Aininian Revolution
The Aininian Revolution (French: Révolution aininienne) was a period of major political upheaval in Ainin between 1795 and 1801 that marked the end of the Kingdom of Ainin and led to the establishment of the Aininian Republic. The conflict pitted monarchists led by Mathieu IV of Ainin against a broad coalition of revolutionaries led first by the Provisional Government and later by the Provisional Republican Authority.
It was preceded by the Great Storm of 1794, which devastated the Aininian trading fleet, disrupted the food supply and caused numerous bread riots. A crop failure in autumn further compounded troubles and induced famine that killed over 15,000 by spring of next year. Tensions, which were already running high, boiled over into spontaneous revolts and latent unrest during 1795's Summer of Discontent. The revolution began in earnest on 18 August 1795 with the Talon incident, when a crowd of theatre-goers in Talon rioted after watching the revolutionary play The Springs of Elysium. After the crowd came under fire from royal troops, revolutionaries seized the city. Soon after, armed rebellion began to spring up throughout Linaque, and quickly spread to the other northern provinces. A coalition of republicans, constitutional monarchists (Anti-Mathists) and agrarian revolutionaries (Terminators) formed the Provisional Government in June 1796 to coordinate the revolutionaries' strategy. Despite their efforts, the war settled into a bloody stalemate by 1797, with revolutionaries in control of the north and the king in control of the south and outlying islands. The impasse was broken in July 1798 by the Lusace Alley mutiny, when unpaid royal troops mutinied and weakened the royal capital of Bounèsquebourg's defences. This allowed revolutionaries to take the city on 31 July and forced the king's court to relocate to Huimont, where they remained for the rest of the war.
The revolution entered its second and more violent phase when rebel leader Henri de Namoirie called for a constitutional convention in Talon to decide the future of Ainin. In March of 1798, the republicans narrowly outvoted the constitutional monarchists, leading the second's armies to chase the newly-established Provisional Republican Authority of Ainin out of the city in the Great Betrayal. In the subsequent Aininian Civil War, republican forces were initially taken by surprised and suffered significant losses, but the bulk of the republican army survived and regrouped in Marlane-la-Prairie. In autumn, they launched a counter-offensive and retook Talon. They followed up by mopping up remaining pockets of monarchist resistance on Vaudale Island and landing in Mercier in 1800, but failed to take Huimont due to a monarchist naval blockade. On February 18, 1801, during a storm that confined the monarchist fleet to port, a flotilla of small ships landed a republican army on Isle-Royale. They quickly overwhelmed monarchist defences and completed their encirclement of Huimont by March 5. Mathieu IV, sensing imminent defeat, escaped from the city on a ship and went into exile in Oelia, while crown prince Jean of Bélancourt remained in the city to sign an instrument of surrender. In the subsequent Peace of Huimont, the Kingdom of Ainin was abolished, the aristocracy lost their traditional privileges and the monarchist armies were ordered to stand down. The return of peace allowed de Namoirie to proclaim the establishment of the Aininian Republic on May 2, 1801 with the signature of the Constitution of 1801.
The revolutionary period was immediately followed by the first election in Aininian history, in which Arnaud de Saint-Hyacinthe and the Radical Party took power. They launched the Cleansing (1801-3), a chaotic campaign fuelled by revolutionary fervour of mass reprisals and random killings against aristocrats, bourgeois, landowners, intelligentsia, conservatives and suspected monarchists. The First Republic period that the revolution ushered in lasted until 1901, when a new constitution replaced the 1801 government form. Together with the 1790-2 Aucurian Revolution, the Aininian Revolution forms one half of the Twin Revolutions, a revolutionary wave based on humanist ideals at the turn of the 19th century that built the framework for some of Esquarium's earliest liberal democracies and whose influence continues to be felt today.
Background
Kingdom of Ainin
Causes
History
Early actions
Talon Incident
OUTDATED, IGNORE
Tensions had been high throughout 1795, but outbreaks of violence had been sporadic and disorganised. This changed on 18 August 1795 when the Talonée incident occured. A large, urban bourgeois crowd had gathered at the Théatre des Cygnes for a performance of the nationalist play The Springs of Ainin, and began to get agitated during the performance. When it was over, the angered crowd assembled in Independence Square (then known as Royal Square) near the theatre, outside an administrative complex of the Namorese authorities, to demonstrate against maladministration during the famine. At the urging of radical leader Jacques Dubois, the crowd began chanting slogans advocating for regime change, and got increasingly confrontational with the Namorese soldiers assigned to guard the complex. Suddenly, around 20:42, a shot reportedly rung out from the balcony of a nearby building, and the crowd, thinking that they had been fired at, rioted. They overpowered and lynched the soldiers, and stormed the administrative buildings, killing dozens of bureaucrats, both Kannei Namorese and Aininian. The angry mob then marched down the city's Marlane Boulevard, burning the homes of known loyalists and lynching Namorese merchants. By morning, a large Namorese relief force had gathered in the faubourgs of the city, when they began burning entire neighbourhoods in an attempt to root out troublemakers. The enraged mob, still in control of the city, suddenly swelled in size as people from the suburbs flowed into the city to join them, bringing weapons and looted arms with them. The crowd declared Talonée a free city and marched out to confront the Namorese in the Battle of the Faubourgs, routing the imperial army and forcing them to retreat south to Doval.
Ambush at Marlane-la-Prairie
OUTDATED, IGNORE
Over the next week, a relief army under the command of loyalist commander André Duverger had assembled in the northern Linaque city of Ponat, and the troops marched down the island's east coast as they headed to take back Talonée and reinforce the battered southern positions of the Talonée garrison. They had come under sporadic attack by poorly-organised locals during their march, taking a few casualties, but the bulk of the regiment made it without incident to the southeastern town of Saint-Robert. From there, they went on the mountainous route west to Talonée that took them past the city of Marlane-la-Prairie, where an ambush by hastily-assembled revolutionary militias awaited them. While marching down Marlane-la-Prairie's main street on 29 August, the regiment came under sustained fire from rooftops and buildings, sustaining many casualties. The artillery battalion was wiped out and its cannons captured when they were encircled by angry mobs in a surprise attack that led to a massacre of the unprepared artillerymen by townsfolks. The militia then turned the regiment's own guns against its infantry, causing many more casualties as the main street became soaked with blood. With many men dead, most officers, including Colonel Duverger, lynched and the heavy weapons captured, the rump regiment fell into a rout and dissipated as an effective fighting force. With no reinforcements forthcoming, the besieged garrison in Doval surrendered on 8 September after negotiating a deal to keep their arms and withdraw north, allowing most of southern Linaque to fall under revolutionaries' control. The Provisional Government of Ainin was established to govern the liberated regions, and news quickly spread throughout the nation.