Post Reunification Woes Rock France
Riots, which have swept the Empire of France since the Renunification, sparked off in Paris today despite a prolonged campaign on the part of the Army and Surete to keep riots away from the Capital, have largely been suppressed.
Rioting has swirled across France since the "night of blood" in which nearly every prisoner in France with a sentence of more than one year was condemned to death. Despite a legal code and imprisonment system quite literally recognizeable from Les Misrables, this wanton slaughter turned the Country on its ear. Those waiting for the release of kinsmen, fathers, mothers, were dealt a crushing blow when the state passed in the dead of night a series of laws converting all sentences into capital sentences.
The laws were passed Constitutionally based on the personal power of the Emperor to suspend the Constitution in a State of Emergency. The State of Emergency was declared in response to Reunification, and by legal standards, while extraoridinary the mass executions...which followed the application of Technosphere tattoos which fed the Reunification process...was within the laws of the Empire. Prisoners were killed as a mercy after being rendered vegetative by the Reunification process, generally by a bullet or guillotine, though in some districts prisoners were hanged, drooling and immobile, or even bludgeoned to death.
Despite support of the Archbishop of Paris, and a general positive response by the intellegentsia, driven in no small part by the tiny but influential Gnostic Church led by former Catholic Bishop of Paris Alphonse Constant, there has been a deep outcry against the massive butchery which has reverberated through France. Village Priests, and unlikely leaders have risen to oppose the killing.
The general issue is the fact that those executed were almost all from among the poor. Wealthy prisoners were spared as a matter of course. Despite a parade of international "experts" in the countryside there is a widespread and common belief that the Government concocted the Reunification as an "excuse" to kill the poor prisoners so as not to have to feed them. Among the students and radical republicans where the need for Reunification has been accepted, there is a contemptuous disdain for the methodology, with elaborate suggestions for systems of lottery, etc. which would be more fair. Moderates say these systems are unrealistic and would only have led to mass revolt before the Reunification could be carried out.
Starting this week, fighting has come to the streets of Paris. Students and radical republicans joined forces with discontented workers to build barricades in the poorest quarters of the city, those overpopulated areas inhabited by the lower classes. The fighters, most of them unemployed construction workers, built their barricades with iron grillwork, paving stones, overturned carriages and furniture. They also cut down the trees lining the streets.
Barricades went up in the eastern part of the capital and 50,000 armed insurgents tried to move on the centre. The full force of the government's reaction hit them. General Cavaignac, who had waged a brutal colonial war in the Meditteranean, used 30,000 regular troops, 80,000 members of the National Guard and 25,000 gardes mobiles (drawn from the dregs of society) to wage war on workers. Fighting raged for four days, with the wealthier western parts of Paris taking revenge on the poorer eastern areas. Some 1,500 workers were slaughtered. Nearly 12,000 were arrested and in the show trials which follow seem likely to fill the empty jails left in the aftermath of Reunification.
The scars of the fight may be felt for years. Bitterness and resentment against Imperial Rule, ameliorated by years of small scale demonstrations of progressive programs is now firmly on the surface, and the Government is forced to spend additional time, resource, and efforts at home maintaining the peace.
