New Burgundy

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1. #1New Burgundy

   Keys: New Burgundy, Nouvelle-Bourgogne

   République de Nouvelle-Bourgogne

   The polity is officially La République de Nouvelle-Bourgogne (Republic of New Burgundy). The city is Port-d'Avenne. New Avenport is what Americans call it, through a process of linguistic contamination of Nouvelle-Bourgogne for the polity and Port-d'Avenne for the city. Resulting in the city being colloquially called “New Avenport”. American newspapers routinely printed constructions that differentiated the two but due to the proximity of New and Avenport in these sentences, repeated across decades of print, and the fact that the city was tied to the Polity, it produced the compound New Avenport as a frequency effect rather than a decision. By 1910 it was fixed in American English usage.

2. #2New Avenport

   Keys: New Avenport, Port’d Avenne · Secondary: New Burgundy

   Port’d Avenne

   Port’d Avenne is the Capital (and only City) of New Burgundy, approximately four hundred and eighty thousand people on the western shore of Delaware Bay, at the mouth of the Avenne River. It occupies approximately 300 square kilometres on and around the Avenne Peninsula — bounded by water on three sides and a low hill ridge on the fourth — and is one of the most densely built environments on the eastern seaboard. Its GDP per capita is comparable to Luxembourg or Singapore. Its currency, the Avenport guilder (A₲. Its parliament traces its institutional lineage to the pre-revolutionary Estates General of France, a claim it makes in the archaic French of the founding-era legal record, while conducting its daily business in English.

3. #3Police

   Keys: Cops, Police · Secondary: New Avenport, New Burgundy

   Law Enforcement

   The Republic’s law enforcement is organised into the Avenport Constabulary, the Harbour Authority, and the Special Intelligence Bureau. The Constabulary handles criminal investigation and uniformed policing. The Harbour Authority has its own enforcement arm covering the port and the Wharf District. The Special Intelligence Bureau officially investigates financial crime and officially does nothing else. The legal system is based on the republic's own codified law, derived from Burgundian customary law and modified by over two centuries of local precedent. It is notably more permissive in matters of personal conduct and notably more rigorous in matters of commercial law. What you do in private is largely your own affair. What you do with money is documented, regulated, and enforced.

4. #4Government (gv)

   Keys: Government · Secondary: New Avenport, New Burgundy

   Government

   The République de Nouvelle-Bourgogne is governed by the Estates General — the États Généraux — its parliament, established by the 1793 Declaration of Independence as the legitimate successor of the pre-revolutionary French constitutional body of the same name. That the Estates General now operates within a democratic framework is the result of a century of reform that the founding families resisted at every stage and accepted at the last possible moment. The formal record remains in French. The formal vocabulary remains pre-revolutionary. The institution's claim to constitutional legitimacy remains rooted in 1671 and 1793, not in 1901.

5. #5Assembly of Notables (gv)

   Keys: The Notables, Upper House · Secondary: Estates General, Government

   La Assemblée des Notables — Assembly of Notables (Upper House)

   The upper house of the Estates General, comprising ten hereditary seats (reduced from fourteen by the 1968 Reform Act), four appointed seats filled by the Lord Chancellor on the recommendation of a nominations committee, and six elected seats filled by Pairs Élus — Elected Peers granted personal, non-heritable baronies for the duration of their term. The Notables can delay but not block legislation from the lower house. It functions in practice as a chamber of institutional memory, elite interest, and the specific moral authority — auctoritas, in the Roman senatorial sense — that accumulates in a body that has been sitting continuously since 1793. Its formal proceedings are recorded in the archaic New Burgundy French of the founding era.

6. #6Assembly of the Nation (gv)

   Keys: The Nation, Lower House · Secondary: Estates General, Government

   La Assemblée de la Nation — The Assembly of the Nation (Lower House)

   The directly elected lower house, where actual political contestation happens. The gap between the Nation's democratic energy and the Notables' institutional conservatism is the republic's central political tension. Now the live expression of this tension is the Dessaint Amendment — Baroness Anaïs Dessaint's twelfth consecutive attempt to reduce hereditary seats in the Notables from ten to seven, converting the difference to additional Pairs Élus positions. It has cleared committee for the first time, with the Duchess of Valmirande's support proving decisive. The full chamber vote is scheduled for the nineteenth of May.

7. #7Lord Chancellor (gv)

   Keys: Lord Chancellor · Secondary: Estates General, Government

   The Lord Chancellor

   Head of government. Presides over the Estates General in joint session. Forms the executive from the dominant coalition in the Nation. The office was created by the 1793 Declaration as a deliberate alternative to both presidency and monarchy — a chancellorial tradition drawn from the republic's Burgundian legal heritage, the guardian of the law's continuity. In 2026, the Lord Chancellor is the Honourable Claire Beaumont-Sarre, fifty-eight, the first woman to hold the position, whose election in 2022 broke a precedent that most people had stopped noticing was a precedent. She is cautious about the aristocracy, aggressive about infrastructure and the Quartier Sud's housing provision, and manages the American relationship with the careful attention it has always required.

8. #8Armed forces (gv) (mil)

   Keys: armed forces, Military · Secondary: Government

   Armed Forces

   The Republic’s armed forces are a small, professional, constitutionally precise institution whose function is as much political as military. They do not exist to win conventional wars. They exist to perform sovereignty visibly enough that it is taken seriously, to make the cost of casual interference sufficiently high that nobody attempts it, and to maintain the republic's claim to genuine statehood in a world of much larger neighbours. Their motto — Pour la durée, for the duration — speaks to endurance rather than victory: the specific military virtue of a force that has never fought a conventional war and whose success is measured by the fact that it has never had to.

9. #9The Guard (mil)

   Keys: The Guard · Secondary: Armed Forces, Military

   La Garde Républicaine — Republican Guard

   The senior service. Approximately six hundred personnel in 2026, divided between the Garde de Cérémonie — the public face, who stand at the gates of the Palais de Justice, escort the Lord Chancellor, and perform the ceremonial theatre of sovereignty — and the Garde Opérationnelle: light infantry trained to professional standards, responsible for the physical security of government buildings, infrastructure, and the Exchange's gold reserves. The Garde has participated in UN peacekeeping operations twice since 1949 — in the 1990s and in 2008 — which gave its officer corps genuine operational experience and its institutional culture a modest but real international credibility. Its ceremonial uniform is deep navy with gold piping, a shako modified with a Burgundian cross badge.

10. #10Navy (mil)

    Keys: Navy · Secondary: Armed Forces

    La Marine Nationale de Port-d'Avenne

    The naval arm. Five vessels in 2026: the offshore patrol vessel La Nouvelle-Bourgogne (commissioned 1998, the fleet's primary open-water capability); the river patrol gunboats L'Avenne and La Burgundie; the fast dispatch vessel Le Conseil; and the coastal survey vessel La Fondatrice (named for the original flagship, retired 1961). La Marine participates in joint maritime patrols of Delaware Bay under a technical cooperation agreement with the US Coast Guard renewed every five years since 1962. Both sides describe this arrangement in entirely different terms in their respective official publications. The vessels annd crew involved are New Burgundy's own.

11. #11Reserve (mil)

    Keys: Territorial Defense, Reserve · Secondary: Armed Forces, Military

    La Défense du Territoire — Territorial Defense

    The reserve and territorial defence force: approximately fifteen hundred part-time soldiers who maintain civilian careers and train on weekends and for two weeks annually, organised into six territorial companies. Membership cuts across class lines in a way that the Garde does not — reservists include Undercroft residents and Bellhaven Heights solicitors, and several founding families serve as officers. The annual training camp is considered the republic's most genuinely democratic institution. Its demographics in 2026 reflect the full diversity of the republic's population, including reservists from the Okafor-Dessève and Marchetti-Fonse families whose professional backgrounds have found natural homes in the medical and engineering units respectively.

12. #12L'Avennou (lang)

    Keys: Avennou, New Burgundy French · Secondary: aristocracy, Language

    The Formal Language: Archaic New Burgundy French (L'Avennou/L'Avennôt)

    The French of the republic's official record is not contemporary Parisian French. It is a fossil of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century Franc-Comtois dialect (Frainc-Comtou)— and more than a fossil, a deliberate preservation. The founding documents of 1671 and 1793, the constitutional text, the noble title grants, the formal record of Notables proceedings — all in this archaic register. It contains archaic eighteenth-century administrative French, Burgundian legal formulae, the honorifics and forms of address of a pre-revolutionary order that France abolished over two centuries ago. Several words in the formal register are pure Franche-Comté dialect survivals that appear in the Constitution and noble title grants that have been in ceremonial use so long that nobody questions them. The National Archives' founding-era documents require access because they require translation competency of a specifically Burgundian historical kind. This evolution of Franc-Comtois has been called Avennou or New Burgundy French.

13. #13French (lang)

    Keys: French · Secondary: Language

    The Prestige Layer: Contemporary French

    The founding families speak French among themselves and at formal occasions as a marker of continuity and cultural distinctiveness — a claim that the constitutional order they preserved is still alive in some meaningful sense. Their spoken French is closer to contemporary Parisian French, learned through education and cultural contact. It has tells: Burgundian/Franc-Comtois fossil idioms and pronunciations the speakers do not recognise as unusual because they have always said them that way. In Modern times it is a learned accomplishment for even the oldest founding-house members, but it is performed with the consistency of people who understand that symbols matter. It is also taught as a second language in the school system.

14. #14English (lang)

    Keys: English · Secondary: Language

    The Daily Layer: English

    What everyone actually speaks. The newspapers are in English. The Assemblée de la Nation debates in English. The street signs are in Avennou. The menus in the Landmark District's expensive restaurants are in French. The Notables' proceedings are formally recorded in French while being conducted in English. Everything else is English. Members deliver speeches in English; the clerks render them in Avennou for the official record. The Undercroft speaks English with Avennou words embedded in it like fossils — the names of streets, the terms of old leases, the liturgical language of the Church of Our Lady of the Harbour. The founding families speak French among themselves. The merchant class code-switches fluently. The gap between these two facts is, and has always been, where Port-d'Avenne lives.

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