The decade that relocated sovereignty from monarch to nation, invented the left-right political spectrum, produced the first systematic justification of state terror in the name of popular sovereignty, and established the template for every political revolution that followed
The French Revolution gave modern politics most of its vocabulary and many of its unresolved problems. Liberty, equality, fraternity. Left and right. The Rights of Man. National sovereignty. The Terror. The coup. Every major political tradition since 1789 has defined itself partly through its relationship to what happened in France that decade — claiming it, rejecting it, refining it, or trying to escape it.