Now the incoming government of the newly autonomous territory wants to replace it with a monument to the leader of the British independence movement, Harold Drummond. As one Londoner insists, the first Napoleon was “a consummate despot who brutally subjugated this country and had our royal family guillotined”. So “probably best not to continue honoring him”. The citizens who wrangle over cancel culture, it should be said, are all animal-headed figures of various species smartly turned out in the late 19th-century fashions of the Belle Époque. On his column, Napoleon I sports a lion’s head.

Welcome to the world of Grandville. Between 2009 and 2017, Bryan Talbot — a former comics artist acclaimed for visually and verbally ingenious graphic fictions such as Alice in Sunderland — published five “anthropomorphic steampunk tales” set in a deliriously witty and inventive alternative past. Beast-headed characters with apt monikers, such as his badger detective Inspector Archie LeBrock, populate twisty thrillers of murder, corruption and conspiracy in high places. They inhabit a Britain subject to French colonial rule over the nearly two centuries since Napoleon’s epoch-making victory at Waterloo.

Steam and gas technology have generated a civilization of advanced, but electricity-free, amenities, from “voicepipes” for instant communication to high-speed air services by dirigible and that engineering marvel, the cross-Channel rail bridge. The language of “Grandville” — Paris, seat of the world-spanning French Empire — has supplanted English except in backward rural districts. There the “old tongue” of the obscure, almost-forgotten playwright Shakespeare persists. Although Talbot’s animals often banter in thickest Cockney and even (in one scene set in a transvestite bar) the venerable gay argot Polari, the notices and posters around them remind us that, in the stories’ world, they’re all speaking French. As one holiday ad proclaims: Skegness est tellement vivifiant!

After a bitter struggle for autonomy pursued both through mass strikes and civil disobedience, and terrorist outrages perpetrated by the “Angry Brigade”, the imperial authorities in Grandville have finally granted self-government to the restive Brits. Even the infamous General Pierre Woolf is dead. The lupine “dictator of Britain”, he ruled the colony with an iron paw and inflicted carnage on protestors in the Brick Lane Massacre. But the ruthless old elites — French or native-born — will not go quietly. A succession of dastardly plots, stunts and atrocities attempt to thwart British self-government. This backlash calls for all the investigative skills of the staunchly proletarian Detective-Inspector LeBrock and his shrewd patrician sidekick, Detective-Sergeant Roderick Ratzi.

More from this author

Literary biographies are on life support

By Boyd Tonkin

The action of the five Grandville volumes took place shortly after the achievement of a fragile self-rule in Britain. Now Talbot has produced a kind of prequel, or origin story. Just published, The Casebook of Stamford Hawksmoor backtracks two decades to the year of independence. Its protagonist, DI Hawksmoor, is a legend among the coppers at the Cour d’Écosse. A saturnine eagle-headed sleuth, armed with Sherlock Holmes-like deerstalker and pipe, he will go on to become LeBrock’s admired mentor and model. The suspicious “suicide” in a Suffolk field of Stamford’s stuffy and rigid civil servant brother (one of many nods to Arthur Conan Doyle) puts our aquiline investigator on the trail of low-life killers (notably the “Butcher of Shoreditch”) and upper-class conspirators. He uncovers a fatal web of corruption around the construction of the neo-Gothic British Parliament at Westminster. But should Hawksmoor trust the ferocious DCI Doberman of Special Branch, let alone his new assistant DS Adrian Rowe, a slick little deer who pretends to come from Kingston nick but speaks with “that distinctive disdainful nasal burr common to Eton alumni”? Even in this anthropomorphic alternate universe, some things never change. Elsewhere, a punter bets 10 francs on Arsenal trouncing Millwall although “Arsenal ain’t won a major pétanque tournament for three years”.

Beyond the plentiful gags and myriad artistic and literary allusions — quotes from Shakespeare, Milton and Byron, visual evocations of Gustave Doré’s vistas of the London slums or Sidney Paget’s original Sherlock Holmes illustrations — Talbot builds his parallel world with terrific audacity and dexterity. What his introduction calls the “historically divergent realm” of Grandville has both the internal logic and the imaginative reach of the boldest fantasy landscapes.

Born in Wigan, Talbot had risen through the hard school of comics illustration for DC Comics, 2000 A.D. and other series. He published his first major graphic novel, The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, in 1982. Over a decade later, The Tale of One Bad Rat — with its Beatrix Potter-style story of surviving child abuse — indicated that his formal ambitions for the “pictorial narrative” had few limits. If the Lewis Carroll-inspired Alice in Sunderland confirmed his gifts, later collaborations with his wife Mary M Talbot took them in fresh directions. Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes, which won the Whitbread Biography Prize, is a hybrid memoir-biography that combines two father-daughter relationships: that of Mary Talbot with her academic father, and James Joyce with the troubled Lucia.

Yet if Talbot has traveled a long way from the playground escapades of Beano and Dandy, he always salutes the comics wizards who pioneered his storytelling art. Background homages to Leo Baxendale, Talbot’s inspirational friend and the creator of the Bash Street Kids and Minnie the Minx, jostle with deftly executed pastiches of Manet, Millais, Mucha, and a score of other artists in the frames and full-page panels of the Grandville books. Talbot the art-history buff even invents a chicken-headed abstract expressionist painter named — Jackson Pollo. Fiercely proud of his working-class roots and secure in his old-school radicalism, he might not appreciate being dubbed the Tom Stoppard of the British graphic novel. Still, this sophisticated and encyclopedic wit, allied to a command of multiple narrative genres, make the comparison far from absurd. And LeBrock does indeed have an admiring canine colleague called Inspector Hound.

The Grandville world of intelligent beasts in a steampunk Napoleonic Britain began when Talbot discovered the satirical anthropomorphic cartoons of an early 19th-century French illustrator, Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard. They triggered a sort of epiphany. “In a moment of genius,” reports Talbot’s publisher Dan Franklin in an afterword to the new story, “Bryan suddenly saw a world.”

The imagination of alternative pasts has flourished for centuries in the arenas of fiction, illustration and (not least) history itself. These days, however, the entire “counterfactual” domain struggles to escape from interminable “what-if-the Nazis-won” accounts of an alternative Second World War. In his (distinctly skeptical) book about the genre and its uses, Altered Pasts, the historian Richard J.Evans traces several generations of “victorious Hitler” speculations in fiction, film and historical writing. Landmarks such as Len Deighton’s SS-GB, Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle and Robert Harris’s Fatherland rise above a terrain crowded over decades with rampant Nazis.

Evans casts a baleful eye on counterfactual tales in whatever guise, whether they take the form of Wishful Thinking or Awful Warning. He sees the invention of parallel pasts as an essentially reactionary genre. It has proliferated because “the concept of progress… took a hard knock” as deterministic visions of an inevitable rosy future — whether Marxist or liberal — lost their allure. It turns out that a sort of Left-Right split governs historians’ discussion of counterfactual narratives. In the other camp, Niall Ferguson — above all in the theoretical introduction to his edited collection of alt-history essays, Virtual History — celebrates the return of chance and uncertainty in thinking about the past. Ferguson advocates a “chaotic” conception of history: one that recognizes complex patterns behind events but also the role of accidents, disruptions and reversals. Such an outlook permits writers to “reconcile the notions of causation and contingency”. Imagine things otherwise and you restore freedom to the past, and to its actors. So conjectural speculation can amount to more than a “parlor game”, or donnish diversion.

Bryan Talbot might strike both Evans and Ferguson as an anomaly: a Left-wing spinner of counterfactual stories (albeit with animal heads) motivated by neither nostalgic longing nor dystopian dread. Narratives that spin off from Bonaparte’s imaginary but perfectly possible triumph at Waterloo themselves have a long history; the idea drives a famous, wistful passage of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. Evans explains that in 1836 Louis Geoffroy — an adopted son of the Emperor himself — wrote a treatise that imagined Napoleon’s conquest of the world: he smashes the British army at the decisive Battle of Cambridge after landing his forces at Great Yarmouth. And a 1907 essay by G.M. Trevelyan, doyen of progress-worshipping Whig historians, spelled out the dire future of British decline that would have followed from Wellington’s defeat in 1815.

The Grandville premise, of long-term French imperial mastery, yielding gradually to home rule, allows Talbot to map (say) the Irish or Indian colonial experience onto British society. The upper crust does very nicely, thank you, with a Frenchified elite not that different — animal identities apart — from their actual counterparts in the era of pea-soupers, hansom cabs, and discreet plush bordellos for the gentry. (That matronly hippo Madame Riverhorse runs a famous house.) As for the plebs, Talbot portrays many varieties of collaboration and resistance, from the moderate nationalism of Harold Drummond (a bulldog, naturally) and his socialists to the terror attacks of the Angry Brigade. Drummond denounces them as “xenophobic fanatics” but the hard-line nationalist tabloids love them, “cynically whipping up hatred of the French for their own profit”. Time and again, the Grandville stories pluck features from our own world and wittily transfer them to its upside-down, inside-out milieu. We even meet a piscine avatar of the author himself: one “Byron Turbot”, an odd fish who ghost-writes “sixty-centime dreadful” true-crime thrillers.

It may seem bizarre to look for enlightenment in the debate over counterfactual stories to a set of comic-book adventures with a cast of talking animals set in a fantasy mock-Victorian Britain. But the Grandville books both imagine a plausible conjectural history — the consequences of a Napoleonic victory — and show how social and technological forces might still have led to a London (and Paris) similar in key aspects to the world we know. And crucially, if also comically, Talbot’s animal kingdom presents a thoroughly colonized Britain with a credible spread of attitudes to the Bonapartes’ dynastic rule: from eager collaboration through grumbling complicity to violent revolt. Counterfactual history has seldom painted as rich an alternative past as Talbot’s — and never a wittier one. Reverse engineered chronology aside, the visual gags on every page delight. Who’s that sad, tipsy ursine figure we spot swigging from a bottle in the street outside the Cour d’Écosse? Bonsoir, Paddington.

Napoleon’s Grand Armée marching down Whitehall was an eventuality that was planned for. “When an enemy lands, all the difficulties of civil government and the restraint of forms cease; every thing must give way to supplying and strengthening the army, repelling the enemy…” wrote Sir David Dundas in a government memo of October 1796. “The great object must be constantly to harass, alarm, and fire on an enemy, and to impede his progress.”

During the war with revolutionary France, the threat of invasion was a reality for the British — not simply a counterfactual dreamed up by an historian having a bath. What if Napoleon had invaded? What then might have been the consequences, both in the short and in the longer terms?

Napoleon’s conquests of other countries provide a clue — notably so if there was strong resistance — most obviously Spain after it was seized in 1808. Such resistance was certainly planned in Britain. Documents from figures such as Thomas, Lord Pelham, Home Secretary from 1801 to 1803, as well as Dundas’s 1796 memo, indicate plans to contest bitterly any French advance from the landing sites, including using scorched earth policies. (Major-General Sir David Dundas would serve as Commander-in-Chief from 1809 to 1811.)

To this end, and in the face of repeated invasion fears, there was a large-scale mobilisation of males into militia and volunteer units, and these were extensively trained. Numerous barracks and Martello towers were built along the south coast. So Britain would have fought, and would have fought hard.

French troops landed in Wales in 1797 and, on a greater scale, in Ireland in 1798. These incursions were swiftly suppressed by locally-available forces, which suggests that far more French troops would have been required for any invasion to succeed. That, indeed, had been the invasion plan in 1759 and 1779, during earlier conflicts. Any French advance from the South Coast would have been contested in the Weald and then again at the Thames. There was also a reserve centre of government in Northamptonshire, to carry on the fight if London fell.

The French advance would not have had the support of air power, airborne troops or mechanised forces, as was the prospect Britain faced in 1940.

If the country had still been conquered, then the hypotheticals open up further. Napoleon’s hostile attitude to Britain, which he regarded as crucial to the opposition throughout Europe, would scarcely have eased as opposition grew there. There were three options used by Napoleon for the lands he conquered, and none was attractive for those defeated. Incorporation in France was one option. This might seem implausible in the case of Britain, but given that Napoleon adopted this method very widely, including for example for the Hanseatic Towns, Dalmatia and, eventually, the Netherlands, it could well have been adopted here. It would have meant military government.

Secondly, there was the option of installing a member of his family, or a close ally, as ruler, as with Naples, Spain, Westphalia, Sweden (with the Frenchman Bernadotte as Regent) and, for a while, the Netherlands. There was no-one available, however, who would have been acceptable in Britain, and no member of the British Royal Family who could have been brought forward.

Thirdly, as with Austria in 1805 and 1809, and Prussia in 1806, they could leave the existing ruler in power but drastically curtail their position, notably by greatly annexing territory, but also by other constraints. This would scarcely have been easy and in Prussia provoked the anger that encouraged an anti-French reaction in 1812-13. It is difficult to see either George III or the Prince Regent as being willing to accept this role. Moreover, unlike in Spain, where the rift in the royal family had provided the French with options, in Britain the divide between George III and the Prince of Wales had greatly eased by this time.

Further reading

France can't cancel Napoleon

By John Lichfield

Napoleon would have needed a quiescent Britain if he was to turn against Continental rivals, but, as in Spain from 1808, a significant occupation army in Britain would have compromised that outcome. Yet Napoleon was not a ruler able to secure quiescence, in large part because, despite the rhetoric of Enlightenment, his rule was oppressive and extortionate. The choice, whether annexed or “allied”, was a poor one. As with Hitler, the inevitable consequences of rule by France was manpower being conscripted and resources seized.

This avarice encouraged opposition which, in turn, was treated harshly. In Lombardy in 1796, Napoleon used summary executions and the burning of villages. Such insurgencies were not new, but they became more important from 1792-1815, in part because the French Revolutionaries and Napoleon transformed, destroyed or took over existing power structures, and also because they accelerated processes of change that much of the population already found inimical.

In particular, French attacks on the Church and Christian practices, let alone full-scale atheistical de-Christianisation, were far from popular, challenging both established beliefs, interests and senses of order, continuity, identity and legality. This helped to contextualise the pressure of meeting onerous French demands for supplies and conscripts for their army, and their seizures of goods and money.

The net effect was a widespread opposition and lawlessness, with, in addition, insurgencies of various types seen across larger areas of Europe as French forces advanced, for example in Calabria in 1806. The French responded with troops, which were referred to as flying columns, by the use of the gendarmerie (mobile armed police), and by recruiting local allies. In 1798, despite what Napoleon saw as the introduction of Enlightenment policies into Malta after he seized it, the island rapidly rebelled in large part due to an insensitive treatment of the Church, which was always a poor strategy, as well as higher taxation. Because of its history of opposition to France, Britain would probably have been far worse-treated.

Further reading

Europe is waiting for its Napoleon

By Peter Franklin

In the British Isles it is very likely that, had Napoleon invaded, he would have found local allies, with more in Ireland than anywhere else. They would not have relied on these rebels to fight for them in England — that was a job for the Grand Armée — but once established, the French would very much have sought assistance in order to get government to work. Moreover, they would have sought to withdraw most of the invading army in order to operate elsewhere.

What French control would have meant would have varied greatly depending on the particular French government in question, and this would have affected the likely supporters in Britain. The radicals of the London Corresponding Society and other such bodies would have worked with the republican regimes of the 1790s but have found an imperial Napoleon far less conducive.

Nevertheless, convenience, self-interest and ideology would have won him some support, as was also the case with the Kingdom of Italy established in 1805. The longer the new order was entrenched, the more likely that there would have been collaborators, although it would have varied. Some of the poets and painters would doubtless have helped decorate the new regime, but they would have been of scant consequence, as anyone with a suitably neo-classical palette would have qualified. Christian Tories, such as Jane Austen, would probably have remained unpublished.

In the ideological sphere, Napoleon’s support for the reintroduction of slavery and the suppression of Haiti would have caused problems for some of the fellow-travellers, but their consciences would doubtless have been flexible, prefiguring those of the historians who have praised Napoleon. Charles James Fox might have justified co-operation on a needs-must basis, and would have certainly been a convenient figurehead for a ministry. The latter would have probably contained “men of business” but the subordination of mercantile Britain to French interests would have exposed their political weakness as quislings able only to implement dictates determined in Paris.

Ultimately, most of the Whigs would probably have found the reality of Napoleonic rule highly unwelcome. The position of his British supporters would have been greatly weakened by the burdens arising from his expectations of support for his imperialism elsewhere.

Further reading

Imagine a world without the USA...

By James Kirkup

The net effect would have been to make British politics far more divisive, both then and subsequently. Conservatism and nationalism would have been closely linked, and the radical tradition associated with harsh foreign rule. In Europe in 1816-48, and to a degree thereafter, there was a divisive political tension that owed much to the legacy of Napoleonic rule. Britain was spared that legacy, and there was only a comparable dissension in Ireland. However much it owed to the silver sea and the Royal Navy, and the security these offered, this difference contributed to British political exceptionalism.

The divisions between liberalism and conservatism that were so bitter in much of Continental Europe in the 19th century — literally then a matter of life and death — played a role in their 20th-century counterparts of Left and Right, as did the legacy of past practices of co-operation or resistance with conquerors. In Britain, things turned out differently, with the centre holding firm for a patriotic affirmation of national sovereignty against extremism of Left and Right. And this owed much to the fact that Britain was able to avoid the rule of Napoleon Bonaparte.