During the War of the Oranges, Leclerc had entered Portugal through Salamanca, but Louis had fallen ill and gone to recuperate at the hot springs midway through. Like Leuven, Salamanca was also a university town.
There was a local custom: after earning their degrees, university students would celebrate by attending a bullfight, then write the word "victory" on the walls with the bull's blood. This differed from the University of Padua, where students who received their degrees were subjected to public jokes.
Severus had even received contraceptives from a female university student in Padua.
After a brief laugh, she calmed down again. Sending the army to suppress the students, she could practically imagine how much the residents there would resent people from France. Rebuilding a new city supportive of France in the less prosperous Mechelen would be far easier.
Compared with Nantes, Rouen's greatest advantage was that the Seine ran through Paris. Cargo had to be transferred from sea transport to inland shipping, which certainly involved loading and unloading. It would be wonderful if they could design a crane that made loading easier.
She had no idea what condition France's ports were currently in. Le Havre was a port city; if there were no loading machines and they still had to rely on manpower, then they would have to issue another bounty.
The Spinning Jenny had not been rejected from the very beginning. Many people had been happy to see machines replace manual labor.
Yet there were only so many orders. Once machines took over production, fewer workers were needed. What the Luddites hated was that machines had stolen their jobs, much like the day laborers who depended on autumn harvest work and lost their jobs to threshing machines, forcing them into the cities.
During the French Revolutionary Wars, many