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| Capital (and largest city) |
Poitiers | ||||
| Language official |
French | ||||
| others | local dialects | ||||
| Religion | Catholicism State religion, freedom granted | ||||
| Government | Parliamentary republic | ||||
| President of La République | Jean-Pierre Raffarin | ||||
| Préfet | Bernard Tomasini | ||||
| Area | 40,000 sq km km² | ||||
| Population | est. 2-3 million | ||||
| Established | 1986 | ||||
| Currency | Franc Poitevin | ||||
The Poitevine Republic survived by virtue of the city of Poitiers leading Poitou-Charentes and pieces of shattered Aquitaine through the chaos of France's fall. As radiological meltdown and political anarchy wracked Western Europe, the Poitou-Charèntais were one of the few surviving independent states in former France. After the Second Sicily War and ensuing peacetime, Poitou, Auvergne the RFTA, and several smaller entities declared the formation of the Seventh Republic, with the region becoming an integral department of the restored French state.
History[]
Pre-Doomsday[]
Before Doomsday, the prefecture of Poitou-Charentes was known for its cuisine. Local dishes included seafood stew and Barbezieux chicken. The ancient port of La Rochelle was a major tourist attraction in the area, and the city of Poitiers was a major historical attraction.
Artist’s impression of the first 1MT bomb exploding over Paris(somewhere over the Montparnasse station was ground 0).
Doomsday[]
- Brest was destroyed by 500kt of missiles on and around the Brest Naval Station.
- Nantes and Rennes were similarly destroyed with several 150 KT strikes around their urban areas, targeted military bases and weapons-grade nuclear facilities.
- Fallout from Rennes and Nantes wreaked havoc on Quimper and Le Mans
- Paris took 4 1MT strikes and was utterly destroyed, with Le Havre and Rouen also being destroyed upriver.
- In Aquitanie, Bordeaux and three military installations south near Mimizan and Archaron were hit was well, rendering both the A63 and the roads south to Mont-de-Marsan unusable.
Martial Law[]
Poitou-Charentes was spared, having been too small and de-militarized to avoid nuclear wrath, but large enough to maintain the provincial level government. Following the destruction, the local government quickly enacted martial law, and contacted neighboring prefectures and regions to do the same. Poitou was in a fortunate position to not receive much fallout or direct damage from any blasts, and was one of the cities more responsive to the first attempt of the State to rally around Le Mans, the largest city to survive in the northwest of France (hosting the greatest number of surviving civil state officials). Nevertheless, Poitevine authorities were responsible for shoring up the resources for not only their citizens but the incoming refugees in various conditions.
Some level of control was maintained in the region, but with the influx of Parisian refugees, most of whom were doomed to die within the following months, resources were quickly overwhelmed. Because of the TGV Ligne Est, Poitou-Charentes faced a larger number of the estimated 6 million refugees fleeing what was left of the Greater Paris conurbation. Attempts to exchange supplies with what was left of Aquitaine proved exceedingly difficult, with the city of Bayonne having fallen into chaos after ETA successfully ousted Spanish authorities south of the border.
With the collapse of the Le Mans-based government in early 1986, Martial law continued with a heavy-handed curfew until 1987. Estimated re-settlement and treatment of refugees of the Paris/Le Havre/Caen bombings in Poitou-Charentes is estimated nearly 3 million, total, from 1983 to 1987. After the height of departures of untold numbers of the French from the surviving ports of La Rochelle, Saint-Malo, Nice and Dunkirk by 1987, Poitiers became the largest (and least dysfunctional) administrative city in western France by default. Even after the fall of Le Mans and Angers, Poitiers and Clermont-Ferrand still attempted to shore up remaining manpower to attempt to reclaim Biarritz from the Basque nationalists. Although a resounding and final defeat saw the front line between the Basques and the French become a no-man's land for decades to come, diplomatic relations would be restored nearly 20 years later after the Treaty of Biarritz.
France-Ouest[]
From 1987-1995 Poitou-Charentes continued under the former French constitution and forms, many of the citizens calling themselves francouestians, and to some extent unified the survivors within boundaries set by the Paris bombings and the Bordeaux / Toulouse bombings. The massif central served as a natural blockade against the masses of dispossessed from Lyon and Marseille, and the heavy winters following Doomsday protected the mountain passes for much four to six months of the year, especially 1983 and 1984.
While the society of Poitou-Charentes remained largely militarized against invaders from the surroundings intent on plunder, society as a whole returned largely to the French norm, with most folks worrying about where they would get their cheese, their milk, their bread, their sausage. A larger push for agriculture lead to a widening of the class, and farmers being esteemed more than former prestige positions of bankers and such.
Many view this 8 year period as the Golden Age of Pictocharentia. Control of the nuclear power plants in the region, including Chinon to the NNE to maintain the train and electric lines was viciously guarded by the Armée Pictocharentais. France's controversial pre-war decision to utilize its domestic uranium deposits allowed the survivor states that emerged from its corpse to continue to meet their own energy needs, after the arduous repair of relay stations and other mechanisms fried on Doomsday. This allowed the region of Poitou-Charentes to maintain a cautiously pre-War quality of life in many areas -- even when the markets were empty of food for days, one could still go home to electricity, eat whatever had saved from their cooled refrigerator and turn on the radio to hear the news. This period would not last, as the second 'wave of death' had begun -- those unfortunate souls who successfully fled the doomed cities but inhaled enough fallout to fester now began to suffer from incurable cancers or otherwise grisly fates. This, accompanies with the plummeting in births for the first decade after Doomsday, saw Poitou - and Europe at large - see its largest demographic contraction since the Middle Ages. The survivors in the smaller cities in between Poitou and Auvergne stopped receiving patrols from Poitou, and in many cases were forgotten about entirely, harassing or scrounging from the roads as they needed to going forward.
Depredations from Without, Dissent from Within[]
From 1995-2000, Poitou-Charentes was faced with consistent attacks to its borders from surrounding survivor groups, at times in a seeming war of attrition. In 1997 Angoulême seceded from the Republic as the mayor, Jean-Michel Boucheron wished to rule his fief as the king of what seemed increasingly to be Hell.
President René Monory garnered the support of the Assembly and launched a military strike to reclaim Angoulême, which proved costly in both terms of man power, arms and political currency with the public. Boucheron was killed in the fighting to capture Angoulême, but reprisals and looting did not happen against the population as was feared, and shipments of bread and other goods arrived within days of the end of hostilities, doing much to patch up the hurt of the Angoumoisins. With Angoulême returned to the Republic, René Monory faced a difficult re-election and was replaced by Jean-Pierre Raffarin, who garnered a large amount of his support from the southern reaches of the country.
A Losing Battle[]
The Southern territory of the Republic became consistently more and more lawless. Iberian refugees, Basque incursions and other Mediterannean refugees moved inland. Conflicts with Euaskadi proper in southern Aquitaine had long since abated, as Poitevine abandoned the notion of being a continuation of "France", and saw the futility in defending lands it barely had any living subjects in.
In a period of contraction worldwide, new brewed of new powers to the south and east which sought to bring the region in decline under their banners. As one daily caravan entering Angoulême became five, and one distressed ship a day in La Rochelle became entire fleets, it was clear that there was a crisis unfolding elsewhere. Old refugee camps were fitted to accommodate these arrivals, but it suspected that there are agents provocateurs in the mix, with word of a rising military power in Sicily. Government efforts to integrate the refugees by the end of 2006 had seen some success, however, much of the existing infrastructure was over-taxed with the increasing stream.
In May of 2006 an envoy of Auvergne reached Poitiers to discuss the "Mediterranean Crisis", although both nations knew that should the reputed capacities of Sicily and its Mediterranean allies be brought to bear against them, they would easily fold, so overwhelmed by refugees as they were. Further worries built as word of the Alpine Confederation reached them, with additional reports. The few sailors of La Rochelle brave enough to sporadically cross the Atlantic in sail or coal vessels returned with bewildering stories about the North American east coast. While the French department of St. Pierre & Miquelon had survived, it had de facto been annexed by a rump Canadian government in Newfoundland led by Margaret Thatcher, as the zone of stability had contracted across the vast majority of the North American continent.
After Angoulême was retaken by Poitou, its historic castle became its military redoubt in its southern front
Government records indicate that had the situation continued unchanged and the Sicilian-Spanish advance had continued unabated, the Poitevine Republic would have seen their territories thrown into anarchy.
New Hope[]
At the same time as these distressing developments, the League of Nations reached the government in Poitiers via an envoy from Monaco. By July of 2009, the President of the Republic was in negotiations with Auvergne and Monaco to present a united front against Sicily, and work toward a unified government. Freight train service was restored in April of 2010, and passenger rail began operation on a limited scale in May of 2010. By 2014, rail travel had increased to the point of rivaling volumes seen at moments in the 20th century, albeit only between points in Auvergne and the Republic Poitevine.
A Seventh Republic[]
With Poitiers and Clermont-Ferrand now connected to the wider French world via Mediterranean and Atlantic ports, air travel, and even rail lines going into Central Europe, there was now a cluster of nerves for the future restoration of France. The WCRB'S 2010 Report on its geopolitical forecasts took this into consideration, arguing on the 'near certainty' of the unification between 2015 and 2020. The parties would continue the momentum on the reunification talks of 2009, with the Seventh Republic ultimately being ratified with its future capital to be Clermont-Ferrand.
Economy[]
Largely agrarian, the Poitevines are now responsible for supplying a great deal of food to neighboring Auvergne, and the restructuring of power-plants to maintain electric production as the current supplies of reactor-worthy uranium produced in post-Doomsday France being of inferior quality to what the plants were designed to consumed.
The port at La Rochelle is the largest by volume of any French state south of Brittany. The larger port of Rowan, which was re-claimed only recently, has resumed activity as well. As such, products imported here oft find their way to Grand-Andorre, Auvergne, and the Alpine Confederation. During the Sicily Wars, ships hesitant to enter the Mediterranean often arranged to unload their wares in La Rochelle and Royan, which briefly saw their economy swell with an unprecedented amount of imports, connections which were leveraged after the return to peace in the Mediterranean.
Population[]
The census figures for the Republic are spotty at best, due to large numbers of refugees. Since Doomsday most censuses taken have only polled people known to be citizens of the Republic, and refugees have largely been discounted.
In the early 2000s, the Population Ministry suspects that total population including refugees is somewhere between 2 and 3 million. As of the decision to reunify with Auvergne and most of the Sixth Republic departments, Poitou's population of citizens registered to its zone of control sits at 3.5 million.
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