Class warfare without the FRW

[Hawkeye]

As I was enjoying watching this fellow review Extra Credits Bismark series and hearing him describe how all the monarchs of Europe would go to war against France if they disposed the king in the 1848 revolutions. It suddenly occurred to me that this environment of monarchs banding together to suppress revolutionaries must have been what influenced Karl Marx's teachings. And of course 1848 can trace it's origins back to the original French Revolutionary War.

So how would philosophy, economics, and sociological thinking have developed if let's say, France becomes a constitutional monarchy in 1789 and following wars are seen more of as a continuation of the previous global wars (7 years war and American Revolution)?

 

[Hawkeye]

I also admit that Thande's Socieitism from LTTW was also on my mind when making this. But its been a while since I read those chapters regarding it's FRW and Societism's development. What were the conditions that led to that?

 

[Fabius Maximus]

One of the striking (to modern people) features of class warfare in the middle ages is that, often enough, the monarchy and the commons would join forces to rein in the power of the nobility. The notion that society is divided into an upper class and a lower class, that every rich person is part of the upper class, and that every member of the upper class would naturally join together to oppress the poor, seems to be a 19th-century development, and I wouldn't be surprised if the French Revolution played a major role in this development. Absent a French Revolution, you'd probably see a more fluid situation, wherein society was divided up into multiple different groups (monarchy, commons, aristocracy, possibly with wealthy capitalists/industrialists emerging as a fourth group) which variously co-operated and opposed each other, depending on which parts of society were dominant at the time.

 

[Salvador79]

France became a constitutional monarchy in 1791, I don't see how speeding it up to 1789 would change things much.
France staying dominated by the liberal bourgeoisie without interruption is what you have in mind, I guess?
I wonder how you're going to manage that.
France was not just Paris teeming with radical revolutionaries, or rather, there was a reason why Paris teemed with radical revolutionaries. The French state was buried over its head in debt, and its socio-economic structures repeatedly caused widespread famine. The famine wasn't caused by the Louis' eating up all the grain, and the debt is not going to go away by the wave of anyone's hand. (Well, it can, but that is a revolutionary rupture which you're trying to avoid, I understand.) Also, France was not faring well in the imperial competition against Britain, and Europe was covered in a spiderweb of strategic alliances. The former isn't going to change miraculously, either, and the latter makes sure that any major developments in France (or even minor ones) will get lots of other European powers involved.
It would take incredibly foresighted political masterminds cooperating with each other in unprecedented ways to steer the ship of French statecraft into calm waters and keep the country on a course modelled after that of the UK or the US throughout the late 18th and 19th century.

But let's say it is managed somehow (probably with a PoD predating 1789 quite a bit), and France is socio-economically and culturally a copy of the Anglo-Saxon blueprint, only with better wine and cuisine.

If this is the case, you have butterflied away not just the socialist and anarchist philosophies we're acquainted with, but also modern nationalism. The landscape of ideologies is yours to sketch - there is a breathtaking freedom for you. What you haven't changed, though, is the industrial working class growing in size across more and more of Europe, urbanising and demanding better wages and living conditions and political representation, and traditional crafts being squeezed out of the market more and more, and a new social stratum of educated "white collar" workers slowly emerging both with the state administration and with private enterprises throughout the 19th century. How they're aligning is anyone's guess, but I would surmise that most of the time, the power monopoly of the state would be employed to protect the existing order and with it the privileges of those who are, well, privileged, until at some point, somewhere, ruptural change would enter the equation, too.