Divergence

What if Napoleon had refused to sell Louisiana, and a five-piastre note today carried its value in French, English and Kouri-Vini across a French Gulf federation of thirty-six million?

Because Napoleon spares Saint-Domingue the Guadeloupe slavery decree and keeps its freed army instead of reinforcing it, he refuses to liquidate Louisiana in 1803 and cedes only the Mississippi's east bank to the United States, mortgaging the rest through Baring and Hope. Eleven years of self-rule around the Balize toll-house, an 1852 refusal of the Bonapartist oath, and federation with the Antilles follow. Today the Fédération française d'Amérique holds thirty-six million people from New Orleans to the Missouri and the Platte, its piastre floating and its currency legislated in French, English and Kouri-Vini.

Fiction. Every episode departs from a documented historical fact and unrolls a world that never happened.

What if Montcalm had refused battle on the Plains of Abraham in 1759, and the shell crater dug for his grave still lay empty under a brass grille in the Ursuline chapel this morning, because the general lived eleven years longer than he was supposed to?

Montcalm's refusal to fight on the Plains of Abraham in 1759 saves Quebec, but not the colony: three thousand starve before spring, and Spain's Family Compact of 1761 keeps Canada French in 1763. A neutral barrier shuts the Ohio to both crowns, New England rises alone against a crowned Philadelphia, and civil war over slavery in 1857-1864 moves the capital to Saint-Louis-des-Illinois. By 2026 a French-speaking federation of ninety million faces British America's hundred thirty million, the piastre a reserve currency and the Académie française seated in Montreal.

Fiction. Every episode departs from a documented historical fact and unrolls a world that never happened.