AH Challenge: Reverse American and French Revolutions

This seems like an obvious one, but my google-fu failed to find it discussed earlier.

Have the American Revolution result in an American Directory proto-fascism, possibly followed by the rise of a Napoleon. And the French Revolution result in a liberal, egalitarian French Republic, one that survives at least twenty years of elections without a coup.

Any thoughts?
 
Re: Flipping the US and French revolutions

Making the American revolution more repressive and bloodthirsty's relatively easy.

Allow the Federalist crowd unlimited power and make George Washington president-for-life and it'd make Robespierre's Reign of Terror look tame.
It was grimly nasty OTL in the Southern colonies, where the Loyalist forces were much more widespread and powerful forces to be reckoned with.
If the Brits had a semi-savvy general-in-chief willing to pardon Patriots and make locals officers in the Southern colonies, the struggle would have been out of the OTL Russian Civil War in savagery and intensity.

FWIW, IIRC, the Brits tried that strategy in the North where Patriot sentiments were far more entrenched.
Also, a BIG stumbling block was British willingness tor recruit blacks as soldiers and sailors which outraged the Southern planters.
IF the Patriots managed to prevail after such a scorched-earth campaign, I doubt sentiments of forgiveness and reconciliation would be foremost on everyone's minds.

As to getting the French Revolution to be less nasty, that's a much tougher problem. In America's case, the leading citizens were tired of their interests getting messed over by an indifferent British Parliament.
The Seven Years' War had scared American colonists sh**less at how ready the British Empire was willing to trade territory for time, and shockingly, treat the Indians' interests as equal to theirs. However, that's a thirteen-year gap between end of SYW (1763) and DOI (1776).

In France, you had this medieval political system trying to deal with the modern age which had gotten increasingly oppressive and disconnected from
its people for a couple of centuries.

The French economy got ever more anemic and sclerotic as the system became more corrupt and incompetent with royal appointees treating their positions as an excuse to benefit themselves, not as a sacred trust.

The whole class of "nobles" that benefited from it, in the French revolutionaries' minds, had to be called to account because they'd been above the law for so long. There were so many egregious examples it was simpler just to paint with a broad brush and consider them all parasites.

To stop the Terror, you'd have to get Robespierre and Co to only go for the worst, try them individually as criminals, and instead of killing them, expropriate their lands and titles and make them work for a living.
Show trials, yes, but no mass executions.

Make it clear to both the jacquerie and nobles that ex-nobles could wear the tricolor and honorably serve France. All France needed was a housecleaning and a fresh start.
A more bourgeois France would have been an economic juggernaut. One can only hope that the Directorate/Etats- General would continue supporting scientific research as the royals did, but that's a personal preference.
 
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