I'm the Dauphin in France

Chapter 989: Foggy Paris
Northern suburbs of Paris.

In the "Jewel VI" carriage, Joseph looked at the report in his hand and said to Berthier sitting opposite him: "So, the British only sent 1 soldiers and 75 cannons to Portugal?"

"Yes, Your Highness."

Joseph shook his head: "This loss of troops is not enough to make Grenville feel distressed.

"Well, Wellesley is very confident in himself. It seems we have to put some pressure on him."

The Chief of Staff asked hurriedly, "Your Highness, are you saying that we should also send more troops?"

"Yes, send more troops." Joseph nodded. "Let General Massena lead 20,000 soldiers to Iberia. Also, let Madrid continue to send more troops. The money they get from the church is enough to support 70,000 to 80,000 troops to fight."

Berthier hesitated for a moment, but asked carefully: "Your Highness, you said before that our country should try to limit the scale of its involvement in the Portuguese war."

"Yes, it's best to keep it within 5 people."

"But you just said that you would increase the number of troops by 20,000..."

Joseph smiled and said, "Massena's troops may move very slowly and arrive in Gascony by the end of the year. Of course, the farewell ceremony must be grand, and Scherer will write a press release."

Berthier immediately understood: "Are you trying to provoke the British?"

"Yes."

This is completely a conspiracy.

France made it clear that it was going to send more troops to attack Coimbra, so Britain had no choice but to follow suit and could not delay. After all, the Duke of York must have already written about how fast the French marched in his report to the military.

By the time your British army arrives in Coimbra, Massena will have already returned to his base.

But do the British dare to withdraw their troops?

Absolutely not.

Who knows if the French are plotting something that suddenly popped up?

It took at least half a year for British spies to confirm that the French army had not entered Spain.

When the time comes, let Massena lead his troops on a "parade", and Wellesley will definitely not dare to act rashly.

As a result of these delays, tens of thousands of British expeditionary forces had to stay in the Portuguese fortress, constantly devouring London's military expenditures.

Berthier thought for a moment and then said, "Your Highness, but in this case, the British will have a military advantage in Portugal. What if they launch a counterattack?"

Joseph threw the documents in his hand on the table and said calmly: "Then General Massena's army will really move south."

The British wanted to have a man-to-man battle with the French army on land, and Joseph would definitely be happy to do so.

Historically, Massena did lose to the Duke of Wellington in Portugal, but that was when he was storming a fortress with Portuguese guerrillas all behind him.

Now it was Wellesley's turn to take the initiative, and the Portuguese people hated the British so much that there was no possibility that Massena could not win.

Not to mention that there were 50,000 to 60,000 Spanish troops assisting them.

As Joseph was speaking, he suddenly smelled a pungent sour smell.

He frowned, knowing that they were almost at Antoine Town. After several years of development, this place, as an industrial park in Paris, was already full of factories and chimneys. There were tens of thousands of workers working here.

In particular, several industries such as papermaking, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, and coal tar refining are extremely developed. Every day, a large number of products are loaded into ships in the town and sold to the entire European continent via the Seine River.

Of course, the pollution caused by industrial development is unavoidable.

Joseph has taken some measures to deal with this, but the effect is not very good. At present, only the "centralized discharge of toxic sewage" is barely implemented, otherwise the water of the Seine River is not suitable for drinking, and it would be too polluted to use it for washing clothes.

Joseph shook his head helplessly. It seemed that the title of "City of Fog" would most likely belong to Paris in the future.

Soon, the convoy drove into the town of Antoine, and the surroundings were immediately filled with the rumbling sound of machines running.

Most of the sound comes from steam engines.

Today, there are more than 30 steam engines of various models installed in the town of Antoine, which are used in almost all industries here, from pulp mixing to liquid centrifugal purification to workshop ventilation.

It can be said that the level of industrial automation in the town of Antoine is the highest in the whole of Europe.

After driving for another ten minutes, the convoy stopped in front of a factory with a sign that read "Paris Fertilizer and Pesticide Company."

When Emand opened the car door, Joseph saw Lavoisier and dozens of senior technicians standing in front of him, saluting him respectfully.

Mirabeau and other officials from the Ministry of Industry got out of the car one after another and surrounded the Crown Prince as he entered the factory.

Joseph looked at Lavoisier, whose dark circles extended almost to the root of his nose, and exclaimed: "I didn't expect you to complete the trial production so quickly. Your brain is really the most precious treasure of France."

Yes, only five months have passed since he instructed Lavoisier to study the industrial production process of potash fertilizer, and the first batch of finished potash fertilizer has rolled off the production line.

In history, it is a tragedy in the chemical world that Marat actually signed an order to chop off the head of such a genius.

"It is a great honor for me to receive your praise." Lavoisier bowed hurriedly, "In fact, I have only done some insignificant work. You are the real creator of this place."

Yes, at present humans still don’t know what “potassium” is, and there are only a few empirical formulas for the reaction processes involving potassium salts, and many of them are wrong.

It was Joseph who wrote the reaction equation of potassium chloride producing potassium sulfate to Lavoisier, which led to the latter's further industrial production experiments.

Led by Lavoisier, Joseph walked into the production workshop and saw two iron reactors more than one meter tall, connected to several pipes of varying thicknesses and instruments.

On both sides of the workshop are the feed and discharge ports, where many workers are busy.

Lavoisier first pointed to the gray-yellow powder in the square storage tank on the right and said, “Your Highness, this is the salt shipped from Bar-le-Duc.

"Without your theoretical guidance, no one would know that these 'bitter salts' actually contain fertilizer."

The salt produced in the Bar-le-Duc region contains a lot of potassium, so it is completely inedible and has always been regarded as garbage and ignored.

This also results in very low mining costs - almost only the labor costs need to be paid.

Lavoisier signaled to a technician, who checked the temperature and told the worker to add dozens of bags of filtered coarse salt into the reactor and then start heating it.

"Your Highness, after repeated experiments, I found that the high-temperature supersaturation method is the cheapest production method." Lavoisier said, "Potassium fertilizer has a high solubility in boiling water, while impurities are very low. If part of the solution is distilled at high temperature, the impurities will be precipitated first."

(End of this chapter)