The Fallen Continent: Louisiana
Bloodshed in the Bayou State.
Population: 750,000
Largest City: Lafayette
Aux armes, citoyens,
Formez vos bataillons,
Marchons, marchons !
Qu'un sang impur
Abreuve nos sillons !
Introduction
Louisiana was granted several boons that should have helped the state remain as well-off as states like Oregon or Kansas. It had two large surviving cities: Monroe and Lafayette. It had access to the Gulf of Mexico, which provided not only access to fishing and the sea, but also warm tropical currents that made agriculture more viable during the Starving Time. Yet a series of cascading events, made worse by clumsy governmental responses, led to great upheaval that’s forever scarred the state. The first of these is a geographic disaster, and the second is the Louisiana Revolution.
The Two Rivers
Before we explain anything that happened in Louisiana, we need a quick geography lesson. Louisiana is, of course, the flattest state in the Union, and is renowned for its bayous and the Mississippi River delta. The state is so flat that it’s one of the only places in the continent where rivers diverge instead of converge, because the ground doesn’t offer a single path of least resistance.
A thousand years ago, the Red River of the South, which forms the border between Texas and Oklahoma, ran its own course into the Gulf of Mexico. The shifting nature of lowland rivers, however, caused it to change course and draw closer to the Mississippi towards the 15th Century AD. When the Mississippi developed a wide oxbow loop at Turnbull’s Bend, near the infamous Angola Penitentiary, it intersected with the Red River, turning it into a tributary of the Mississippi. The far end of the Red River downstream of Turnbull’s Bend became the Atchafalaya River, a small distributary of the Mississippi.
Turnbull’s Bend slowly began to dry up after Captain Shreve of Shreveport fame dug a canal between the horseshoe ends of the oxbow in 1831. The lower half of the bend became the Old River, which would alternately flow eastward and westward into the Mississippi and Atchafalaya, respectively, depending on the water level. As the 19th Century progressed, however, the Old River was consistently flowing westward; the Red River wanted to return to its original course. If left to their own devices, the Atchafalaya would receive the primary discharge of the Mississippi watershed, and the Mississippi would be left as the shallow distributary, before the two rivers eventually totally separate once more. This cycle is thought to occur naturally every thousand years, and was due to happen again by the 20th Century.
Such an outcome would spell doom for America’s most important waterway and some of its most important cities, so the government had to try and avert it, or at least postpone it. Throughout the 20th Century and well into the 21st, the US Army Corps of Engineers built the Old River Control Structure, a series of dams, locks, and channels that regulates water flow between the Red, Mississippi, Atchafalaya, Upper Old, and Lower Old rivers. Though this feat of engineering was admirable, it was a constant uphill battle to fight against one of the world’s mightiest rivers in such vulnerable lowlands. On several occasions, it nearly failed due to floods and hurricanes.
Being so vital to American economic infrastructure, the Old River Control Structure was naturally a target for enemy missiles in the Great War. Despite a valiant interception effort, missile defense could not destroy the dozens of warheads bound for the locks and hydroelectric stations, and the Structure was destroyed.
Abandoned to the whims of nature, the Atchafalaya flowed freely once more. The ex-distributary immediately took on the Mississippi’s discharge, and began to empty nearly 20,000 cubic meters of water per second into the Gulf of Mexico. The environmental consequences were devastating. Southern Louisiana suffered the worst floods it had ever experienced, dwarfing the mayhem of Hurricane Katrina. Refugees from New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Alexandria, and Lake Charles fled from their destroyed home cities seeking safe haven, and only found submerged wetlands. The fiasco further worsened the already tumultuous situation in Louisiana and pushed it over the edge into total governmental collapse. The end result was the Louisiana Revolution and the formation of one of America’s first communist states.
Today the Atchafalaya remains the primary point of entry into America’s waterways. The river northeast of Turnbull’s Bend is still called the Mississippi, and northwest is still the Red River, but most river traffic passes through Morganville and Sources Krotz (previously Morgan City and Krotz Springs, respectively). The river trade is heavily restricted by the totalitarian Acadian government, however, who holds a stranglehold on what goods inland factions can import from abroad. To circumvent this, many riverboat captains take the longer, riskier route through the diminished lower Mississippi, specifically by taking the Mississippi River—Gulf Outlet Canal. The MRGO was previously dammed up after Hurricane Katrina, but postwar floods spilled over and broke the levees. Abandoned to its fate and considered unsalvageable, most of the New Orleans Exclusion Zone is now underwater, having been reclaimed by the delta.
One would think that nuclear fallout would be a dangerous concern inhibiting river travel—and to some extent it is—but time can heal even the sting of atomic radiation, and most of the fallout has been washed away by now. Of greater concern to the people living downstream of the Old River is runoff industrial pollution in their food and drinking water. Pollutants have taken a hefty toll on the river-dwelling populations of America, and Louisiana is no exception. Though the river’s toxicity is slowly declining, Acadians still know not to drink from the Atchafalaya and to find water and fish elsewhere, if they can help it.
The Louisiana Revolution
While Tony Battista was still on his flight from D.C. to Twin Falls, Louisiana’s antebellum Commissioner of Insurance Jared Magoulas took over the rump government as Acting Governor. He relocated the state government to Opelousas, a former state capital, in the hopes that the move would help maintain legitimacy and continuity. The symbolic intent was sound, but the strategic consequences were not. It lacked sufficient facilities to host the kind of administration needed to tackle the herculean crisis the government was about to face, both from the flood and from the refugees. It was too isolated from the areas that mostly badly needed government assistance, yet was too far removed from the remote corners of the state to make a good screw-off retreat capital for an neglectful hermit government, a la South Dakota or Illinois. Lafayette, being larger and located at a critical interstate junction, would have been the more pragmatic choice for a provisional capital. Settling in at Opelousas wasn’t the worst decision the rump government could have made, but it was a bad portent of the things to come.
The Opelousas Government, as it came to be known, struggled during the first months of the Starving Time, even when they had warmer weather and richer food stocks than their contemporaries in other states. The rationing system was incompetently managed—fish and meat were improperly preserved, leading to spoiling, and improperly prepared by the camp chefs, leading to disease outbreaks. Few governments handled rationing exceptionally well, but Louisiana bungled it worse than other states—and more importantly, they had bad PR. They made no real attempt to hide or justify the fact that rations were obviously prioritized for state officials and their families. This was by no means uncommon, but Acting Governor Magoulas lacked the acumen of someone like Dodge City’s David Brannigan (or even basic warlords), who knew to redirect the people’s frustrations and fears towards some external enemy and absolve themselves of blame. Magoulas was content to let the public know just how comfortable he was in his warm, dry, well-provisioned headquarters, six stories above the flooded Opelousas streets.
The government’s preference for skilled, highly-educated professionals to receive priority rationing was par for the course, but poorly-implemented, and again, poorly-presented to the public ear. Bribery and corruption abounded throughout the muddy refugee camps, leading to black markets and greed-induced violence. Many of the actually-qualified refugees did not possess the documents to prove their professional status and languished in starvation alongside the state’s poorest. Louisiana’s large black population, meanwhile, denounced the program as racist and a deliberate attempt by white elites to starve them all to death.
In spite of Opelousas’ comically mismanaged rationing system, Louisiana initially enjoyed better food security than most states— and yet it still wasn’t enough to feed everybody when the Starving Time set in. Although the weather warmed up earlier than in other states, the floods ensured similarly poor harvests to the northern US, and famine worsened. Faced with floods, starvation, and an apathetic, incompetent government, the mass unrest that was brewing within the refugee camps and shanty towns boiled over into a massive, surprisingly well-coordinated rebellion against the State of Louisiana.
Three main pillars supported this rebellion. The first were the resettled urban refugees, who were mostly poor blacks. The malaise of the Great 21st Century Crisis, combined with political organization among refugees during the Starving Time, had radicalized them into ardent socialist revolutionaries. Joining forces with them were local poor, mostly rural whites, and especially Cajuns. The Cajuns had undergone a radical social transformation of their own during the 21st Century Crisis, and were ideologically similar to the blacks, albeit with a more nationalistic bent to their socialism. Finally, there was the key to the Louisiana Revolution’s success: the defectors. Most of the troops under Acting Governor Magoulas’ control were Louisiana National Guardsmen and US Army Reservists who were either already mobilizing for WWIII or were drawn up on the day of the Great War. Many of these troops were just as hungry and wet as the rebels, and were hesitant to fire on them. The 256th Infantry Brigade Combat Team in Lafayette openly sided with the rebels and joined their cause; they were the ones who officially organized the rebellion into the Louisiana Transitional Government and ousted the rump state in Opelousas.
With the Louisiana National Guard’s largest, best-equipped unit now on the side of the rebels, dämmerung fell for Opelousas. Governor Magoulas was captured and executed by firing squad; his body was given over to the mob to rip apart afterward. Other members of his government met a similar fate, or else fled into the swamps and NEZs to eke out a living somewhere else. A select few low-level officials in other towns throughout southern Louisiana survived, thanks to the intervention of the National Guard. Most of the survivors fled to Natchitoches or Bogalusa, and a few made it to Natchez and Mansfield. A single state legislator and his retinue managed to commandeer a working aircraft and escape to Dodge City, where they established a Louisiana government-in-exile that officially represents the state within the Dodge City Convention. With Opelousas gone, the entirety of southern Louisiana was defenseless to the LTG rebels.
The Transitional Government was not, however, an entirely unified force, and soon split along racial and ideological lines. The revolution had been waged mostly by minorities: the blacks and the Cajuns, both of whom immediately began to distrust each other once the dust had settled. After a series of internal conflicts, purges, and small-scale rebellions, the quasi-nationalist Cajuns tamed the military, seized control, and purged the blacks from their government. What followed was the Acadian National Revolution, the most brutal series of targeted killings ever enacted in American history.
Republique Populaire Acadien
Acadian People’s Republic
Capital: Lafayette
Classification: Left-Wing Ideological Regime (Totalitarian dictatorship)
The Acadian People’s Republic is a dream decades in the making, though some might describe it as more of a nightmare. Its roots lie in the Great 21st Century Crisis, when political polarization led to the formation of the Acadian1 Movement, a left-wing nationalist program promoting the re-adoption of French culture across Louisiana and the national consciousness of the Cajun people. This movement established a network of politically-active Cajuns who were waiting for the opportunity to assert their independence. When the refugees laid siege to Opelousas, it was Paul Blanchard and his Acadian People’s Party (Parti Populaire Acadien, or PPA) leading the charge.
Blanchard was a public defender before the Great War, and took control of the PPA after its leaders were killed in the bombing of Lake Charles. In the early months of the Great War, he courted the remnants of the party structure, the discontented refugees in the government camps, and the Cajun survivalists and militiamen coming out of the woodwork and brought them all under his wing as the public face of the Acadian Movement. Blanchard masterminded the PPA’s involvement in the Transitional Government and whipped up a revolutionary fervor with his left-nationalist rhetoric. He described the Democrats as “lying fascists,” the Republicans as “honest fascists,” capitalism as “the cruelest ideology ever invented,” denounced government-issued vaccines as poisonous, and promoted homeopathy in the place of modern medicine, among other idiosyncratic positions.
Although a part of the Louisiana Transitional Government, the PPA developed into a rival power structure of its own and politically outmaneuvered the chaotic Lafayette government, which was then reaping the rewards of a disastrous experiment with direct democracy. The 256th Infantry BGT challenged the PPA’s bid for dominance, but was exhausted, undermanned, and in low spirits. Moreover, they were unpopular due to the clemency they gave to former members of the Opelousas Government, and their doomed efforts to try and feed everybody equally were denounced by the PPA as keeping “useless eaters” alive while the working class starved. Blanchard and the PPA raised their own army, the Acadian Red Guards, and ousted the beleaguered National Guard after a brief civil war.
Now sitting in office, Blanchard realized that there were far too many mouths to feed and too few skilled personnel to administer his state. The weather was finally getting warmer, but the floods were still a serious problem, and the masses still languished in damp, filthy, overcrowded, malaria-ridden camps. In short, the Transitional Government was badly overextended and might not survive the Starving Time if nothing was done about it. Sitting in the same precarious position as Acting Governor Magoulas before him, Blanchard had to act fast before the masses turned on him. Devising a solution, he whipped up nationalist fervor among his core Cajun support base and told them that the blacks were the source of their problems. These lazy blacks, he said, were not working, yet were eating all of the food. He asserted that surviving, treasonous elements of the Opelousas government and National Guard were still at work within the LTG and were fomenting a rebellion against the French Acadian people; there would be a coming war of race and class, and the capitalists planned to use the blacks as foot soldiers against the true, honest workers of Acadia.
Acting upon this rhetoric, he launched a brutal purge, liquidating any and all elements of the prewar government he could find. Petty officials, former national guardsmen and police officers, and especially black leaders were all executed. Blanchard went for the black population as a whole next and provoked a brief, but furious race war that raged across Louisiana among blacks and whites for the duration of the Starving Time. Throughout the conflict, the PPA successfully positioned the Cajun people as the champions of both the working class and the white race, and began the ongoing process of forcibly assimilating the white population into French culture (to this day, French remains the only legal language in Acadia). Blanchard’s leadership and initiative carried the Acadians to victory, and nearly all of the Transitional Government’s black population died or fled north. Those who escaped founded a powerful faction of their own in Natchez, Mississippi.
Part-way through the race war, now referred to by Acadia as “the Acadian Patriotic War,” Blanchard officially dissolved the LTG, declared Louisiana and the United States of America to be capitalist sham countries, and proclaimed Acadia’s independence as the Republique Populaire Acadien: the Acadian People’s Republic. He drafted a provisional constitution and placed the country under martial law that was to stay in effect until the end of the “national emergency,” however long that could have been.
The Louisiana Transitional Government was no more, and Blanchard was the supreme leader of Acadia. Yet even with the blacks gone, there were still too many mouths to feed. While most factions solved this issue by abandoning large sections of their territory to anarchy, Blanchard chose to maintain his frontiers and kill off the excess mouths instead. His solution was the “Acadian National Revolution,” which was officially instigated in order to “implement socialism in one country and fully realize the ambition and potential of the Acadian people.”
The Red Guards killed anyone connected to the old regime. They killed their families. They killed clergymen and they killed devout laity. They killed right-wing dissidents and liberal dissidents alike. They killed virtually all of the blacks left in southern Louisiana. They killed whites—including Anglophone Cajuns—who refused to learn the French language. They killed bankers, financiers, anyone who worked in a bank in any capacity, and anyone who worked as management in the private sector in general. From Promethean Energy moguls to the former assistant manager of a Best Buy in some town halfway across the state, no one was spared the wrath of the Revolution. They killed Jews, charging them with the crimes of “Zionism” and “inherent capitalist tendencies.” What few foreigners could be still found in Acadia were killed on the grounds of “inherent culturally regressive tendencies” and “attempted genocide of the Acadian people.”
Blanchard didn’t necessarily believe all of his propaganda (just most of it), but he needed all the excuses he could find to kill off a large enough portion of the population that he could feed everyone else and stave off the threat of another revolution. The Acadian National Revolution killed over one million people through a combination of massacres, executions, disease, starvation, and forced labor. In terms of achieving its primary goals, it was successful—Louisiana had one of the lowest starvation rates in the country, and Paul Blanchard successfully cowed all political opposition to create an extremely stable country, albeit one up to its ankles in blood. But as for saving lives, the number of people killed in the Revolution is approximately the same as how many people might have starved, had it never taken place. The Cajun people were aware of this even then, but supported the Revolution on the grounds of “it’s us or them.”
By the end of the Starving Time, the population had been culled to manageable levels, and Blanchard declared the Revolution complete. Only then did the PPA institute a constitution for the republic, which was approved in a plebiscite by a vote of 100.00% with a 99.70% turnout rate. The country continues to hold regular elections with similar electoral results.
Decades later, the Acadian People’s Republic has a strong agricultural industry, and its population is finally beginning to recover from the nadir it reached following Acadian National Revolution. It possesses a decent industrial base, but suffers from an extreme lack of skilled labor and competent administrators. Its greatest economic boon is the Atchafalaya River, by giving the Republic a stranglehold on trade between the Mississippi River basin and the outside world. They allow other factions to pass through the river but charge cutthroat rates in exchange for access. The river itself still presents an environmental challenge to Acadia with its frequent floods and runoff pollution from rivers upstream.
The Acadian military is large, ideologically loyal, and decently-equipped, but it is poorly trained and led thanks to a lack of good officers. It can currently defend its own territory, but cannot hope to expand in its current state. Blanchard, meanwhile, is now a very old man, and must prepare his country for a future without him. With his appetite for blood sated, Blanchard he has eased up on his psychopathic tendencies since the National Revolution. But make no mistake, the RPA is undeniably a communist police state. If Acadia wishes to survive the coming trials, it must find a way to staff its military, government, and industry with skilled personnel and prepare for Blanchard’s passing.
American Empire
Capital: Bogalusa
Classification: Right-Wing Ideological Regime (Klan state)
Imperial State of Louisiana
Capital: Bogalusa
Classification: Right-Wing Ideological Regime (Klan state)
Allegiance: American Empire
The “Florida Parishes” of Louisiana east of the Mississippi were left to fend for themselves after a continuous blanket of fallout from the Old River to the sea geographically severed them from the rest of the state. Seven of the eight Parishes (East Baton Rouge was obviously gone) formed a regional association, the Florida Parishes Co-Operative, to maintain continuity of government in the wake of the Great War; their capital was located in Bogalusa on the border with Mississippi.
The Florida Parishes didn’t immediately break with Opelousas, but the geographic isolation politically differentiated them from the rest of the state. They were in closer cooperation with the State of Mississippi than they were Louisiana, and also placed a heavy reliance on right-wing militias and vigilantes to fight back against refugee gangs from New Orleans and Baton Rouge. When right-wing figures from throughout the American South assembled in Hattiesburg, Mississippi and held the Regenerated Congress, the Florida Parishes sent a delegation to represent the State of Louisiana. This bizarre arrangement of dual loyalty to the conflicting powers of Opelousas and the Regenerated Congress persisted until the Lafayette revolutionaries toppled the Opelousas Government. Rather than establish an emergency government or join the state police regime in Natchitoches, the Florida Parishes leaned more heavily into their far-right support base and held their own round of state elections.
This is when the Ku Klux Klan first comes into play. Though far-right groups throughout the country surged in membership during the Great 21st Century Crisis, the Klan languished in obscurity, with a tarnished reputation as a miniscule, disunited, and obsolete group filled with senile hicks and federal informants. The Klan’s fortunes changed, however, when Opelousas fell and the revolutionary terror began. Thousands of people fled from the revolution, and those not yet touched by it feared they would be next.
The Bayou Knights of the Ku Klux Klan—the largest KKK organization left in Louisiana—successfully capitalized on this fear and swelled their ranks with loyal members. In a manner not too dissimilar to Paul Blanchard’s propagandizing across the Mississippi, the Bayou Knights positioned themselves as the defenders of law and order and the saviors of white, Christian Americans against the twin threats of black warlordism and French communism. The Bayou Knights’ Grand Imperial Wizard, Jeffrey D. Mouton, grew powerful enough to incorporate the other remaining Klan organizations, amalgamating them all into the Invisible Empire of the Ku Klux Klan.
Mouton leveraged his military and political power into a contentious but successful campaign in the Bogalusa government’s first Gubernatorial election. As both Grand Imperial Wizard and elected Governor, he facilitated Louisiana’s entry into the Regenerated Congress and gained notoriety as its most prominent white nationalist voice. Just like Noah Hopkins, the Oklahoman who represented the Christian nationalist faction of the Regenerated Congress, the white nationalist Mouton was shut out of national elections by more pragmatic center-right establishment politicians. Joined by a host of far-right dissidents, Mouton broke off from the Regenerated Congress and denounced it. Holding a new congress of his own, he proclaimed the birth of the American Empire.
Far from being a traditional monarchy, the American Empire blends traditional American government with the paramilitary and ideological structure of the Ku Klux Klan. The Empire itself is divided into two halves, the Visible Empire, which is the public face of the government, and the Invisible Empire: the Klan and its party structure. Posts in the government are linked to those of the Klan; the Governor of the Imperial State of Louisiana, for instance, is tied to the post of Grand Dragon of the Louisiana Klan. The American Emperor is tied to the title of Grand Imperial Wizard. In this sense, the American Empire is an elective monarchy, though the Emperor in “visible” settings is treated more like a “first citizen” and a civilian dictator than a real monarch (as opposed to monarchs like King Malcolm of the Ozarks or King Leonard of Cushing).
Life within the American Empire is comparable to other far-right regimes. They are not as intellectual as the Northwest American Republic; they are staunchly Christian, but not as blindly fanatical as some of the “Kingdom of God” factions. They are not genocidal like the George Washington Legion, nor do they practice slavery; they want to rule over America and its citizens, be they white or black—not kill them. They do practice Jim Crow laws, however, and have instituted a new legal code (the Empire runs off of civic law and not common law, which is a unique quirk to Louisiana) that includes specific racial laws based on the Nuremburg Laws of Nazi Germany. Lynchings do occur within the Empire, but remain illegal and are not sanctioned by the government or by the Klan. Still, the American Empire is not too much more than another right-wing militia regime with limited control over its territory outside the main towns and highways. They aren’t in a great position to consistently enforce both the racial codes and lynching laws, and have more pressing matters to attend to than hunting down every racial vigilante gang.
The relatively (load-bearing relatively) moderate outlook of the Klan compared to some other far-right regimes is in part due to the government infrastructure inherited from previous regimes. While the Klan rules the government and not the other way around—unlike how the Regenerated Congress hoped things would go—they cooperate with local authorities more than one would expect. Another factor contributing to this relationship is the political legitimacy afforded by the dramatic rise of totalitarian Acadia, making even the hated KKK seem reasonable by comparison.
After declaring independence, the war with the Regenerated Congress developed to the Klan’s advantage, leading to the capture of southwest Mississippi. They would have pressed on towards Hattiesburg, had the Selma Government of Alabama not marched in and occupied the city themselves. Now the Regenerated Congress is no more, and Hattiesburg is little more than a client state and a buffer of its Alabaman patron. Both the American Empire and Hattiesburg—Selma are not strong enough to destroy the other outright, so they continue to sit and scowl at each other and wait for the situation to change until one of them gains an advantage.
Creole Republic
Capital: Natchez, Mississippi
Classification: Local Government (Local secessionist republic)
Further up the Mississippi, beyond the Old River, is the Creole Republic. They began as a local county cooperative, not unlike the Florida Parishes, and were likewise partnered with their neighbors across the river. They took on the incredible task of trying to accommodate the hordes of refugees coming north from Baton Rouge and south from Vicksburg, and were an especially attractive destination for those trying to escape the Atchafalaya floods.
The already hard-pressed “Mississippi Refugee Resettlement Zone” had an even greater challenge ahead of it when Blanchard instigated the “Acadian Patriotic War” and effectively committed genocide against the black population of southern Louisiana. Hundreds of thousands of blacks came tramping north to the safety of Natchez and Farriday, and the Zone did not have the resources to feed all of them. Though most starved, many still survived and changed the fabric of their adoptive homes. The more politically-organized factions within the refugee community were integrated into the political framework of the Zone and helped facilitate its secession from the United States as the Creole Republic.
The Creole Republic is ideologically driven by black nationalism, but in a far more moderate and tempered form than in other instances. Unlike their counterparts in South Carolina, the Natchez Creoles largely abandoned the trappings of Marxism; Blanchard’s RPA obviously tainted the reputation of the ideology, and the most committed black socialists were already killed by the Acadian Red Guards when they tried to stand their ground down south. Instead, the Creole Republic is characterized by the continuation of the MRRZ’s authoritarian emergency government. The ruling establishment likes to describe it as “sensible centrism” to avoid the ideological excesses of the Acadians and the KKK, but the reality is less saccharine than their propaganda entails. A growing issue within the Creole Republic is that of discrimination against darker-skinned citizens on the part of the mostly lighter-skinned and mixed-race political leadership.
Geopolitically, they’re in a good spot for the time being. They don’t have much in the way of industry, but they have a large population and a strong agricultural base. They’ve successfully expanded into the anarchy of northeast Louisiana and incorporated it into their Republic, and have earned a valuable ally in the Kingdom of the Ozarks. Though the Ozarks maintain measured silence on questions of racial equality, they understand the utility of the Creole Republic as a southern buffer state and an ally against their mutual enemies in Natchitoches. The result is a series of military and economic agreements and one of the very rare instances of a straight-line border between two independent factions.
Patriarch of Alexandria
Capital: New Alexandria (Marksville)
Classification: Religious Faction (Theocratic state)
From his see in “New Alexandria,” the Patriarch of Alexandria proudly holds the line against northward communist expansion. This regime originated as a band of refugees from Alexandria who resettled in nearby Marksville. They had already started taking to calling the town “New Alexandria” in reference to their home, but “Marksville” became a wholly inappropriate name following the rise of the communists to the south. New Alexandria already had a politically-rightist bent, and eagerly received rightist, mostly Protestant refugees from the south.
Among these exiles was an Anglican priest, one of the more outspoken dissidents against the Blanchard regime, who had led a large flock of emigres with him to the northern haven. There, he cultivated an even larger following and eventually took over the city outright as a prophet-warlord. He split off from the Church of England (which underwent a crisis in leadership after it took too long to effectively respond to the Great War) and proclaimed himself to be the Patriarch of Alexandria and All America, the primate of the Church of the United States.
Though their neighbors decry them as overzealous madmen, the people of Alexandria know that they alone serve as the first line of defense against godless communist tyranny.
Beauregard Parish
Capital: DeRidder
Classification: Religious Faction (Theocratic county government)
Located southwest of New Alexandria is another theocratic state, or rather the continuation of a prewar government, now placed under the effective control of a postwar Catholic holy order. That government is Beauregard Parish, and the Order of St. Amos is the power behind the throne.
St. Amos was a leader of the Louisiana Catholic community—both French and English—during the horrible time of persecution and starvation after the Great War. He adopted some radical changes in his quest to defend the Catholic faith in the face of the Acadian National Revolution, which some decry as borderline heretical, yet others defend as necessary given their harsh circumstances, or even a return to true Catholic teaching that’s been neglected by the mother Church. Shedding much of the intellectualism that shapes the modern Catholic Church, Amos adopted mystical principles and practices, claiming to follow the early Church Fathers in a patristically-minded fashion. He stressed an emphasis on contemplative, non-imaginative prayer, avoiding spiritual prelest, revelatory mysticism instead of intellectual theological study, and a decreased emphasis on Papal primacy (a necessary evil, considering the destruction of Rome and the extremely limited contact Americans enjoyed with the relocated Papacy in São Paulo).
He earned the ire of many Catholics, especially those overseas, but gathered a large following throughout Louisiana, wrote many religious texts, founded a mendicant order, and established communications with the Holy See before he was martyred by the Red Guard during Blanchard’s reign of terror. The Papacy confirms the canonicity of the Order of St. Amos as well as Amos’ saintly status, but is a little hesitant to do so. They don’t like everything the Amosites are doing, but want to extend the hand of friendship to the persecuted Louisiana Catholic community and prevent them from sliding into outright schism or apostasy. The Amosites and the Holy See mostly communicate through the more neutral channel of the St. Paul Republic and its Diocese of Alabama.
Although Amos died in Acadia, most of his followers survived the perilous exodus to DeRidder, which was previously under the control of an emergency county government. Beauregard Parish was terrified that Blanchard might turn his gaze east and attack them, so they willingly accepted the Amosites and their accompanying laity to bolster their population and man their defenses. The Order quickly grew into the most powerful force in the parish and overshadowed the government in importance. Under pressure from the Order, Beauregard Parish ended the emergency government and began holding regular elections, in which the Amosite-backed Christian Party consistently wins by landslides. Eccentric though they may be, the Amosites are well-meaning and charitable people who can competently and diligently administer their small territory. Sometimes the Order can be overbearing and hysterical, however, with the townsfolk often giving way to moral panics over Marian apparitions. Most controversially, the Beauregard County penal code includes flagellations for sins, and public floggings are a common offense for petty crimes.
Though they are a surviving county government with democratic processes, like DeSoto Parish up north, Beauregard Parish declined to join Desoto’s state government, much less the Republic of Texas that later absorbed it. They remain on good terms with Nacogdoches, even if the Texians see them as odd and cult-like. They are heavily dependent on the Republic of Texas for their military defense, and the Texians consider them an indispensable buffer against the Acadians.
Acadia, for their part, is content to let Beauregard County stay. Although the underground Catholic community is a continued nuisance, they don’t pose an imminent threat against the PPA’s political order. After he had made his point with a few targeted massacres, Blanchard was actually content to let them leave Acadia back in the National Revolution, as it meant less dissidents and less mouths to feed—which was the main goal of the purges in the first place. Acadia has bigger, more pressing problems for the near future, mostly concerning an increasingly-unified voice among the Mississippi River factions that want to break their stranglehold on the river trade; a few loud-mouthed Catholics don’t seem to pose much of a threat. And, at any rate, they don’t want to share a border with the Republic of Texas either.
State of Louisiana
Capital: Mansfield
Classification: Local Government (Re-founded secessionist state government)
Allegiance: Republic of Texas
When the rest of Louisiana was cast adrift at the start of the revolution, DeSoto Parish withdrew into isolation and hunkered down to stay alive. Like the nearby state police regime in Natchitoches, DeSoto denied entry to refugees and adopted a strict localist platform. DeSoto was strong and remote enough to avoid incorporation into the Louisiana Emergency Council, and instead drew closer to the Texans in Nacogdoches for trade and defense. They formed a reliable eastern flank for Nacogdoches, and they returned the favor with a guarantee of independence to keep the state police at bay.
This relationship was formalized some time after Nacogdoches proclaimed the Republic of Texas. DeSoto matched the declaration by holding their own Gubernatorial elections as the new State of Louisiana, which only the Texian government recognized. They continued their relationship as independent allies until the Texian government adopted a federal model and incorporated the III Corps Military District as a constituent state of the Republic of Texas. Two weeks after the second Texian constitution was adopted (or third, if you count the constitution of the 1836 Republic), the Mansfield government of Louisiana petitioned Texas for incorporation into their union.
The Mansfield government, commonly known as Texian Louisiana, is something of an aberration in the Republic of Texas. They’ve reformed their electoral system and voting franchise to match the State of East Texas, but retain the old Louisiana legal code, heavily amended for post-apocalyptic use. Unlike the United States of America, the Republic of Texas does not have a flat two senators per state; instead, the number of senators is variable and is based on districts that represent roughly equal portions of the population which are to be redrawn once a decade with every census. As such, Louisiana currently has only two senators to East Texas’ twelve and III Corps six military adjutants (who sit in lieu of senators until the military government democratizes). It also has six members in the Texian House of Representatives, to East Texas’ thirty-six and III Corps’ eighteen.
Most relevant to the rest of Louisiana is Texian Louisiana’s territorial claims. They reject the Spanish-American boundaries established by the Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819 and claim the entire borders of the old New Spanish province of the New Philippines (that is, pre-Mexican Texas), stretching all the way to the Red and Atchafalaya rivers. This means that they consider part of the ALEC, all of Beauregard Parish, and most of the Acadian People’s Republic to be their rightful territory. There are a few warhawks in Texas who really do want to press these claims and restore “the natural borders of Texas,” but most of Republican Texas really doesn’t care, and considers it more of a legal fiction to justify the inclusion of Mansfield in the Republic. Their non-aggression towards any of the Louisianan factions is evidence of their real motives. Given the ongoing wars in central Texas and the even bigger ones shaping up further west, it will likely be a very long time before the Republic of Texas turns its gaze towards Louisiana—if they can even survive until then.
Arkansas-Louisiana Emergency Council
Capital: Natchitoches
Classification: State Legacy (State law enforcement regime)
While Opelousas was on fire, the Louisiana State Police was busy administering the remains of northwest Louisiana on the state government’s behalf. When Opelousas fell, the most of the few remaining state officials fled north along with the loyal remnants of the National Guard, who didn’t join the 256th Infantry BGT in siding with the revolutionaries. There was not much left in the way of civilian government in Louisiana anymore, so the northwest fell under martial law as a police state. A token state government does exist in Natchitoches, made up of bench-warmers from Opelousas who escaped with little more than their lives. But its existence is a legal fiction, a mere rubber stamp for the real powers of the region, the Arkansas-Louisiana Emergency Council.
It was originally just the Louisiana Emergency Council, a diarchy between the Superintendent of the Louisiana State Police and the Adjutant-General of the Louisiana National Guard. They cooperated closely with a similar state police regime in El Dorado, Arkansas, however, and incorporated the rump El Dorado government into the Council following the fall of the Hot Springs military government and the rise of the Kingdom of the Ozarks. Now the diarchy is a triumvirate and includes the Arkansas Acting Secretary of Public Safety alongside the two Louisiana members. Although Natchitoches is the official capital and is host to the State Police, Monroe and El Dorado are unofficially secondary capitals.
The ALEC’s rule is austere even among postwar law enforcement and National Guard regimes. They’re better to live under than most warlords, but they authoritarian and repressive nonetheless. Where most police states would disperse rioting crowds with nightsticks and riot shields, the State Police in Natchitoches were not shy of opening fire on dissenters with live ammunition. The most infamous episode in the ALEC’s history was the Siege of Monroe, when they captured it from the Monroe Monsters, the city’s previous rulers. The Monsters were an undeniably brutal and wicked gang, but the intense collateral damage and high civilian casualties caused by the ALEC’s intense assault remain a subject of controversy.
From the very start, the State Police denied entry to most refugees on principle, and were extremely stingy with rations even among those who already lived under their rule. They opened up a little more following the Acadian Revolution by selectively incorporating skilled refugees (almost all of whom were white Anglo-Americans), but it pales in comparison to the likes of Natchez, DeRidder, or even Bogalusa. The Council owes its continued existence to Paul Blanchard and the RPA, and uses the fear of communist aggression to keep a tight leash on its subjects. The ALEC is officially an English-language organization, and speaking French in public is a crime punishable by six months’ penal servitude.
Having inherited the El Dorado government and its sour disposition towards the Ozarks, they are the natural enemy of the King in Hot Springs. They also don’t think kindly of the Creoles, the Republic of Texas, or really anyone else in their close vicinity. They do view the Dodge City government fondly, however, and have petitioned President Haldeman for membership in the Dodge City Convention. Dodge City’s response is that they already have a Louisiana government-in-exile, and Natchitoches can rejoin the Union as soon as they recognize the Governor-in-exile’s authority and start holding statewide elections. Unsurprisingly, the Emergency Council is loth to comply with Dodge City’s demands. They previously supported the Kahului government in a mostly symbolic gesture up until its dissolution during the Hawaiian Spring. Today, they’re thinking of shifting their support to the naval government in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, for whom political liberalization is not a pressing concern.
Index
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In late 20th and early 21st Century parlance, the Francophone region of southern Louisiana was referred to as “Acadiana.” This term originated as a typo by the American Broadcasting Company in 1963 and caught on. The Acadian Movement did not use this term and preferred to call the region by its older name of “Acadia.”
I feel a disturbance in the force. Somewhere, LifeIsBeutiful is rambling on about how Acadia is the most basedest tradest country in the world...