For an EXTREMELY soft AH, you could pull a Guns of the South and have neoreactionary time travelers come in to try and nip it in the bud (thinking that it's the root of all modern evil). Have some fictional French town take the place of Rivington.
What’s more likely to happen is that the Comte de Provence, the OTL Louis XVIII, takes power as he was more closely related and hasn’t emigrated.Two thoughts coming to mind on possible subsequent events:
1. Louis-Philippe II, the Duke of Orleans and Louis XVI's cousin (believed by some modern-day scholars and more contemporaries to be one of the main instigators of the March) becomes King in the wake of the massacre, bringing a form of real constitutional monarchy to France well ahead of Louis XVIII in 1814-15, or his son doing so in 1830; or the attack against the immediate Royal Family spirals into a general targeting of all royalists (basically an earlier version of the Terror), and he ends up executed anyway.
What’s more likely to happen is that the Comte de Provence, the OTL Louis XVIII, takes power as he was more closely related and hasn’t emigrated.
An interesting thing I hear is that, Alexander I, surprisingly enough, was actually in favor of a republican government in France. Moreau actually came back to Europe, and that Malet had named Moreau as the leader of a interim French government in case his coup had succeeded.A very late PoD, but perhaps a successful Malet coup?
A few people have already mentioned Lafayette, but do you think his making a successful escape from prison in 1794 would have had a significant impact on events in France? I have Lafayette on the brain since I recently finished listening to a biography of him. My inclination is to say that if he had successfully escaped, the effects for France would have been relatively insignificant: it seems unlikely he would have returned to France very soon and risked recapture and a longer imprisonment (or worse) so in the end he'd probably be waiting on Napoleon and the coup of 18 Brumaire anyway.
I wonder if there's a POD that gets you a republican, federalist France? So much of the Revolution's legacy has been the centralisation of the state, as the nation-state. A Republic that at least tolerates regional differences or even languages would be very distinct from our France.
The problem, I suppose, is that the federalists reached their peak after the war had broken out and during the terror- and it wasn't a particularly strong showing for them even then. It's also worth noting that many federalists weren't federalists at all, but just had the label slapped on them by their enemies. Even if they had won, diffusing authority from Paris is not going to win the war.
Still, I think that's a cultural POD worth exploring.
Very true. And it makes even more sense when you consider that it was a couple decades after his imprisonment before he dipped his toe back into the political waters.After the Field of Mars, I'm not sure there was any route left to him better than exile, internally or otherwise.
I think the difficulty is Paris. Much of the revolutionary energy came from the capital. The Parisian mob was essential in staving off reaction. And they'd definitely include federalism in the scope they need to defend against.
If you can engineer a situation where the revolutionary energy is coming from the provinces, you'll get the material basis for federalism from it. Maybe forces loyal to the directory crush an attempted Jacobin/Napoleon coup and clamp down on Paris while floating a monarchical restoration, leading to radicals in the armed forces who are coming back to the front to seek alternate sources of support in France's secondary cities and promise federalism if they back a march on Paris to deal with the situation?
Good point.
I feel that by 1799, mass revolutionary energy is on the wane. How about something similar but earlier- Artois and Marie Antoinette persuade Louis (or he's dead somehow and there's a reactionary regency) to crush Paris and the National Assembly sometime between 1789 and 1792. Royalist units move in, there's massacres when the population rises, vicious street fighting but the crown manages to hold.
The Parisian leadership scatters into the regions- Lyon, Marseilles, Bordeaux et cetera. Committees of Public Safety begin trying to salvage the revolution in their regions, then awkwardly coordinate- a bit like the Spanish juntas during the Peninsular War.
Eventually, the Revolution triumphs- but now the regional power bases are well established and no one wants to be the first committee to give up their powers to Paris lest their Jacobin/Orleaniste/Girondin rivals don't do the same.
I wonder if there's a POD that gets you a republican, federalist France? So much of the Revolution's legacy has been the centralisation of the state, as the nation-state. A Republic that at least tolerates regional differences or even languages would be very distinct from our France.
The problem, I suppose, is that the federalists reached their peak after the war had broken out and during the terror- and it wasn't a particularly strong showing for them even then. It's also worth noting that many federalists weren't federalists at all, but just had the label slapped on them by their enemies. Even if they had won, diffusing authority from Paris is not going to win the war.
Still, I think that's a cultural POD worth exploring.
@LSCatilina once said at the other place that the federalists tended to be reactionaries.