A bien mérité de la Patrie Verdiend door het Vaderland | |||
| Capital (and largest city) |
Lille | ||
| Other cities | Tournai, Kortrijk | ||
| Language official |
French | ||
| others | Dutch, German, English | ||
| Religion | Catholicism State religion, freedom granted | ||
| Government | Republic | ||
| Established | 1983 | ||
| Currency | Flamand (fl) | ||
Lille and the northern reaches of France were protected from much of the unrest and social collapse after Doomsday; the pattern of nuclear strikes effectively separated the region from other parts of France, Germany, and the Low Countries. Northern France and eastern Flanders became an exclave of civilization in a radioactive landscape, centered on the region's largest surviving city, Lille. By the late 80s Lille was the principal surviving government in the region, and in the 90s it adopted the identity of a new republic, the Republic of Lille and the Flemish Lands. The republic's territory and influence contracted as outlying areas were abandoned or links with them frayed, while Flemish nationalists repeatedly caused unrest in the Dutch-speaking north. Since the 2010s Lille has confirmed its status as a new state separate from France; while Flanders remains a troublesome region with an active nationalist movement, it remains securely part of the republic.
History[]
Doomsday[]
Compared to other regions of the country, the far north of France saw few direct attacks on 26 September 1983. The northernmost nuclear strikes were the port of Le Havre, the city of Metz, and, about halfway between them, the air base of Quartier Mangin; these cut off the northernmost vertex of the French hexagon. A few runs by bombers armed with conventional ordnance crossed the region, notably striking Reims, Rouen, and several points along the coast.
The most serious hazard in the region were now the two nuclear power stations. The newer station, Gravelines, suffered superficial damage by conventional bombs. Technicians rushed to stabilize all four reactors, scramming them and engaging emergency power systems to keep the fuel cool as it decayed. With support and security provided by surviving local authorities, the power plants' operators began work on a system to slowly and safely shut down the plant permanently. To do this, they had to restart reactions in two of the reactors to keep the pumps working as seawater was slowly brought in to flood the remaining fuel. The plant remained a danger, but it was under control.
The second nuclear power station, in Chooz, was in a much more precarious position. It was controversially located at the end of a salient of land projecting into Belgium, and strikes in central Belgium cut it off from other sources of support. Chooz had only a single reactor, over twenty years old, and once it was scrammed, it was much harder to keep it cool. A meltdown occurred before the reactor could be flooded with water from the river Meuse. Techs were able to partially arrest the meltdown, but it still contaminated the river and much of the surrounding countryside. Chooz became a radioactive hazard, like much of central Belgium.
Nuclear survivors, especially from the zone around Paris, strained the resources of all the surrounding regions. However, woodlands to the north of Paris acted as a partial barrier, funneling this human flood in other directions. Le Mans, 200 kilometers west of Paris, emerged as the most important hub for the displaced and became the seat of France's emergency government. In the winter of 1985-86, the city exploded into destructive food riots that destroyed what remained of the Fifth French Republic. Government installations survived in Quimper in Brittany and in Poitiers, both of them even further away from France's far north. The region was left totally isolated.
In the north, Amiens, seat of the regional government of Picardy, became the largest destination for displaced persons, and dismal camps soon spread out in the fields and along the Somme. Starvation and disease claimed many lives. Further north, local communities tried to control the influx. They declared quarantines and deployed the Gendarmes and Police to maintain order. The regional governments of Picardy and Nord-Pas-de-Calais coordinated efforts to triage the victims of the nuclear bombings, but Picardy, with its capital Amiens, was soon overwhelmed. By mid 1984 the government of Picardy had collapsed and most Picard cities were left to run themselves if they were in any functional order at all.
The emergence of Lille[]
Lille was the largest surviving city in the region and the seat of Nord-Pas-de-Calais. It was the natural hub within what was left of far northern France and far western Belgium. For the most part cut off from the rest of France, this wider region looked to Lille to coordinate the overwhelming tasks of providing relief, maintaining security and managing resources to stave off starvation. A few NATO forces were trickling into the region from the west; they were employed securing the zone around Lille and Amiens.
NATO stay-behind operations were activated during this time - secret paramilitary networks intended to resist a Soviet occupation. But in practice, throughout Europe such operations had become closely aligned with the political far right. The French operation, which had been involved in the war of independence in Algeria in the 1960s, was undergoing a period of reorganization. The new network was not well established and was crippled by the destruction of Paris and other key cities. In western Belgium, by contrast, stay-behind elements arose to secure the surviving towns and eliminate signs of Soviet infiltration. They found willing allies in the Belgian gendarmerie and in partisans of the Flemish nationalist movement.
The Belgian agents initially cooperated with their allies in France, but at bottom both they and their resented the French presence in Flanders. They were disinclined to follow the lead of a French city. Nationalist bands soon were setting up armed checkpoints and forcibly taking over surviving local governments. Many displaced Belgians from the francophone Walloon provinces were fleeing westward into Flanders, and where they settled, they frequently found themselves attacked. NATO troops came in at the behest of the headquarters in Lille to keep the peace. The nationalist militias rarely challenged the soldiers directly. Some feigned cooperation and continued to operate in secret. Others melted into the countryside and transformed into guerrillas.
The main surviving settlements of Belgian Flanders came to a tense and precarious accommodation with the regional government. By 1985 or 86, overt clashes came to an end. Most local Flemish authorities continued to stand by NATO unity, while most of the population was mainly concerned with their next meal. Authorities tried to convince the nationalists among them that Flemish autonomy would be respected, while suppressing, or at least concealing, militant activity. NATO troops patrolled the roads. Away from the towns and roads, in the flooded flats of West Flanders, the movement continued to ferment. Militias harassed French officials and intimidated locals. Belgian Flanders would become a permanent headache for the regime taking shape in Lille.
Military reforms[]
After 1985, Lille enacted strict laws to bring the military under local control. NATO was no longer a viable alliance, and invading Soviets were no longer a threat; instead, the threat to safety came from deserted soldiers and bands of desperate survivors, both of which provided fertile ground for recruitment by the nationalist militants. Surviving NATO troops were gradually replaced with units of militia conscripted locally. The rate of conscription was high, but an extensive public awareness campaign prevented too much backlash, and citizens of Lille responded favorably.
This militia network centered on Lille became the backbone of the emerging new state, and it allowed for both local autonomy and coordination from the capital. This system sometimes came under strain as Lille and the localities struggled for power. In Belgian Flanders, nationalist militias forcibly ousted more than one local cadre seen as too subservient to Lille. But on the whole it allowed for one system to spread throughout the island of survivors in northern France and the Flemish Lands. By the end of 1986, the region immediately surrounding Lille was secure, and outposts were established. 1989 saw the rise of an affiliated militia in Amiens, which helped restore law and order throughout much of Picardy.
Diehard nationalist militias, still led by Belgian gendarmes and stay-behind agents, were pushed more and more to the margins as the pro-Lille forces grew. In 1987 the nationalists elements separated to form a united group, called the 11 of July Civil Guard (11de Juli Burgerwacht). They established a base in central Bruges, which had not been attacked on Doomsday but had been gradually abandoned due to flooding and the difficulty of finding food. The consolidation of an organized opposition force sparked an increase in violent clashes, both in Belgian Flanders and in nearby French and Walloon villages.
Cross-Channel tension[]
Since the region was isolated over land by natural and nuclear barriers, the largest number of refugees during the late 1980s came from Britain. Often unwelcome, many British arrivals struggled to find a safe haven on the Continent and found themselves shunted from one temporary settlement to another. The largest number ended up along the lower Somme, where they joined displaced Parisians in founding new settlements of survivors in the marshy lowlands. Continentals trying their luck in England faced similarly poor treatment, and they became some of the main targets of the xenophobic movement that would later grow into the True British Army. This spurred some French, Dutch and Belgian people to go back to the Lille region, where they spread stories of English savagery.
In this way mutual mistrust grew. Locals went out of their way to discourage people who were coming from across the Channel. More British fishing vessels were now coming to grace the harbors of the Flemish lands. When asked, coastal people feigned ignorance of the status of the inland areas. Outsiders believed that they were no more than a string of survivor settlements hugging the coast - Dieppe, the Bay of the Somme, Calais, Gravelines, and Ostend - rather than a growing network occupying a significant part of France. A Walloon saying circulated during this time: On n' va nén fé djaye avou dès étrânes: "We don't dance with strangers."
Accordingly, when in 1989 an official mission sailed from the Irish-Scottish Alliance looking to establish an aid station, the inhabitants of the coast were decidedly uncooperative. Local officials in the ports stonewalled the Irish and Scots, moving them along from one small port to the next and never allowing them to penetrate the hinterland. At Dieppe, the westernmost outpost with a connection to Lille, the local militia came out to display their lack of enthusiasm for the project, and the vessel quickly sailed back to Ireland, still ignorant of the extent of the growing Lillois state.
The task of resisting Perfidious Albion managed to unite the efforts of the French- and Dutch-speaking people in the orbit of Lille. Where Flemish nationalists had influence, their resentment became directed across the Channel and toward the military regime trying to restore a rump Belgian state in the Ardennes, an area that seemed much more distant than Lille because it lay on the far side of the ruins of central Belgium. Lille was an acceptable protector for the Flemish as long as the city did not interfere too much.
Elections of 1995[]
Civil rule never fully died out at the communal and municipal level. Many municipalities transformed into agrarian cooperatives governed themselves while reporting to a military supervisor. Military rule served to govern larger districts that linked together villages where the people mostly looked after themselves.
By the mid-90s, there were calls to transform this network of allied militias into something more durable, and to create civic bodies to oversee the armed forces. The Belgians took the lead here: moderates believed that creating a regional government for Flanders would placate the nationalists while keeping the most extreme elements in check. The communities dependent on Lille that had been part of Walloon Belgium, centered on Tournai, formed their own region, called Hainaut. The French communities followed the Belgians' lead; half a dozen regional governments, each corresponding to about half of a former département, formed by 1995.
That year, the leading towns agreed to hold general public elections. At the urging of the military and the city government of Lille, candidates were limited to members of officially sanctioned parties. This served to bar parties sympathetic to the 11 of July Civil Guard. Some people in the Flemish region announced a boycott of the election, but a moderate party also formed to advocate for Flemish interests within the new system.
The clear winner of the elections was Adrien Hendryks of the Patrie, Liberté, Solidarité Party. The PLS has been largely viewed as responsible for the restoration of civil liberties to the populace despite the ongoing curfew. The curfew was and is accepted by citizens as a means of protecting themselves from the unrest that had engulfed Picardy in the 1980's.
Constitution of 1999[]
As the new millennium turned, President Hendryks and his administration called for a renewed constitution to be written to replace the ad hoc agreements that had bound the localities together since the 80s. Delegates were invited from all eight regions. The resultant constitution was a hybrid of Belgian and French constitutions, although biased toward the French constitution and its republican forms. This marked the birth of the new republic, now officially called Lille and the Flemish Lands, or Lille-Flanders.
Military curfews were ended in most of the republic in 2000 as part of the constitution process; however, there remained a Zone du Contrôle Militaire near the borders of Lille-et-Terres-Flamande to protect against marauders. Even Bruges, whose population was rising, had a civil government in power; the militant Civil Guard went deeper underground, out in the countryside and into the wilds beyond the Lillois border. By now they were more like a source of constant unrest than an active guerrilla war. The republic's military requirements were standardized: citizens of the nation were to be involved in the Home Guard from the age of 16 to 45, and Home Guard Reserves from 45 to 60, much as the Swiss had been prior to Doomsday.
End of Isolation[]
The 21st century saw a new Europe start to emerge from the small communities of survivors that had scraped out a living since the day the bombs fell. Other factions were going through the same steps as Lille-Flanders, creating new political structures to replace what had been lost. The new republican constitution enabled the Lillois to engage in formal diplomatic relations with their neighbors.
In 2000, Lille-Flanders concluded a consequential accord with the Benelux Union, made up of the successor governments of Belgium and Luxembourg. This agreement acknowledged that the western end of Belgium had chosen to become part of this new republic. The Belgian government accepted the reality of the new world. Around the same time, the republic concluded diplomatic and trade agreements with its cross-Channel neighbors, Woodbridge, Essex, and Southern England, as well as with some more distant neighbors in western and northern Europe.
Formal relations with other parts of France took more time. With the exception of Lille, most of the significant breakaway states were located inland, and travel was more difficult. Furthermore, some were reluctant to acknowledge the demise of the French Republic. It took until 2006 for Lille-Flanders to exchange ambassadors with Bourgogne-et-Franche-Comté, the nearest French neighbor of any size. Lille and the Flemish Lands joined the League of Nations in 2009, fully embracing their status as an independent republic. The League HQ in Tonga was nearly impossible for Lillois delegates to travel to, but the republic would be able to participate via the League High Commission for Europe in Gothenburg, Sweden.
Lille, Flanders, and France[]
2010 was a momentous year for citizens throughout the former territory of France. For the first time, delegates from surviving parts of the Métropole met with counterparts from the Outre-mer, which by now had come together to form the Republic of the French Southern Territories (RTFA). With the so-called Clermont accords, it came to appear inevitable that a reunited French Republic would form in the not-so-distant future, most likely by adding the independent states of the French to the existing structure of the RTFA. Many disagreements remained over the details, but Lille-Flanders seemed poised to join it.
The prospect of joining a reestablished France, even a very loosely-governed one, provoked a new round of unrest, both in the Flanders region and among the Dutch-speaking population scattered in other parts of Lille and the Flemish lands. The 11 of July movement had faded: the old stay-behind operatives had long retired or passed on, and the vast majority of the people had accepted the status quo of the Lillois state. The militancy of the 80s had mellowed into a kind of stubborn agrarianism - but the Flemings were not French and had no desire to be. So even while the Lillois government continued talks with Burgundy, Poitou and Auvergne, the 11 of July Civil Guard sought to take advantage of the situation. It began to actively recruit and plan new rounds of attacks on symbols of French identity, such as street signs and old war monuments.
This state of affairs continued for several years while the fragments of France negotiated the terms of a reunification. It became clear, however, that Lille-Flanders as a whole lacked the political will to join the new world-spanning republic. Lille was isolated from the rest of France, and that very isolation had helped save it. It now supported a significant population who had come from Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, and Britain; many of its young people were the product of mixed marriages. Lille's most important economic links were outside of France; within the boundaries of the old republic, the main trading partner, Burgundy, was also wavering on the idea of reunification. And of course, there was a very loud minority that was dead against any thought of rejoining a French Republic, and their discontent was fueling acts of terrorism.
French loyalists could of course be found in Lille as well. A new party, L'Union pour la République, formed around the issue and worked to push Lille-Flanders toward the Seventh Republic. It sought to tie the "no" side to the extremists of the 11 of July movement and other nationalists. But in the end, it failed to gain enough support and remained in the opposition in parliament. In 2015, Lille-Flanders formally withdrew from the process of forming the new French Republic, leaving open the possibility of improved trade agreements and cultural collaboration.
Economy[]
With renewed contact with other French states, and a growing sense of security, the government at Lille has 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 40 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.
Along champagne, the pre-doomsday biscuit factory Jules Destrooper in Lo, Lo-Reninge, West-Flanders, which was reopened in 1988 after it became a canned food factory, has become one of the main sources of exportation to North Germany, Southern England, Luxembourg and the Celtic Alliance.
Transport[]
The main tramway line of the Coast Tram/Kusttram, connecting the cities and towns along the West Flemish coast between De Panne, near the former French border, and Knokke-Heist, near the former Dutch border, got rebuilt in 1990. The tramway links many of the main settlements and has become the main transport artery for the region. Using former SNCF and SNCB/NMBS trains, the network haves a central railway route at Lille, Kortrijk, and Lichterwelde.
| ||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||||
