By April 1869, the willows by the Seine had already spit out their tender green leaves and stretched their graceful branches. The spring breeze blows gently across the Seine, driving away the chill of winter, and spring has arrived.

Today's Parisians, however, don't see spring. The bridge, which used to be busy with traffic and tourists, has become quite deserted, except for some patrol policemen, leading police dogs, patrolling back and forth along the road, and interrogating people who they find suspicious and look like "socialists" and "rebels". And those who are being questioned will probably be taken away and heard from if they do not satisfy their answers, as if there had never been such a person in the world.

The French Third Republic and the Prussians signed an armistice, agreeing to cede land to the Germans as reparations, but it was easy to cede land, Alsace and Lorraine were already under German occupation anyway, and the main inhabitants there were Germanic-speaking Germans. But it is not so easy to pay huge reparations of up to five billion francs. Napoleon III did not have such a large sum of money in his treasury, and if he had such a large amount of money in the treasury, he would not have lost so badly. There are many rules of war, but the most basic one is probably that the stronger material force prevails, and to put it more colloquially, in most cases, war is a game in which the rich and handsome crush the poor dicks. Although some people on the Internet in later generations always ridiculed Gao Fushuai for bombing a tent worth ten dollars with millions of dollars of missiles, in a war, the odds of victory are always higher.

In order to raise such a sum of money, the French were busy borrowing money from all over the world, while begging the Germans to pay in installments. But money is always the hardest thing when you need it most. I think that when France was still rich and handsome, as long as they said that they wanted to borrow some money to spend, they waited outside the door of the Ministry of Finance, crying and shouting that they wanted to lend them money, and the carriage of the bankers could be discharged several miles away. But now, this war with the Prussians has suddenly turned France from a rich and handsome man to a dick. So the bankers' attitude towards France immediately changed 180 degrees, and one by one they clutched their money bags tightly and kept saying that unless you were willing to pay higher interest, we just wouldn't have the money to lend you. However, if they really borrowed money at the interest they expected, it would be equivalent to France being robbed by Germany again, and then robbed by this group of vampires again.

But the shape was stronger than the man, and in the end the government of Thiers had to give in to these vampires and borrow large sums of usury from them to pay the war reparations. In order to repay the reparations, the Thiers government naturally had to do some scraping of the ground, so that there were naturally many dissatisfied people, and the French had a tradition of "revolution", well, in order to repay the money normally, it was better to return the northern states that were still occupied by the Germans as collateral as soon as possible, and the Thiers government had to suppress those who tried to rebel, and this naturally required more money.

A four-wheeled carriage, led by four groups of horses, drove slowly across the Concorde Bridge and headed in the direction of the seat of government. The spotlessly clean, mirror-painted body, and the four horses pulling the cart all speak to the identity of the people on board, and only the foreign vampires in France of this era would have such unscrupulous flaunting of their extravagance.

Sitting in the carriage was MacDonald's venture bank's agent in Europe, Catherine's cousin David. Now he was going to talk to the French about a loan. Compared with other banks, MacDonald Ventures has relatively generous loan terms and lower interest rates, so their loans are naturally more popular with the French government. Of course, this generosity did not come without a price, and the price was that France had to open its markets to Scrooge's consortium in some respects. This is the case, for example, in industries that can bring win-win results to everyone. Well, for example, the French government has agreed to allow qualified foreign companies to open factories in France to produce nitrogen fertilizers. And enjoy full tax exemption for up to 15 years. (When the Germans and Scrooge signed a memorandum of cooperation to share technology, it was stipulated that neither side could sell the product in each other's countries, but there was no detailed division of the international market.) So Scrooge simply planned to produce this directly in France, taking into account the tax exemption and the low wages of French workers compared to American workers, to produce here and earn more. In addition, fertilizer plants are a major source of pollution, and pollution is better in France than in the United States. Although some of the technologies to reduce sewage discharge are not impossible to get in the hands of Scrooge, why spend money to reduce sewage if you can pollute freely? After all, in the sixties and seventies of the nineteenth century, it was an era of full capital and vast skies, and the capitalists experienced a period of laissez-faire, freely pursuing wealth and power, polluting if they wanted to, and reducing wages if they wanted to. ）

In addition to opening the "earth gold" factory, the French were forced to open the steel market to Scrooge. After the loss of high-quality iron ore in Alsace and Lorraine, France's steel mills were left with only inferior iron ore with high sulphur and phosphorus content. And they don't have the full set of technology to deal with such a thing in their hands. So, well, the "market for technology" cooperation method is released. The French government allowed Scrooge to take a stake in the French steel companies, and promised to give full national treatment to the steel companies in which Scrooge had a stake. And give appropriate preference to the policy.

Of course, such an operation would require a lot of money, but it was not a big problem for Scrooge. The Germans still owe Scrooge a large sum of money for loans and goods. Now a considerable part of the reparations that the Germans extorted from France went directly to the MacDonald Venture Bank, which then turned around and sent some of the money back to the United States, lent some of it to the French government, and the remaining small part, plus the interest paid by the French government every month, was used to build these projects.

Now the Thiers government has made new requests for loans, and now there are many people who are dissatisfied with the government, who hate their traitorous people, who can revolt and overthrow the government at any time, and on the other hand, the government of the French Third Republic itself is a super strange government, simply put, a republican government in which there is no one in the government and parliament who supports the republican system. There were only three royalist factions in the entire government and parliament – the "Orthodox" who supported the Bourbons, the "Orleans" who supported the Louis Philippe dynasty, and the "Bonapartes" who supported Napoleon's other relatives – and it was only because the three factions were so constrained that it was impossible to determine who would be the Emperor of France, and a so-called republican form of government was created. Even the president of this "republic" openly declared himself a royalist, who was only temporarily president, and who would in the future hand over power to the legitimate king. It's just that the time is not yet ripe.

Although Thiers tried to reconcile the three factions, none of the three factions really trusted him. His presidency was a product of compromise because there were not many people who could accept it with all three factions. But he is not their own man. They need him to bear the charge of betraying the country and suppressing the revolution, and it is really at a critical moment, and it is not impossible to sell him to make a compromise.

This is a common political trick too. The people behind the scenes always have some shady work to do. But it's hard for those who do this work to end well. Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty used his master's father as a knife to deal with the princes, and beheaded him to appease the anger of the princes; Wu Zetian used Zhou Xinglai Junchen as a knife to kill those suspicious ministers, and disposed of them to appease the anger of the ministers. It's nothing more than a knife that doesn't work well and then a new one. But even if you understand this, there is still an endless stream of people who are willing to make knives. And the knife makers don't want to be abandoned like this, they always fantasize that they are a different knife, and they can do it for a long time because of where they can solve thousands of cattle and "the blade is new". It's the same with Thiers. So he had to borrow money again to buy a batch of armaments, to arm a reliable army, and not to require them to be able to defeat the Germans, as long as they could defeat the rebels anytime and anywhere.

And in this matter, is there a better partner to work with than a new friend full of goodwill like the MacDonald consortium? While France and Prussia were negotiating the amount of reparations, their leader, Mr. Scrooge MacDonald, openly spoke out that the Prussians would show the victor's leniency and not put forward excessively harsh conditions. When the socialist rebels in Paris rioted, he openly criticized them for rebelling at a time of national crisis. Moreover, they provided France with loans at relatively lower interest rates, and were willing to help France's troubled agriculture, steel and mining industries out of their troubles. In addition, the power of their weapons has already been proven by the Franco-Prussian war. Any French soldier who fought in the Franco-Prussian War and used the weapons of MacDonald's Infantry Weapons Company was impressed with the weapons they produced. Therefore, Thiers hopes to borrow another amount of money from MacDonald Ventures to buy MacDonald's weapons to protect the good situation of unity in France. He also believed that requests like this, imbued with what Scrooge called win-win wisdom, would be met with a satisfactory response.