Text commanded by the Committee of Public Command to be read aloud in all educational institutions of the Republic upon the Day of the Republic’s Foundation
1 Vulpiose, Year XX
Citizens!
In the dark ages before the Republican era, Guntreland was not governed by its people. All power was usurped, by virtue of a treaty of two hundred years’ standing, by a despot styling himself king—a tyrant whose authority endured for life, and descended from father to son as though men were cattle to be inherited.
This tyrant leaned upon two pillars of iniquity: first, upon the so-called aristocrats, families proud only of their nearness to former kings, and of the ill-gotten wealth they had heaped across generations by draining the labor of others; second, upon the brood of the so-called king’s men—so-called baseborn creatures whom the crown rewarded with gold for services of deceit, extortion, and menace on behalf of the monarch and his nobles, so that the aristocracy might soil no hand while every crime was committed in their interest.
Under that old regime, virtue was despised; society prized instead the slavish imitation of the king’s vices and those of his court. So monstrous were the laws that an aristocrat, failing to strike an animal in the hunt, was granted the right to slaughter two of his own peasants, lest his weapon seem “mute.” So absurd the customs, that a man’s “refinement” was judged by holding a fork in a crippled manner, merely because a degenerate king, his fingers twisted, could not grasp it aright. At court, to display knowledge was “ill-bred,” in honor of a queen who boasted that she “never burdened her head with thought.” To reveal genuine feeling was shameful; affectation and sneering irony were accounted the very signs of education.
As for “royal justice”—it was this: should a noble or a “king’s man” commit violence upon one of the “lower orders,” it was not the criminal who suffered prison, but the victim! The king himself would sign a sealed letter condemning the injured man, and any so-called “lowborn” witnesses, to lifelong chains—lest the scandal of noble misconduct disturb what they dared call “the honor of the King, guardian of aristocratic rank and fountain of the king’s men’s dignity.” Even within noble houses, heads of families were privileged to imprison their own kin without trial or crime—not when these kin were vicious and immoral, but rather when they refused to mimic the false manners demanded by the old society, or declined to submit to the family’s will in perpetuating that detestable order.
Citizens of the werewolf and vampire races were denied schooling and medicine, confined to wastelands; whosoever slew them beyond those desolate bounds received a golden coin as bounty from the king.
Nineteen years ago, upon the wall of the municipal house of Loransburg, in what is today the First Region, there appeared a Proclamation. It was bordered with the black-silver-white tricolor, and it declared: that the People of Guntreland, sovereign upon their continent, cast down the tyrant Alfons Afsen and proclaimed the Republic.
The local king’s men burned this notice, and their inquest ended with peasants beaten and the municipal president flung into a dungeon. Yet on the morrow, proclamations of the same content appeared on the walls of every city and every village. Uprisings flared across the land, where citizens, esteeming sovereignty now their own, sought to wrest control from aristocrats and king’s men. Armed with force, the enemies of the People prevailed, and blood-red reprisals fell upon the patriots. In the months that followed, the royalist terror and the inequalities it sanctified shone clearer than ever before.
Yet the patriots possessed at last a comfort and a hope unknown to them in all former days. Each morning, cities and hamlets awoke to find new Proclamations—addressed to the Free Citizens of the Republic of Guntreland. No longer uniform, these writings touched every question of public life. First they summoned elections to offices; months later they issued decrees, levied taxes, pronounced judgments, and, most glorious of all, declared solemn Rights of Man.
None knew where were lodged these “Committees of Public Command,” these “Commandants of Departments,” these “People’s Tribunals” and “Patriotic Commissions.” None could say who composed them, nor how they compelled obedience to their decrees. Yet obeyed they were: taxes gathered, judgments executed, orders fulfilled—despite the peril of defying the “royal sovereignty,” that is, the tyrant’s usurpation of the People’s sovereignty.
The secret of this “underground Republic” was nothing else than the awakened conscience of the citizenry. The pamphlets of liberty, printed and dispersed by hidden presses, lifted every heart to recognize its duty: to obey the authority which ruled in their name, and not in the name of a despot luxuriating in a distant palace. Thus even the poorest man, if he possessed a virtuous nature, paid his tax to the Republic, esteeming it the mark of an honest citizen.
It is needless to say that the enemies of the People did not sit idly by. The royal regime seized whomever they suspected of allegiance to the Republic. Those who engaged in the posting of placards – the most visible sign of Republican labor – and in other patriotic endeavors, were often cast into the clutches of the tyrants. It was proclaimed that the payment of taxes to the Republic should be punished by death, as well as any participation in its activities. The dungeons groaned with good patriots, subjected to the most atrocious torments. By day, Nature herself was blasphemed in the public hangings and burnings of men condemned for “treason against the king”; and by night the squares gave way to spectacles no less abominable – the shameless revels of the king’s men. These, emerging in fury from their savage banquets within the palaces, flaunted ever greater luxury before the eyes of the honest citizenry – luxury steeped in every form of debauchery, prodigality, corruption, and immorality – while the people dared not even step into the streets, lest they fall victim to the insolence of their oppressors.
Some faint-hearted citizens, lacking in Republican consciousness, began to identify themselves with their oppressors, adopting and imitating their vile customs, imagining that such mimicry constituted “elegant manners.” In this insolence the Court itself took the lead. There, the tyrant Alfons Afsen and his infamous mistress Releren[1] – whom he kept at his side in defiance of his official consort, the so-called “queen” – surrounded by flatterers, spent their days in festivities of unbridled extravagance. Animals from every corner of the world were purchased and brought solely that they might become the objects of the tyrant’s hunts. Releren, not content with this, demanded and obtained the construction of an entire city in the “Ferdinandian” style, peopled solely by actors, its only purpose being that she and her coterie might at will enact the lives of the heroes of their favored Sigislandish romances. Her shameless diversions extended further still: with her companions – women who were obliged to purchase their presence in her circle by submitting to her every caprice – she played at cards with stakes consisting of the king’s pre-signed letters under seal, which the victor filled with the names of lovers or some other favorite of one of her defeated playmates. Meanwhile the “royal” sons drove their carriages through the city by night; the money they did not squander upon their numerous mistresses they burned openly before the poor, mocking their poverty.
Thus passed seven entire years. Yet each morning the walls of the cities and villages still blossomed with placards framed in the black-silver-white tricolor, ending with the cry: Honour the Constitution, Citizens! Each placard addressed some new question of public life. The reply of the tyrants was ever greater terror, in impotent fury. What rapture must have filled the hearts of good citizens – and what horror seized the tyrants and their slaves – when, on the fourteenth of Vulpios in the Eighth Year, every town and hamlet of Guntreland awoke to find its walls covered with placards announcing to the free citizens of the Republic of Guntreland the general elections for the first convocation of the National Assembly, the supreme representative body of the Republic! This immortal proclamation declared in clear terms that every citizen had the right both to vote and to be elected to that body.
And indeed, every house in the Republic, save only those known to belong to the enemies of Liberty, was visited by some “travelling merchant,” whose box, appearing to contain his wares, was in truth a ballot-box into which each might place the name of the representative of his choice. On the thirtieth of Passer of the Eighth Year it was proclaimed that the first National Assembly had been constituted. Royalist soldiers and mercenaries scoured the remotest corners of the continent in search of the Assembly’s seat, yet they found it nowhere. A few months later, unknown patriots distributed among the citizens thousands of copies of a tricolored volume entitled The Constitution of the Republic of Guntreland. From that day forward the institutions of the Republic multiplied threefold, together with their placards which each morning adorned the people’s dwellings.
Citizens sent no more dispatches by the king’s post, but by the Republican. They travelled no longer in coaches drawn by the tyrant’s horses, but in those of the Republic’s own stables. They were tended not by royal physicians but by Republican doctors; their children, for whom under the monarchy no education had existed, were now instructed by Republican teachers secretly dispersed throughout the continent. Even time itself was counted by the new calendar, devised by the Assembly, which measured not from the congresses of tyrants but from the founding of the Republic – its months, named in honor of Nature after the animals’ names of old, each of equal length, even as citizens are equal in rights and duties.
And with the same revolutionary zeal as the Republican post, stable, school, and hospital, so too labored the Republican press, diffusing through every province in thousands of copies the truth of man’s natural liberty and the monstrous chains of slavery in which mankind had groaned beneath monarchy.
Yet the old regime struck back with vengeance multiplied a thousandfold. National Representative Johan Gelbs was betrayed for gold by a peasant at whose house he lay concealed while performing his duties as Commissioner of the Interior. He was seized, and broken upon the wheel before the royal palace at Eustata, where the infamous Releren now resided, the tyrant having – at the insistence of the high nobility from which his wife Henrietta descended – “banished” her from the Summer Palace at Schwentzstadt. There followed a terror yet greater, in which thousands of patriots perished.
Two years more passed, and some months besides. As the tenth anniversary of the Republic approached, placards began to appear in town and countryside, calling upon all citizens to celebrate the advent of the new Republican year. As the day drew nigh, the panic of the old regime increased. On the eve of the anniversary, there was no town nor hamlet whose streets were not choked with the king’s soldiery – bolstered with the young and brutish rabble of the tyrant’s men, clad in their gaudy costumes and armed with cudgels, come forth to prevent the citizens from observing their true New Year. Whoever among the common people donned even modestly festive attire, or in whose house a somewhat richer meal or an unusual number of guests was perceived, was beaten and cast into prison, even where no intent of Republican celebration was present. Hunts were organized through the forests, like the aristocrats’ favorite fox-hunts, in the hope of finding there some Republicans marking the decade of their Revolution. Thousands were scourged, imprisoned, dragged into dungeons, and handed to torturers and executioners. At sunset the tyrants and their slaves surrendered themselves to their nightly banquets, more shameless than ever, convinced that brute force had prevented the sovereign People from commemorating the decade of their Republic.
But then, at the stroke of midnight, suddenly shone forth the windows of the circular, stone, and austere edifice of the Theatre at Eustata, the most populous city of Guntreland. For within, in the great ceremonial hall, beneath the light of a thousand candles, sat assembled one thousand two hundred and one representative of the People, chosen from every corner of the Continent-Republic. Upon the order of the day for this New Year’s convocation stood but a single question: the emergence of the Republic from secrecy into the public sphere. After a multitude of patriotic orations drowned in the thunder of ovations, the Assembly decreed it unanimously by acclamation. The stone walls of the Theatre trembled with the unanimous singing of the hymn: Honour the Constitution, Citizens! At that very instant the windows of thousands of homes throughout the continent blazed with light, while every royal arsenal in Guntreland was assaulted by patriots – all united by the tricolor band upon their arm.
For in so many cases the grave and silent man, thought a miser concerned only with his shop; the jester, deemed a simpleton indifferent to politics; the esteemed manufacturer or craftsman honored in his community; the beggar despised by all – in so many cases these had for years been revolutionaries, joined in the secret organization of tens of thousands, preparing for this night, the greatest and most illustrious in human history. When the Honest People seized the arms, they marched upon the public buildings, even upon the royal fortresses where the powder was kept, and the arsenals where lay the cannon. And of course upon the castles and palaces of the aristocrats and the king’s men, who now received just punishment for centuries of tyranny. That night the crackle of muskets and the flashes of powder rang over Guntreland together with the refrain: Honour the Constitution, Citizens! Streams of blood flowed – royalist and Republican alike.
Never before had the sun risen with such radiance as on the morrow, the first day of the Eleventh Year of the Republic, the first year of Liberty. Already that night the revolutionaries had seized more than two-thirds of the territory of the Continent. Wherever the tricolor unfurled, ancient inequalities and injustices were abolished, and the people rejoiced in their emancipation. Yet the enemies of mankind had no thought of yielding! In the regions now numbered the Sixth, Sixteenth, Nineteenth, and Twentieth – where the king’s men were best entrenched – the insurrection failed; the army remained faithful to the tyrant, the revolutionaries perished without securing the strategic positions, and the most frightful executions of captured Republicans followed, their dwellings razed. The tyrant Afsen, then in his southern summer capital of Schwentzstadt upon the Schwenc Peninsula, consolidated his power there and evaded the People’s righteous vengeance. In Eustata itself, street battles raged between the citizens and the royal guard for ten full days, until at last the final soldier of the king surrendered at dawn on the Tenth Day of Liberty.
In that same Night of the Republic’s Emergence, the good sergeant Hugel, with a hastily assembled detachment of Republicans – some armed with muskets, others only with saws, pitchforks, and knives – burst into the villa of the former countess von Fagenburg, where a revel so frenzied was held that none heeded the sound of combat outside. There he found the tyrant’s sons, Rupert and Clarence Afsen, in the midst of drunken and licentious debauchery. After a bloody struggle in the marble halls between his untrained fighters and the royal guards come to defend the former princes, he succeeded in taking them captive and consigning them to a well-guarded wine cellar, leaving them there to drown the grief of their sealed fate in the choicest vintages of their ancestors.
Wherever the Republic prevailed, the machinery of government began to operate flawlessly from the first hour, for in truth it had already existed these ten years, functioning in secrecy in cellars and attics, in foresters’ huts and herdsmen’s cottages, where committees, boards, commissions, and courts had long convened. Now, no longer obliged to conceal themselves, the operation of the state was only the more vigorous. The Republican Army and Constitutional Guard were formed, defending the free territory and often enlarging it at the expense of the royalists. The Continent of Guntreland was divided into twenty interior regions[2] and one administrative capital region, with seven further regions planned for the islands under Guntreland’s sovereignty once liberated. Laws were passed, institutions founded. In time the entire mainland of Guntreland, save only the Schwentz Peninsula, came under the authority of the National Assembly. A month after the Republic emerged from secrecy, the foundations were laid of the Pavilion of Immortality, in whose crypt were inscribed the names of all who had suffered for the Republic, and of all who had labored in the Underground Republic. All who, under the old regime, had committed crimes in violation of the laws of natural morality were annihilated, exiled, or condemned to prison.
The mighty Sigislandish tyrant, Ferdinand II, from his golden throne within the star-fortress of the city of golden domes across the sea, beheld with horror the power displayed by the people of Guntreland. Until that hour he had perhaps rejoiced at the “insubordination of subjects” with which his ancient rival was plagued, flaunting his theory of a “werewolf-vampire conspiracy” said to stand behind our Republic, as a pretext for strengthening his own autocracy and purging a portion of his nobility. But after the Night of Emergence, this monarch – who fancied himself the supreme sovereign of the world – resolved to act.
Gathering in his capital all his bejeweled nobility and all his generals in their purple splendor, he decreed that the bicentenary of the Congress – at which the oligarchic elites of six continents had guaranteed each other their dominion over the peoples – must obliterate the achievements of the first decade of free citizens’ revolution against tyranny. Citing the clause of that Congress by which it was the duty of the Sigislandish Archking to organize the suppression of every insurrection against the established rule upon any continent, he promised the tyrant Afsen that the bicentennial of the Congress would be celebrated with himself as absolute master of Guntreland.
Superstition among Sigislandish sailors – who had taken a verse of their poet Balster, the supposed words of a mythical kraken vowing vengeance upon Sigisland before the Congress’s bicentenary[3], as literal truth – combined with a far more rational fear of the Guntrelandic navy, then the first in the world for skill, strength, and civic ardor, and with Ferdinand’s own vanity, his thirst to enact a deed worthy of eternal indignation, a deed to eclipse every scene of the Sigislandish epics: all this led him to resolve to cross the Old Sea not by water, but by the skies. From the gold he had plundered from the Sigislandish of the vampire race he constructed the greatest aerial fleet in history. The other tyrants of every continent, answering his summons, likewise began to levy armies and fit out ships and balloons for the coming war upon Guntreland, ready to attack in concert with Ferdinand’s ascent.
The people of Guntreland, aware that the greatest invasion the world had ever seen was being prepared against them, organized their defense. When the enemy balloons already soared upon the strongest northern wind, foreseen by the experts of the Archking’s Academy, the representatives of the National Assembly showed noble composure. On the authority of the Constitution they declared a permanent state of emergency, to last until the whole of Guntreland was under the Republic, and a permanent session of the Assembly – a sign of their consciousness of ultimate victory even in that darkest hour – and enlarged the powers of their executive organ, the Committee of Public Command.
During those terrible days of waiting for the invasion, the People showed great wrath toward the hidden enemies who, crouching under Republican authority, awaited the invader, celebrating his arrival already in their homes. But the force of universal Justice brought triumph to the Republicans over the tyrants: Ferdinand’s balloons exploded, with him in his pride, his heir, his counts, barons and generals, his eight estates and his entire army.
Yet the Republic could not breathe freely, not then, nor even to this day, for still the whole world is against it. By their overwhelming numbers the tyrannical navies destroyed the entire Republican fleet – once the pride of Guntreland. They occupied all the islands encircling the continent, and by ships and aerial patrols blockaded every Guntrelandish port, cutting off all commerce with the independent archipelago states. Upon these islands they stationed their airships, from which each day they rain bombs upon the Republic. (…)
HONOUR THE CONSTITUTION, CITIZENS!
[1] Arlena Releren, the infamous mistress of king Alfons, who came from a family of the king's people, her place in the court - where she soon attracted the king's attention – she won thanks to her acquaintance with countess Klauzen, whose husband count Esther, on the recommendation of the marquis of Jehelburgh, chancellor of the royal treasury, for a certain time came to the position of the minister of commerce. Releren remained unsurpassedly infamous for her caprices, spending and influence on the monarch. On the night of the Republic's exit out of the secret to the public sphere, the Eustatian mob pulled her out of the carriages -in which the royal mistress was returning from the capital parties to the the royal palace - and torn her to pieces; regarding the news of her death, Alfons said only one word -
– “dammage”.
[2] Each of these regions is divided into districts and districts to municipalities. At the helm of each of the regions, including the Twentieth region (the peninsula Schwentz), which the Republic did not control, was the Regional Commander appointed by the Public Command Committee. The regions are numbered in the chronological order of the first appearance of Republican proclamations on their territory.
[3] In Balster's poem "Admiral Meiblich", a kraken in the center of the ocean intercepts the Sigisland fleet during its return to the parent continent after the end of the Twenty-Six-Years’ War, and after losing a bet with the Sigislandite admiral that it will know better than him the flags of all the ships he had swallowed up to then he plunges into the sea, promising that, it will not attack boats under the purple flag for a hundred and ninety seven years, but that within three years of the expiration of that deadline "it will come to collect all debts for its two centuries long fast".
