If they just finish the Panama canal instead of going for Nicaragua, they'd be finished earlier.Fascinating...I'd like to include such a massive shift to make France a three-dimensional realistic actor in the story, but fear the language barrier makes that difficult if not impossible for me to do well on my own.
I would say that in the short term, France is not richer YET in the ATL as they haven't gotten ROI yet. Finishing the canal took the USA fourteen years even benefiting from the French moving about 1/5 of the dirt in the process of failing prior. For France to succeed would take something similar in time scale. Starting in 1884 as in OTL, I postulate they'd be done similarly in ATL Nicaragua foutrteen years later. That would be 1898, just in time for a war to be fought over it.
It's not just a matter of return on investment but pure cashflow coming in and the might that goes with it. France will have, once again, changed the face of the globe after Suez. Who gives a shit about Alsace-Lorraine anymore? Fuck Germany, France now controls a massive portion of the world shipping.
You could see crazy projects coming up: the Trans-saharian railway going from Algeria to the Gulf of Guinea, the Chott El-Djerid canal, creating a sea in the Sahara.
It's incremental: if the savings, and trust, of the French citizens are not impacted by the Panama scandal, they'll go crazy for geo-engineering, which means they might be able to make their African colonies profitable (something that was never achieved).
Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself. Point is, no Panama scandal means less populist politics. This means that France will be more sure of herself and less prone to Witch hunting