Chapter 784: The Polarized Opinions of Italians

In fact, the higher you stand, the farther you can see. But this is not always a good thing. For example, Prince Metternich overestimated the so-called Italians.

It makes people feel a little sad that Prince Metternich, who once vowed to turn Italy into a geographical term, is old after all.

Compared with the name of Italians, Venetians, Lombards, Tuscans, Parmesans, Luccas, Modena, Romans, Sicilians, and Sardinians are more easily accepted by Italians.

Due to the geographical barriers for thousands of years, they have formed different cultures and habits, and even their languages ​​have differences.

Historically, the Italian government began the process of modernizing the Italian language in 1870 and promoted the Tuscan dialect (also known as the Florentine dialect or Tuscan), and it took 120 years to solve the language problem.

The north-south conflict in Italy still exists today. However, it is not appropriate to let these guys concentrate in the northern Italian region. After all, no one knows whether they will create new problems in the end, just like the Gu refining.

Franz thought of moving them to Tripoli. After all, this place will be very important in the future, and the local population is seriously insufficient. Not to mention development, even infrastructure cannot be handled.

In fact, there is another point, that is, the execution and ruling power shown by the Karamanli family are far from what Franz expected.

It is really inefficient to let them rule this area, and there are sailors and dock workers in northern Italy.

In fact, the Italian city-state also has a commercial tradition, so Franz thinks the plan is feasible. His first step is to prepare to immigrate 30,000 people to the Tripoli area from 1846 to 1850.

In fact, there was an immigration plan earlier, but relying on natural immigration was too slow. After the end of the Second Turkish-Egyptian War, by 1846, less than 2,000 Austrians immigrated to Tripoli.

Compared with Tripoli, the natural environment of neighboring Tunisia is much better. After all, it was the birthplace of Carthaginian civilization.

However, the reality is that Britain, France, Sardinia, and even the United States have all intervened. Even though Tunisia once made two tentative attacks on Tripoli as a bandit, the Austrian side could only treat it as an ordinary bandit incident.

So don't think about Tunisia for the time being, unless one day an agreement is reached with other powers, or some large-scale conflict breaks out.

As for the conscription of Italians, Franz kept a wait-and-see attitude.

Because at this time, the evaluation of Italian soldiers in Austria was polarized. Some people held the same view as later generations, thinking that Italian soldiers lacked fighting will and fighting qualities.

Forever low morale, astonishingly poor obedience, no organization, no discipline, marching like hiking, fighting like going to the market, in short, they don't look like an army.

In addition, Italians are also the most fond of forming factions in the army. They often form secret societies and use their wisdom and strength to escape military sanctions and deal with their own people.

Another part of the commanders believe that Italian soldiers are hardworking, versatile, highly motivated, and have a spirit of sacrifice.

In fact, Italian soldiers cannot be generalized, but at least they are good cooks and logistics troops, as well as excellent hunters.

Franz thinks that the reason why some outrageous situations occur is mainly because of the overemphasis on humanism, which makes them lack team spirit and discipline.

At the same time, there is a lack of recognition and consensus, because since the fall of ancient Rome, the Italian region has always been in a state of city-state separatism, and the geographical division is more serious than that of the German region, and there has been a long-term lack of real threats.

The last point is that Italians are often discriminated against, their military pay is often lower than that of other nationalities, and they cannot be paid on time and in full.

Other problems need to be slowly changed through reform and education, but Franz thinks that the military pay is easy to deal with. After all, the Austrian Empire is not short of money now. In order to reduce the rapidly increasing gold reserves, it even has to choose to spend money and make some incomprehensible investments.

As for the mutual connection between the Italians, Franz doesn't care much. After all, they prefer to form small groups rather than unify. If nothing is done, they will fight each other.

And he also hopes that those potential enemies will emerge on their own, which is also a way to lure the snake out of the hole in a sense.

Because of the family's reputation and the image of the country, there are not many opportunities to cut the grass and root it out.

What Franz did was actually not in conflict with Prince Metternich's policy, so the two policies could be carried out at the same time.

On the island of Ireland, the situation is getting worse and worse, because the potato harvest is almost complete again.

And this time there will be no more food in the cellar, and at the same time, the price of food in the UK has hit new highs, and more food is shipped from the island of Ireland to the UK mainland.

The number of people starving to death continues to increase, and more Irish people who can't pay the rent are driven out of their homes. Most of the land in Ireland belonged to landlords, even their homes.

The landlords had power close to that of medieval feudal lords, and their income was affected by the famine.

But those poor Irish people could not afford the rent, so the landlords from Britain came up with a new method.

That is to rent the original land to two families, which can not only make up for their losses, but also make a small profit, but this will make life more difficult for the Irish.

The British followed Austria's work-for-relief project and declared bankruptcy. At the same time, typhoid and cholera broke out in the workhouse, and several cars of corpses were loaded and taken to the suburbs for burial every day.

However, the British have never had a bottom line in being unhuman. Colonial Secretary Lord William Gladstone proposed that the Irish could immigrate to Australia, which could not only solve the problem of sparse population in the colonies, but also alleviate the famine problem on the island of Ireland.

This proposal sounds fine, but the problem is that when it was implemented, they found that it was not as cost-effective to immigrate Irish Catholics as to buy black slaves from East Africa.

Britain would abduct Protestants from the German region, but abandon its own Catholics. At this time, the Governor of New South Wales proposed an opinion that there were too few local women and hoped that the British government could immigrate more women to solve the fertility problem.

At that time, Australia was not a governor's district, but a geographical term composed of several governor's districts.

So the British government decisively adopted the advice of the Governor of South Wales and selected healthy and age-appropriate women from the workhouse.

Countless dirty and sordid transactions took place, and eventually batches of Irish girls were lured to Australia to serve as reproductive tools for the lower-class colonists who were almost twice their age.

The corruption of the upper-class life in the colonies at this time was actually no worse than that in big European cities, and they naturally looked down on these ordinary girls.

In fact, the upper-class of the South Wales colony said:

"Our money should be spent on decent and well-educated girls, not on a group of lowly and ignorant creatures."

Although the lowest class in the Australian colonies would not starve to death, the high-intensity labor and childbirth could not be exchanged for dignity and material satisfaction. Most people only got a long sentence of double torture of body and mind.