The War Court and Lap Pillow, Austria's Mandate of Heaven

Chapter 1573 Cut off the beard
Soon, large quantities of Lyon silk, or rather imitations of Lyon silk, took over the American market.

This directly ruined the French plan, which was to use the opportunity to raise prices to make up for the losses from the Lyon fire. However, before the prices reached their expected levels, a large quantity of Lyon silk suddenly appeared on the market.

The tycoons of the French silk industry immediately guessed that someone was shipping the goods ahead of schedule.

Napoleon III, who already had suspicions about the Lyon fire, immediately ordered the arrest of Pierre Marne. After a friendly exchange with the Paris police, he successfully recovered most of the silk that should have been destroyed in the fire.

Pierre Marne, after all, was the Minister of Finance of the Second French Empire and had played a crucial role in Napoleon III's ascension to the throne, so he was naturally not dealt with publicly.

After all, the finance minister being the biggest corrupt official would be a huge scandal in any country. Especially in the case of the Second French Empire, which was then in a precarious state.

After figuring out the whole story and the information about Pierre Marne and his accomplices' hidden assets, Louis Napoleon meticulously arranged an accident.

This time, even those who were not optimistic about Napoleon III had to applaud his boldness and decisiveness. Everyone believed that Pierre Marne had deliberately shipped the silk to South America to sell in order to reduce suspicion.

However, the French soon discovered a problem: Lyon silk had not disappeared from the South American market, and contrary to Pierre Marne's testimony, Lyon silk was also being sold off in North America.

Napoleon III was also puzzled by this, and he even began to suspect that Mazos had not died and that Mazos had taken the silk to North America.

However, France is not in a hurry. After all, the production of Lyon silk is very limited. As long as they hold onto it, the price will eventually rise.

But the French soon discovered that the amount of Lyon silk circulating in the market was far greater than they had expected, and the dumping momentum showed no signs of abating.

It was only then that the French realized the seriousness of the problem. The so-called "short time" was calculated based on the length of the trading cycle at that time, but in reality, two or three months had already passed.

In fact, Franz did not expect the French to be so arrogant, but he would not let the opportunity slip by. So the Austrian Empire reaped a huge benefit in the past two or three months.

France immediately launched countermeasures, confident that the Lyon silks on the markets of North and South America were fake, given the limited production of Lyon silks and the fact that they couldn't have appeared out of thin air.

The French government announced that there were large quantities of counterfeit Lyon silk on the market and urged people to purchase from legitimate French channels. At the same time, it dispatched silk experts to compare the counterfeit Lyon silk on the market with genuine products in hopes of finding a way to distinguish them.

It must be said that these French experts are truly remarkable; they quickly discovered the differences between the two and invented a whole set of identification methods.

Unfortunately, in the American market, most people do not have this ability and find it difficult to learn the simple methods they talk about.

After all, without audio or video, it's very difficult to learn by word of mouth and a few simple pictures alone.

However, this was not the most critical issue. The most critical issue was that the market panic caused by the French's previous self-righteous propaganda had even led to a drop in the price of Lyon silk.

Some people, unable to distinguish between genuine and fake products, simply gave up on Lyon silk and opted for Venetian silk, which also comes from Europe.

Meanwhile, due to the abundance of Lyon silk in the market, Venetian silk became a scarce commodity. This alone brought the Austrian Empire nearly 3000 million florins in profit annually. If the decline in the Eastern tea trade and the resulting opportunities for inferior tea from Austrian colonies are also taken into account, the Austrian Empire's profits from the Far East wars would exceed 5000 million florins.

This only represents the market profits. If we also include the goods sold to the Qing Dynasty and the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, the Austrian Empire's annual revenue would approach 1 million florins.

However, what Franz didn't know was that such good days wouldn't last forever. In fact, not only Austria, but most European countries did not expect that the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom would take the initiative to trade with the West, and in the days that followed, it once again led to a widening trade deficit between the East and the West and a rise in the price of silver.

Fortunately, Franz established the European Monetary Union and completed the gold standard reform; otherwise, the repeated fluctuations in gold and silver prices in the following decades would have certainly tormented the Austrian Empire, which relied on a dual gold and silver standard.

Since the Austrian Empire first became the world's largest economy in 1848, its fiscal revenue has continued to surge at an annual growth rate of over 10%.

Besides the Austrian Empire's own technological advancements and the continuous expansion of its market and domestic demand, the most important factor was the Austrian Empire's tax reform.

At that time, most countries in the world only had the ability and courage to collect taxes from the poor, but the Austrian Empire could collect taxes from the powerful and wealthy.

In fact, at this time, most countries not only dared not tax the powerful and wealthy, but even had to give them various privileges to appease them.

After all, capital knows no borders; it can come and go as it pleases. The swords of noblemen are not without their drawbacks, and officials are the pillars of the social structure.

The most frightening thing is that the three have long since colluded, merged, and even transformed into one another. They have truly achieved a state of interdependence, with each containing the other.

In the 19th century, in the conventional sense, any organization or individual that dared to declare war on them would only face one outcome: annihilation.

If their interests are even slightly touched, a strong backlash will inevitably follow, ranging from economic decline to the collapse of social order.

Unfortunately, they encountered Franz in a feudal and autocratic country, and were schemed against by him for more than a decade.

Regardless of how much LJBT scholars deny that the statement "power defines interests" is often true, especially in the nineteenth century.

When a king plays a game on his own land, he will win no matter how he plays. Moreover, Franz was no mediocre man, so when he entered the game with the royal funds, even the god of finance could not stop him.

The so-called departure tax is merely a superficial measure. In the end, Franz was the biggest capitalist in the entire Austrian Empire, and not just a lukewarm financial capitalist, but also one who controlled industrial capital that could be directly replaced.

Any capital that attempted to leave the Austrian Empire would be swallowed up instantly; after all, if you didn't make the money, plenty of others would.

However, Franz dared to do this only because he controlled the army, having already broken the sword of the nobility. The reason Franz fought so fiercely and bloodily in 1848-1849 was largely to weaken any potential opposition.

Of course, this was not Franz's achievement alone. In fact, the Austrian Empire had been weakening the power of the nobility since the time of Empress Theresa, but Joseph II himself messed things up.

After the war against France, the Austrian nobility suffered heavy losses, and with the spread of British and French ideas, many nobles gave up maintaining armies.