Wednesday, October 1, 1800. Spain ceded Louisiana to France in return for Tuscany.

Today In Wyoming's History: October 1: 

1800         Spain cedes Louisiana to France in return for Tuscany. Spain retained, however the right of first refusal on the territory.

It was by way of the Treaty of San Ildefonso.

Preliminary and Secret Treaty between the French Republic and His Catholic Majesty the King of Spain, Concerning the Aggrandizement of His Royal Highness the Infant Duke of Parma in Italy and the Retrocession of Louisiana. 

His Catholic Majesty having always manifested an earnest desire to procure for His Royal Highness the Duke of Parma an aggrandizement which would place his domains on a footing more consonant with his dignity; and the French Republic on its part having long since made known to His Majesty the King of Spain its desire to be again placed in possession of the colony of Louisiana; and the two Governments having exchanged their views on these two subjects of common interest, and circumstances permitting them to assume obligations in this regard which, so far as depends on them, win assure mutual satisfaction, they have authorized for this purpose the foUowinz: the French Republic, the Citizen Alexandre Berthier General in Chief, and His Catholic Majesty, Don Mariano Luis de Urquijo, knight of the Order of Charles III, and of that of St. John of Jerusalem, a Counselor of State, his Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary appointed near the Batavian Republic, and his First Secretary of State ad interim, who, having exchanged their powers, have agreed upon the following articles, subject to ratification.

ARTICLE 1

The French Republic undertakes to procure for His Royal Highness the Infant Duke of Parma an aggrandizement of territory which shad increase the population of his domains to one minion inhabitants, with the title of King and with all the rights which attach to the royal dignity; and the French Republic undertakes to obtain in this regard the assent of His Majesty the Emperor and King and that of the other interested states' BO that His Highness the Infant Duke of Parma may be put into possession of the said territories without opposition upon the conclusion of the peace to be made between the French Republic and His Imperial Majesty.

ARTICLE 2

The aggrandizement to be given to His Royal Highness the Duke of Parma may consist of Tuscany, in case the present negotiations of the French Government with His Imperial Majesty shall permit that Government to dispose thereof; or it may consist of the three Roman legations or of any other continental provinces of Italy which form a rounded state.

ARTICLE 3

His Catholic Majesty promises and undertakes on his part to retrocede to the French Republic, six months after the full and entire execution of the above conditions and provisions regarding His Royal Highness the Duke of Parma, the colony or province of Louisiana, with the same extent that it now has in the hands of Spain and that it had when France possessed it, and such as it ought to be according to the treaties subsequently concluded between Spain and other states.

ARTICLE 4

His Catholic Majesty will give the necessary orders for the occupation of Louisiana by France as soon as the territories which are to form the arrandizement of the Duke of Parma shall be placed in the hands of His Royal Highness. The French Republic may, according to its convenience, postpone the taking of possession; when that is to be executed, the states directly or indirectly interested will agree upon such further conditions as their common interests and the interest of the respective inhabitants require.

ARTICLE 5

His Catholic Majesty undertakes to deliver to the French Republic in Spanish ports in Europe, one month after the execution of the provision with regard to the Duke of Parma, six ships of war in good condition built for seventy-four guns, armed and equipped and ready to receive French crews and supplies.

ARTICLE 6

As the provisions of the present treaty have no prejudicial object and leave intact the rights of an, it is not to be supposed that they win give offense to any power. However, if the contrary shall happen and if the two states, because of the execution thereof, shall be attacked or threatened, the two powers agree to make common cause not only to repel the aggression but also to take conciliatory measures prosper for the maintenance of peace with all their neighbors.

ARTICLE 7

The obligations contained in the present treaty derogate in no respect from those which are expressed in the Treaty of Alliance signed at San Ildefonso on the 2d Fructidor, year 4 (August 19, 1796); on the contrary they unite anew the interests of the two powers and assure the guaranties stipulated in the Treaty of Alliance for all cases in which they should be applied.

ARTICLE 8

The ratifications of these preliminary articles shall be effected and exchanged within the period of one month, or sooner if possible, counting from the day of the signature of the present treaty.

In faith whereof we, the undersigned Ministers Plenipotentiary of the French Republic and of His Catholic Majesty, in virtue of our respective powers, have signed these preliminary articles and have affixed thereto our seals.

Done at San Ildefonso the 9th Vendemiaire, 9th year of the French Republic (October 1, 1800)

[Seal] ALEXANDRE BIRTHIER

[Seal] MARIANO LUIS DE URQUIJO

In Memoriam. Claudia Cardinale

Tunisian born Claudia Cardinale has died at age 87.  Her entry into film came after being chosen as the most beautiful girl in Tunisia, where her Sicilian parents were immigrants.

One of the Italian (in her case Sicilian) bombshells of the 1960s, Cardinale is famous for a series of well regarded Italian movies, but perhaps best known in the US (outside of film aficionados) for her unlikely role as the Mexican heroin in The Professionals and again as the heroin in Once Upon A Time In The West.  8 1/2 may be her best known Italian film.

She was married once, and had two children, the first of whom when she was a teenager and whom was the result of a rape.  Her parents raised that child as her brother until her true mother was revealed to him when he was eight years old.

In addition to Sicilian and English, she spoke French.

Overshadowed in the US by Sophia Loren, she was known as "Italy's girlfriend".

Lex Anteinternet: Monday, September 10, 1945. Eh? (Additional Labels)

Lex Anteinternet: Monday, September 10, 1945. Eh?: Post war news items were getting a bit weird. Mike the Headless chicken was ineffectively beheaded, and would go on to become sort of a frea...

Monday, September 7, 1925. Failed landing at Al Hoceima.

It was Labor Day.

Nolan Motors, I'd note, was still in business into the 1990s.

The Spanish Army attempted to make an amphibious landing at Alhucemas Bay at Spanish Morocco.  It was a complete and disastrous failure.

General Maurizio Ferrante Gonzaga was appointed by Prime Minister Mussolini as the Commandant-General of the Fascist Party's Voluntary Militia for National Security (MSVN),  the "Blackshirts".

British troops fired on Chinese protesters at Shanghai.

Last edition:

Saturday, September 5, 1925. Picnic Etiquette

Labels: 1680s, 1688, 1920s, 1925, Art, Calvin Coolidge, Cartoons, Catholic, Christianity, Ethel Hays, French Empire, New York, religion, Weather

Sunday, August 22, 1915. Hill 60.

The Australian 2nd Division launched a dawn attack in the Battle of Hill 60.  It was unsuccessful.

And. well. . . 

Last edition:

Friday, August 20, 1915. Nicholas II takes command of the Russian Army.

Labels: 1910s, 1915, Art, Battle of Hill 60, Battle of Sari Bair, Battle of Scimitar Hill, British Army, Czar Nicholas II, Gallipoli, Imperial Russian Army, Landing at Suvla Bay, Monarchy, Russia, World War One

Friday, July 30, 1925. The Manka Schultz Ice Company.

Khan Manka partnered with Dutch Schultz (Arthur Simon Flegenheimer) to form the Manka Schultz Ice Company.  Manka was partnering with Schultz in order to advance his movie industry career.

Albania ceded parts of its territory to neighboring Yugoslavia including the village of Džepište and the Monastery of Saint Naum, as part of repayment for Yugoslavian help in defending Albania against claims by Italy.

Last edition:

Wednesday, July 29, 1925. Traffic stop.

Labels: 1920s, 1925, Automobiles, Catholic, Cats, Christianity, Fascism, Greece, Italy, mehr Mensch sein, New York, police, religion, The Press, Vatican City

Wednesday, July 29, 1925. Traffic stop.

New York, July 29, 1925.

L'Osservatore Romano printed a long list of Fascist offenses against Catholics.

Italy announced a new law providing that any newspaper publishing attacks on the government that were "too strong and too frequent" would receive two warnings, after which the paper would no longer be recognized.

Mikis Theodorakis (Μιχαήλ "Μίκης" Θεοδωράκης), Greek composer known for Zorba the Greek's score, was born.

Last edition:

Tuesday, July 28, 1925. Léon Augustin Lhermitte

Labels: 1880s, 1887, 1920s, 1925, Agrarianism, Art, France, Women

Monday, July 20, 1925. Salkhad.

Druze rebels captured the French Army garrison at Salkhad.

Sheikh Sultan el-Atrash, leader of Druze revolt in October, 1925.

The Druze have been in the news recently given a conflict between the Druze, who tend to be allied to Israel, and Bedouins.  

Nobody ever wanted the French in Syria, excepting of course, the French.

Italy and Yugoslavia signed the Treaty of Nettuno.  The treaty allowed Italians to emigrate to Dalmatia, and was opposed by the Croatian Peasant Party, causing Yugoslavia to take three years to ratify it.

Boise City, Oklahoma, was incorporated.

Last edition:

Saturday, July 18, 1925. Nazi tome and Scopes trial.

Labels: 1920s, 1925, Adolf Hitler, Art, Evolutionary Biology, German Weimar Republic, Germany, law, Nazi Party, Science, Tennessee, The written word

Saturday, July 14, 1945. Verboten und Nicht Verboten

Eisenhower announced the closure of SHAEF.

Eisenhower also eased the fraternization rules between Allied troops and German civilians allowing Allied soldiers to chat and speak to German civilians.  

Nazi German poster recruiting women for for the Reichsluftschutzbund, i.e. civil defense.  Women, and teenage boys, later served on antiaircraft gun crews.  A few months after the end of the war, the same targeted audience was beginning to become friendly to US troops.

By September nearly all of the rules would be removed.

Fraternization in this context does not mean what people commonly assume it does, but it is more in line with the etymology of the word's origins, from Latin through French:  "to sympathize as brothers".  Eisenhower, who was first of all an administrator, and highly intelligent, recognized that contact between the Western Allies, and with Americans in particular, would help have a corrosive impact on Prussianized and Nazified German culture.  Bans on contacts had already been lifted as to contacts with children, which were impossible to prevent between oversupplied American troops and German children anyhow.  The British, contrary to what is often reported in regard to the development in policy, followed suit.

There was really no danger that French troops were going to fraternize to any significant degree with Germans, nor those of any country the Germans had overrun.  And of course in Russian controlled territory, where Eisenhower's orders didn't apply rapine Red Army troops simply terrorize and brutalized civilians, and not only Germans.

Be that as it may, the inevitable problem that existed with American troops in particular fraternizing in the wider sense was already there.  It had been a problem after World War One during which the American Army had taken steps to stop friendly contacts between Germans and Americans with limited success.  At that time, Americans already were noting in letters home that Germany looked more like the US than France did, in that it was more technologically advanced and cleaner.  By the end of World War Two this was much more the case, with Americans being shocked by what they deemed the primitive conditions the French and Italians lived in, and impressed with the more advanced state of German municipalities.  While its often little noted, a non insignificant number of GIs found themselves not really liking the French and outright horrified by the conditions Italians lived in.

With things being the way they are, even before the end of the war the U.S. Army had trouble keeping soldiers away from German women, which is not to say that all such contacts had only one thing in mind.  Having said that, the conditions that followed the havoc of the Eastern Front and the war in general were having a massive impact on German culture even without Eisenhower seeking to step in and direct it.  The German military had been huge with a very large number of German men in it.  Many of them were killed during the war and many were simply missing by 1945.

A vast number of German men were held as prisoners of war as well.  The Western Allies held over 3,150,000 by April 30, 1945.  By the end of the war that number was over 7,614,790,with the 425,000 German POWs in 511 main and branch camps. The Soviet Union also held at least 2,733,739, fewer than a person might suspect, actually, reflecting the nature of the combat in the east.

The Western Allies did not, and could not have, repatriated German POWS immediately.  The US held German prisoners until 1946 in the US, with it notably being the case that many went from disciplined Nazi soldiers to actually enjoying the last year of their captivity.  Reeducation proved unnecessary as they rapidly evolved into democratic Germans in the last months of their captivity.

The point, however, is that with over 10,000,000 German men in captivity, and with millions of German men killed during the war, and with the German citizenry in the east put to flight, nature began to play a role in things very quickly.  Hundreds of thousands of German women were left without support in a country that had largely resisted imposing female labor on its citizenry during the war.  Man young women knew at an instinctive level that the normal path of finding a lifelong mate had been destroyed.  And the collapse of the Nazi system proved to be a bit like tearing a scab off a wound as even the Nazifield population proved capable of abandoning Nazi propaganda pretty rapidly, even if only superficially in some instance.  

Added to this, the war itself had damaged domestic life globally.  This has been noted in the context of World War Two marriages in the US on this site already.  While the German situation was different, it was found that after the war an appreciable number of Germans, both male and female, simply changed identities up to and including abandoning a spouse, missing or not.  In some instances German women became outright disgusted with German men and blamed them for the war and the fate they'd suffered, something that was also the case with Japanese women.

By June of 1944, Life magazine was noting:

There’s one blonde Fräulein with braided hair who always walked past two MPs every day on her way to do shopping, swinging her hips from side to side even more noticeably than usual. As she passed she would look slyly at the MPs, tap one hip and utter the word, ‘Verboten.’ […]

In Germany fraternization is officially a matter of high policy. But for the GI it is not a case of policy or of politics or of going out with girls who used to go out with the guys who killed your buddies. You don’t talk politics when you fraternize. It’s more a matter of bicycles and skirts waving in the breeze and a lonesome, combat-weary solder looking warily around the corner to see if a policeman is in sight.”

Ultimately somewhere between 14,000 to 20,000 German women would marry American soldiers after the war, something that stands in remarkable contrast to the French, as only 6,500 French women married US soldiers.  Between 10,000 and 100,000 Italian women married U.S. soldiers. 70,000 English women did the same.

Late war German poster celebrating Maria Schultz.  The poster states; "A German Girl! 'Germany will endure all suffering and create a new world', said Maria Schultz on the 12.February 1945, awaiting her death sentence"  Schultz, whose actual last name may have been Bierganz, was arrested when her diary was discovered, which was fanatically pro Nazi and full of fantasies about killing U.S. troops, but she was just let go, not executed.  German women would help rebuild Germany, but not in the way she imagined.

If all of this seems a bit odd, it's probably a lot more human than people might suppose.  Germany had been heavily propagandized during the Nazi era, but the era was a lot shorter than people like to recall, which is frightening in that Germany descended into madness so quickly.  Be that as it may, DNA tends to rule at the end of the day and the Japanese and German examples tend to show that, with the German one perhaps being the most consequential.  Nazi Germany had very distinct concepts of what women were to do, which were more than a little perverse.  Germany itself was, of course, a Christian nation which the anti Christian Nazi party was seeking to transform into something else, and which it was surprisingly successful in doing in its short period of rule.  

Recruiting poster aimed at teenage girls for the Hitler Youth.  The female variant of the Hitler Youth, the League of German Girls would prove to be downright perverse, encouraging a radical pronatalist view of their role.

The Nazis were heavily invested in an exaggerated martial concept of manliness which failed.  By late 1944 the Allies were on Germany's doorstep.  Fairly soon German soldiers in the East would outright be fighting to the last man to try to protect German civilians from the Red Army, which is much of the reason that the fighting in 1945 was so much worse in the East than at any time prior to that.  German troops did in fact go down fighting in many instances to attempt to give German civilians, including women, the chance to get away, but to a large degree they failed.  German men, in other words, were unable to protect German women from rape and death in the East.

In the West, the German military failure had less severe physical consequences, but German manhood failed there too.  Cities were destroyed and lives wrecked.  The irony, however, was that in the West, the Allies themselves became the protector, and indeed the liberator, of German women.  By making them temporarily Verboten, they gave them independence in a way that they had not had since 1932, if ever.

Italy declared war on Japan.

The French flag was formally unfurled at the summit of the Victory Column in Berlin.

The monument celebrated the German victory over France in the Franco Prussian War.

Japanese destroyer Tachibana was sunk in Hakodate Bay by aircraft of the U.S. Navy.  The battleships South Dakota, Indiana and Massachusetts, plus two heavy cruisers and 4 destroyers, bombarded the Kamaishi steel works in the first naval gunfire directed against the Japanese home islands.

The Simla Conference ended without a positive result.

Last edition:

Friday, July 13, 1945. Japan seeks a way out.

Labels: 1940s, 1945, Australia, Diplomacy, Dwight Eisenhower, Germany (Berlin), Internment of Japanese, Japan, Luzon, Nazi Party, Racism, USSR, World War Two

Monday, July 2, 1945. Advances on Balikpapen.

Maria Michi in Rome, Open City.  She also played the role of the welcoming Italian turned prostitute in Paisan.  Both films were directed by Roberto Rossellini and filmed immediately after World War Two.  Why am I featuring her? See below.

Tokyo's population was down to 200,000 people due to evacuations from the bombed city.

Australian troops took Balikpapan's oil facilities.

American operations conclude on the Ryukyus.

The submarine USS Barb fired rockets on Kaihyo Island near Sakhalin,the first instance of a submarine firing such weapons.

Mountbatten is ordered to launch Operation Zipper, the liberation of Malaya, in August.

The 1945 Sheikh Bashir Rebellion broke out in Burao and Erigavo in British Somaliland against the British.

"The American Farmer" was the cover story in Newsweek.

Louis Till, father of Emmett Till who is remembered for being lynched at age 14 in 1955, was executed by the U.S. Army at Aversa, Italy for two counts of rape and murder.  

The elder Till had married the younger Till's mother when they were 18, over the objections of her parents. The marriage was not a happy one and she divorced him after he physically attacked her.  A conviction from that resulted in his joining the U.S. Army in order to avoid a prison sentence.

While Tills' conviction and execution are debated, the circumstances of the crime, which involved a home invasion and rape, are vile, and it seems that the trial was well conducted.

What's this have to do with the younger Till's lynching?  Absolutely nothing.  The junior Till never knew his father as the relationship had disintegrated when he was a mere infant.

There may be something, however, to take away about the horrors of the postwar world.  Armies are made up of all kinds of people, particularly conscripted armies.  Putting somebody in uniform so they wouldn't go to jail was fairly common.  There was a guy in boot camp with me who was there for that very reason, and I know a very successful person who essentially had the same thing occur to him.

And wars are a huge violation of the moral order.  Invading armies have always been associated with crime, with rape being a particularly common one.  Occupying armies, and even garrison armies, have a fair amount of moral depredation they bring on as well.

This certainly doesn't apply to everyone in uniform in these conditions, and not even the majority of those in uniform, in most modern armies, but it's frankly the case that World War Two created a vast amount of prostitution in Europe, some of it of a massively desperate type as portrayed in Rossellini's Paisan, and discussed in Atkinson's The Day of Battle.  Italy was quite frankly particularly hard hit as its infrastructure was far less developed than that of France or Germany, and it's population lived much more primitively and much closer to the poverty line.  Indeed, the vast bulk of the Italian population even before the war lived in what Americans of the same period would have regarded as poverty.

In these conditions, Italian women became targets.  Many prostituted themselves.  Some entered what might be regarded as a species of concubinage.  A biography of Bill Mauldin notes, for example, that for a period of time both Mauldin and another Stars and Stripes reporter kept girls in their mid teens, something that would have been regarded as a crime in the U.S. given the girls' very young age.  Paisan, as noted, depicts a middle class Italian girl descending into poverty, and then trying to grasp a straw out of it that nearly appears.  The classic The Man In The Grey Flannel Suit depicts a middle class American businessman who was an officer during the war engaging in a secret affair that produces a child while a soldier in Italy.

Concubinage is one thing.  Rape quite another, but murder is beyond the pale even for most whose morals decay in wartime.  But not for everyone.  And of course, we haven't touched on the Red Army, for whom wholescale rape, and then murder, of the women of the countries they overran was routine.  The percentage of Soviet soldiers that went home as rapist likely isn't known, but it was appreciable, and appreciated apparently by Soviet women, which lead to that generations domestic lives being notoriously turbulent.

War changes everything, and most of what it changes, isn't for the better.

Last edition:

Sunday, July 1, 1945. Battle of Balikpapan. The Post War German Map. Blondie.

Labels: 1940s, 1945, Australian Army, Automobiles, Battle of Balikpapan, Borneo, Dutch Army, Germany, Growing up in the 1970s, Music, New Wave Music, Personalities, Post WWII Occupation of Germany, Rock Music, World War Two

Saturday, June 20, 1925. La battaglia del grano.

Benito Mussolini launched "The Battle for Grain" ("La battaglia del grano"), aimed at increasing Italy's wheat production to the point of becoming completely self-sufficient.

FWIW, today Italy uses a lot of Ukrainian wheat.

Audie Murphy was born into a sharecropping family in Hunt County, Texas.  He'd grow up under difficult conditions, learning to hunt in order to help feed his large family, and leaving school to pick cotton in fifth grade.

Last edition:

Thursday, June 18, 1925. Death of Robert La Follette.

Labels: 1920s, 1925, Death, German Weimar Republic, Germany, It was because of World War One, law, Monarchy, Personalities, Socialism, Wisconsin

Tuesday, June 12, 1945. The suicide of the Japanese Marines.

Today in World War II History—June 12, 1940 & 1945: 80 Years Ago—June 12, 1945: US Marines make push for final pocket of Japanese forces on Okinawa; hundreds of Japanese Marines commit suicide.

Sarah Sundin's blog.

On Okinawa, US troops took the Yaeju Dake escarpment.

Allied forces occupied Trieste.

Dwight D. Eisenhower received the Freedom of the City of London and the Order of Merit.  In receiving them, he stated:

Humility must always be the portion of any man who receives acclaim earned in blood of his followers and sacrifices of his friends.

The Visayan Islands, including Samar, Negros, Panay, Leyte, Cebu, and Bohol, between Luzon and Mindanao, were secured by American forces. 

Penn Station, June 12, 1945.

Niecey Brown, a 74-year-old Black woman, died from injuries after an off-duty white police officer forcibly entered her house and beat her with a bottle in Selma, Alabama.

Last edition:

Monday, June 11, 1945. King gets another term. . . but it's a minority government.

Labels: 1940s, 1945, Army, Canada, China, Conscientious Objectors, Court, Imperial Japanese Army, Marine co, Okinawa, William Lyon Mackenzie King, World War Two

Saturday, June 9, 1945. Parade.

Yugoslavia agreed to evacuate Trieste so that claims to who should administer it could be resolved.

Ultimately the city would go to Italy.

Japanese Prime Minister Kantarō Suzuki told the Diet that Japan would "fight to the last."

"One rifleman reloads, and another fires in the 96th Infantry Division's advance to capture Big Apple Hill, scene of intense fighting on Okinawa 9 June, 1945.  96th Infantry Division."  The firing soldier is carrying a M1911 handgun and appears to be carrying a Japanese one in a shoulder holster as well.  The other solder is carrying a combat knife on his belt.

Marines surrounded Japanese forces on Okinawa's Oroku peninsula.

The 37th Infantry Division captured Bagabag on Luzon. The  24th Infantry Division took Mandog on Mindanao

A victory parade was held in Los Angeles for George S. Patton and James Doolittle.

Last edition:

Friday, June 8, 1945. Battle of Porton Plantation

Labels: 1940s, 1945, Army, Australian Navy, Battle of Porton Plantation, Bougainville, French Resistance Movements, Imperial Japanese Army, Korea, New Zealand Army, Philippines, Theresienstadt, World War Two