[Dragaera] How are Teckla Republics formed?

[Howard Brazee]

Scott Schultz wrote:
> The Teckla have no particular House culture. City Teckla live different 
> sorts of lives than country Teckla, and it seems plausible (I'd say likely) 
> that Teckla in one part of the Empire could have methods of governing their 
> affairs that differ entirely from those in another part. For instance, a 
> village living under the rule of an Iorich noble could be presumed to have 
> very different lives than those living under a Dragon or an Athyra. This 
> could be wrong, of course. One thing we HAVE seen is that the nobility 
> appear to be rather "hands off" in the management of their peasants as long 
> as the grain is being grown, taxes paid, and obligations being kept. It may 
> be that there IS a sort of homogenous peasant culture in the Empire except 
> in the rare cases where a noble takes it into her head to become a 
> micro-manager, the local laws are being flouted, or a noble is simply so 
> narcissistic that he forgets that the peasants are people and mistreats them 
> to the point of revolution.
>
>   
At least some rulers have obligations to those they rule as well.   But 
those obligations tend to be largely defined by the rulers - although 
not 100%.   What works best in ruling is to make life predictable to 
those ruled.    That means either supporting their culture, or having 
them adapt to the culture you want them to have.

> Today I started reading _The Scarlet Pimpernel_ and, probably not too 
> surprisingly to the readers of this list, in the back of my mind I started 
> trying to fit it it in to the history of the Empire, just to see how it 
> would work. (Prompted by a fun question I'd had for sometime back - what 
> would a Dragaeran superhero be like - Robin Hood or the Pimpernel being the 
> obvious answers.)
>
> It got me thinking - Why would a Teckla Revolution be  peaceful? In fact, 
> why would it even be the same from Cycle to Cycle? The fact that there have 
> been 17 Teckla Republics doesn't actually imply that they tried the same 
> form of government every time!
>
> While I'd pictured the Teckla Republic forming every time as a kind of 
> replay of the formation of the United States, there's no good reason why it 
> should have happened that way. It's plausible that it could have formed at 
> least once (maybe more) with a Robespierre figure who led their own version 
> of the French Revolution and ended up sending hundreds of nobility (from 
> Houses at the bottom of the Cycle, most likely) to the Star in an effort to 
> purge the Empire and hold onto power. While Verra acknowledges that a true 
> Socialist revolution can't stand because of the Cycle, that doesn't mean 
> that it hasn't been tried or will never be tried by some Teckla Lenin or 
> Trotsky leading their own Bolshevik Uprising.
>   
There's nothing about Socialism that makes it any more likely to be 
lasting than other forms of statehood (despite what Marx said).

It is interesting to note how many little revolutions the French had 
during its Revolutionary times.   Lots of things were tried.