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At 10 a.m. on December 25, 1879, when the explosive press release of the French news agency Havas appeared on the desktop of the editor-in-chief of Reuters and Wolff, in accordance with the requirements of the "Trilateral and Quad Societies Agreement".

Almost no one could believe that a Russian fleet suddenly crossed Denmark and rushed out of the Baltic Sea without anyone knowing, and forced its way through the English Channel right under the noses of the British, reaching the French port of Brest.

Despite their doubts about reality, the editors of Reuters and Wolff, out of reason, believed in the professional ethics of their Hawass counterparts, and only two hours later than the ones on the streets of Paris, the new ones in English and German began to fly through the streets of London and Berlin in the afternoons.

The Wolf Society, which was in keeping with the rigor of the Germans, carried the headline "The Imperial Russian Navy Appears in Brest, France", and devoted a great deal of space to the editorial below the breaking news on the possibility of a Franco-Russian alliance and the dangers it posed to Germany.

Reuters' side story and editorial were more direct and intense, directly using the headline "The French and Russian navies join forces to challenge the sea power of the British Empire", this shocking side title, and the seriousness brought by the fierce headline, made readers in London more willing to pay attention to the matter out of their pockets.

In fact, if one sees the off-the-beaten-story news agency distributed on the streets of Paris, Wolf society feels that its news report is too rational and flat like a glass of water, while Reuters society feels that its news headline is weaker than the roar of a little milk cat.

"The old king is dead, the new king is in place - the world will be decided by France and Russia!"

"The sun never sets on the new order on the bones!"

"France wants to say no to Britain and Germany!"

The French titles are more eye-catching than the other.

In the face of sudden events, the press often took a step ahead of the professionals in the field of diplomacy, until at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, in front of Whitehall in London and Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin, a large number of diplomats dressed in all kinds of festive costumes rushed together, and then all kinds of inquiries and orders flew like snowflakes between Britain, Germany, France, Russia, and Denmark by telegram.

Like the journalists, the British and German diplomats also wanted to find out the cause of the matter more quickly and accurately, because the big names at 10 Downing Street, Schulenburg, and even Buckingham Palace and Charlottenburg Palace were anxiously waiting.

And the bigwigs of the Élysée, the Quay d'Orsay, and the Place de la Concorde, together with the whole of France, were plunged into a frenzied atmosphere of joy and joy than Christmas, and the Champs-Élysées appeared on the Champs-Élysées with long-lost patriotic marchers full of joy, confidence and pride.

Shouts "Long live the great France!" In the crowd of slogans, the image of Mariana is naturally indispensable, including Marianna who is neatly dressed to represent the republicans, and Marianna who is open-breasted and breasts to represent the revolutionaries.

Fortunately, today, at least today, the French, who had received the news of the Franco-Russian alliance from all over Paris, excitedly crossed the Arc de Triomphe, along the Champs-Élysées, in the direction of the Elysée Palace, crowded and struggling to advance, just to shout to the French president, "Long live the great France of freedom!" ”

The French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, nicknamed the Pier d'Orsay, even broke the tradition of not working on Christmas Day, and at about 6 p.m., in front of the French reporters crowded in front of the Foreign Ministry building, made an exception to issue a simple but strongly worded Christmas diplomatic statement.

"Just today (December 25, 1879), four warships of the Baltic Advance Fleet of the Imperial Russian Navy successfully visited the French naval base in the port of Brest, and this visit was the beginning of a series of future military cooperation between France and Russia."

"The military cooperation between France and Russia is entirely based on the principle of voluntariness and equality, and is also where the common interests of the two countries lie."

"In the foreseeable future, the Franco-Russian alliance will be a decisive force in the world order."

This brief diplomatic statement undoubtedly poured a large bowl of water into the already boiling Anglo-German oil pot.

Originally, the diplomats in Whitehall prepared a diplomatic statement for Foreign Minister Cecil, which was quite mild in terms of position and wording, saying that both the English Channel and the Danish Channel were considered by the British Government to be international waters, that the Russians should enjoy the right of free navigation, and that the British Government was completely open to the visit of the Imperial Russian Navy to the French military port.

As soon as they received the Christmas declaration from the French Foreign Ministry, the British diplomats in Paris did not dare to slack off, and immediately telegraphed the statement back to London, and the officials in Whitehall who received the statement handed it over as soon as possible, and were about to go to Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, to meet with Prime Minister Disraeli.

Responding to toughness will not allow the British public to accept a weak government, especially in the final moments before the election campaign.

The German Foreign Office at 76 Wilhelmstrasse, next door to Schulenburg at 73 Wilhelmstrasse, the old Chancellor Bismarck has not left Berlin on any holiday since he assumed the post of Reich Chancellor, so the Secretary of State, Count Blo, does not need to travel all the way to report to the top of the government like Foreign Minister Cecil.

Therefore, after France made an official statement, at about 7 o'clock in the evening of the 25th, the German Foreign Ministry became the first power to make a statement.

"The Reich government has taken note of the latest statements by the French government, first of all, we are open to military cooperation between France and Russia, but we must warn about the potential risks of such military cooperation, and any military cooperation between great powers will exacerbate the arms race between European countries, and there is a potential risk of war."

The implication is that Franco-Russian military cooperation is your freedom, but it is also Germany's freedom to wage war.

"Secondly, the right of freedom of navigation in the Danish Straits should be respected by all parties, and any violation and failure to implement the contents of the Copenhagen Treaty is undoubtedly a tearing up of the Treaty, and as a major party to the Copenhagen Treaty, the German Reich is obliged to preserve the integrity of the Copenhagen Treaty, and will therefore instruct the Royal Navy to intensify its patrols in the Danish Strait to prevent the recurrence of similar incidents."

The implication is that the Imperial Russian Navy quietly passed through the Danish Strait, and most of the responsibility lies with the inability of the Kingdom of Denmark to implement the Treaty of Copenhagen, so the German Navy will assume the responsibility of maintaining the implementation of the Treaty, regardless of whether the Kingdom of Denmark agrees or not, I will take over the control of your Strait.

"Finally, an alliance of European states based on the premise of military cooperation is a great challenge to European security, and will be regarded as a great damage to the interests of the German Reich, which supports the existing balance of power among European states and opposes any alliance that alters the existing world order."

The implication is that my position is in favor of the British Empire, and my friends in London, should I hurry up and coordinate everyone's position.

This brief, war-threatening diplomatic statement was in fact the result of urgent consultations between Wilhelm I and Crown Prince Frederick and Chancellor Bismarck in the Charlottenburg Palace on the afternoon of the 25th.

For the Romanovs, driven by greed, to move closer to France, the German top had long foreseen today's results.

Politically, since the first half of this year, after the Russians succeeded in blackmailing the French one after another, as long as the French are willing to do the most wrongs and end their international political isolation by sending money, and the Russians continue to be greedy for money, then the proximity between France and Russia is an inevitable result.

Economically, France's credit capitalists need a credit market for investment, and looking at the whole of Europe, France sees the country with the most investment potential, whether it is population, land, resources, or markets, and Russia is the first to be recommended, and only Russia.

In all fairness, in terms of the profitability and security of capital circulation in later generations, many countries are actually better off choosing Russia than Russia, such as the United States on the other side of the Atlantic, France's neighbors Britain and Germany, and even Austria-Hungary.

But this is the nineteenth century, an era in which capital pursues its own sphere of influence and has the greatest exclusivity over it.

The purpose of capital chasing is different, and it has to start with the gold standard.

At the beginning of the 19th century, after Britain established the gold standard, relying on its status as the world's factory and the center of world trade, on the surface, the world's currency settlement could only be through gold, gold coins and gold bars, but in fact, it was the British pound that performed the function of international currency, and international trade and international credit were basically settled in British pounds, making London the world financial center in the gold standard era.

As a major feature of the world's financial center, many countries need to open a sterling account in London, and then sell their own gold by buying pounds, and use pounds sterling as the settlement currency of international trade, so that the pound sterling becomes their de facto gold reserves.

How could the French, who were extremely well-developed in the credit and banking industries, not understand that London, as the center of the financial industry, could make a lot of money by simply relying on simple turnover and lending, and after 1873, after Germany and the United States (the impure gold standard) joined the gold standard, the French became more and more jealous of London's status.

The classical gold standard system pursued from the nineteenth century to the early twentieth century has a huge feature, which is called the center + peripheral model, which is not only in addition to the four central countries of the gold standard of Britain, France, Germany, and the United States, but also around them as the center, the implementation of the silver standard, and even the paper standard of peripheral countries, such as Russia, Austria-Hungary, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Qing State, Japan, Mexico, and so on.

Among these peripheral countries, such as Spain, Portugal, Greece, and the British colonies, the silver or double standard countries were centered on the United Kingdom, Mexico, Peru, Colombia, and other countries were centered on the United States, and Austria-Hungary was centered on Germany.

France, the center of the gold standard, has little country around it, except for its own colonies.

The implementation of the gold standard system by European and American countries is actually a disguised economic exploitation for the countries and colonies that depend on it, and the four countries that control nearly 70% of the world's gold make huge profits by forcibly underestimating the economic level of the colonies and other countries, buying raw materials at low prices and selling goods at high prices.

This is also the fundamental driving force for the above-mentioned four powers to desperately pursue colonies and spheres of influence.

On the map of the world in 1879, the countries that had not yet been purely included in the sphere of influence of the gold standard of Britain, France, Germany, and the United States, that is, the three huge empires, Tsarist Russia, Qing and Ottoman Turkey, attracted and occupied the above three countries, and it became the main battlefield for the competition for the world financial center between Paris in France and London in the United Kingdom.

As for the military aspect, the significance of winning over Tsarist Russia for France to reduce military pressure from Germany is self-evident.

Looking at the above political, economic and military conditions, the Franco-Russian alliance seems to be a match made in a fairy tale, but the reality is not a fairy tale after all. In one of Joey's conversations with his father and Prime Minister Bismarck, Tsarist Russia was a piece of poison coated in honey for France, economically, politically, and militarily.

From an economic point of view, Tsarist Russia's foreign exports are mainly raw materials, and Russia's raw materials are not irreplaceable, and they are extremely vulnerable to the impact of the prices of raw materials in the British and French colonies and the United States.

Britain and France have a large number of colonies, and it is impossible to use the cheap raw materials of the colonies to purchase Russian iron ore, coal mines, timber and grain, not to mention the United States, a natural resource country favored by God, so the raw materials and products of Tsarist Russia will eventually have to do business with Germany, an industrial power, and at most Austria.

A seller of raw materials still can't monopolize the raw material market, even if the French borrow more, it can't solve the dilemma of Tsarist Russia being controlled by others in foreign trade, the more raw materials are sold, the more vulnerable it is to the buyer's price reduction, especially when Germany also began to develop overseas colonies.

Foreign trade is the poison of the Romanovs, and the domestic economy of Tsarist Russia is the poison of the poison.

To put it simply, the Prussian serf reform was to truly turn the serfs into free people, and the government gave the serfs interest-free loans to buy their freedom, and required the Prussian nobles to use the ransom money for the construction of factories and cities, and to use the factories and cities to accommodate the freedmen.

The German serf reform can be said to be a successful example of the Prussian liberal aristocracy transforming society from top to bottom.

The transformation of serfs in Tsarist Russia was nothing more than a means for the aristocracy to deprive the serfs of their property and occupy more land in disguise, and by the way, to stuff the low-interest loans subsidized by the empire to the serfs into their own pockets, and at the same time to throw a large number of landless peasants into the poor cities and industries of Tsarist Russia.

The Russian capitalists, who had sufficient manpower, began to squeeze the labor of the Russian workers with all their might, and the factories were producing commodities at full capacity, but the workers who could only maintain food and clothing could not afford to buy the commodities produced by the capitalists.

Tsarist Russia has an economic crisis, and European countries are also in an economic crisis, some people may be willing to buy raw materials, but who wants to buy Tsarist Russia, your shoddy industrial products?

In order to solve these industrial products of Tsarist Russia, which were not looked down upon by Europeans, and at the same time to solve the large number of idle freemen who had nothing to do after the reform of serfs, Tsarist Russia had to focus on the Near East, the Middle East and the Far East by means of war, and by annexing the territories of other countries to ensure its exclusive mode of trade.

That's right, the Russians produce the worst things, but now the great tsar is your new ruler, so no matter how bad you are, you have to use domestic products, and if you don't use domestic products, you don't love Russia, and if you don't love it, you will kill your head.

Life and death, the perfect sales strategy for the products of the Russian Empire.

Therefore, Tsarist Russia is like a greedy bear, constantly devouring the land adjacent to it, in a vain attempt to use the vast land to ensure the operation of the empire's economy.

However, with the continuous expansion of its territory, Tsarist Russia will inevitably break out into war with other countries, and it will inevitably fall into the vicious circle of "losing to death, winning to death", such as the recent Tenth Russian-Turkish War, although Tsarist Russia won, but also saddled with a huge government debt of more than 6 billion rubles.

The huge government debt immediately detonated the currency credit crisis of the paper rupee, the level of the Russian economy in 1879-1881 basically fell back to the level of 1849, the sluggish economic situation and the large number of unemployed people, which were the main reasons for the assassination of Alexander II in history.

In order to solve this economic problem, Tsarist Russia decided to adopt a more extreme monetary policy under the protection of a strong totalitarian system to survive the death.

A rare situation in the history of the world in which four different forms of money coexisted appeared in the Russian Empire.

Under the gold standard system, the settlement of international trade depends on the gold content of the currencies of various countries, so Tsarist Russia specially minted imperial Russian gold coins (Inbelian) and silver coins (kopecks) for foreign trade, and Russia adopted the gold and silver double standard model for international trade, these two metal currencies can only be used for foreign trade, and are never allowed to be used for domestic circulation in Russia.

In Russia, the only currency allowed to circulate is the paper ruble, which is the paper standard.

Between the imperial Russian gold and silver coins used for foreign trade and the paper ruble in domestic circulation, it is a credit coupon used to exchange between the two, and the role of the credit coupon is explained in the most popular economic terms, which is called foreign exchange control and compulsory foreign exchange settlement.

To explain the example of the Russians' grain exports, suppose that the German merchant is only willing to buy a ton of Russian wheat with 100 marks, which is equivalent to 45 imperial Russian gold coins according to the exchange rate, but the cost of the Russian grain merchant reaches 550 paper rubles, and he has to sell it for 600 paper rubles, which is equivalent to 60 imperial Russian gold coins, to make money.

It stands to reason that this money-losing business obviously can't be done, but the German mark is the foreign exchange that Tsarist Russia urgently needs, so the Tsarist authorities must facilitate the completion of this business, the specific method is that the Germans hand over 100 marks to the Tsarist government and then take away the grain, and the government will give the credit voucher worth 60 imperial gold coins to the grain merchant, and the grain merchant will take the credit coupon to the designated bank to exchange for 600 paper rubles.

In this way, foreign merchants were willing to do business with Tsarist Russia, Tsarist Russia had foreign exchange reserves, and grain merchants also made money, and everyone was happy.

As for who loses... Then you have to guess.

If this complex monetary system of the non-gold standard can continue smoothly for 20 or 30 years, after accumulating a large amount of foreign exchange (gold), it will enable Tsarist Russia to smoothly enter the gold standard monetary system.

Historically, in 1895, it was precisely by virtue of the success of this monetary system that Tsarist Russia began to implement the real gold standard.

But there has always been a fatal flaw in entering the gold standard in this way, that is, the fear of war, especially of all-out war, if you participate in a large-scale war of the nature of national debt, and also lead to the occupation of your own territory, then this monetary system will immediately disappear, and by the way, the country will disappear.

Historically, the Russian Empire fell in World War I, and this monetary system was the main culprit for the economic collapse.

And Joey's Russia in this world, while implementing this deadly monetary policy, dares to unite with France to provoke Britain and Germany, in Joey's view, it is just dragging France to hell together.

If union with France is an invisible bomb economically, then politically, Tsarist Russia is sitting on a powder keg that has been ignited.

Historically, no matter which family ruled Russia as a tsar, it relied on strong totalitarian politics and relied on a small number of nobles to control the land, wealth and knowledge of all Russia to rule the ignorant serfs in Russia.

When the whole of Europe was in a period of agricultural production, Russia could use this totalitarian method to deter Europe, but after learning from Britain, France, Germany, and the United States and entering industrialization, this system of rule based on the illiteracy of all serfs encountered a huge challenge.

Industrialization requires knowledgeable and educated manufacturing workers, and an illiterate serf cannot become a qualified manufacturing worker, and in order to turn an illiterate into a qualified manufacturing worker, it is necessary to be educated, and if you are educated, you will have ideas, and if you have ideas, you will ..... There is trouble.

The serfs of the agrarian era called the tsar "Daddy", and the serfs would respond to whatever Dad said, because the serfs knew Daddy in St. Petersburg and Moscow all their lives.

And now I am educated, I know that there is London, there is Paris, there is Berlin, there is Rousseau, there is Montesquieu, there is Diderot, there is Kant, there is Hobbes.... Of course, great teachers are also essential.

Naturally, social change cannot be avoided.

Originally, according to the advice of the Moscow aristocracy, in order to maintain the rule of the Romanov family, Tsarist Russia should return to the era of conservatism, reshape the spirit of ancient Russia, and completely put an end to the invasion of European socialism, especially French republicanism.

And now the Romanov family took the initiative to accept the loan from France and allied with France, which undoubtedly gave the careerists within Tsarist Russia the opportunity to acquire new ideas, the hooligans are cultured, and the gods can't stop them, not to mention that the tsar is not a god yet.

The unstoppable end is that countless assassinations await the current and future Tsars.