AH Challenge: French and British Revolutions

You're challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to have a revolution in France and Britain between 1785 and 1805 with a POD no earlier than 1700. Go!:D
 
1789, just a few months later, repeats in London.
Not really necessary for a POD to have.
just 1848 was replicated all over europe, 1789 also could cross the channel.
king beheaded in front of Buckingham palace, Tower burnt Bastille-like, new cromwell declaring republic, french and english brothers marching side by side toward a Freedom, Justice and Friendship.
In a few years, civil war.
 
Well, there already was a revolution in France between 1785 and 1805, so we're halfway there just from the OTL.

Perhaps if the French Revolution hadn't gone off the rails and descended into bloodthirsty (Robespierre) and warmongering (Napoleon) despotisms, and had instead established a viable republic like the American Revolution just had, those two revolutions together could have served as an inspiration to the British and stirred up anti-monarchical sentiment there?
 
Bah. Owing to my Sans-Cullote hair, no doubt, I feel people tend to misunderstand the French Revolution.

There's no doubt that the American one was, in some very important ways, more succesful. It suceeded in its goals with minimal upheaval and ended with establishing a rational, flexible, durable, intelligent constitution who's ideals remain relevant today.

It also left thousands and thousands of people literally enslaved. Sure, trying to change that could well have created Haiti times ten to the twelfth; practically speaking, it was probably the better option. In terms of principles, it's still abhorent.

I broadly agree that if the French revolution had stopped where the American one did, it would have been better for everyone. Better for a lot of the people killed by the wars, not least Frenchmen, and better for future generations lacking the meme that you can just unplug a society and start again. But...

You have to realise just how miserable, wretched, and inescapable the conditions of the vast majority of people in 18th century Europe - in France, Britain, anywhere - actually were. Most people lived under the rule of a hereditary despot kept in power by a mixture of fear and tradition who could waste his wealth on stupid prestige projects and military willy-waving while his people eked an existance of hunger, overwork, and brutalisation. "North Korea", in other words. Sometimes, it was somewhere under 10% of the population rather than just one guy. "Apartheid".

The usual assumption is that the moment that dictators and executions came along, the Spirit of the Revolution, generally imagined to be that of modern liberal democracy, was betrayed, and it was all going wrong. But to think in contemporary terms, people really were willing to go through a lot of hardship, and to accept the necessity of obeying orders and killing lots of people, if they thought it would overthrow the system that governed lives they'd been born into - and given those lives, that's pretty understandable.

In short, it's easy and probably correct to be a Girondist now, but it was easy to be a Jacobin then, and I think many of us probably would have been.

The point of all this is that making the revolution less radical (which almost certainly means keeping the king) is unlikely to inspire a revolution in Britain. A moderate revolution would be a mechanism for the wealthy middle classes to gain a political say and a fairer system of finance, which in Britain they already had the beginnings of, comparatively speaking. And on the other hand, I don't think a radical revolution is at all impossible in Britain.

One way to go about it might be to have us win early on in America. The precedents this established - that if a legislature is troublesome you can shut it down, and that people outside the established church are hiding under the bed working against the King - combined with the prestige it gives to the hardliners could swing Britain further into reactionary authoritarianism than we already went.

France is still going to be the spark, because France is the one with no dosh (the losses of the ARW can likely be made somewhere else, even if it delays things a little). But once that happens... well, in the latter 1790s, things got pretty hairy for the government. Add in a messy situation in the colonies, and you could have a triple-whammy.
 
The usual assumption is that the moment that dictators and executions came along, the Spirit of the Revolution, generally imagined to be that of modern liberal democracy, was betrayed, and it was all going wrong. But to think in contemporary terms, people really were willing to go through a lot of hardship, and to accept the necessity of obeying orders and killing lots of people, if they thought it would overthrow the system that governed lives they'd been born into - and given those lives, that's pretty understandable.

I agree.
A revolution to be succesful must have a bit of millenarism: it must be both a political upstage and a cathartic act.
In a few words, you must rise up to fight the Evil (meaning that tyranny, capitalism, bolscevism, or whatever you like): it is a religious crusade against the forces of Hell to bring Heaven on Earth.

And the basic idea is that you could draw Heaven on earth only by waving through a lake of blood.
 
It also left thousands and thousands of people literally enslaved. Sure, trying to change that could well have created Haiti times ten to the twelfth; practically speaking, it was probably the better option. In terms of principles, it's still abhorent.

I don't think anyone's arguing that the American Revolution was an unqualified success. The Founders had to make some very unfortunate compromises in order to hold things together, and even though they assembled the single most successful political revolution in history, I don't deny things could have been better if they had been willing to be just a bit more radical.

Nevertheless, the French Revolution, like most revolutions, was too radical, and to its own detriment.

Most people lived under the rule of a hereditary despot kept in power by a mixture of fear and tradition who could waste his wealth on stupid prestige projects and military willy-waving while his people eked an existance of hunger, overwork, and brutalisation.
And I don't blame them for doing what they thought was necessary to rid themselves of that despot. It's just unfortunate that they ended up trading one despot for another. And then yet another, far more ambitious despot later on.

In short, it's easy and probably correct to be a Girondist now, but it was easy to be a Jacobin then, and I think many of us probably would have been.
I'll not deny that. Actually living through a terrible situation is very different from looking back on it with a couple centuries' worth of hindsight. While something is actually happening, you have no way of knowing how it's going to turn out.

But whatever their motives were, it doesn't change the fact that things went too far in France. And it isn't as though there weren't wise political thinkers around at the time that they could have listened to and thereby made things better.

For one thing, I think both revolutions would have benefited from not ignoring Thomas Paine so much. He wanted to make the American Revolution just a little more radical, and the French Revolution just a little less. And America and France would both have been better off for it.

The fact is, Robespierre and Napoleon both happened. Just because we can look back on it now and understand why they happened, that doesn't mean their happening wasn't a tragedy for the French Revolution. And in the context of this thread's challenge, I was merely suggesting that if they hadn't happened, and people in Britain were able to see that the Americans and the French had both just discarded despotic regimes and set up sensible systems where the people governed themselves, that could have inspired them to rise up and try the same thing. The zeitgeist of the era did seem to be moving in that direction.
 
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