On July 14, 1789, a Parisian crowd attacked an old fortress called the Bastille, looking for gunpowder. They killed the governor, paraded his head on a pike, and went home for dinner. The fortress had held only seven prisoners. The act was symbolic, and the symbol was the point: the king's stone walls were no longer self-evidently his. Within months, France had abolished feudalism, declared the Rights of Man, and convinced itself it was beginning a new calendar of human history.
What followed was a decade-long oscillation between hope and horror that has set the template for every revolution since. A constitutional monarchy in 1791. A republic in 1792. The execution of the king in 1793. A Terror in which the revolution devoured its own — Robespierre sent his closest allies to the guillotine, then went to it himself a few months later. A directory. A coup. By 1804, the republic was an empire, ruled by a Corsican artillery officer who crowned himself in the Pope's presence. The Revolution had failed in almost every immediate goal. But the ideas it released — citizenship in place of subjecthood, equality before the law, the abolition of inherited privilege, the nation as a moral project — could not be put back. Restored monarchies across Europe found themselves, within a generation, conceding to subjects what they would not concede to citizens.
Every modern revolution — Russian, Chinese, Cuban, Iranian, Arab Spring — has been read against the French template, with its predictable arc from idealism to terror to authoritarian reaction. The lesson many drew is that overturning the old order is the easy part; building the new one is where revolutions go to die.