What made alliance-switching so common during the Napoleonic

Fug, just realised that the screenshot was in Swedish. Well, it's pretty self-explanatory what it says.

>>2943057
Flags are pretty helpful senpai.

>>2943057
It's pretty cool to see country names in different languages every now and then.

>>2943057
Most country names are similar cross-linguistically.

Also, I'm guessing most of us on /his/ are polyglots of some sort, which helps a lot. "Frankrike" is nearly identical to the German name, "Frankreich", for example.

>>2943052
Napoleon probably realized countries would leave the Continental System as soon as he left, considering he had to invade them to get them to join.

>>2943052
You have to understand, that an early 19th century state was a lot less " internally strong" than a modern state. The amount of reach that the government had into the daily life of the random farmer or tradesman was considerably less; and while the aristocratic system was starting to die in a lot of places (and that death had progressed furthest in France, which was one of the reasons it was able to field armies and supply them so disproportionately to its population and wealth) in central and Eastern Europe, the government of a state was much more insulated from the populace of the state than it would come to be.

Men who fought in your wars were either mercenaries or people raised on royal or noble estates; funding for it in large part came from estate revenue, not tapping into the wealth of the nation overall. This made governments far more self-contained. Which in turn meant that a total reverse in policy could come as fast as a king or a senior minister deciding it should be so. It was pretty common pre-Napoleonic wars too, check out the Renaissance Italian wars if you want to see some truly insane side-switching.

>>2943052
>during the Napoleonic Wars
Don't you mean "from the beginning of times onward"? We modern people are somewhat fixated with loyalty in diplomacy, but it's a silly concept that never held any water, and it doesn't now either.