I mean, clearly it wasn't an _ideal_ outcome, and at least in theory it could have skipped the Reign of Terror and Napoleon. But also, clearly, after those (and, really, even during Napoleon) it left the average French person in a far, far better place than they would have been under the near-feudalism of the old system.

Very few countries get out from under totalitarianism without significant bloodshed. The US had its revolution and civil war. The UK had a bunch of civil wars. Germany had _both World War 1 and World War 2_ (it didn't take the first time). You could call the Reign of Terror actually comparatively mild; it only killed about 25,000 people, so far fewer than the comparables.

I do wonder if the fall of the Iron Curtain, which is the big glaring _exception to the rule_, revolution-wise, and also the most recent large-scale example, has misled the younger generations on this.

I stated this as a matter of course (as in, we'd see broad support for absolute monarchy in France if that wasn't the case), I have no insider information, I'm not even French. It seems I need to clarify "good move".

If your question is "was the Terror awful?", I'm sure you'll have a near totality of french people agreeing with you. If you ask "in retrospect, was the Terror awful enough so that the French nation would have been better off without its Revolution?", then I don't think you'll get many agreement.

The deaths associated with the Terror were plentiful, that's true, but this period was also carefully framed by the bourgeois class who took power afterwards. In terms of deaths, it's around 40k people. The american civil war was 700k deaths. Before Trumpism, would any american say out loud that abolishing slavery wasn't worth it?

Do you know of a french person who wants to return to the Bourbon rule? me neither. They like that they live within a republic. A revolution was necessary to achieve this. Hence my parent comment.