War Palace and Knee Pillow, Austria’s Destiny

In fact, the higher one stands, the farther one can see. But this is not always a good thing. For example, Prince Metternich overestimated the so-called Italians at this time.

It makes people feel a little sad that Prince Metternich, who once vowed to turn Italy into a geographical term, is getting old after all.

Compared with the title Italian, Venetians, Lombards, Tuscans, Parma, Lucca, Modenese, Romans, Sicilians, and Sardinians are more likely to be called Italian. accepted.

Due to thousands of years of geographical isolation, they have formed different cultures and habits, and even their languages ​​​​are also different.

Historically, the Italian government started the process of modernizing the Italian language in 1870 and promoted the Tuscan dialect (also known as the Florentine dialect or Tuscan language). It took 120 years to solve the problem. language problem.

The conflict between north and south in Italy still exists today. However, it is not appropriate to allow these guys to be highly concentrated in northern Italy. After all, no one knows whether they will cause any new problems like Gu Refining in the end.

What Franz thought of was to move it to Tripoli. After all, this place would be very important in the future, and the local population was seriously insufficient. Not to mention development, even infrastructure could not be completed.

In fact, there is another point, that is, the execution and dominance displayed by the Karamanli family are far from Franz's expectations.

Letting them rule this area is really inefficient to the point of waste, and Northern Italy is full of sailors and dockworkers.

In fact, Italian city-states also had a business tradition, so Franz felt that the plan was feasible. His first step was to prepare to immigrate 30,000 people to the Tripoli area from 1846 to 1850.

In fact, there were immigration plans earlier, but relying on natural immigration was too slow. After the second Turkish-Egyptian War, by 1846, less than 2,000 people from Austria immigrated to Tripoli.

Compared to Tripoli, the natural environment in Tunisia next door is much superior. After all, it was the birthplace of Carthage civilization.

But the reality is that Britain, France, Sardinia, and even the United States all had a hand in it. Even if Tunisia made two attempts to attack Tripoli as a bandit, the Austrian side could only regard it as ordinary. Handling of banditry incidents.

So don't think about Tunisia for the time being, unless some kind of agreement is reached with other powers one day, or some kind of large-scale conflict breaks out.

As for the recruitment of Italians into the army, Franz maintained a wait-and-see attitude.

Because at this time, the evaluation of Italian soldiers in Austria was polarized. Some people held the same view as later generations and felt that Italian soldiers lacked the will to fight and the fighting qualities.

Morale is always low, obedience is astonishingly poor, unorganized, and undisciplined. Marching is like hiking, and fighting is like going to the market. In short, they don't look like an army.

In addition, the Italians are also a group of people in the army who like to be aggressive. They often form secret societies and use their wisdom and strength to escape military sanctions and deal with their own people.

Another group of commanders believed that Italian soldiers were hard-working, versatile, highly motivated, and had a spirit of sacrifice.

In fact, Italian soldiers cannot be generalized, but at least they are good cooks and logistics troops, as well as excellent hunters.

Franz feels that the reason why some outrageous situations occur is mainly due to the over-emphasis on humanism, which makes them lack team spirit and discipline.

At the same time, there is also a lack of recognition and consensus, because since the fall of ancient Rome, the Italian region has always been in a state of divided city-states. The geographical fragmentation is more serious than that of the German region, and there has been a long-term lack of real threats.

The last point is that Italians are often discriminated against. Their military salaries are often lower than those of other ethnic groups, and they cannot be paid on time and in full.

Other issues require reform and education to slowly change, but Franz thinks the military pay issue is easy to handle. After all, the Austrian Empire is really not short of money now. In order to reduce the rapidly increasing gold reserves, it has to choose to scatter coins and carry out Some investments that are hard to understand.

As for the mutual connection between Italians, Franz didn't care much. After all, they preferred to form small groups than to unite. If they didn't do anything, they would fight on their own.

And he also hopes that potential enemies will emerge on their own, which in a sense is luring the snake out of its hole.

Since the family's reputation and national image have to be taken into consideration, there are not many opportunities to eradicate the problem.

What Franz did actually did not conflict much with Prince Metternich's policy, so the two policies could be carried out at the same time.

On the island of Ireland, the situation is getting worse as the potato crop is almost gone again.

This time there will be no more food in the cellar. At the same time, food prices in the UK have hit record highs, and more food is being shipped from the island of Ireland to the UK mainland.

The number of people dying of starvation continued to rise, while more Irish people who could not afford the rent were evicted from their homes. The vast majority of land in Ireland belonged to landowners, even their homes.

The landowners had almost the power of medieval feudal lords, and their profits suffered due to the effects of the famine.

But those poor Irish people really couldn't afford the rent, so the British landowners thought of a new way.

That is to rent the original land to two families, which can not only make up for their losses, but also make a small profit, but this will make the life of the Irish even more difficult.

The British imitated the Austrian relief-for-work program and declared bankruptcy. At the same time, typhoid fever and cholera broke out in the workhouses. Several cartloads of corpses were loaded every day and taken to the suburbs for burial.

But the British have never had a lower limit when it comes to being inappropriate. Colonial Secretary Lord William Gladstone proposed that the Irish could be immigrated to Australia, which would not only solve the problem of sparse population in the colony but also alleviate the famine problem on the island of Ireland.

This proposal sounds like there is no problem. The problem is that when it was implemented, they found that it was not as cost-effective to immigrate Irish Catholics as to buy black slaves from East Africa.

Britain would lure Protestants from Germany, but abandon its own Catholics. At this time, the Governor of New South Wales expressed an opinion that there were too few local women and hoped that the British government could immigrate more women to solve the fertility problem.

At that time, Australia was not a viceroyalty, but a geographical term composed of several viceroyalties.

So the British government decisively adopted the Governor of South Wales's suggestion to select healthy and age-appropriate women in the workhouses.

Countless dirty and dirty transactions took place, and eventually batch after batch of Irish girls were lured to Australia to be used as reproductive tools for lower-class colonists who were almost twice their age.

In this era, the corruption of high-level life in the colonies was actually no worse than that in big European cities. Naturally, they looked down upon these ordinary girls.

In fact, senior officials of the South Wales Colony stated:

"Our money should be spent on decent, well-educated girls, not wasted on a bunch of base and ignorant creatures."

Although the lowest class in the Australian colonies would not starve to death, high-intensity labor and childbirth could not bring them dignity and material satisfaction. What most people received was nothing more than a long sentence of double physical and mental torture.