French Revolution

The French Revolution is presented not as a single, settled historical cause but as a contested turning point in the account of Tristero. It may have offered the underground postal network an opening to help end the Thurn and Taxis monopoly; a later account also describes a schism within Tristero over whether to aid that old adversary. The uncertainty surrounding both claims makes the Revolution part of Oedipa’s accumulating, unverifiable history of rival mail systems and political power.

The Revolution and the End of a Postal Monopoly

Emory Bortz recounts that, after the Holy Roman Empire ended, Thurn and Taxis lost the source of its legitimacy. As the organization struggled, its opponents could appear to possess a power beyond ordinary political explanation. Bortz says that by 1795 it was suggested that Tristero had staged the entire French Revolution to create an excuse for issuing the Proclamation of 9th Frimaire, An III, which ratified the end of the Thurn and Taxis postal monopoly in France and the Lowlands.

The scale of this allegation is striking: a revolution becomes, in one version, an operation serving a postal network’s strategic objective. But the account does not establish who made the suggestion or what evidence supported it. When Oedipa asks whether Bortz has read it somewhere, he cannot provide a source, replying only that someone might have raised the possibility. The claim therefore registers as rumor within the historical narrative, not as confirmed fact.

Tristero’s Internal Schism

A typescript Genghis Cohen receives from a contact in New York offers a different view of the Revolution’s consequences. Purportedly translated from an 1865 article in Jean-Baptiste Moens’s Bibliothèque des Timbrophiles, it draws on the supposedly discovered and decrypted journals of the Comte Raoul Antoine de Vouziers, Marquis de Tour et Tassis. According to this layered account, a faction within Tristero refused to accept the Holy Roman Empire’s end and regarded the Revolution as a temporary madness.

That faction sought to assist Thurn and Taxis through subsidies, reasoning that the two aristocratic houses had a shared obligation. Its overture divided Tristero. At a convention in Milan, debate continued for a week, enmities deepened, families split, and blood was shed. The proposal to subsidize Thurn and Taxis failed; many conservatives then left Tristero, interpreting the outcome as a judgment against their cause. The article describes the organization as entering a historical eclipse, weakened by the loss of noble patronage.

Aftermath and Competing Histories

The same typescript traces Tristero’s diminished fortunes from the Battle of Austerlitz through the upheavals of 1848. It says the network survived with little of its earlier aristocratic support, handling anarchist correspondence and participating only peripherally in political movements, including the Frankfurt Assembly and the barricades in Buda-Pesth. Many members reportedly fled to America in 1849–50, where, in the account’s ironic conclusion, they would serve those seeking to extinguish revolution.

Bortz’s discussion makes the Revolution matter both as a supposed instrument against the postal monopoly and as the occasion for division within Tristero. These explanations do not settle one another into a coherent, verified history: one is explicitly presented as a suggestion without a known source, and the other arrives through a translated article based on purportedly decrypted journals. Their competing stories instead show how the Revolution can be absorbed into rival explanations of political change, clandestine organization, and the fate of communication outside state control.