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.
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What Are Some Interesting PODs For The French Revolution?
- Thread starter Christian
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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.
Fair point, though since he was at Versailles along with the primary Royal Family at the time of the March, it may well be that he gets killed along with them. OTL's Charles X had left France right after the storming of the Bastille in July, so he would be the strongest claimant in the wake of such a massacre, but Louis-Philippe II, being on the spot, supportive of the Revolution and willing to rule as a constitutional monarch (though how much all that might change after the Royal Family's ATL demise is open to question), might well be elevated to the throne instead, perhaps even setting up a different form of OTL's Orleanist-Legitimist rivalry. Of course, if a massacre resulting from the March becomes a wider purge of royal contenders and French royalism in general, then Charles X would be the only credible claimant to escape it, and thus end up as the first ruler in a Bourbon Restoration rather than OTL's Louis XVIII
Radac
Too young, too simple, sometimes naïve
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A very late PoD, but perhaps a successful Malet coup?
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.
There is, of course, the very old hypothesis that if there had been no American Revolution then there would have been no French Revolution.......
I recently read a history of the Revolution and I was struck, even more so than other major historical events, by just how many possible PODs there were in such a relatively short period of time, any one of which would have resulted in an unrecognisable world. Can't think of specifics off the top of my head though.
Of the ones mentioned above, I particularly like "they keep Louis XVII as a puppet boy king and avoid a titular republic" because it seems so contraindicative of the defining narrative of OTL, yet nearly happened. I was just reading Pepys' diary about the Restoration in England, and much the same is true there of how it happened - the way it went from almost total apathy about a restoration to everyone gaily going along with hanging, drawing and quartering the remaining regicides a month later, for no apparent reason. You get the impression that we could just as easily have ended up with Monck as another Cromwell and still be a republic to this day, or something along those lines, if things had gone only slightly differently.
Of the ones mentioned above, I particularly like "they keep Louis XVII as a puppet boy king and avoid a titular republic" because it seems so contraindicative of the defining narrative of OTL, yet nearly happened. I was just reading Pepys' diary about the Restoration in England, and much the same is true there of how it happened - the way it went from almost total apathy about a restoration to everyone gaily going along with hanging, drawing and quartering the remaining regicides a month later, for no apparent reason. You get the impression that we could just as easily have ended up with Monck as another Cromwell and still be a republic to this day, or something along those lines, if things had gone only slightly differently.
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.
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After the Field of Mars, I'm not sure there was any route left to him better than exile, internally or otherwise.
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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.
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.
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?
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.
This also adds more fuel to the fire for an alternate history story idea I've been kicking around.
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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.
The crown drowning its legitimacy in blood is one way to deal with republican city/royalist country issue that holds federalism back. But honestly I don't think the crown can hold Paris without razing it to the ground in those conditions. There's a reason they ruled from Versailles.
How about an Austrian backed occupation under the monarchy (the royal family escaping and coming back maybe?) prompting the revolution to develop guerrilla warfare instead of conscription in mass, which of course means building a base in the countryside? When the republic finally liberates itself as Austria exhausts its willingness to back an unpopular monarchy, it emerges as a coalition of local guerrillas rooted in provincial bases.
Maybe that's too out there.
Ricardolindo
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Many of them were, and many more were accused of being reactionaries. It didn't help that the heyday of the federalists was during the Great Terror, when just about anyone could be accused of being a reactionary.
But as I said, that's not actually what I'm interested in: it's looking at whether one of the distinct ways that the Revolution shaped France- shaped modern nations to this day- could be different, while still maintaining a 'revolutionary' quality.