And it's widely perceived as "breaking the dam" in a way that inspired countries
Well it did a lot more than inspire those countries, it invaded them. It's easier to accept the liberal critique of your government when your government has been thrashed. And when the people tasked with national salvation think the way forward is reform on the English model if not the French, both because it will make the state more effective and more popular (and delivered on both to some extent). Really the enemies of the Revolution played a very big part in promoting its ideas and making it seem like "progress", which is good because the Revolution could be considered its own worst enemy most of the time
But if France avoids revolution (let's say by never restoring the parlements and taxing its way out of fiscal crisis)
Sure. But taxation was what the whole thing was about, taxation and debt and unaccountable spending with no oversight. And the burden falling in an uneven way across the population-- walls built around Paris not for protection, but to make sure no one dodges the tolls. Of course the wall doesn't go around Versailles. Just Paris. Taxing your way out, Paris knows what that means. So even if it didn't have a Revolution in this scenario, Paris probably had a big riot. Maybe other riots in other cities. Might have produced a wave of radical emigres who seek refuge in Britain or Switzerland or something.
If a Revolution happens in another country it would probably be over the exact same issue, because it's a hard one to solve while maintaining the traditional expectations of who pays for what, how much, and why.
Although, another country might not have the problem of suspending its Estates' assembly for decades, and then making a big show of reopening with the Cahiers de doleances.
I'm thinking you need both a place exposed to Enlightenment thinking and a big urban center with most of the population being poor, therefore the potential for a radical urban working class. It seems to me rural peasants tend to be harder to form into a mob and tend to be more conservative anyway.
The institutions of police and military command and supply are in the cities. A disturbance within the city itself can more easily paralyze that and stop it from acting. This is what happened in Paris-- the police lost control, then Lafayette intervened with the National Guard, which was supposed to be nicer and more compromising while still protecting order and property. Then the Guard's new recruits generally turned out to be... well, the same people they were supposed to be suppressing, because they're just all sharing the same city-- breathing the same air, reading the same pamphlets.
Peasants have a taller order, they have to come into the cities from without, and the forces of order can maintain cohesion-- letting their professionalism carry the day, even if they are outnumbered. Plus peasants live in a less interconnected world, they don't live in six floor apartment buildings, distances are greater. So rather than a "counter revolution" the Directory got something even worse-- banditry, omnipresent violence and counterviolence, so much that no matter how many its police arrested, no matter how much of a mockery it made out of its amnesties and promises not to bring back the Terror, it simply couldn't win without signing over the whole of the state to Napoleon and similar personalities. The Directory was not defeated exactly, but "the peasants" (no less confused a group than urban dissidents-- there were people who felt like land privatization didn’t benefit them enough, former victims of the Terror and continuing Directory anticlericalism, active royalists as well as mostly apolitical people who just had a grudge) denied it victory. Then Napoleon stuck himself with the same problem out in Spain, except now the guerrillas had British help, and even if they didn't the government was not institutionally capable of achieving the mission set for it.
But other than all that, sure. We want a country that 1) spends beyond its means, probably on a massive army 2) could offend a big city's population by doing that 3) could then lose control of its own instruments of coercion.
It's probably the Austrian Netherlands, the Dutch Republic, or Prussia. IIRC the Dutch were having another spin on the cycle of "Stadtholder or not" violence around the 1790s but Prussia stopped it by invading them, and then France exploited the result over several phases of occupation. The Austrian Netherlands might do what the Seven Provinces did against Spain.
But Prussia, there's a possibility. Their country is at constant risk of dismemberment, and Elizabeth of Russia nearly delivered on that. So they have their big army. But, their territory east of the Elbe is very rural, a lot of low value exports of raw materials to England-- so there's not much to tax, not that it will stop Berlin from trying. And I think Berlin had a toll wall as well, plus the increasingly ambitious character of Enlightenment thought there in Kant's time (spurred on by a sense of intellectual rivalry with Saxony). If there were to be a Revolution, barricades in Berlin and Konigsberg, and it was threatened with invasion from all of Prussia's neighbors, that might actually be enough to ensure that most of Prussia's state and army don't defect. The army is specifically tasked with preventing Prussia's dismemberment, and Austria will at least ask for Silesia back. Meanwhile many of the bureaucrats of the OTL Prussian reform might become Revolutionary wunderkinder-- not necessarily ideologues, but the kind of competent managers any big organization needs to get things done. It would be a very odd situation, Prussia might even lose-- confronting Austria and Russia at once would be very difficult, probably impossible without a Polish revolt or some other disturbance. France might drag its feet though-- instead of actually sending a big force to invade Prussia, they might make a more token contribution and think of ways to turn all this into a loss for Britain somehow. Maybe the revolutionary Prussian flag looks like
one of these-- one of them is black-red-white, almost the Wilhelmine flag.
An Austrian revolution would be pretty wild. It's not as crazy as it sounds either-- this is long before the Czech and Hungarian national awakenings, the German or Germanophone element is a lot stronger in both countries and might function like the French speakers of Occitania and Brittany in conducting the Revolution outside of Vienna. The threat of dismemberment could also compel the old government's institutions to stay loyal and carry out the extensive reorganizations (probably a lot of centralization at first) of the new government(s)-- although the Hungarian estates would probably respond less willingly to this sort of thing than common/Archducal institutions like the army. Maybe the Austrians run into some financial problem while pursuing HRE reform and find, like France, that rethinking their financial structure turns out to mean rethinking their social structure.
Russia or Spain? Well, Madrid's not a very big city. St. Petersburg is much more successful. Maybe Spain's colonies try to organize a more autonomous government, things spiral out of control, and the resulting war bankrupts Spain (again) and transmits republicanism. As for Russia... it seems like the Romanovs were doing pretty good in the late 1700s/early 1800s. They might not have even relied on debt as much to finance their wars, which they generally won.
The French revolution was not realy a revolt of the poor against the aristocracy. It was more a revolt of the wealthy non nobility against the aristocracy. Basicly the urban upper and upper-middle class. The wealthy merchants, artisans, etc. They were an important driving force in France, but had no political power. They wanted that power and this is what caused the French Revolution, I believe.
That's very true, Robespierre was a small town lawyer, not an urban working class guy. The deputies of the various assemblies were of a similar profession and status. Taxation might have been their big issue, but by that point many of them sincerely believed that they were called on to do more than just troubleshooting. They believed in a government of "virtue", like the old Roman Republic. A very middle class way of thinking, both in their conception of virtue (hard work and business and merit good, laziness and corruption and privilege bad) and in their pining for an ideal of good government most familiar to them from a Latin-and-Greek education. The real American and Dutch Republics were just the beginning of what they considered possible-- a truly moral order, ruling by the will of the people (because obviously they'll all want the same thing, or else split in very predictable ways. 9 out of 10 philosophers agree).
But if the monarchy and its supporters were able to maintain exclusive command over the most heavily armed people in the city, Robespierre would have just carried on being the fairly idealistic person he was before Year II.
The Revolution happened, and then went through additional phases, because that command failed over and over again-- it first needed to be shared ad-hoc with pro-reform figures like Lafayette, and was then lost entirely to people radicalized specifically by the experience of living for over two years in a lawless city with no sign of positive change. So to produce a similar event, someone needs to riot, and it can't just be the lawyers.
