It is obvious that the French Revolution was a vaster and more profound social upheaval, involving more violent conflict between classes, more radical reorganization of government and society, more far-reaching redefinition of marriage, property, and civil law as well as of organs of public authority, more redistribution of wealth and income, more fears on the part of the rich and more demands from the poor, more sensational repercussions in other countries, more crises of counterrevolution, war, and invasion, and more drastic or emergency measures, as in the Reign of Terror. From very early in the French Revolution the American Revolution came to seem very moderate."
— R. R. Palmer
At the end of the American Revolution, you had a country indistinguishable from the one you have today. Only wealthy, male property-owners had the vote, rampant slavery, and for all the secular ambitions of the Republican Deist contingent, America was fundamentally Christian. At the height of the French Revolution you had universal male suffrage, equal rights for Jews, Protestants and men of colour, and of course France became the first country in the world to abolish slavery, without compensation, in an act of law. That happened in 1794. So from the standpoint of democracy, the vision of the French revolution, and that of its radicals has been far more vindicated than that of the Founding Fathers, who, attempts by hip-hop historians notwithstanding, have a permanent asterisk next to them for their blatant hypocrisy.
But then it’s not truly fair to compare the two events.
The French Revolution is more or less what would have happened if America had its Revolution and the American Civil War between North and South at the same time. The Radical Republicans of the American Civil War were more or less the American Jacobin Party, in their modern, centralized vision of a nation state that was free, equal and meritocratic. Lincoln is Mirabeau + Danton, and Thaddeus Stevens of course was regarded by (then) journalist and future Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau himself as the American Robespierre.
Democracy as the world lives it today, as even America lives it, for all the credit people grant to Washington and Jefferson, was first defined by Maximilien Robespierre:
"No one at the time of the Revolution, went as far as Robespierre in stating what were later to be recognized as the essential conditions of the democratic state... Universal franchise, equality of rights regardless of race or religion, pay for public service to enable rich and poor alike to hold office, publicity for legislative debates, a national system of education, the use of taxation to smooth out economic inequalities, recognition of the economic responsibilities of society to the individual...religious liberty, local self-government - such were the some of the principles for which he stood, and which are now taken for granted in democratic societies."
