Maurice Agulhon
History of contemporary France
The French Revolution did not create French nationality, but neither did it demolish it. The desire to usher in a new era - l'An I de la Liberté - was not a desire to wipe the slate clean. The enlightened majority of the National Assembly resulting from the Estates General of 1789 initially enthusiastically agreed to keep Louis XVI as head of state and Catholicism as the official religion. It was up to the king to accept innovations that had nothing yet of the character they were to take on in the year II. The fact that he didn't is a decisive, if under-analyzed, aspect of the situation. While we no longer ignore the radical, and perhaps potentially tyrannical, ideologies of Rousseau and his emulators, we fail to consider that the head of Louis XVI, after all, was not devoid of ideology.
so 1789 is not the point of origin of our ideological schism. It's the point of origin of the violent political forms this schism has taken or given rise to. Here again, in the quest for responsibility that underpins value judgements, the choice of the king seems to me to be decisive : the battle waged against a still peaceful Revolution is at the origin of the chain of violence. War and the Terror seem to me to be less programmed in a hyper-rationalism inherent in Jacobin ideology than the result of the great refusal of the dominant powers of the time to accept the Future and Liberty.
Agulhon M., Histoire de la France contemporaine, Paris, Collège de France/Fayard, coll. " Leçons inaugurales du Collège de France ",no 98, 1986 ; digital edition : Collège de France, 2014, https://doi.org/10.4000/books.cdf.599.
