In fact the French revolution was basically a scam. One of the first measures of the Revolutionaries was to reserve voting rights for the rich on the pretext that the poors had not enough instruction. But most/all of the French enlightenment philosophers with the exception of Rousseau (who was a Swiss) advocated the closing of the no-cost schools who were giving some instruction to the poor: they told that instruction was bad for the people. And after the revolution the persecutions against the Catholic Church had as a side effect the closing of these schools since most of them were funded by the Church. And they weren't replaced. So the poor were kept in that state of ignorance who had been the pretext for denying them their voting rights.

Other significant steps in the French revolution: the expropriation and sale of nobility and clerical lands and their sale in ways who denied their acquisition by the peasants (domains were not divided in parcels for sale) while allowing the bourgeoisie to pay them with highly devaluated assignats (paper-money).

The ban of any form of syndicates in 1791 (Le Chapelier law) and later, under Bonaparte, the legal inferiority of industry workers (the law stated that the word of the employer was to be believed in case of conflict) and the creation of the "Workman Booklet" (Livret Ouvrier) who forced workers to keep a booklet recording anotations of both the police and employers about the worker's behaviour.

In fact far from having lived to its procalimed ideals of "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" the French Revolution illustrates what Orwell says in "1984": revolutions are the way for a fraction of the middle class to dcsiplace the former dominant class by leveraging on the lower class, they don't improve the life of the lower class.

Wow, I had just finished (two days ago) a book about the French Revolution; while it spent page after page talking about the actions of Robespierre, it did not allow me to get into his head as your short and excellent article did.