| |||||
| Anthem | "Réveillez-vous, Picards!" | ||||
| Language official |
French | ||||
| others | local dialects | ||||
| Religion | Catholicism State religion, freedom granted | ||||
| Government | Parliamentary republic | ||||
| President of La République | |||||
| Préfet | |||||
| Area | x km² (nominally ruled), y km² (ruled) km² | ||||
| Population | est. x (y if all claimed territory is estimated) | ||||
| Established | 1996 | ||||
| Currency | Franc Bourgo-comtois | ||||
 Reclamation in progress
This 1983: Doomsday article is currently being updated by its writers. Please do not edit or expand upon this page as it has not been completed. Feel free to comment on the talk page. |
Burgundy, officially La République de Bourgogne-et-Franche-Comté is a parliamentary republic claiming to be the successor to the Duchy of Burgundy. With the advent of Doomsday, each region first consolidated their hold, then built up a united government, which in many ways acts as the renewal of Burgundy.
Pre-Doomsday[]
Dijon and Besançon were both regional capitals of semi-affluent regions of France. Neither were as affluent as the metropolitan centres of Paris, Lyon, or Marseille, which served as a blessing to them with the bombs of Doomsday passing them over.
Post-Doomsday[]
During Doomsday, the Grand Est region of France sustained multiple nuclear strikes which collectively formed a north-west to south-east axis of destruction across Champagne, the Ardennes, Lorraine and Alsace. The strikes were concentrated on urban nodes, airbases, and key transport infrastructure, producing both immediate devastation and long-term disruption to regional governance.
In Alsace, Strasbourg was directly struck, while an additional detonation occurred east of Kaltenhouse near Haguenau. Belfort in the Territoire de Belfort also sustained heavy damage. Several military installations were targeted in what is believed to have been a coordinated strike package. In Champagne, Saint-Dizier Air Base and the facilities at Saint-Saveur were destroyed. In Lorraine, Metz-Frescaty Air Base and Chambley-Bussières Air Base suffered similar fates, while a detonation at Gare de Metz eliminated the city’s function as a major rail hub, cutting both east–west and north–south lines.
The overall effect was the creation of a continuous 'destruction corridor' through the Grand Est, fragmenting the A4 and A31 autoroute corridors, damaging bridges along the Moselle and Meurthe, and blocking secondary routes with debris. The strikes caused widespread communications outages, with trunk exchanges and relay towers rendered inoperative. Medical facilities across Champagne and Lorraine were quickly overwhelmed, and large-scale, uncoordinated evacuations ensued, with many displaced civilians moving south and west into Burgundy and the Franche-Comté.
Meteorological conditions at the time contributed to the dispersal of radioactive fallout. Prevailing westerly winds carried contamination eastwards and north eastwards from Champagne into the Ardennes and Lorraine, with locally high deposition recorded downwind of the Saint-Dizier and Saint-Saveur clusters and in the vicinity of Metz. River systems, including the Marne and the Moselle, were subject to contamination risks at lowland points and major crossings where debris was culminating on bridgeheads down river of the blasts.
Analysts have suggested that the strike pattern indicates a deliberate attempt to neutralise tactical air power, disrupt rail-based mobility, and isolate key urban centres without fully destroying city cores. The collapse of civil administration in the Grand Est, combined with refugee movements and supply chain redirection, is regarded as a contributing factor in the subsequent political reorganisation of Burgundy
The initial aftermath of the strikes was characterised by mass displacement, localised administrative collapse, and ad hoc emergency measures. Refugee flows from Alsace moved rapidly into Mulhouse and Colmar and then westward into Vosges, overwhelming municipal capacities and disrupting public order. The loss of Paris, inferred from the sudden cessation of communications, was quickly confirmed in surging refugee columns through Troyes and Auxerre. In Nancy, arrivals included West German civilians fleeing Saarbrücken as well as survivors from Metz and the devastated stretches of the Rhine valley.
Civil authority, already strained by infrastructure damage and communications failure, proved unequal to the combined humanitarian and security demands. Improvised checkpoints, ration queues, and requisition posts appeared along the Troyes–Dijon–Chalon axis, but were quickly outpaced by need. The Ardennes massif and surrounding forests became a hazardous transit zone; exposure, shortages, and radiological contamination contributed to significant mortality among those attempting to cross on foot without organised support.
Within this moving perimeter, Dijon and Besançon as the centres of Burgundy and the Franche-Comte functioned as 'civil islands', administrative pockets insulated from direct blast effects but encircled by belts of destruction and unstable transit. In Dijon, municipal authorities established reception camps (later formalised as centres d’accueil) and mustered a civic militia to secure the Agglomération Dijonnaise and its approaches. Over a period of weeks, the city transitioned from a passive refuge to a controlled urban perimeter, reopening limited onward routes and regularising the militia under municipal authority. These measures provided a template for subsequent Burgundian consolidation.
Environmental and radiological conditions deteriorated across the Grand Est. Fires in Strasbourg and Metz lofted smoke and particulates into the regional atmosphere, followed by episodes of soot- and ash-laden rainfall. Localised zones of high deposition produced visible vegetation stress in parts of Champagne and the Ardennes, with stands turning brown-red in the weeks after the strikes. Radiation levels remained elevated along downwind corridors, complicating evacuation and relief operations.
Critical infrastructure received targeted emergency attention. At the Fessenheim nuclear power station, both reactors were SCRAMed and a reported contingent of roughly 700 workers undertook stabilisation and cooling tasks for several weeks as a stopgap pending more permanent measures. While successful in averting an immediate secondary crisis, the prolonged effort further strained regional manpower and logistics already diverted to humanitarian response.
What Remains[]
In the days after Doomsday the map of eastern France seemed to come apart at its folds. Refugees from Alsace pressed first into Mulhouse and Colmar and then westward towards Champagne and Burgundy; others, fleeing the glass ruins of Paris and the smoking gaps between the destruction of Lyon, poured through Troyes, Auxerre, Chalon-sur-Saône and Lons-le-Saunier. From the Low Countries a thinner, steadier line drifted south by way of Cambrai and Reims and into Verdun and Nancy. None of these movements were coordinated. They followed rumour, habit, and the fading logic of road signs whose destinations no longer existed. What began as transit quickly became pressure, on bakeries, petrol stations, surgeries, pharmacies, and then at pace, came collapse.
Municipal order decayed unevenly but decisively. Police detachments, deprived of radios and fuel, lost the ability to project force beyond a few blocks; gendarmerie posts became islands without boats. The courts suspended their sessions for want of clerks and safe passage. Hospitals shifted to triage at the door, rationing anaesthetics and thread with the same care they once reserved for rare drugs. Curfews were declared and as quickly ignored. Ration queues formed and fused into crowds; the crowds prised open shuttered shops and then warehouses. Opportunism hardened into violence. In Nancy, Troyes, Auxerre and Colmar the last semblance of city-wide administration gave way to a patchwork of armed streets and shut-in courtyards, where authority existed only as far as voices could carry.
Besançon held a little longer. There the prefecture and the mairie clung to procedure as a sailor to a floating flotsam, issuing communiqués, hoarding fuel for ambulances, and rotating what remained of the police through sleepless shifts. Yet even the Bisontins were ruled by the fear that anything might tip the balance: a panicked rumour, a fire started in the wrong place, a convoy arriving at the wrong hour. 'On a knife edge' was not a metaphor but a daily assessment.
As faith in urban order drained away, tens of thousands chose the countryside. They went to the villages of Champagne, Côte-d’Or, Haute-Saône and Jura because there were granaries there, and ponds, and family names that might be recognised. The movement deepened the problem it sought to escape. Rural clinics were stripped in days; parish halls became dormitories; mayoral offices learned to say 'no' and to mean it. Roadblocks appeared, some manned by gendarmes, more by farmers in work gear and conscripts on leave, with signs painted on barn doors directing 'new arrivals' towards fields set aside as camps. It was an improvised ethics built from proximity and fatigue. One village welcomed, the next refused, a third extorted passage and then apologised the following morning.
Within this shifting perimeter Dijon and, to a lesser degree, Besançon became what contemporaries called 'citadels': pockets protected less by walls than by intact routines and a sense, perhaps false, that someone was in charge. In Dijon, the municipal council and surviving departmental officials did something rare in those days, they met, recorded their decisions, and acted on them. The council declared a state of emergency and consolidated authority in a Municipal Emergency Committee. Rationing, introduced haltingly in the first week, was expanded and regularised. Requisitioning powers were invoked for grain, fuel and medicines. Teams were organised to keep pumps turning and the deceased burning. Refugee camps that had sprung up along the ring roads were formalised as centres d’accueil whose efforts in cataloguing refugees, triaging for viability of survival and eventual movement on to another settlement were pivotal in the early days of the upheaval.
In parallel, the city of Dijon raised a civic militia. The idea had been discussed in other towns, but there it often came to nothing for lack of leadership or ammunition or because rival groups insisted on their own colours. Dijon moved early and insisted on one chain of command under municipal authority. The militia’s first mandate was not to fight pitched battles, there were few to fight, but to hold the city’s approaches, escort supply runs, disperse illegal markets that emptied warehouses overnight, and enforce a curfew firm enough to give shopkeepers confidence to reopen. Weapons amnesties offered a way to trade liability for ration credits. Identity checks were reintroduced at the gates. None of this made Dijon popular beyond its boulevards, but it made the city work, and that in turn allowed bread to be baked and moved, and bread was the measure by which policies were judged.
By the end of the second week the language around the city had changed. Dijon, wrote a prefect from a neighbouring department, 'has become a citadel.' The term stuck. It did not mean impregnable; it meant selective. The citadel would admit registered entrants through controlled points; it would refuse mass inflows it could not feed. The effect was immediate. Transit shifted north towards Châtillon-sur-Seine and south towards Seurre as columns diverted to avoid the checkpoints. Informal economies migrated with them, producing new concentrations of risk along country roads that had never before borne the weight of a nation moving on foot.
This system, born of scarcity and fear, brought stability of a sort. It also left wounds. Families separated at the barriers sometimes camped for days hoping for a name to be recognised, a letter to arrive, a policy to be waived, an officer to look the other way. The militia’s confidence rose as its mandate widened; abuses, inevitable in such circumstances, followed at the margins and were punished unevenly. What the Dijonnais preserved, however, was civic time, the rhythm of collection rounds, clinic hours, council meetings, against a backdrop of places where time had been replaced by waiting. This has been touted as one of the most crucial historic documents retained from the immediate aftermath of the nuclear exchange, and has been studied by historians and government organisations alike in the post doomsday aftermath.
In the north and east the environment worked against the living. Fires in Strasbourg and Metz sent smoke high; in the days that followed, bitter rain fell in squalls, depositing soot and metals on fields and skins. Along downwind corridors the radiation was not uniform but spattered and treacherous. Stands of pine in the Ardennes and copses in Champagne browned from the top down, a change whose beauty, recorded in a few stunned diary entries, was a warning rather than a relief. Footpaths across the uplands became lethal to the unadvised; those who misjudged distance or wind sometimes simply lay down and die as the invisible spectre overwhelmed their bodies. The numbers are imprecise, but the pattern is not: mortality climbed fastest where movement was most desperate.
Nancy, Troyes, Auxerre and Colmar did not so much 'fall' as empty. Their centres survived in forms recognisable on a map, but authority shrank to what could be seen from a window. Markets operated under escort or not at all. In several quarters the only law left was the reputation of a street and the capacity of its residents to keep outsiders moving. When reprieve came it was not through a single act but the accumulation of many small ones: a convoy permitted through a barricade with extra rations or a parish priest who could still convene a meeting in the church.
It is tempting to tell this period as the story of a single decision in a single council chamber. It was not. The breakdown of civilisation in the Grand Est and Burgundy came from the interaction of mass displacement, supply shock, failed communications and fragmented security. Dijon’s exceptionalism lay not in a miracle of command but in speed, coherence and an insistence that rules, however draconian, be written down and applied. The city’s conversion from refuge to controlled perimeter, its regularised camps, its labour brigades and its managed corridors did not resolve the wider crisis; they made possible the continued existence of a functioning municipal core from which something else could be built in the future.
That 'something else' would later be the Republic. The habits formed in these weeks became the republic’s early grammar. To those turned away at the gates, the citadel would always be a wound. To those within, it was a proof that order could be held long enough to matter. Both views are necessary to understand what followed.
Mustard Wars (90's to 00's)[]
In the early 1990s, continuing refugee movements from Paris, Lyon and the Low Countries coincided with the formalisation of the Dijonnais and Bisontins “citadels”. Dijon hardened the N274 into a barricaded security belt, trucks, rail wagons and prefabricated obstacles forming a de facto dry moat, while observation posts were established along the Ouche valley and at Daix. Besançon relied on perimeter denial around the river loop and city proper, but its satellite estates (Les 408, Clairs-Soleils, Planoise) remained volatile. Entry screening produced large cohorts of unregistered people at processing sites in Noiron and Chaucenne-La Maguyotte, channelled onward to relocation centres at Audeux and Uzel/Pelousey/Les Essarts. The isolate-and-exile policy preserved order inside the cores but externalised risk: expelled groups and late arrivals congregated in the Forêt de Chaux, the scrublands of northern Côte-d’Or, the Morvan, the Vosges foothills and along disused canal and rail rights-of-way.
Between 1990 and 1993 these concentrations coalesced into fluid bands, dozens to low hundreds, composed of displaced Parisiennes and Lyonnais, Walloon and Dutch stragglers, and local criminals and outcasts. Their financing depended on salvage, skimming of informal markets, grain and fuel levies, and occasional kidnapping for ransom. Names recorded in municipal and gendarmerie files include the Route Noire, Fraternité de la Chaux, Marne-Est and Cavaliers de la Saône, although leadership and membership shifted frequently. In the same years Besançon’s estates experienced sustained disorder; contemporary records attribute roughly 15,000 civic tribunals over fifteen years for crime, crowd violence and militia clashes, a figure contested by later scholarship.
From 1994 to 1998 the conflict moved onto the transport grid. Insurgents taxed movements along the Burgundy Canal and Saône ferries and mounted opportunistic raids against convoy halts. Bisontins authorities responded with armed escorts for scheduled convoys and tighter identity controls; raids inside the N274 loop became rarer but more lethal. By the mid-1990s the violence had acquired its popular label, the “Mustard Wars”, after a widely reported incident in which residents in central Dijon repelled would-be looters by throwing jars from the historic Maille shop and neighbouring flats. Documentation of the episode is sparse and later accounts suggest embellishment, but the term persisted in public memory and municipal rhetoric.
Between 1998 and 2004 insurgent groups adopted camp-and-raid methods: seasonal hideouts in forest margins, night movements along canal paths and rail beds, selective hostage-taking, diversionary arson, and roadside devices improvised from agricultural fertilisers. Urban authorities shifted to a “cordon et relais” posture, fixed inner barriers around the cores would be supported by mobile pursuit groups in the periphery and rotating relief for rural communes under levy pressure. Amnesty offers were tied to work credits or ration entitlements and the issuance of “clean papers” on surrender of arms. Field justice varied by circumstance, ranging from amnesty and compulsory labour details to expulsion and, in aggravated cases, execution; surviving paperwork is uneven, and later commissions highlighted inconsistent standards of evidence. Humanitarian effects cut across security lines: winter flight proved especially lethal, and repeated levies by both sides deepened scarcity in small communes.
From 2005 the reopening of northern corridors and partial returns to depopulated towns reduced pressure on the citadels. Relocation centres stood largely vacant by late-decade, while remaining bands of the disenfranchised fragmented under combined amnesty and pressure operations. The period conventionally ends in 2009 with the pacification of Polaincourt-et-Clairefontaine, where a mixed Dijonnais–Bisontins column compelled surrender after besieging the town and executing designated ringleaders following field proceedings. Survivor testimony characterises the measures as brutal, whereas municipal reports cite emergency measures to justify the means.
By the close of the decade the citadel model had preserved municipal continuity in Dijon and, to a lesser extent, Besançon and provided the administrative routines that shaped early Burgundian institutions. Critics, however, argue that exile policies exported violence to the forests and canal corridors and normalised extra-legal practices whose social costs were borne disproportionately by transient populations and outlying communes.
Rétablissement[]
With no French survivor state manifesting from the ruins of la Métropole, the informal Dijonnais–Bisontin understanding shifted after 2005 from habit to policy. Planners set out to extend the citadel toolkit beyond Lower Champagne and along the Marne–Meuse, not to replay the sieges of the 1990s but to reopen towns to settlement and end corridor violence that plagued the prior decade. Survey teams mapped a web of prospective settlements that could be brought back into routine life, sites with waterworks that still ran and market junctions that would anchor escorted trade.
In 2006 the two councils launched a resettlement levy: by rotation, a designated urban quarter of Dijon or Besançon was asked to furnish 100 volunteer families to recolonise a target town. Each convoy travelled with a mixed detachment, engineers, medics, clerks and a militia company, and was tasked to develop markets, survey the town infrastructure, restore wells, establish grain depots and re-establish civic registers. Conscription on a Swiss-style model, already embedded in both cities, supplied the garrison element; new towns were expected to host a permanent cadre while recruiting local auxiliaries into the regularised civic guard.
By late 2006 the policy generated its own momentum. Colonised towns and villages began petitioning Dijon and Besançon for admittance to the union, seeking access to escorted convoys and grain reserves from the citadels. In parallel, the citadel method was exported to Troyes, Auxerre. Verdun and Nancy, where municipal committees, supported by Dijonnais and Bisontin advisers, recreated civilisation with ration accounting and amnesty-plus-registration schemes. The effect was a gradual transition from the “age of citadels” to a wider civic law-and-order regime in which emergency regulations were sunset and ordinary courts and councils returned to regular sitting.
Nuclear safety became a priority as the restoration zone approached abandoned Alsatian territory. Under a joint Dijon–Besançon commission, the Fessenheim plant which was SCRAMed during Doomsday was formally decommissioned through a staged programme of fuel transfer, on-site storage and perimeter reduction. This decomission would not be complete for at least 15 years. The move unlocked a cautious resettlement of Colmar, where habitation resumed district by district under radiological monitoring and water-table testing. With the Rhine corridor no longer a hard stop, escorted trade re-opened towards the upper Alsatian plain, though the ruins of Strasbourg were still off limits for the civilian population.
By 2010 Burgundian settlement nodes were reported as far-flung as Provins, Sézanne, Vitry-le-François, Bar-le-Duc, Mulhouse, Sarrebourg, Pontarlier, Saint-Claude, Oyonnax, Bourg-en-Bresse, Cluny, Montchanin, Le Creusot, Autun, Saulieu and Avallon. Officials stated that “Rétablissement” should be completed across the former prefectures of Burgundy, Franche-Comté, Alsace-Lorraine and Champagne-Ardenne, excluding territories claimed by Lille-et-Terres-Flamandes, Luxembourg, and the Alpine Confederation in Savoy by 2026.
The enlargement forced institutional change. A provisional council in Dijon matured into a representative chamber for integrated communes, with seats granted once a town could show a census roll, sitting court and a civic guard under civilian authority. Municipal militias were consolidated as a standing civic gendarmerie answerable to an interior committee; field tribunals wound down as circuit judges resumed their rounds. From 2012, delegates opened structured talks with Lille and Alpine Savoy on diplomatic issues in the Grand-Est and beyond. Both sides set border demarcation aside until restoration stabilised on each frontier.
The decisive event of the decade came in 2008 with the proclamation of the Republic of Burgundy and the Franche-Comté in Dijon, adopted by the assembly as a basic law that fused the Dijonnais, Bisontin, Verdunois, Nancéien, Auxerrois, Tricasse and Colmarine spheres into a single republic with a capital at the Palais des États. Each Citadelle would hold offices in the palace, followed by palaces for the Grandes Régions
In the 2010s, day-to-day cooperation between Burgundian survivors and those of Lille-Flanders produced a unique shared regime over the woodlands of Champagne and the Ardennes, formally recognised as the Copropriété des Forêts d’Ardenne et de Champagne. This was a joint undertaking to restore the region’s wine-growing potential through managed reforestation, soil recovery to produce stable decontaminated vineyards capable of producing crop. The programme’s first milestone came in 2017, when the inaugural post-Doomsday Champagne vintage was corked and bottled.
In the south, an Alpine-backed Savoyard expeditions crossed the Jura and sat with Franche-Comte militia in Dole. The meeting set a pattern still seen today: The Savoyards negotiated convoys from the mountains through the Jura foothills for trade, in return they would help to establish a plan for the Rhône–Doubs contaminated sites and a radio circuit for the high valleys. Staff began to rotate. Engineers first, then medics. What started as a cautious visit became a habit of cooperation, and in time a formal alliance between the mountain state and the forest towns.
To the Dijonnais’ surprise, a parley at Nevers brought them face to face with survivors claiming representation of a government at Clermont-Ferrand of the Republic of Auvergne. The Seine-Orléans radiation belt had kept Dijon from pushing that far west, so first contact was wary but civil. Both sides set the question of Nevers’ authority aside while channels opened and envoys moved between Dijon, Besançon and Clermont. Over the next season a mix of couriers and technical liaisons, followed by small barter convoys, turned a chance meeting into working relations, replacing the old assumption that Auvergne and the west of France was lost with a timetable for deeper ties.
By 2015, the language of sieges and brigandry had largely receded. Forest bands that had defined the Mustard Wars were rare and local; policing moved from cordon operations to rural patrol and investigation. Resettled towns taxed, judged and elected again as part of the republic. What began as two citadels protecting themselves had become a networked state whose authority rested on the tapestry of survivor settlements following their carved path, and after the proclamation of the republic, on the institutions that outlived the emergency that created them.
Consolidation[]
Following proclamation, Burgundy moved from emergency governance to managed expansion. In 2015 a joint Burgundy–Lille Flanders Border Commission completed delimitation in Champagne-Ardenne and issued protocols for customs, river policing and vintner quotas in the region. The same accords unlocked cross-border production schemes for wine and sparkling wine, shared coopers’ workshops and glass supply, and a logistics arrangements granting Burgundian craftsmen and merchants scheduled access to North Sea ports under Lille-Flanders administration. The regions of Aisne and Ardennes would fall to Lille to patrol and govern, where Le Petit Champagne would be administered in the newly restructured civic centre of Reims. A mirror track in diplomacy saw Geneva host a permanent Burgundian embassy, with the Alpine Confederation formally recognised as an allied partner in Dijon, coordination focused on convoy security through Jura passes and technical exchanges rather than defence guarantees.
Urban hierarchy shifted as resettlement matured. Nancy, Colmar and Verdun emerged as secondary centres after sustained investment in civil infrastructure and law reform; Dijon and Besançon remained the principal poles of population and administration. With trade corridors more predictable, Burgundian wine and Champagne moved into English and North German markets under escorted contracts and neutral brokerage, reviving vineyard labour and river haulage along the Marne and upper Saône.
Security policy turned outward but stayed controlled. A Burgundy–Lille Co-Surveyance Corps sounded the Seine to the approaches of the former Île-de-France region and established a forward garrison at the remnants of Melun for archive recovery and hazardous-site assessment. Comparable, shorter missions entered the Lyon basin and Metz to catalogue the destruction and recovery where salvage was feasible. These operations were deliberately paced; movement followed radiological readings and bridge inspections rather than fixed timetables. The Alsace military corridor was again reduced as the Fessenheim reactor began to be decommissioned. Now the restricted zone was strictly the former urban zone of Strasbourg-Haguenau. This would lead to trade opportunities across the Rhine with the southern German survivors in Swabia-Württemberg
Institutional consolidation followed quickly. The 2016 general election, the first held under universal suffrage and a standard electoral law, returned the Majority Parti po la Bôrgogne to control of the Council in Dijon and a working majority across the chamber’s committees. Emergency decrees were sunset in stages; the civic gendarmerie came under statutory oversight; circuit courts resumed routine calendars in the second cities and major sub-prefectures. A modest fiscal union, financed road repair and canal dredging beyond the Dijonnais core into the Grand-Est. Environmental remediation defined the late phase. Along the Rhône, teams from Grenoble and Monaco joined Bisontins engineers to introduce river-safety protocols: bank shielding, hot-sediment mapping, intake filtration for towns downstream, and controlled dredge disposal. Planning for the Bugey complex accelerated in 2022, drawing on lessons from Fessenheim: interim shielding and groundwater barriers first, then staged fuel removal and structure demolition. Heavy works were scheduled to begin in 2025, with site decontamination projected into the late 2030s.
The France Question[]
Initial approaches came from Outre-Mer delegations linked to the RTFA, whose initiative was promoted from Papeete and Nouméa with support from the SAC and ANZC. At that stage Burgundy was still a loosely integrated cluster under Dijon’s stewardship. Western polities in Poitou and Auvergne engaged the RTFA project with notable goodwill; Burgundy’s posture was more hesitant, shaped by geography as much as politics.
A persistent north–south radiological belt from Paris through Lyon to Marseille, following the Seine and Rhône, limited east–west movement and collaboration. Consequently, Burgundian diplomacy developed first with Lille-Flanders, Savoy and Monaco, actors generally unenthusiastic about a new French republic, rather than the more pro-French centres in the west. Officials in Dijon maintained that this was not hostility to the RTFA proposal but a matter of priorities: stabilise corridors and neighbours already in contact, then consider wider political projects.
From 2016 discussions in Dijon remained non-committal while practical agreements advanced to the east and north. The RTFA liaison argued that accession would raise Burgundy’s profile nationwide and, in some versions, even make Dijon the seat of a future republic; minutes of joint sessions record that point as “contested”. Advocates of union also stressed access to southern markets and the reopening of suppressed cultural circuits. Opponents drew on recent memory: the Mustard Wars, the waves of Parisienne displacement, and the risk that a France centred restoration might re-impose the patterns that had brought the cataclysm to the Marne and Meuse. Public debate increasingly framed identity in civic terms, Borgogne rather than a return to an abstract Français.
A plebiscite was held in early 2018. Campaigns for and against accession were conducted across the integrated communes, with supervised access to radio markets and town-hall forums. The result was 59% against joining the proposed Seventh Republic. Turnout was highest in the citadels, particularly in the resettled regions of Verdun, Auxerre, Nancy and Troyes. Rural communes with recent resettlement showed more varied patterns, reflecting differing experiences of security and trade.
After the vote, Burgundy reaffirmed cooperation with Clermont-Ferrand without accession. It joined a growing francophone consortium for trade and cultural exchange, opening its markets more widely to western partners. The government continued to deepen links with Lille-Flanders and the Alpine sphere, arguing that consolidation of these relationships offered greater immediate benefits than constitutional realignment that would come with the seventh republic. It was now that the Dijon government also accepted the cessation of Nevers into the Auvergne government and would delimit the border with the new seventh republic along this former axis.
Foreign Relations[]
With the arrival of contact with Auvergne and the Poitevin Republic in the 2000's, trade has increased. News of the Restoration Colony movement has also piqued the interest of the Poitevin and Auvergant governments.
Economy[]
With renewed contact with other French states, and a growing sense of security, the government of Lille-et-Terres-Flamande approached Burgundy-and-Franche-Comté about restoring the status of the now-largely abandoned Champagne region of France. Treaties were concluded in 2008, and the first vintage of Champagne manufactured according to the regulations that existed prior to Doomsday is expected to be released in 2013, as a Restoration Vintage, celebrating survival and renewal 30 years following Doomsday. Some of this vintage held for release in 2016 according to typical practice prior to Doomsday. Subsequent bottlings will proceed in normal fashion, restoring the flow of Champagne to the wider world.
Sports[]
Burgundy has a fledgling football series, with regular matches throughout the year.
Another big sporting event is auto racing. In the small commune of Prenois, around 20km from Dijon, is the Circuit de Dijon-Prenois. Built in 1972 by former wrestler and rugby player François Chambelland, it is a 2.4mi/3.8km rollercoaster(F1 drivers such as Jean-Pierre Beltoise and François Cevert were consultants for the layout) that first hosted the French GP in 1974, alternating with Paul Ricard near Marseille. The circuit is famous for the last lap battle between Gilles Villeneue and Rene Arnoux in the 1979 race, also the first pre-war race won by a turbocharged car. On DD, the circuit was essentially preserved as it was. When the F1 series was announced to be resumed in 2010, the Prenois circuit applied for the Burgundy Grand Prix- in 2015, F1 returned to the circuit and has become a mainstay of the calendar, alternating with the Orleans Grand Prix in Le Mans.
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