Lance & Pen he had arrested.   The Mountain Cat split, some supporting Rarsa, others indignantly resisting.   The latter he arrested too, and then purged even the Liberal Party delegates.  But he made grand gestures of reconciliation, and won over many people who initially opposed his power grab.  He forged a grand coalition based on the strategy of "Left in the Country, Right in the City"-- meaning that he won over the peasants (heart of the Mountain Cat) by opposing the iregemi planters, and won over the industrialists by opposing emergent labor.   Both planter gangs and union strikers suffered the Army's wrath.  The peasants grew to love him as he wiped out the planters for good.  This was the final stage of the destruction of the Iregemi.

Bergonia (or at least parts) had suffered war in the 1780s, 1830s and 1850s.  One essayist wrote, "Our passions are our disease, a disease of evil madness."   Rarsa's prescription was simple:  "Order and Peace First," not unlike the Comtean motto of "Order and Progress" (now emblazing Brazil's flag).  1868 saw a new constitution establishing his dictatorship and leaving Congress emasculated.  By 20th century standards he was a benign tyrant, but he like every dictator had a dark side.  A Department of Security-- horribly efficient by Berg standards-- imprisoned several thousand political prisoners at a time.  But the people at large called him "Uncle."   Smiling Rarsa dolls (usually in military dress) and hagiographic biographies of him were common, and his portraits were ubiquitous.  Only among the laboring proletariat in the cities was he disliked.

Rarsa ruled as dictator from 1866 to 1879.  It was, as everyone had hoped, a time of exceptional calm. He gave Bergonia its first strong central government and established modern institutions such as good paper money and a banking system, regularized bureaucracy, commercial and criminal courts, uniformed police, and prisons, orphanages and asylums-- and especially schools.  Public schools perhaps stand as Rarsa's greatest testament.  His administration was determined to make Bergonia not merely literate, but educated.  In this respect he honored the Zaomitan-Mountain Lion legacy. 

During his years heavy industry boomed, especially textiles, iron & steel, and shipbuilding.  The network of railroads was completed during this time.  The industrialists grew fantastically rich-- becoming a new upper class and mixing with the dictator and his retainers.  Rarsa increased expenditures on the navy considerably, with the navy tripling  in size during his time in power, which gratified the steelmakers. 

1879--  the Third Commonwealth

In 1879 Rarsa organized elections for a constituent assembly and steered the parties (minus the radicals) to write a liberal constitution.  It borrowed from the American constitution-- balance of powers with a strong veto-welding President, a prime minister and cabinet approved by Congress, an independent judiciary, and federalism with 24 states.  The people would elect the President directly, and Congress remained unicameral.  As in every preceding constitution, Congress and the President were elected every three years.  The guarantees of rights were hedged and piecemeal.  This became dubbed the "Third Commonwealth."  However, Rarsa reserved for himself the presidency, which he kept until 1885.  

In the first election, in 1880, Rarsa won without opposition and the Conservative Party won a narrow margin in Congress over the LRP.  But in 1882 Rarsa suffered a stroke and he retired from the presidency.  His hand-picked successor, Jean-Paul Secloa, a man with extensive ministerial experience during Rarsa's dictatorship, from outside the parties, won overwhelmingly in the election of 1883, in his first bid for public office. 

There was now largely a two party system in Bergonia's history, with the LRP and the Conservatives (the "Silk Ties").  From 1880 to 1920 the Conservatives and Liberals, with similar policies that allowed the capitalists a free hand at industrialization, gamely competed in elections. 

The Factionalized Mountain Cat

The party of the Mountain Cat had by now fractured.  The moderate "Cats" who had most loyally supported Rarsa joined the old Liberals in a newly constituted Liberal Republic Party.  They supported moderate reforms of the existing order, and largely became a vehicle for petty-bourgeoisie atrei.  Many called the LRP the "Fat Cats" or "Lap Cats" in laughing mockery of their their Mountain Cat pedigrees. 

However, the more radical "Cats" (called "Feral Cats" by their distractors) had dispersed into numerous quarrelsome parties and formed alliances with labor unions and peasant associations.  They contrived new, sometimes bizarre, and very imaginative ideas for a new society, usually based on books first published in the 1830s about Tanic society.  They opened flirted with revolution, formed secret societies, and called themselves socialists.  Some studied Marx, but his "scientific" and "materialist" version of socialism interested them little. 

1879-1908--  resurgence of the Left under the Third Commonwealth

In 1879 Rarsa allowed for the adoption of a liberal constitution, which founded the Third Commonwealth, and lifted a lot of the oppressive features of his dictatorship.  After Rarsa's departure, his successors allowed much more generous freedom of speech and organization.  Thereafter leftists appeared in the open air and made themselves known.  

By 1885 socialist parties and anarchist groups had formed in all the big cities, aligned roughly according to the extent to which they adopted European socialism or native concepts.  Countries like Russia, France and Britain had one or two major cities where growth of radical or revolutionary movements could occur in a concentrated, usually centralized fashion.  Ceiolai was Bergonia's great capital, but Bergonia had many other large cities, each a regional center.  Thus there were multiple centers, allowing more heterogeneity in any urban-based movement. 

The growth of Bergonian Labor

The first unions organized around 1820.  These were nearly all trade unions, and they had close ties with the Mountain Lion Party.  After the Mountain Lion split in two, the unions maintained close ties with the Feral Cats, and most adopted the name "socialist" after the Feral Cats did.  The unions conducted strikes in the 1860's and 70's, but after a very large strike among the textile workers John Rarsa prohibited strikes in 1869.  

There was, coincidently a wave of strikes in 1885 in both Bergonia and the United States.  The nation's railway workers struck in 1887, and the government attempted to fire all the strikers.  Afterwards the Conservative government attempted to ban strikes.  This brought on a wave of violent confrontations.

In the 1890s new syndicalist unions formed, to compete against the older "socialist" unions.  Thus, the multiplicity of radical tendencies was mirrored in the nation's fractured labor movement, which by 1910 included these groups of unions.

The Ciranic cultural movement

 

The Ciranic was a cultural movement that pushed a new syncretism between the European and the native Bergonian.   It began with painters, sculptors and designers during the Liberal Decade (1840's).  The Ciranic idealized change.  It encouraged dialectic hybridization of forms, both European and Arei.  Native artists borrowed European forms, idioms, technique and technology, and even cultural motifs.  

 

In its inception the Mountain Lion was a strictly nativist movement, originating in the atrei interior.  Borrowing European ideas and styles was something the Mountain Lion had not always approved of.  But most Feral Cats in the 1870s and 80s, as well as many other atrei radicals, changed their outlook when they saw the sudden onrush of technology-- gas lights, battleships, electricity, factory mechanization.  The Ciranic convinced many atrei that the presence of European culture in Bergonia was not a problem, but an opportunity.  The Feral Cats-- Manioto Pratli in particular-- therefore decided that a synthesis between atrei and European culture was Bergonia's best way to go.  The grafting of European democratic and socialist theory onto Tan traditions was itself an example of this Ciranic fusion.  Ciranic culturalists explored the classic texts of all the Eurasian civilizations, including the great Eurasian religions, looking for parallels with ancient Bergonian philosophy.  

A left wing coalition in 1902

 

By 1895 the Commonwealth (Gatlarin) Party and the Feral Cats (PRB) had commenced regular consultation and cooperation.  In 1902 they formed an electoral coalition, and soon closed ranks together entirely.  The two socialist groups also cooperated with the anarcho-syndicalists and the unions.  

 

As a broad intellectual movement the Feral Cats and to a lesser extent the anarchists both took democratic, socialist and anarchist concepts from Europe and grafted them onto ancient Miradi & Tan ideas.  The Bergonian socialists and anarchists were by 1895 quite distinct from their European brethren, and often suffered their denunciations.  

1870-1900--  growth, industrialization, urbanization: formation of the proletariat

By 1880 Bergonia had a population of 63,000,000, larger than the United States.  The central government was powerful and the countryside was peaceful, overall much more free of crime & disorder than before 1840.  The "Third Commonwealth" had regular institutions (tax department, postal service, national bank, courts) that functioned island-wide, and elections were now held regularly.  

Industrialization:  The country rapidly industrialized after Rarsa took over in 1859, somewhat on par with Italy and Japan.  Bergonia's internal markets were now sufficient to drive demand for textiles, finished metal goods and other manufactured goods, which in turn produced demand for iron, steel and coal.  Bergonia was able to satisfy other important prerequisites for industrial growth: a stable regime of property and commercial law, a stable currency, protective tariffs, formation of capital, and governments disposed toward industrialization.  By 1870 the entire island was well crisscrossed by railroads.  Factories in a dozen urbanized areas produced textiles, steel, tools, ships, steam engines, glass, plumbing, fasteners, lenses, telegraph equipment, soaps, perfumes, and paper.  The government had the will and the means to engineer large public works-- dams, canals, irrigation, bridges, harbors and roads.  A good island-wide network of railroads (completed in 1850) had opened up the interior, and a large Bergonian navy sailed the Atlantic and penetrated the Pacific. 

 

Foreign markets continued to help drive production of cotton, sugar, beef, lamb, fruit and other food and crop commodities.  Craftsmen industrialized their operations and turned out large quantities of Bergonia's specialties: optics, glassware, perfumes, ceramics, things greatly desired as curios and exotica by European bourgeosie.  Bergonia also exported minerals to Europe and the east-coast US.  Fine harbors made transshipping of goods easy and inexpensive.   Bergonia was opening, at least economically, to the world.

 

To some extent Bergonian industry relied on British and American capital, but by 1870 Bergonian capitalists were amassing fortunes and banks had built up huge reserves, so there was now plenty of indigenous capital for new enterprises.  

 

Factory workers had no choice but to live in tenements erected by the corporate employers and local rich landlords.  Most tenements were three or four storied, made of brick covered with stucco, with hundred of little square windows each with a glass pane and no louvered shutters.  The workers and their families hated this style of building, and often knocked out the walls around the windows to enlarge them.  Sanitation in many of these neighborhoods was bad, with no running water and open sewers.

 

Industrialization and urbanization inevitably produced and crystallized three new classes: (a) the urban industrial moguls (the bourgeoisie), dependably Europeanized, even the participating atrei), (b) a middle class (petty bourgeoisie, craftsmen, shopkeepers) in varying degrees Europeanized, and (c) the urban proletariat, utterly atrei.

 

The Moguls:  Bergonia's new industrial elites included both whites, sherei and atrei.  Atrei industrialists, merchants and bankers eagerly embraced Western ways; some were Christians, others just embraced bourgeoisie dress, style, manner and values (as did their counterparts in non-Christian Japan, China, India and Middle East).  As the elites built railroads, factories and mills, these atrei joined the new class of gilded moguls—in so doing they became utterly modern, secular and scientific in their outlook, since they almost entirely rejected native ways and had never been engrained with Christian values. Since only about one fourth of the people were practicing Christians, the moguls found little use for Christianity as a tool for control. The moguls (and their servants who taught in the universities and wrote for the newspapers) were free to actively champion western secular materialism.  The industrialists' wives and daughters imitated the best Paris and New York fashions and imported luxury goods from London.  As a class the moguls disdained the native languages in favor of French and English. The LRP (Liberal) and Conservative parties both eagerly took money from the moguls and served their interests.

 

The "Petty-Bourgeoisie"-- the New Middle Class:  Government, banks and industry all needed bureaucrats and managers.  The ranks of the professional class grew, including physicians, druggists, lawyers, accountants, clerks, engineers & architects.  In the interior all these people, even in cities like Ceiolai and Varsca, were nearly all atrei.   But in the coastal regions many descendants of European settlers moved into the professions and trades.  Christians were over-represented in this group, but it included hundreds of thousands of Miradi in responsible positions with money and status.  This swelling class generated demand for the first mass-produced consumer goods.  People of this class uniformly wore European dress and in varying degrees pandered to European tastes, with Paris the beacon of fashion.  A sizeable portion of them wore native dress in their homes and on holiday.  Many read French and English novelists and put on at least a pretense of a "liberal" European-style education, even though they still attended to their Miradi faith and cremated their dead.  They whole-heartedly adopted European Bourgeoisie notions of propriety and respectability. 

 

The Proletariat-- the New Working Class:  The cities swelled with shanties built by new immigrants from the countryside, bleak filthy rows of workers tenements surrounding coal-fired factories whose stacks spewed black soot everywhere.  The work week was long and brutal.  Diet was poor (hominy and beans).  Only the warm climate made life in the slums of Ceiolai any more tolerable than the slums of London or Berlin.  

 

When peasants moved to the city for work, the city transformed them into a different sort of creature.  They lost the psychological foundations of village collectivism.  The emerging cities of industrial capitalism were places of secularism and materialism, where money values ruled, where the hold of traditional religion loosened.  If you lacked money, your life or that of your children could be forfeit.  Before Columbus Bergonia had quite big cities (Ceiolai in 1500: 3 million), and even in such places the clan-system produced stable neighborhoods, and provided mutual protection and aid.  In modern times there was no clan system to guide and protect newcomers and distressed people, and the modern industrialized cities began eating people.  Folks in the slums often went hungry.  Sanitation was deplorable.  Disease was rampant.  Children were often put to work.  Young women with infants had to work as prostitutes.  Injured workers were discarded.  Crippled men begged in the sunlight.  Unemployed men thieved in the shadows.  The police functioned only to protect money, and treated the working class the way penitentiary guards treat the prisoners.  The new rich built beautiful mansions, but often built them behind walls.  The "gated community" was invented b Bergonian industrialists in the 1870s, who wanted the security of high brick walls against undesired contact with the masses.  Fury against this new cruelty was given voice when union agitators (ironically often sons of the new petty- bourgeoisie) preached socialism and anarchism to the workers.  Among academicians, bohemians and journalists every color and shade of opinion contended.  Unions grew in the factories and mines, and socialism became a rage. 

 

The New Cultural Rift:   Both Christians and Miradi believers among the lower and middle classes found that they had less and less in common with the moguls and their bourgeois attendants. A wide rift based on class opened, dividing society between the proletariat and peasantry on one hand, and the moguls and petty bourgeoisie attendants on the other.  The new upper class was not nearly as Christian as the old pre-industrial upper class that founded the Republic.  Likewise, while the peasantry was still mostly Miradi, the proletariat included both a westernized element-- atrei who went to Mass, listened to their priests, wore pants, shirts with cuffs and vests-- and a very nativist element-- atrei who wore tunics and loose pants under long jackets, danced at the temple and cremated their dead.

 

Bergonia shared the same plight as many other countries--Mexico, Russia, Turkey, China, Japan—countries with heartfelt traditional cultures struggling with (and against) rapid industrialization and westernization. The particularities of each nation's culture dictated how it responded to these encroaching forces. Bergonia’s native culture had been badly crippled in the colonial era, and the atrei were deeply ambivalent, and fractured, about westernization.  The racism smugness of white Western European culture stung resurgent atrei pride badly, but no significant part of Bergonian society desired the total rejection of Western influences.  

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