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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.)

Most of the people that were killed by the French Revolutionaries were peasants not aristocrats. (The king did not kill those peasants, the revolutionaries killed them.) Proportionally, the clerics of the Catholic Church suffered the most, but the total number of the clergy in France were relatively small (about 10,000 or so) compared to the slaughter inflicted upon the peasants by the revolutionaries. Heck, that doesn't even get to the purges, when the French Revolutionary leaders started executing, their fellow revolutionary leaders to get rid of their revolutionary rivals.

If the aristocracy was so bad, and the French revolutionaries were so good then why did the French Revolutionaries have to kill hundreds of thousands of French in the Vendée? The truth is that most of the French still respected the king before and during the revolution. That is why he was not killed in 1789. Instead of getting rid of the king in 1789, the French created a constitutional monarchy until 1793. It is not until Louis tried to flee from France that the more radical forces in the National Assembly finally had an excuse to justify killing the king to the people. (There is ample evidence that the king's execution was not for criminal reasons but because of political concerns.) Almost half of the National Assembly wanted Louis to live which doesn't make him sound like too much of tyrant.)

So to recap the French Revolutionary spirit: Mass murder of peasants, purges of fellow members of the national assembly, murder of fellow revolutionaries once power was obtained, show trials with forgone verdicts, attack on the Church and a decade of dechristianization, laws against crosses in public and wearing cassocks, and more. The French Revolution has more in common with the Bolshevik Revolution than it does with the American Revolution. Even the revolutionaries themselves said that they wanted to rule by "reason" and "terror".

By the way, though many of the Founding Father's of the US had been sympathetic to the French Revolution at first, once when they realized what the French revolutionaries were doing even they recoiled from it and condemned it.