WI:A Less Bloody French Revolution?

What if the French Revolution had succeedeed in establishing a constitutional monarchy and had avoided the purges and the Terror and thus discredit democracy in Europe for generations?
 
It would need an intelligent king, a nobility not overprotective of it's privilege. The other european monarchs should also be more intelligent as to not issue the Brunswick Manifesto, the king should not try to force a war against Austria and then refusing to support the war. The king should also accept to collaborate with the Girondins.

And also you assume that after the republic is proclaimed, the Terror is inevitable, even if the more moderate of the assembly prevailed.

And i don't think that the establishment of a Constitutional Monarchy would discredit democracy, as it was a sort of democracy, and it would encourage other people of Europe to make their own revolution and establish other Constitutional Monarchies, as their won't be any form of hate against the French and their ideas (if they don't go on a spread of conquest).
 
Imladrik said:
It would need an intelligent king, a nobility not overprotective of it's privilege. The other european monarchs should also be more intelligent as to not issue the Brunswick Manifesto, the king should not try to force a war against Austria and then refusing to support the war. The king should also accept to collaborate with the Girondins.

Louis XVI wasn't stupid : he was quite intelligent on the contrary. He was also quite willing to make the reforms : he did a few of them BEFORE the Revolution started. For example, shortly before the Revolution started, he got rid of the Lettres de Cachets, a symbol of a Absolutism which authorized the King to send someone in prison just because he wanted so.

What Louis XVI lacked was assurance : he wasn't combattive enough to fight the overpriviledged nobility. Plus, he had been ill prepared to become King as his family felt he was more stupid than his eldest brother (who died in 1761 at age 10) : he thus never acquired all the qualities needed to be King. Two quotes of him prove he never found kingship easy :
"God, protect us! We are reigning too young." - Upon his accession to the throne (he was 20)
"What a burden! And I learned nothing about it." - Sometime during his reign.
If Louis XVI had had a little more guts, he might have been able to handle the Revolution better.

Regarding French Nobility, I think the fact you would want to protect your privileges isn't limited to them. Other European monarchs were faced by their nobility when they issued policies to reduce their privilges. Anyone with privileges will want to keep them and do everything to do so. I don't think the nobility would be favorable to losing its privileges, unless it's majorly liberal or held at swordpoint (which it was sort of during the Revolution). What could help though would be not to reinstitute the Parliament of Paris in 1774 : while it was supposed to be a reformative body, most of its members were highly reactionnary nobles.

Getting the other monarchies not involved would be easy : just have the French Revolutionnaries refuse to propagate their ideas with military force. Robespierre, whom I don't really like, was right when he said "No one loves armed missionaries". Preventing the execution of Louis XVI is also a good way to avoid foreign intervention, since they wouldn't feel threatened.

Imladrik said:
And also you assume that after the republic is proclaimed, the Terror is inevitable, even if the more moderate of the assembly prevailed.

I don't think the Terror was inevitable personnally. What lead to the Terror was a feeling of inside and outside opposition to the French Revolution. Get rid of both, and you wouldn't need the Terror. Avoiding the Jacobins clique of Paranoids and Purists (Robespierre, Saint Just, Fouquiers-Tainville and their associates) would also be a good way to prevent the radicalisation of the Revolution which lead to the Terror.

Imladrik said:
And i don't think that the establishment of a Constitutional Monarchy would discredit democracy, as it was a sort of democracy, and it would encourage other people of Europe to make their own revolution and establish other Constitutional Monarchies, as their won't be any form of hate against the French and their ideas (if they don't go on a spread of conquest).

Agreed on that.
 
France would have this as its flag instead of the OTL revolutionary tricolor:

800px-Flag_of_Constitutional_Royal_France.svg.png
 
Louis XVI wasn't stupid : he was quite intelligent on the contrary. He was also quite willing to make the reforms : he did a few of them BEFORE the Revolution started. For example, shortly before the Revolution started, he got rid of the Lettres de Cachets, a symbol of a Absolutism which authorized the King to send someone in prison just because he wanted so.

What Louis XVI lacked was assurance : he wasn't combattive enough to fight the overpriviledged nobility. Plus, he had been ill prepared to become King as his family felt he was more stupid than his eldest brother (who died in 1761 at age 10) : he thus never acquired all the qualities needed to be King. Two quotes of him prove he never found kingship easy :
"God, protect us! We are reigning too young." - Upon his accession to the throne (he was 20)
"What a burden! And I learned nothing about it." - Sometime during his reign.
If Louis XVI had had a little more guts, he might have been able to handle the Revolution better.

The problem is not what Louis XVI did before the revolution (he was certainly not the worst king of France) but what he did during the Revolution, when he used is veto powers on a lot of laws passed by the Parliament, when he fled Paris, when he conspired to create a war between Austria and France, when he refused the help of the Girondins. No really i don't think he was stupid, but he did a lot of stupid thing during the Constitutional Monarchy.

Getting the other monarchies not involved would be easy : just have the French Revolutionnaries refuse to propagate their ideas with military force. Robespierre, whom I don't really like, was right when he said "No one loves armed missionaries". Preventing the execution of Louis XVI is also a good way to avoid foreign intervention, since they wouldn't feel threatened.

The execution of Louis XVI took place during the war, as France was already at war with Prussia and Austria. Alas, the Directory was to stupid to keep the "natural frontiers", the Rhine, the Pyrénnés and the Alps, and went to war to pillage every neighbouring country to compensate it's bloody financial incompetence.

I don't think the Terror was inevitable personnally. What lead to the Terror was a feeling of inside and outside opposition to the French Revolution. Get rid of both, and you wouldn't need the Terror. Avoiding the Jacobins clique of Paranoids and Purists (Robespierre, Saint Just, Fouquiers-Tainville and their associates) would also be a good way to prevent the radicalisation of the Revolution which lead to the Terror.

I really thin that Robespierre was not so bad (and he was not alone in the Comité de Salut Public, he was elected several times by the Convention, so there is a lot of culprit here), he was even a pretty good lad, with ideas far ahead of his time. He supported the abolition of the death penalty, he supported the abolition of slavery etc etc. But he was paranoid yeah.

Shogun said:
France would have this as its flag instead of the OTL revolutionary tricolor:

I don't think so. During the Constitutional Monarchy, the Naval Jack was the Tricolour in reverse order and the National Jack was the white flag with the reverse Tricolour in the canton. During the Fête de la Fédération, the flag were White, Red, Blue in horizontal stripes. So the OTL colour arrangement could happen, but it is only one of the 12 possibilities. And for the CoA, as in every other flag, it will only be seen on some flags (state flag, war flag) or maybe on a royal standart.
 
Well, when I think of less bloody revolutions I can't help but think of the American Revolution. Now of course there was fighting which of course leads to blood, but the ARW was not as bloody or chaotic.

The reason I think the French Revolution was quite bloody was because it contained alot of class warfare. You get poor french fighting wealthy french.

Now what were the differences between the American and French Revolutions? Well putting aside the geographical politics I would say that what made the American one less bloody, and therefore more successful was the Great Awakening. America was influenced by the enlightenment, which had an anti-clerical/religious tendency. At the same time there was the Great Awakening, a religious revival. So you had people saying "think for yourself" at the same time as others saying "Repent, God wants a good and moral people". Its this combination of ideas that created America. In France on the other hand you had just the enlightenment, which was not so much saying "think for yourself" as much as it was saying "Destroy the old order".

So I think in order to have a less bloody French revolution is for there to be some sort of moralistic religious revival. Unfortunately with a state church that has been absorbed into the government it kinda hard to get that.
 
The reason I think the French Revolution was quite bloody was because it contained alot of class warfare. You get poor french fighting wealthy french. Now what were the differences between the American and French Revolutions?

The main difference between the American and the French Revolution was that the American Revolution was an independence war and not a revolution. A revolution is the overthrow of the government and social system. That simply didn't happen in America: the merchant interest, the landed class, the slaveocracy and the people voted into political office all stayed the same. Meanwhile the government they were protesting about remained in place - they just lost 20% of their people that were an ocean away. True revolutions have class conflict almost by definition. You can make a case regarding local colonial officers being overthrown, but its a weak one, seeing they didn't exude too much power themselves to begin with.

Well putting aside the geographical politics I would say that what made the American one less bloody, and therefore more successful was the Great Awakening. America was influenced by the enlightenment, which had an anti-clerical/religious tendency. At the same time there was the Great Awakening, a religious revival. So you had people saying "think for yourself" at the same time as others saying "Repent, God wants a good and moral people". Its this combination of ideas that created America. In France on the other hand you had just the enlightenment, which was not so much saying "think for yourself" as much as it was saying "Destroy the old order".

I think you're attributing far too much to religion. There have been plenty of revolutions in Eastern Europe during the downfall of communism that were less violent than the ARW despite no religion intact. The reason the French revolution got so nasty is because of the sheer anger on the part of the oppressed, due to the huge numbers in terrible poverty. Ironically, America's success as a stable nation owes a lot to the British actually being pretty good overlords (to them, if not elsewhere!).
 
The main difference between the American and the French Revolution was that the American Revolution was an independence war and not a revolution. A revolution is the overthrow of the government and social system. That simply didn't happen in America: the merchant interest, the landed class, the slaveocracy and the people voted into political office all stayed the same. Meanwhile the government they were protesting about remained in place - they just lost 20% of their people that were an ocean away. True revolutions have class conflict almost by definition. You can make a case regarding local colonial officers being overthrown, but its a weak one, seeing they didn't exude too much power themselves to begin with.



I think you're attributing far too much to religion. There have been plenty of revolutions in Eastern Europe during the downfall of communism that were less violent than the ARW despite no religion intact. The reason the French revolution got so nasty is because of the sheer anger on the part of the oppressed, due to the huge numbers in terrible poverty. Ironically, America's success as a stable nation owes a lot to the British actually being pretty good overlords (to them, if not elsewhere!).

Well in France the Royalists had significant popular support while in the Eastern Europe, without the USSR, there simply was no support for the regime.
 
Well in France the Royalists had significant popular support while in the Eastern Europe, without the USSR, there simply was no support for the regime.

No not really. The Royalist managed to get control of the Chouans and the Vendéens after their revolts, and their revolts were not initialy Royalist. The Chouans revolted as they perceived the revolution as a danger to the privilege Britanny had. And for the Vendéens, it was as a reaction to the Levée en Masse. Even in the nobility, not everyone supported the King (example : Phillipe Egalité the Regicide). And a more important thing is : the URSS and it's successor states were not in a state of war. The closest Revolution to the French Revolution is imho the 1917 revolution in Russia. The country was torn between numerous opposing forces (the red, the white and the few nationalist in Russia, the Jacobins, the Federalist movement and the Royalist and their allies during the French Revolution), while the country was at war against several other countries (all the major player of WWII sent troups in Russia during the civil war, and France was at war with Prussia and Austria before it was a Republic). In the American war of independance, the population was far less divided than in those two Revolutions, thus leading to a less bloody revolution.

In fact, if you look at what happened in Germany in 1917 (and the two Revolutions), we can see that it's often the more ruthless group that win. The SPD did not hesitate to ally with far right groups to destroy the communists, and to assassinate Rosa Luxemburg and other leading communists. So if you got a revolution who want to really change the sytem, with internal division, i think it will be bloody.
 
Louis XVI wasn't stupid : he was quite intelligent on the contrary. He was also quite willing to make the reforms : he did a few of them BEFORE the Revolution started. For example, shortly before the Revolution started, he got rid of the Lettres de Cachets, a symbol of a Absolutism which authorized the King to send someone in prison just because he wanted so.
Not completly wrong, but not completly true. The reforms he made were mostly done under the pressure.



I don't think the Terror was inevitable personnally. What lead to the Terror was a feeling of inside and outside opposition to the French Revolution. Get rid of both, and you wouldn't need the Terror. Avoiding the Jacobins clique of Paranoids and Purists (Robespierre, Saint Just, Fouquiers-Tainville and their associates) would also be a good way to prevent the radicalisation of the Revolution which lead to the Terror.
I don't agree. Every big revolution has a phase of purge. Look at Tunisia.


The reason I think the French Revolution was quite bloody was because it contained alot of class warfare. You get poor french fighting wealthy french. Now what were the differences between the American and French Revolutions?
It wasn't poors against wealthy, it's aristocracy (and a part of the clergy) against third state (and a part of the clergy). But there were poor aristocrats and very wealthy bourgeois (actually, they were the greatest winners of the Revolution).

What made the revolution so bloody (in my opinion) was the Civil constitution of the clergy. In many places (what is funny is that they fit with the right winged current areas of France) it was refused, and sometimes with violence.
 
France would have this as its flag instead of the OTL revolutionary tricolor:

800px-Flag_of_Constitutional_Royal_France.svg.png

I don't think the Tricoloour was really all that revolutionary. It just had the Bourbon White flanked by the colors of the flag of Paris. Which could still be considered symbolic of the King being moved to Paris. What I wonder about is if slavery would still be abolished while no Napoleon meaning that Haiti stayed French. What does everyone think about how the Revolution would effect Normandy? Wasn't it considered a seperate kingdom in terms of certain rights?
 
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