Laeralian Revolution
| Laeralian Revolution | |||||||
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 Soldiers of the Rose Army in Laeralsford, 1920 | |||||||
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| Commanders and leaders | |||||||
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 Field Marshal René Gramont General J.P. Salaun | ||||||
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| 100,000-150,000 | 130,000-180,000 | ||||||
The Laeralian Revolution (Fr: Révolution Laeralien) was an armed conflict in Laeral between 1918 and 1921. Triggered in the long term by racial and economic inequality in Laeral and the failures of the First Allied Provinces of Laeral to address economic and agrarian grievances, the conflict began due to the aftermath of the devastating First Fellsian War and the government's refusal to provide economically for veterans of that conflict. Beginning as a peasant uprising, many of whose participants were Fellsian War veterans, the revolutionary Republican forces soon included the socialist Rose Army under René Gramont and the Committee for Democracy and Progress as well as variously revolutionary agrarian forces, who faced off against Loyalist troops supporting the government of Prime Minister Augustin Brienne. The defeat of government forces resulted in the regime's overthrow and the proclamation of the Republic of Laeral in 1922.
Causes
The causes of the Laeralian Revolution is among the most heavily-debated subjects in Laeralian historiography. During the Republican Era,a leading school of thought adopted traditional great-man theories, and centered on the growth of ideological radicalism among the First Fellsian War officer corps, as seen by leading officers such as René Gramont and J.P. Salaun's affiliation with the Committee for Democracy and Progress, as well as the relative weakness of Vespasien Jamet's successor as Prime Minister, Augustin Brienne. In this school of thought, poor decisions by Brienne's government coupled with the decisiveness of the Committee for Democracy and Progress and the charisma of its members (notably René Gramont) produced optimal conditions for the revolution's success.
This school of thought faced off against the orthodox Gramontist perspective on the Revolution, which emphasized the failings of the First Allied Provinces to provide for citizens and the consequent widespread outrage and dissatisfaction with government corruption and economic conditions, which led to a spontaneous popular uprising guided by René Gramont and the Committee for the Democracy and Progress. Another ideological explanation for the Revolution was communist historiography, which sought to bring the Gramontist narrative into harmony with communist theories of class struggle to portray the Revolution as a working-class uprising in accordance with communist theory. Accordingly, the Republic of Laeral was understood to represent a transitional regime on the road to communism.
From the 1960s onwards, these traditional interpretations have both been challenged. Greater focus on race in Laeralian history and society emerged as a political current in the 1960s and 70s as racial unrest challenged the Gramontist ideal of race-blindness, which had viewed race as a dividing factor to be minimized in the construction of Laeralianness. The notion of "one country, two nations," or in other words Laeral as a biracial society, emerged following the Great War as a portion of the Juexing Movement, a wider struggle for racial justice. Academics molded by the Juexing Movement criticized earlier interpretations of the Revolution as overly class-centric, and instead emphasized the Laeralian Revolution as a backlash to racial discrimination under the First Allied Provinces. For these historians, the roots of the Laeralian Revolution were to be found in the emergence of Rén identity groups such as the Rén Self-Defense League during the First Great Migration, the Jingtu Movement, and the revival of Minjian (including the reestablishment of the Minjian High Conclave) immediately prior to the war.
Other schools of thought during the late 20th and 21st centuries have sought to highlight other factors in the Revolution. The role of gynarchism and the women's movement has come into greater focus through the work of scholars such as Hiranur Aksoy, while peasants' economic woes as a result of poor weather conditions, the First Fellsian War, and environmental degradation resulting from poor land use in the Western Riverlands has been highlighted as a principal cause of peasants' eagerness to embrace the Revolution, notably in Noël Lavoie-Zhao and Li Cunrong's scholarship. Another, more fringe, historical explanation has centered on a supposed Laeralian collective psychological desire for strongmen during the early 20th century, which, per, Jean-Louis Kuster in the 1995 book The Authoritarian Mindset: Culture and Leadership in Laeral, 1854-1954, explains the success of Vespasien Jamet, while the weakness of Augustin Brienne as prime minister left Laeralites particularly eager to embrace strongman René Gramont and explains the authoritarianism of the Republic of Laeral.
One influential work, 2014's The Laeralian Revolutions: A New History, used regionalism as a lens to explore the Laeralian Revolution, arguing that the revolution took on profoundly different forms in Eastern Laeral, Western Laeral, and the Xianhai Peninsula, as the methods and motivations of the revolutionary movement differed completely based on differences in regional development. It is likely that scholarship on the Revolution will continue to add and develop interpretations of the conflict's causes.
The following narrative aims to harmonize the above schools.
In the long term, the Laeralian Revolution was propelled by the corruption and inefficiency of the Vespasienate and the system of social and racial stratification it had put in place. From 1890 to 1909, the First Allied Provinces of Laeral's government was dominated by Prime Minister Vespasien Jamet, an autocrat whose tenure in office (the "Vespasienate") saw a strengthened federal government and Laeralian westward expansion, as well as substantial enrichment for the plantation-owning class which principally backed Jamet's grip on power. The policies of racial segregation, including the expulsion of millions of Rén peasants in the Riverlands from their homes to designated "reserve territories", had resulted in persistent poverty and social exclusion for Laeral's Rén population. Meanwhile, the civil service and the educated middle-class were increasingly dissatisfied with restrictions on political expression; this dissent was formalized with the formation of the 6th of May Society in 1910, which would later become the liberal revolutionary group known as the National Revolutionary Directorate. The creation of the Committee for Democracy and Progress, which brought together left-wing military officers in criticism of the regime, resulted from both economic and political grievances during and after the Laeralian Revolution.