Would the Frenc Rev. still have happened

if France had not been involved in the various wars it was involved in?
mainly if it was not in War of Austrian Succession, the Seven Years' War, or the American War of Independence?

so if France had stayed out of ALL of those wars, it would not have been bankrupted, and would the French revolution not have happened?

Quite possibly...

It would be easier to avoid those wars all together, though...

Not hard with the first two... just have a surviving male Habsburg heir...

The third could be got rid of with a PoD early enough...
If France is too strong, maybe most of New France stays French (for longer, at least)...
 
How does France remain strong if it stays out of wars ? Basically its enemies would gang together and divide various bits of the continent the way it wants to...

Best Regards
Grey Wolf
 
Well, I don't think that the French revolution had to happen, not like it did OTL anyway. But at some point the flaws of the monarchist system are bound to be revealed. The kings didn't know how to save money, almost literally lived in an ivory tower and France can't always have good luck in wars.

Reforms at the point of the enlightenment are inevitable, a bloody revolution is evitable though.
 
In order to avoid the French Revolution, or some other violent social upheaval then your going to need to really make some serious changes to how the Kingdom of France is ruled and how the French state views its place in Europe. I would say you probably need to go back and make France have a much more British tilt to its policy. What I mean by that is that you need to change French history so that either the Hugenots win, and since that is rather hard, you need to have a reformed French state, where the urban middle class and the aristocracy are allied, where the population is trade oriented, and the state is eager to create a situation where trade is encouraged. I think that Toynbee had an idea about this, that France had two "axis:" one was in the east, and focused France on the continent, on wars in the trans-Rhine area and in northern Italy; the other was on the French Atlantic coast, and focused France on the ocean, and thus trade and overseas colonies. France was focused eastward, and thus you have the absolutist monarchy and the financial and social structures upon which that monarchy is based. A westward, ocean-focused France, with a pro-trade government (not necessarily monarch, you might have some kind of Parlimentry evolution, perhaps the Estates-General could become stronger, with the reformed Church the power of the Second Estate could be eliminated from power within the French state, and the Estates-General would be the First and Third Estate, something to check the monarch and strengthen the hand of the merchant classes) would battle the Dutch, English, and Spanish for global supremacy, but on the sea, not in pointless continental wars.

But that is just my opinion.
 
^Let's elaborate on les États-Généraux for a bit. Could there be a way for the Estates-General to become as powerful as the English/British Parliament?
 
I think that for the Estates-General to follow some kind of English/British-ish path, then you're going to have to fiddle with religious issues and the attendant class issues, mainly making France's Wars of Religion result in the victory of the urban middle class and there noble allies (that would be the Hugenots in OTL)
 
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