In fact, the spark of this uprising had been buried even before the war began.
Later Western accounts often portrayed businesses and states as the greatest victims of price wars for propaganda purposes, but in truth, workers, farmers, and countless ordinary people were the real victims no one paid attention to.
A price war was, in itself, a process of shifting costs. Disaster could be passed down layer by layer, and those at the bottom could only endure it by force.
In fact, when Franz had debated the various states before, they had not been indifferent, nor had they been unwilling to speak out—they simply had no voice to speak with.
The first obstacle before the vast majority of commoners was not courage, but the publication fee.
A hundred Florins might have been just a meal to those at the top, a single banknote in their wallets.
But to most people at the bottom, it might have meant half a year's living expenses, several months' worth of food for an entire family. They might not have been able to save that sum in years.
To speak of risking life and death took only four words, yet every stroke of those words had to be written in blood and life.
Yet more tragic still, those who put forth all their savings could often buy no more than some remote corner, and the second barrier they faced was the censorship of newspapers and publications by the governments of the various states.
Those who held the right to speak had never wished to hear dissenting voices. Most opposing voices were strangled in the cradle, and even those who made too much noise vanished along with them.
Controlling public opinion and enforcing brutal suppression was a game rulers had played for thousands of years,