French Revolution=British System of government?

As per the thread, how could an alt-french revolution happen so that ultimately a British style parliamentary system is set up which retains the king but eliminates much of his powers? What kind of POD would need to happen?

What would be the consequences?
 

Thande

Donor
Well yeah, but his relationship with Layfayette would have to be greatly improved as well as get his whole plan to get support from Louis XVI, right?

Probably. I don't claim to be an expert, and after all the causes and outbreak of the French Revolution is notorious for being one of the most complicated pieces of history to understand.
 
Probably. I don't claim to be an expert, and after all the causes and outbreak of the French Revolution is notorious for being one of the most complicated pieces of history to understand.

And thank to you, I can't remember whether it actually involved a guy with no pants or not. Yeah, I know it didn't.
 
For this, you don't really need a true alt-revolution - all you need is an OTL pre-1792 system which is continued and strengthened.
 
Of course Britain's system of government in the 1790s had power being shared by a tiny landed elite, a King, and a Parliament elected by a rather small proportion of residents.

The laws they made included huge numbers of capital crimes.
 
Of course Britain's system of government in the 1790s had power being shared by a tiny landed elite, a King, and a Parliament elected by a rather small proportion of residents.

True, but the original request was for:

a British style parliamentary system is set up which retains the king but eliminates much of his powers

By British-style, I imagine he means 'British in form' rather than 'having the exact power relations of Britiain in this period'; the revolution had gone beyond the contemporary setup in Britain almost from the beginning.
 
True, but the original request was for:



By British-style, I imagine he means 'British in form' rather than 'having the exact power relations of Britiain in this period'; the revolution had gone beyond the contemporary setup in Britain almost from the beginning.

Well, not quite; it was a (in retrospect very unstable) British-type system between 1789-1792. The trick would be getting that to last.
 
Well, an easy POD would be to have Louis XVI NOT attempt to flee, which might not give the jacobins the ammunition they needed to accuse him of treason outright, without which I can't see them ousting him, much less killing him.
 
Louis must avoid using his veto power to try to bring down the new system by paralising it. That is what soured most of the moderate revolutionary about him.

To do that, you need to get rid of the Queen and of Artois clique. Maybe she dies from the flu after a pique-nique with Artois and the Kings blames his brother and shuns his faction.
 
Well, not quite; it was a (in retrospect very unstable) British-type system between 1789-1792.

No; the French system went past that from the beginning in many ways, particularly in respect of the franchise, which was massively limited in Britain in this period, and basically kept power in the hands of landowners - the revolution was very much an anti-landowner movement, and it created the widest franchise of any large European state.

Other ways as well - the King was pushed much more in the direction of what we would recognise as a 'true' constitutional monarch under the early revolutionary system than the British monarch of this period, who was still very politically involved. So it went a good deal further than the British system of the period.
 
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