1855 United States Tycoon

In April 1869, the willow tree by the Seine had already spit out its tender green leaves and unfolded its graceful branches. The spring breeze blew gently across the Seine, driving away the winter chill, and spring had come.

But today's Parisians cannot see spring. On the Concorde Bridge, where traffic was heavy and tourists weaving, it has become quite deserted. There are only a few patrol officers, holding police dogs, patrolling back and forth along the road, and interrogating them from time to time what they think is suspicious. It looks like "social Activists, "insurgents". And if the answers of those who are interrogated do not satisfy them, then he will probably be taken away, and then there will be no news, as if there has never been such a person in the world.

The Third French Republic and the Prussians signed an armistice agreement, agreeing to cede territories to the Germans. It’s easy to cede territories. Alsace and Lorraine are already under German occupation, and the main residents there speak German. Germanic. But paying huge compensations of up to five billion francs is not so easy. Napoleon III’s treasury definitely did not have such a large sum of money. If there was such a large amount of money in the treasury, then he would not lose so badly. There are many laws of war, but one of the most basic is probably the stronger material power. To put it more generally, in most cases, war is a game where the rich and handsome crush the poor. Although there will always be people on the Internet in later generations who ridicule Gao Fushuai for bombing ten-dollar tents with millions of dollars of missiles, but in a war, the chances of victory are always higher for Gao Fushuai.

In order to raise such a sum of money, the French asked the Germans to pay in installments while busy borrowing money from all over the world. But money is always the hardest thing to come when you need it the most. When France was still rich and handsome, as long as he said that he wanted to borrow some money to spend, wait outside the door of the Ministry of Finance, crying and shouting that he wanted to lend money to them. But now, the battle with the Prussians has suddenly beaten France from being rich and handsome to being a dick. As a result, the attitude of those bankers toward France immediately changed 180 degrees. They covered their money bags tightly one by one, and kept saying that unless you are willing to pay a higher interest rate, we I just have no money to lend you. However, if they really borrowed money at the interest they expected, it would mean that France would be robbed again by this group of vampires after being robbed by Germany.

But the situation was stronger than the others, and finally the government of Thiers had to surrender to these vampires and borrowed a large amount of usury from them to pay war reparations. Borrowing in order to repay the indemnity, and in order to repay the loan, the Thiers government can naturally only do some land scraping. In this way, there are naturally many people who are dissatisfied. The French have a "revolutionary" tradition, um, in order to be able to Repay the money normally, so early to return the northern states that were still occupied by the Germans as collateral, the Thiers government must suppress those who tried to rebel, and this naturally required more money.

A four-wheeled carriage drove slowly over the Concorde Bridge, drove by four batches of horses, towards the seat of the government. The spotlessly cleaned, brightly painted body painted with high-grade paint that can be used as a mirror, and the four horses that pull the cart all illustrate the identity of the person in the cart. In this era of France, only foreign vampires can do it. Such unscrupulously show off their luxury.

Sitting in the carriage was Catherine's cousin David, the European agent of McDonald Ventures Bank. Now he is going to talk to the French about a loan. Compared with other banks, the Macdonald Ventures Bank's loan conditions are relatively generous, and the interest rate it asks for is also a little lower, so their loans are naturally more popular with the French government. Of course, this kind of generosity does not come without a price. The price is that France must open its market to Scrooge's consortium in some ways. For example, this is the case in some industries that can bring everyone a win-win result. Well, for example, the French government has agreed to allow qualified foreign companies to open factories in France to produce nitrogen fertilizer. And enjoy a complete tax exemption for a period of fifteen years. (When the German and Scrooge signed a memorandum of cooperation to share technology, it was stipulated that neither party could sell this product in the other's country, but did not carefully divide the international market. So Scrooge simply planned to produce this directly in France. Taking into account the tax exemption and the low wages of French workers relative to United States workers, they can produce here and earn more. In addition, fertilizer plants are an important source of pollution. Pollution in France is always better than large pollution in United States. Although reduced Some technologies for pollutant discharge, the large laboratory in Scrooge's hands is not impossible, but it is free to pollute, why spend money to reduce pollutant discharge? After all, in the 1960s and 1970s, it was a capital full of energy and vast sky. In the era of free capital, capitalists have gone through a period of laissez-faire time, freely pursuing wealth and power, pollution, pollution, and wage reduction when they want to. This is the era of free capital, and everything is free.)

In addition to opening a "local gold" factory, the French were also forced to open the steel market to Scrooge. After losing the high-quality iron ore in Alsace and Lorraine, the steel plants in France only used the second-grade iron ore with high sulfur and phosphorus content. And they don't have the full set of technology to deal with such things. So, um, the cooperation method of "market for technology" was released. The French government allowed Scrooge to control these French steel companies and promised to give them full national treatment. And give appropriate inclination in policy.

Of course, such an operation requires a lot of money, but this is not a big problem for Scrooge. The Germans still owed Scrooge a large loan and payment. Nowadays, a considerable part of the indemnity that the Germans knocked out from France is directly handed over to the McDonald Venture Capital Bank, and then the McDonald Venture Capital Bank turned around again and sent part of the money back to United States, part of it is lent to the French government, and the remaining small part plus the interest paid by the French government every month, is just used to build these projects.Now the Thiers government has put forward a new loan request. Now many people are dissatisfied with the government and hate their traitors. They can launch an uprising at any time and overthrow the government. On the other hand, the government of the Third French Republic is itself A super weird thing. Simply put, this is a republican government in which there is no one in the government and parliament who supports the republican system. There are only three royal parties in the entire government and parliament-the "Orthodoxists" who support the Bourbon dynasty, the "Orleans" who support the Louis Philippe dynasty, and the "Bonapartists" who support other relatives of Napoleon. It was only because the three factions contained each other so that it was impossible to determine who would be the emperor of France, so a so-called republic had to be created. Even the president of this "republic" has openly declared that he is a royalist, only temporarily serving as the president, and will hand over his power to the legitimate king in the future. It's just that the timing is still immature.

Although Thiers worked hard to make peace among the three factions, none of these three factions truly trusted him. His presidency is a product of compromise, because not many people can accept the three factions. But he is not their own person. They need him because they need him to bear the charges of traitorousness and suppression of the revolution. When the critical moment is reached, it is not impossible to sell him to compromise.

This is a common political trick. The people behind the scenes always have some dark work to do. But it is always difficult for people who do these tasks to have a good end. Han Martial God used his father Yan as a knife to deal with the princes, and cut him in the waist to calm the anger of the princes; Wu Zetian used Zhou Xinglai as a knife to kill the suspicious ministers, and dealt with them to calm the anger of the officials. It's nothing more than a knife that doesn't work well and then another knife. But even if they understand this, there is still an endless stream of people who are willing to be knives. And those who make knives don’t want to be abandoned just like that. They always imagine that they are a different kind of knife, able to "knife like a new blade" for a long time because of where they can solve thousands of cows. Go on. Thiers is the same. So he has to borrow money again to buy a batch of armaments to arm a reliable army. They are not required to beat the Germans, as long as they can defeat the Rebellion Party anytime and anywhere.

And in this matter, is there a better partner for cooperation than the new friends who are full of goodwill like the Macdonald Consortium? Just as France and Prussia were negotiating the amount of compensation, their leader, Mr. Scrooge McDonald, publicly screamed, hoping that the Prussians would show the lenient and benevolence of the winner and not put forward too harsh conditions. When the socialist rebellious parties in Paris launched riots, he also publicly criticized these rebellious parties for rebelling at a time of national crisis, which was extremely wrong. Moreover, they have provided France with loans with relatively lower interest rates and are willing to help France’s crisis-stricken agriculture, steel, and mining operations to get out of the predicament. In addition, the power of their weapons has been verified by the Franco-Prussian War. Any French soldier who fought with the Prussians who used the weapons of the Macdonald Infantry Weapons Company in the Franco-Prussian War left an unforgettable impression on the weapons they produced. Therefore, Thiers hopes that he can borrow a sum of money from McDonald Ventures to purchase McDonald’s weapons in order to protect the good situation of Francian’s stability and unity. He also believed that such a request filled with the wisdom of Scrooge's win-win situation would surely receive a satisfactory response to him.

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