How about Alexander I, who wanted to take Napoleon out following the victory at Leipzig, galloping all the way to Paris if that's what it took. Just think what fun all those Cossacks would have had raping, pillaging, burning, all the way to and inside Paris until they cornered their nemesis.
I expect the Prussians would have had little if any compunction about executing, one way or another, the individual who'd been humiliating them continually since Valmy.
And poor, long-suffering Francis I… what he might not have done to erase the stain of Austria's humiliation, larger even on many levels than Prussia's.
Indeed, the Spanish would have visited some appropriate end on their tormentor, and probably taking quite a while, for maximum effect.
Yet in the end, it's a big so what? Who emerged from exile, and the fantasies of execution by aggrieved groups, as a bigger winner than the monarchs who remained, for the time being, firmly on their thrones?
The British will do fairly well, if one is fond of Victoria and her ministers and the stamp of an era: industrialism, imperialism, upper middle-class values, constricting, faux-pious morality on the outside, raging depravity in private, and over it all a wonderful sense of unmitigated complacency.
The Prussians get Frederick III, the Wimp, until they get Frederick IV the Crazy, who blundered badly in 1849, leading to Kaiser Wilhelm I and clever Bismarck, the only light in that particular tunnel.
The Austrians will endure an entire century of nonentities, second-rate politics, forgettable leaders of any kind, and another abject military defeat in 1866. Well, they will manage to perfect the waltz, and how to put whipped cream on everything…
The Russians will endure Alexander I's waffling between liberalism and conservatism until he succumbs to a bizarre sort of spiritualism, and leaves everything to his brother Nicholas I, who will be followed by a lengthy succession of neocon autocrats unheard of in Western Europe since the late middle ages. What fun!
And the Spanish? They get the once-adored Ferdinand VII, who when he returns to the throne recalls the Spanish Inquisition, announces the earth is indeed flat, and makes certain that the Spanish economy, already on life-support, finally gasps its last. Spain fades away into mediocrity and obscurity.
Now that I think about it, none of these folks could shoot well enough to hit the side of a barn, much less an average-size French guy.
paints brigs for the British fleet.
