That's the key.
All cultures have all the types - bad ones have their 'Thomas Jefferson's' in jails as political prisoners - and their 'Hitler's' running the place. Mediocre cultures have shoe salesmen running the country... We have similar distributions of good and evil - what matters is where those groups end up in the culture. Our 'evil' has traditionally been stuck near the bottom - that's changing...
The French chose the leaders of their revolution - well, 'leaders' because they killed off all of them over the course of their revolt. We chose our leaders too - and they lived to ripe old ages...
If Europe has serious financial problems they might default to the 'french' tradition. It appears the Greeks are going down that path. We, in spite of all the liberal wet dreams about insurrection and violence, will deal with our great depression the same way we dealt with the last one.
I'm casually stunned you would defend how the French acted during their 'revolution'. I'm going to assume you don't have an excuse for Stalin...
“The reason we didn’t have guillotines was because ignorant mobs filled with blood lust didn’t run our revolution.”
But that is exactly what I am saying! Our revolution was run by landed, well-read, smart men. The French revolution was run by starving, ignorant, peasants. You and I agree on the reasons that our revolution was better both in the final government that resulted and in the lack of retribution.
But please don’t let you hatred of the French peasantry excuse the French aristocracy. We are all aware of how violent the revolution was, but perhaps you are not aware of hot violent the French aristocracy was prior to the revolution. They killed tens of thousands of peasants before the peasants killed tens of thousands of the aristocracy. (There were other peasant revolts leading up to 1790, and those were put down with as much brutality as the peasants later demonstrated.)