There was Robespierre and the Jacobins who enforced their notion of revolutionary purity on others but they were in the end consumed by their own violence.
You’re right it took a long time for democracy and individual freedom to take root but once the French Revolution was purged of its radical excesses it became a banner for liberal democracy in Europe and elsewhere.
It gave people hope they didn’t have before and even if the ideals they dreamt about couldn’t happen for them, it could happen for their children and grandchildren.
We’ll agree to disagree about the French Revolution but the lesson for me is as long people rise and fight for freedom, it will never die in the hearts of men.
dead people can’t hope, and the only consistent product of the french revolution was mountains and mountains of dead people. dead of starvation, dead of disease, dead from violence, dead from the guillotine, and dead at the hands of their “fellow revolutionaries”.
it was a virulent social infection that required generations to recover from. it may have even been more traumatic upon the collective french psyche than the nazis, and that really is saying something.
other than french apologists and addled liberal utopian snake handlers, I’ve never encountered anyone who defended french revolutionaries for their (and it makes my skin crawl just to type this) humanity.