Laeralian Revolution
| Laeralian Revolution | |||||||
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 Soldiers of the Rose Army in Laeralsford, 1920 | |||||||
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| Belligerents | |||||||
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| Commanders and leaders | |||||||
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 Field Marshal René Gramont General J.P. Salaun General Hong Kuo-shu General Yang Ching-tsan | ||||||
| Strength | |||||||
| 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 an urban 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 various other revolutionary groups, who faced off against Loyalist troops supporting the Laeralsford 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
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.
Historiography
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.
Revolution
First Phase (October 1918-July 1919)
Following the First Fellsian War, Laeral's economy struggled to recover as many veterans found themselves unemployed. Prime Minister Augustin Brienne, the successor to longtime strongman Vespasien Jamet as leader of Laeral, found it difficult to maintain the coalition of wealthy landowners, urban commercial leaders, and local elites which had formed the bedrock of the Vespasienate, and had faced a competitive election in 1917, where dissident Jamet regime insiders had launched an electoral challenge which was only narrowly beaten back. Meanwhile, a financial crisis and poor harvest led to rapidly rising prices, causing misery for urban and rural Laeralites alike. When labor unrest began in Gaolan, the capital of heavily-populated Neidong province, Brienne deployed the army to put down the strike and riots. At the riot's head was First Fellsian War hero and veteran's association head René Gramont, who met with the soldiers' commanding officer and convinced him to disobey his orders to use force. When Brienne ordered Gramont and other opposition figures arrested, many soldiers rallied to Gramont's banner, triggering the start of the Laeralian Revolution in earnest.
Although Gramont no longer held military rank, other officers in the Laeralian military, notably J.P. Salaun, deferred to him in joining the nationwide uprising demanding food, the return of veteran's pensions, and land reform. Leaders of the growing uprising, including those who would later be known as the Gang of Five, assembled in the city of Renfeng, where they declared themselves the Committee for Democracy and Progress and issued a list of policy proposals, the Renfeng Platform. These included a return to republican governance, food for all, and land redistribution. Supporters were instructed to seize arms and remove appointed government officials from office before electing representatives to the Committee for Democracy and Progress.
This Renfeng Convention occurred in parallel to political organizing in Laeralsford, the national capital, where in the outlying town of Brévonnes, elements of the liberal opposition 6th of May Society under firebrand Dr. Edmond Yeoh assembled to plan a national uprising aimed at forcing Brienne to resign and call fresh elections. The 6th of May Society had been under surveillance by regime agents for years; upon the outbreak of violence in Gaolan, the Society's leaders had been arrested en masse, with Yeoh narrowly escaping after being tipped off.
Following the issuing of the Renfeng Platform and the 6th of May Society's declaration of uprising, soldiers mutinied, union workers seized control of their workplaces, and sharecroppers took revenge on wealthy landowners. In western Laeral, the conflict immediately took on a racialized nature as Rén nationalists, Minjian hardliners, and countless disenfranchised peasants seized control of their lands in a series of scattered uprisings, largely inspired by their divergent understandings of the Renfeng Platform. In eastern Laeral, labor unions formed the backbone of the urban uprisings, in some places joined by mutinous soldiers, and largely recognized Gramont and the Committee for Democracy and Progress as their leaders. Others in eastern Laeral, particularly in the cities, took direction from the 6th of May Society, whose revolutionary element under Dr. Edmond Yeoh declared itself the National Revolutionary Directorate.
The situation in the cities was chaotic, as soldiers fired upon and forcibly dispersed demonstrations in Laeralsford and other areas where local officials and governors held kinship or patronage ties to Brienne, such as in the nation's northeast. Revolutionary sentiment was also comparatively weaker in the Catholic Belt of Therese, Sarene, and Sendrasi, where uprisings were easily put down. Conversely, the MENNJ provinces[c] in the Riverlands, where state-backed land theft and subsequent poverty under the Vespasienate had embittered the provinces' Rén majority, had been hotbeds of agitation and quickly deposed the authorities, falling in line with Gramont and the Committee for Democracy and Progress. Laeral's eastern seaboard was the center of the Revolutionary Directorate's activities, where rebels in Althea bearing allegiance to the Directorate took control of the city briefly before being put down by government troops.
As news of the fighting reached the territories of western Laeral, a wide array of local rebel movements mobilized and clashed with government troops. These movements were largely nonideological, mobilized by local grievances such as land theft, and at some times scarcely indistinguishable from banditry. Some rebel bands, such as that led by Chang Shuo-bin "the Cripple," aimed to restore the Zhao Kingdom, while others adhered to the CDP and the promises of the Renfeng Platform. Chief among these was Hong Kuo-shu and his brothers.
Battle lines stabilized over the winter of 1918, while the Committee for Democracy and Progress declared the formation of the Rose Army and its auxiliary Rose Banner Brigades to unify rebel forces under the CDP's leadership. In April, Loyalist forces' routed the Rose Army's Southern Front under General Yang Ching-tsan at the Battle of Bertignolles in Harcour and, under General Hugo Maurice, mounted a counter-offensive directed at Gaolan and the central Riverlands. This threat led the Committee for Democracy and Progress to evacuate to Songshan as the wartime capital.
The end of the first phase of the Laeralian Revolution is widely accepted as the Battle of Prades, a pitched battle in Neidong province where ragtag forces of the Rose Army under René Gramont repelled Maurice's forces and briefly turned back the offensive. With this battle and its propaganda value for the Republican cause, it became clear that the war was certain to be protracted.
Second Phase (July 1919-December 1920)
The second phase of the war saw the mobilization of the largest forces and pitched field battles in central and eastern Laeral. Outnumbered and possessing shortages of aircraft and artillery compared to the Laeralsford government's forces, the Rose Army traded space for time, gradually falling back westward and northward in order to rearm and draw out the Loyalist supply lines. Although repeatedly forced to give ground before Loyalist forces' advance, the Rose Army remained intact and continued to build its numbers. By winter of 1919, the strategy was showing signs of success as the Rose Army professionalized.
At the same time, on the diplomatic front, Republican forces became increasingly unified. Most notably, Edmond Yeoh and the National Revolutionary Directorate met with René Gramont and the Committee for Democracy and Progress in Fays-la-Chapelle, Carellon, where the two sides agreed to the Republican Pact, an alliance between the two parties.
As uniformed government forces were pushed out of territorial western Laeral, the conflict there saw the fiercest instances of violence against civilians. Skirmishes between rival rebel forces saw Hong Kuo-shu, newly named as Western Front commander by the Committee for Democracy and Progress, lead his Rose Army forces against Zhao nationalists and against Arrivée settlers. After the collapse of the Laeralsford government's authority in Western Laeral, Arrivée settlers there largely turned to the Arrivée-supremacist militia group the Chevaliers of the Veil to organize resistance to the revolution.
1919 also saw the emergence of fighting in the Xianhai Peninsula. The de facto leader of Arquien and Bethune provinces, Léon Charrier, was a political chameleon of only nominal loyalty to Laeralsford. After meeting secretly with Edmond Yeoh, Charrier declared his allegiance to the National Revolutionary Directorate, provoking an attempt to seize power by the Xianhai Constabulary, the feared police force widely seen as under the thumb of Xianhai's powerful landowner class.