AHC: More successful French Revolution

The French Revolution is arguably one of the most important events of its time period, drastically altering the political situation of Europe, directly leading to the Napoleonic wars and to the rise of democracy in Europe. And although it did manage to significantly alter France, it failed to make France a democracy - it was never one for more than 15 years until the Third Republic, in 1870 (17 if you count the July monarchy as a democracy, which is debatable).
How can you change the Revolution to install in France a democracy that manages to actually stay one til modern day?
 
You basically have to prevent ideologues from gaining influence or power in convention and have more pragmatic leaders willing to work not to throw everything out because it was just linked to feudalism or monarchy. The American Revolution didn't ''reset'' society from zero, we pretty much kept most of the social structures prior to the independence. Basically, we need to find fewer devotees of Rousseau. Rousseau's ideas were fine but they weren't right for a country that was the size of France and with no tradition of democracy. Rousseau's emphasize on legislative assemblies and direct democracy made things more unstable and opened a window for the radical mobs of Paris influence the central government way too much. The people of Paris didn't speak for the whole of France. Most people who were peasants didn't want their local priest defrocked.

If you look at many figures during the radical phase, most of them were quite young, even Robespierre himself was only 36 and his ''right man'' Saint Just was only 26.
 
A good early POD would be to stop the ban on National Assembly members being able to stand for the Legislative Assembly. That made the latter far more radical, as most of the realm's non-ancien regime political types were blocked, leaving the Legislative Assembly in the hands of newly inspired utopians with less grasp of political practicalities.
 

Hardial

Banned
France was simply not economically or socially developed enough for liberal parliamentarianism to succeed. The vast majority of the population were rural tenant farmers and the vast majority of wealthy individuals were reactionary landowners. The Church held a strong ideological grip over the French masses. A "democratic" election would probably result in the Revolution just abolishing itself. A successful French Revolution would see a long lasting liberal bourgeois dictatorship that can undertake the economic and political reforms the French nation needed to develop further.
 
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