Is there any way france could be ruled by emperor again after WW1? It must be a constitutional monarchy.
AHC: Third french empire
- Thread starter Lestoicire
- Start date
The Legitimist faction accepts the proposal to have the old fleur de lys flag as the presidential standard.
They still had their African and Indochinese colonies (and Guiana, etc.), unless you mean the semantics involved in declaring Henri "Emperor".
Socialist unrest in France gets much worse, in the late 1920s/early 1930s. Politics radicalises on both sides. Mainstream republican right-wingers get marginalised and the Action Française-style monarchist ultra-conservative right becomes the main right-wing opposition to the socialists. In OTL it was the likes of de la Rocque who was in a position to overthrow the French government with the help of a hefty dose of right-wing fervour, and ultimately he was too principled to do that sort of thing. Get rid of de la Rocque and get people like Maurras (but more savvy and charismatic) more popular in the political right and they just might manage to take power with the aid of the fear of the establishment about socialist subversion. The new regime includes really extreme right-wingers supporting the Bourbons who essentially wish the French Revolution never happend but its main leader is a pragmatic man who just wants power and doesn't want to alienate the bulk of the French people by taking such an extreme course, but the character of his regime is essentially royalist and hard-line nationalist, so he restores a Bonaparte rather than a Bourbon, hoping to placate royalists while also appealing to more mainstream right-wing nationalist sentiment. Hey presto, Third French Empire—though it's a military dictatorship in all but name. It can have a constitution too (which makes it a constitutional monarchy, though not a democratic monarchy), though it's probably a constitution where socialism is illegal and most power is in the hands of the military, the Emperor and the upper classes.
I admit this takes a lot of assumptions and I wouldn't exactly give it a 10 out of 10 on plausibility, to put it mildly, but that's the best I can do.
I admit this takes a lot of assumptions and I wouldn't exactly give it a 10 out of 10 on plausibility, to put it mildly, but that's the best I can do.