Today, in news of odd-fic-I-read-this-weekend

[moon_custafer]

First in a historical AU series in which Napoleon is exiled to the Midlands rather than St-Helena, which naturally means that eventually he and Arthur, Duke of Wellington meet at a country house party, become frenemies, and investigate a murder with supernatural overtones. Oh, and there’s slash. It needs an editor in places (some sentences have an anachronistic ring or are just confusing); but overall it works as a non-comedic story about a crack!fic pairing. The supernatural bits are effective, not-too-cliched, and hellaspooky (it looks like the Big Bad for the whole series might be Fae, and very much the creepy not-at-all-humanoid kind) and for a story based around an M/M pairing, there are a lot of good female characters (my favourite — and everyone’s, judging by the comments — is Harriet Arbuthnot, Arthur’s friend who everyone assumes is his mistress; really if anything she’s trying to fix his relationship with his wife Kitty.) Pale Before the Fall (40021 words) by oneinspats
Chapters: 13/13
Fandom: Historical RPF, Napoleonic Era, 18th & 19th Century CE RPF, Napoleonic Era RPF, 19th Century CE France RPF, French History RPF, british history RPF
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Napoleon Bonaparte/Arthur Wellesley, Arthur Wellesley/Kitty Wellesley, Bonaparte/Wellington, Napolington
Characters: Napoleon Bonaparte, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, Harriet Arbuthnot, Kitty Wellesley, OCs of various sorts, Montholon, Albine Montholon, Fannie Bertrand, Henri Bertrand
Additional Tags: playing with history, historical fiction - Freeform, magical realism but not but IDK, faux gothic, Ghosts, 2spoopy4u
Series: Part 1 of A Near Run Thing
Summary:

After Waterloo, through a cunning lawyer and some finagling, Bonaparte manages to end up in England instead of St Helena for his final exile.

Of course things don't stay quiet. There's an old murder. A stodgy Duke newly returned from France. A disintegrating marriage. And a couple of ghosts to top it all off.

(and full of pretentious chapter titles and what not)

Comments

Nappy!

[palain-7.livejournal.com]

Funny you should run across some Bonaparte stuff right now as his enormous section in Wikipedia is what I'm reading whenst bumping along on the bus these days. Seems he started out as a Corsican separatist because he wanted the island out from under the French thumb. I guess having a Corsican as the absolute dictator of France was his Plan B!

Looking what I've read so far (I've just gotten to the part where he's just gotten firmly in control after beating the crap out of the Italians & friends) it seems that he's possibly better remembered as one of the architects of modern liberalism than as a military man. He used his odd dictatorship (which legitimized itself through plebiscites - some rigged, some not) to just dump a lot of revolutionary ideas into his society: separation of church and state,meritocracy, equality before the law, property rights and so on. His 'Napoleonic Code has been described as the 'greatest codification of laws since the fall of the Roman Empire' and about 70 countries' laws are based on it.

A spiffing general too though since, in addition to the above, he had to defeat seeming endless coalitions of nations, usually with Britain in them somewhere, trying, at first, to grab the ruins of the pre-revolutionary France, and then later, trying to survive after Nappy got fed up with them and conquered them back.

Re: Nappy!

[moon_custafer]

In the fic we mostly see him from wellington’s PoV which, this being a fic, tends to swing between “I want to punch his smug face” and “I want to kiss his smug face.”