PC = Plausibility Check
I was watching a documentary on the French Revolution. They mentioned that despite all the Jacobin insanity that took place in Paris, most of the country was fairly moderate. ...
Well, heck, just how oversimplified was this documentary? I trust it mentioned that out in the countryside, peasants were mobbing the manor houses of their landlords, turning them out and burning the records? Didn't it?
Or did they gloss over that? I'm assuming you wouldn't categorize that as "moderate" behavior, or would you?
It's quite true that the detailed concerns and interests of the country folk diverged from those of the city people. Actually I believe that most events and developments in Paris had at least echoes in the various other cities and big towns of the kingdom/republic, though it would be fair to say that Paris was the most turbulent and radical. But if your documentary suggested that the whole revolution was a purely Parisian affair I'm afraid you've been badly misled!
And country people, while not city people, had their own axes to grind with the Old Regime. The Revolution meant to them that they could take the land they had been cultivating and claim it for their own, and once they burned that bridge they had quite a lot to fear from any prospect of restoration of the Old Regime. There certainly were districts that were ready to rally to the King, and more districts that while they certainly didn't want the old rules back in place, didn't necessarily like the latest news they were getting from Paris either. But having for the most part decisively and irrevocably turned their backs on the old order, they were also committed to promoting and defending and advancing some kind of new regime. Getting onto the same page as the Parisians and to some extent the city people across the nation in general--that's called "politics."
That happened a bit later in real life. Its called the Paris Commune, and it didn't end well.
Well, the Commune had no intention of going it alone forever any more than Paris of 1790 would have expected to. I would bet that, despite the fact that the decidedly (and viciously) anti-Communard Third Republic did prevail, that there were sympathizers all across the country and that the possibility of a whole rash of Communes throughout France, or at least many important districts of it, wasn't remote. The question was, did the Communards have any prospect of devising some sort of political compact that would win the country folk over as well? That's where I am most in ignorance! But I am pretty sure that one reason the new Third Republic government turned so harshly on the Commune was precisely that they feared if they gave it time and space, the example would spread the unrest to other cities and if some districts of the countryside went over as well, that would be it for the Third Republic. And something like that was precisely what the Communards were counting on; a France of Communes was what they were fighting for, not some single freak city-state sideshow. Of course just one city alone, even if that city was Paris, could not survive!
And vice versa I daresay the Communards hoped their example might spread even beyond defeated France, and the movement sweep all of Europe. Which is why, as amusing as it was for the German occupiers to watch Frenchman massacre Frenchman (and woman, and child) even as these same besiegers were submitting to a humiliating and costly victor's peace, the Germans would make sure the Republic and not the Communards would win. Otherwise, flush with victory or not, they might be facing a Cologne, a Frankfurt, even a Munich or Berlin Commune (Kommune?) within a year...
So no, a single stand-alone Commune was not in the cards, not in 1871 and not in 1791. Nor would anyone in Paris want that in either year!