To the Barricades and Beyond!

[PAUL CHAUVELIN]

Since most of the players have at least one character involved in the Barricades, and everyone will be affected by the aftermath, it seems to me it might be a good idea to get some ideas going on just what's going to happen. It's nice when everyone participating in a plot can, well, participate in the plotting.

A little bit of background on the historical canon (per wikipedia):

The uprising broke out on June 5, 1832, at the funeral of General Lamarque. Approximately 3,000 rebels took control of the eastern and central parts of the city, holding them overnight. By the next morning, however, 40,000 regular army soldiers had joined the 20,000 strong National Guard militia, and the insurgents were outnumbered 200 to 1. Before the day was out, the rebellion had been comprehensively crushed. The people of Paris didn't rise in support, and with 93 killed and 291 wounded, it doesn't look like most of the 3,000 really fought tooth and nail, either.

Clearly, it's going to take some serious AUing just to keep the Barricades Posse alive. There's the assistance of the Sacred Heart, but I honestly don't see the addition of a couple dozen guerrillas to the insurgent side as being enough to tip the scales. Against those odds, even a couple hundred wouldn't do it. There have to be fewer troops and/or more support for the rebels.

Then there's the question of how we get from 'taking and holding part of the city' to 'full-on revolution, government overthrown, chateaus throughout the country in flames, aristos fleeing for their lives.' There's also a gap of at least a day or two between the Barricades and the Revolution, in which the Garden Party takes place to account for.

So, ideas? All that comes to me is the people of Paris being more willing to join the rebellion, and the 40,000 soldiers arriving a day or two late (and then maybe being so heavy-handed in their methods of putting down the rebellion that they trigger a revolutionary backlash).

[Deleted]

Hmm... I was thinking that maybe, instead of having just one board to have the barricade roleplay, we may just have an "event" that covers the whole thing. It's kind of hard to really explain without a concrete example, so please forgive me for this:
Maybe we could have it in four parts, like:

• Pre-barricade/Before the Storm or something like that:
  France: ABC Planning Board, the Sacred Heart PB, Royalty PB(whether or not they really plan, just a pre-bar discussion), and On the Streets/The Rest of the Revolution PB
  England: The League PB, The English Salon/Courts of the King/On the Streets (for League + others, monarchy etc. etc.)
  
  *So Pre-Bar would most likely last a few days. Admin could just announce how long it would be. After that, it would be closed or something like that, and we move on to:
  
  
• The Bar- so this is the one of the main attractions of the event
  All open venues only in France?
  
  *Leave it open for some days again, then close the event. We can have the Garden Party/the Lull. Don't really know how it goes.
  
  
• The Lull
  
  
• The Revolution- Like the Bar, event venues only in France?
  
  (I probably messed up the titles and venues and the like. I'm sorry. Oh, and Bar= Barricade, PB= Planning Board)
  

I was also thinking:
Prior to the start of the event, people should choose sides for their characters. Since we're already doing the AU bit, we might as well stretch it further by allowing our RP results to influence the end of the revolution. We can settle it by having a point system. The side with the most points will have their "ending". We can have, for example, 1 point for each post in Pre-Bar and the Lull, and 2 points for each post in Bar or Revolution.

Also, maybe, the Admin could drop "random events" like... Ummm, Armand St. Just's bullets were stolen by some children! or
It starts raining hard!

[Deleted]

This idea sounds kind of stupid, but what if the National Guard has a mishap with their gunpowder? After all, the rebels stole a lot of it. The people of France will be coming to their aid with lots of weapon, gunpowder, and anything else they can use. The soldiers will be stuck with a supply of gunpowder that might have been ruined by the rain, and their bayonets won't do them much good until they can actually get into the barricade, which they might not if there are armed revolutionaries enough.

[HENRI ROQUEFEUIL-BLANQUEFORT]

Another possibility is--and I don't know much about the composition of the French military at the time, so without some research I can't promise what percentage of the government forces would likely be able to be incited to this--that enough of the people join the uprising (for whatever reason) that some substantial portion of the military forces refuse to fire upon civilians. This relies on some proportion of them being from Paris. Whether some percentage of the soldiers outright change sides, simply refuse to open fire, or desert and run for the hills--combined, that can reduce the size of the attacking force. A real stroke of luck would be to get some (relatively minor) officer to desert and switch sides with the men under his command, providing the revolutionaries with not only an additional company or so (100 men to a company, typically), but also a trained officer who might very well know some of the other side's plans. An unusually gifted and charismatic officer, upon defection, might even be capable of sparking a broader mutiny among the government troops if he plays his cards right...

As far as what would make the people rise... well, it has to be pretty horrible for the average Joe on the street. Food supplies cut off to the general population or, similarly, water supplies cut off--but either would take a while to make the people desperate enough for most of them to be willing to fight. The problem is, of course, that for misery or political agitators to work out well... it would have to have started some time before, and been more than the general conditions of nineteenth century urban, working-class life.

[HENRI ROQUEFEUIL-BLANQUEFORT]

...Idea:
-The Sacred Heart rebels (or at least most of them) do escape from Essonnes, which obviously isn't ideal from the government's perspective. A handful of soldiers who were supposed to be responsible for springing the trap are shot within the following week, without a proper court martial. After all, their commanders rationalize, something is moving in France and such an emergency requires quick action. There was no time for court martial. This is viewed as extraordinarily unfair among the enlisted men, many of whom are conscript soldiers with little interest in high politics.

-Word travels quickly, despite official attempts to halt the rumors that the men were killed because the commandant of the gunpowder mill made a mistake and refuses to blame himself. A small mutiny occurs among the infantrymen, many of whom have connections to the roiling discontent in Paris itself—and other cities throughout France. This mutiny is put down by a cohort of officers allied to the Chouannerie, though a handful of the mutineers escape. All official communications regarding the incident are suppressed and hidden from the king.

-The escaped mutineers make it to Paris, informing the families of the men killed about what happened. The underground press takes up the story, inflaming the more radical parts of the literate population. The whispered rumors are enough to cause a surge of bitterness toward the existing order in the army, even if not toward the state as a whole. It's not enough to spark a revolt, but it could build into a demonstration... except that a revolt is already building, and some percentage of the population will be irritated when the army shows up.

-A circle of more idealistic officers, mostly young and with social ties to the radicalized students of Paris (likely a combination of well-born young men who are siblings and cousins to the students, and a handful of slightly older men who rose through the ranks from being conscript soldiers themselves), come to the conclusion that what happened was morally inexcusable. When the orders come through that they are to suppress a revolt in the city, they don't know what sparked the revolt—but they can assume it has something to do with this mutiny.

-Although they are deployed into the city to crush the revolt, the majority of these officers do not give their men the order to fire. Some may release the men under their command to fight on whichever side their conscience guides them to; others may overtly give the orders to join with the rebels. Some may simply and deliberately get their men stuck in the outskirts of town, get a cannon stuck in the mud (it has been raining), etc.

-End result: at least several hundred trained soldiers are not attacking the rebels at all, and many of them are coming to their assistance. Many of them are ably commanded. All of them are equipped to fight. Plenty of them have a bone to pick with high command themselves. In addition, some of the civilian population of Paris is not only angry about the normal stuff, but also specifically upset with what the military did... and a few more will trickle to the barricades for the chance to fire off a shot.

-One of the circle of defecting officers could, conceivably, send himself off on a suicide mission to assassinate whoever is in command of the army. He would, presumably, pretend to be coming bearing an urgent message about what is going down in the city. But hey look, that message is a bullet in the skull. So unfortunate. No doubt he would be arrested and either killed on the spot or imprisoned and held for court martial, but he might just throw enough chaos into the chain of command to delay orders from getting where they need to go for the army to work efficiently.

[TYBALT SANS-GAUCHE]

Wow, that's quite a detailed Plan you have there Ash xD It's that sort of butterfly effect that could really cause an earthquake. I think we all agree that for this uprising to turn into a succesful revolution we definitely need part of the military on the students' side. Brothers and cousins refusing to shoot at their kin, changing sides, and in turn other militia refusing to also shoot at their former friends and brothers in arms. It smacks of outright civil war... but what else is a civil war than a revolution no one could find an end to?

The only problem with this plan seems to be its large scale. This would need time to develop, time we would need to go back to... since we're already at the barricades, and for this to be succesful they sooomehow need to survive the first two days. How could we possibly play this whole story out? it is a bit much to just accept as 'given' and background...?

[LIBERTE]

Hello all,
Emmy, Gwen and myself are currently in the midst of working on a timeline, which plots out the future of the rebellion and revolution. We will be taking into account everyone’s ideas and once we have it completed will consider also any ideas you wish to add later on. You are welcome to continue discussing your ideas here and we will include everything as best as we can.

One of the benefits of the site being a roleplay game and Au is that we can design the historical facts to allow for good plotting. While we aim to keep everything as realistic as possible, we don’t want to shy away from changing some factors.

Please run any subplots and those ideas by us that will have a direct effect on the plotline. We want everyone to have a good share in the action and possible moments to shine, so please keep it even and fair.

Please bear with us and continue to post in the current action threads until we move on to post barricades.