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What Are Some Interesting PODs For The French Revolution?

C

Christian

Well-known member
I’ve heard a lot about the royal family successfully reaching Montmedy or the Girondins triumphing, but I want some more original or obscure ideas.

Like, what if, as some wished in the Estates-General, a bicameral legislature managed to be installed?

What if Mirabeau managed to get his way and allowed members of the legislature to be appointed as ministers?

What if Robespierre never proposes the self-denying ordinance, potentially giving him a bigger platform to protest Brissot’s bellicose rhetoric?

What if Corday stabs Robespierre instead of Marat, leaving Robespierre as a martyr and Marat to slowly waste away from his skin disease?

What if Augereau got his way and the Jacobins move against Bonaparte or Dubois-Crance gets his way and arrests Bonaparte at Saint-Cloud?
 
What if the troops surrounding Paris before the Bastille was stormed were ordered to attack? The officers called it off because they were unsure of their loyalty. So either the Bastille itself is never stormed or the attackers of the Bastille get even angrier, more radical and gain more numbers.
 
Lafayette was offered the position of President of the National Assembly quite early into his stint as Commander of the National Guard. If you can somehow get him to take that up, there's a bunch of places you can go from there. President of a French Republic, de facto PM of a constitutional monarchy, accidentally triggering a Jacobin uprising, lots of places to go.
 
Major Crimson said:
Lafayette was offered the position of President of the National Assembly quite early into his stint as Commander of the National Guard. If you can somehow get him to take that up, there's a bunch of places you can go from there. President of a French Republic, de facto PM of a constitutional monarchy, accidentally triggering a Jacobin uprising, lots of places to go.
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I’m pretty sure that position wasn’t really what we would think of president now. It was largely a ceremonial position that was held for a few weeks before a new one was appointed.
 
Christian said:
I’m pretty sure that position wasn’t really what we would think of president now. It was largely a ceremonial position that was held for a few weeks before a new one was appointed.
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Of course, it was an administrative position and this doesn't tilt the whole revolution on its head but even so it brings Lafayette much closer to the centre of power at a pretty pivotal moment in the Revolution. It doesn't ensure anything but it certainly makes him the most powerful person in the revolution up to that point and gives him a more senior political role than he ever had IOTL. Frankly, just by combining the figures of leader of the National Guard and leader of the National Assembly, you're investing a lot of the power of the Revolution into a single individual both on a practical and symbolic level.
 
It would be interesting to see if you could get to a Republic without the 10th of August, especially if you could keep Lafayette and the other 'liberal' nobles on board.

The trouble is that in the event Louis absolutely burns his bridges with them, they'd be more likely to replace him with the duc d'Orleans. But let's handwave all that- there's a flight to Varennes but no massacre of the champ de Mars. Orleans is removed somehow- for simplicity and the sake of radicalisation, lets say he's stabbed by some fool who people think is linked to Artois. His son is a slightly unknown quantity so people don't want to put him straight on the throne, and you end up with Lafayette as President of the National Assembly and Regent of France.

By 1793 you now have a situation where the French Republic has two nascent parties- the Montagnards as the out and out republicans, and Lafayette with an unwieldy coalition of right Girondins, constitutional monarchists and federalists.

Implausible? Sure, but you could have fun with it.
 
Usually AH French Revolutions tend to be far more moderate than OTL’s and so I’ve been thinking about how the French Revolution could become more extreme than it was OTL’s, veering massively in a left-wing or right-wing direction. Obviously @Thande explored this in LTTW but is there a way to do it with a POD in say 1789? Which figures would be able to make this happen?
 
Here’s a couple:

1789: If the Royal Family had left Versailles before the Women’s March had arrived. (As always, blame Louis. But what would the Revolutionaries had done if faced with an empty palace and a fleeing Royal Family? Would Civil War ensue, presumably with Louis fleeing or as a puppet of the Ultras?

1791: If Mirabeau had not died.

(Not sure just how successful he’d have been in wrangling the Revolution to his and the Queen’s interests, but worth considering)

-If Marie Antoinette and her children had been able to escape in one of the post-Varennes schemes.

1792: if they had kept Louis XVII as a boy King and the Republic had been a Regency instead.

-If the Duke of Brunswick’s incendiary Manifesto had not been issued.

1796:if Babeuf’s Conspiracy of Equals had overthrown the Directory. (The whole Republic being run by this guy would be fascinating, although only managing to seize Paris and it being The Commune, but 75 years earlier, has potential as well)

1797: if Lazare Hoche had not died.

1799: if Sieyès had found a different sword to lead the 18 Brumaire. (Say, for instance, Joubert doesn’t die at Novi, or Napoleon falls ill at the Nile)

1800: if Toussaint Louverture and Haiti had declared independence from Napoleonic France.

Then there’s related PoDs, such as Leopold II of Austria not dying in 1792, or perhaps something more outlandish, like the Duke of Brunswick somehow ending up on the French Throne/Command, as was allegedly being negotiated at one point.
 
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I kinda like the idea of the revolutionaries being confronted with an empty throne, declaring a republic in absentia or picking an extremly pliant member of the royal family to install as a constitutional monarch, and Louis et al just sort of withering away once the revolutoinary armies avoid being disloged and wasting away in exile somewhere.
 
What if the Prairial uprising succeeded in their aims of “Bread and the Constitution of ’93!”? They apparently called for immediate elections, so that could probably backfire on them and get a royalist majority in the legislative.
 
Venocara said:
Obviously @Thande explored this in LTTW but is there a way to do it with a POD in say 1789?
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Aznavour said:
1789: If the Royal Family had left Versailles before the Women’s March had arrived. (As always, blame Louis. But what would the Revolutionaries had done if faced with an empty palace and a fleeing Royal Family? Would Civil War ensue, presumably with Louis fleeing or as a puppet of the Ultras?
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"The Royal Family gets massacred by the Women's March" seems to fit as well.
 
Venocara said:
It does, although barring the inevitable foreign intervention I have no idea what would happen from there.
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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.

2. With the contemporary perception of the Women's March being composed of almost entirely women, maybe the Royal Family's massacre provides a stark example for anti-feminist and anti-women's rights efforts in general, at the time of the Revolution and in later decades/centuries?
 
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