The quiz

War → debt → taxation → representation crisis: the same mechanism as 1775, at ten times the scale. Interest consumed half the royal budget, and only a national body could legitimize taxing privilege.

Haiti was quarantined for succeeding. France later extorted a 150-million-franc “indemnity” — compensation to the enslavers — as the price of recognition. The age’s principles, tested where they were expensive, failed.

Napoleon dissolved the thousand-year Holy Roman Empire (1806) and rebuilt ~300 statelets into ~40 satellites — modernized by the Code, garrisoned by France, and taught a nationalism that would turn on its teacher.

Economic war that only works if total obliges you to conquer every leak — Portugal, Spain, the Papal states, finally Russia. The blockade’s logic wrote the itinerary of the Empire’s destruction.

The army was dying of logistics while winning its battles. “General Winter” was the explanation preferred by the man whose plan had failed — distrust explanations of disaster that exculpate the planner.

Bourbon France and Spain, re-partitioned Italy: thrones put back by treaty and, where needed, by bayonet. The Concert of Europe existed to keep the hatching in place.

“I called the New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old,” boasted Canning. Political independence arrived braided with British economic dependence — loans, cloth, and the Royal Navy offshore.

June Days in Paris, Germans against Czechs, Magyars against Croats — the risings’ seams opened first; and unlike 1789, no army collapsed. Revolutions succeed when soldiers won’t fire; in 1848-49, from Custoza to Világos, they fired.