None of those places functioned as modern nation states prior to the Peace of Westphalia. Monarchies were in constant flux, collapsing all the time as brother invaded cousin and so on. How exactly does this refute my point?

I'm not sure why you're bringing up the Peace of Westphalia when the topic is how monarchies transformed into democracies. There weren't many democracies at that time.

Spain for example wasn't a democracy until the 20th century and the first attempt at democracy failed miserably and only the second succeeded after the monarchy backed dictator died and the king didn't follow the late dictator's legacy as planned.

Uh,ok, if you're going to be intellectually dishonest and move the goalposts "here is the single path that dictatorships take (demonstrably not the case in whatever the final dictatorship that transitioned to democracy for each given non-revolutionary countries)...Spain, Portugal, and Chile were all examples from the last half century. How do both this and the general case I described _not_ refute your point?

> Britain

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Civil_War ended with the execution of the Monarch, a brief military dictatorship, and established the principle that the Monarch cannot rule without the consent of Parliament.

Not exactly the French revolution, but hardly a smooth transition either.

The parent comment is an exceedingly narrow description: totalitarians always tighten their hold until they collapse. I wasn't making a correspondingly strong counterclaim that the transition was smooth and bloodless for every/most polities. We can quibble about whether Post-Civil War Britain qualifies as having sufficiently transitioned to democracy (and if not, then Post-CW Britain is the polity in question that transitioned without collapse). But it's easy to refute the ludicrous original claim that polities under totalitarians only ever follow a single path.

I lol'd really hard at your mention of "Spain", here.

Not sure I get the joke. Is the claim that Francoist Spain was never totalitarian or that post-Franco Spain still is?

Current Spain is still francoist Spain. There has been no breach of legal continuity since the Spanish republic was defeated by fascism in 1939.