Hanging with History

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. In a great triumph for France, and Talleyrand personally, Belgium is born.  This is one of history's true ironies because of how the existence of Belgium weakens France in the 20th century. The episode ends with Talleyrand's last treaty, his treaty with Rome, over his own soul. But the birth of Belgium requires a revolution whi...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. “Talleyrand was in a black mood.  All that he had achieved over the past eighteen months had been destroyed: the bloodless and amiable return of the Bourbons in 1814 was being travestied by the vindictive and mean minded 2nd Restoration.  The favorable conditions obtained for France by the Treaty of Paris in 1814 were to be revised and t...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. There is a commonplace, dismissive, reductive argument you will hear all the time.  That napoleon stood no chance.  Even if he had triumphed on the field at Waterloo, as in some ways he really could have.  The forces arrayed against him were so massive he had really no hope.  A huge Austrian and German army was coming in from the Rhine,...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. Last episode we looked at France, Scandinavia and Italy.  Italy was particularly fascinating, but we were bare able to scratch the surface.    Now we look at Germany, contrasting Talleyrand's careful thought about France and Louis the 18th with Metternich and Hardenberg's lack of vision. Finally, Castlereagh gives up his effort...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. Last episode we described how in Paris there was a party like atmosphere, the dreamy, giddy glow of it, how it sucked in the later arrivals.  The immense joy they all wallowed in.   Part of the peace settlement allowed France to keep all the looted art they had taken from all over Europe.  And I’ve mentioned this before, but the allied l...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. The core of this entire messy situation was the evening of March 31st when Talleyrand and Tsar Alexander meet.   This moment that everyone could feel was decisive at the time, the Allies were all hyper aware of the importance of these few days, the core idea is that it did matter a great deal what the tsar thought and what he wanted.  An...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. But you already covered the French Revolution?  Why bring up events from 25 years prior to the narrative? Well, Actually, I’ve covered the French revolution twice.  Once in the France the Enemy arc, covering the situation before ethe Revolution, and then in the French Revolution arc a couple years later.  You might recall I did the agric...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response.  Elizabeth’s greatest domestic threat was the Puritans.  Under Knox they quickly came to dominate Scotland.  A Reindeer75 episode.   Elizabeth was obviously favored by god and this gave her an enormous advantage in what was understood to be a religious argument.  We look into Calvinist ideas of salvation, what does it mean to be Elect an...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. Grand Strategy in Elizabeth’s war with Spain.  The Hawkins strategy turns out to be a winner.  Spain has two more Armadas to throw at England.  Their most successful effort was Spain’s attack on Brittany, while France is still divided by Civil War.  “Paris is worth a mass”, says Henry of Navarre, wrapping up a long series of brutal civil...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. The key at this point is Talleyrand is getting ready to leave Napoleon and enter into a form of opposition against him, because he sees Napoleon as a danger to France , as a danger to Europe, and as a man about to fall and fail, reach exceeds grasp.  But political opponents of Napoleon either end up dead or locked up at a chateau in Vinc...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. Last episode Talleyrand barely escapes France ahead of a death sentence.  Then the British decide he might be a spy, well he might have been an excellent spy, though we know he was not a spy. He went to America, George Washington refuses to see him, but Alexander Hamilton welcomes him. By the end Talleyrand has decided to play the danger...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. It is somewhat preposterous for an origins of the industrial revolution podcast to feature so much a French diplomat.  That would be true if Talleyrand were merely a French diplomat, rather than a bridge between the old world and the birth of the modern.  A man who nearly embodies the shift from the sacral to the instrumental, a man who...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. This is a deep dive into the problems of 1814 (being terror and bitterness) and the solution: Legitimacy, Huge, vast problems gripped Europe in 1814.  Usurpations all over Italy, chaos and foreign occupation in Germany, Thrones without occupants, deserters roaming France.   Solutions are needed, but can a continent dominated by fear find...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. The Convention of Plesswitz ends and war begins again August 11.  The focus is on driving Napoleon out of Germany and then the action turns to Scandinavia, to include Danish Holstein, with most of the focus on Norway. Napoleon's desperate attempts to defend Saxony end at the biggest battle in European history to that time. Allied wa...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. Of the large political entities in Europe in 1813 the Austrian empire was one of the oddest, from a modern perspective and possibly the most vulnerable. It was really the personal realm of the house of Habsburg.  I’ve talked a lot about it in the past assuming a great deal of background knowledge on the part of the listener, so let’s fil...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. Trying to recover from defeat in 1812, Napoleon had enormous obstacles to overcome.  But these were NOT obvious at the time, surprisingly to us, most of the great and the good expected Napoleon to win in 1813. Tsar Alexander had some very unusual motivations for a major head of state in the Europe of the time.  These motivations, includi...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. We examine the question: "Who won the bloody war anyway?" The Canadians won, the Native Americans lost, the British won, the Americans lost and most of all, far more importantly, the Americans won the war overwhelmingly.  The apparent contradiction here is resolved. The great clashed happen in the land war.  The elite British l...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. The war starts with America terribly unprepared.  British efforts to make peace suffer from a lack of focus; Casltereagh is just not applying much brainpower and effort to the American sitution. Almost no navy.  A tiny regular army like 11,000 men, terribly officered.  No real tax funding for the government to speak of.  Deliberately, th...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. The first episode of a mini arc on the War of 1812.  This covers origins and how the British got unto a war they had no interest in.  The Americans had a variety of motives.  The surface reasons usually discussed in popular history and podcasts seem a little crazy, not fitting in with te reality of the early 19th century very well.  But...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. 1812 in Iberia was heavily conditioned by the Napoleon's invasion of Russia. 1812 was a major transition year for the war in Iberia.  Wellington defeated Marmont's Army of Portugal in the course of an afternoon and drove King Jospeh out of Madrid.  The French were able to recover thanks to superior manpower.  However, in order...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. The world turns on this 1812 campaign and its outcome.  We explore more issues, and turning points from the previous episode, some new and some expanding of previous issues.

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. Napoleon never intended to invade as far as Moscow.  It was just supposed to be the 2nd Polish campaign.  But Napoleon's hammer blows kept missing. Napoleon's blend of insightful planning and terrible planning for the invasion led to the temptation to do what the Empereur knew was wrong.  Just go a little deeper. There were at...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. The 1810 and 1811 campaigns in Iberia were defined by an absence- Napoleon’s absence.  Napoleon had won the battle of Wagram in July of 1809.  This was at once a decisive defeat of the Austrian army, and the biggest land battle in European history up to that point. Obviously, the flow of men was out of Spain, into Germany during 1809.  B...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. We cover resistance to the French invasion of Catalonia in 1808.  What can a lone frigate do?  And then the battle of the Basque Roads (in Western France near Roquefort) where very unorthodox fireship tactics were used, French loses were high, but it could have been an annihilation victory except for…well, are we looking at the very wors...

You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. The Austrian pro war party is emboldened by the French defeat at Bailen.  By April 1809 Archduke Charles is leading the newly reformed Austrian army into Bavaria. Napoleon has made a brilliant response, quite unexpectedly.  Davout's 3rd Corps and his German allies show they can still defeat the Austrians. But during the course of th...