What has the French Revolution ever done for us?

I have been interested at the propaganda victory and ideological debate surrounding the French Revolution ever since I was in school. We had to study William Burke's 'reflections on the revolution in France'. William burke was an Irish conservative and British MP. He was a Tom in other words. His essay began, roughly from memory, 'when I first beheld the queen of France, then the dauphiness, alighting from her carriage her feet scarcely seemed to touch the ground...' and lots of flowery prose defending the beauty of a corrupt and murderous monarchy. I was livid at being forced to read this gilded nonesense and being told, no argument, that it was great prose. I discovered William Blake's 'let the brothels of Paris be opened'

The Queen of France just touched this globe,
And the pestilence darted from her robe;
But our good queen quite grows to the ground,
And a great many suckers grow all around.

I can remember the joy I felt reading through my Da's old book of Blake, most of it incomprehensible to me, and discovering this; someone else we were told was 'good' lacerated Burke's idiotic pretensions. It felt good, centuries later, to have my point of view expressed on this issue by a great writer. Imagine how much better it would have felt at the time? "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!" as Wordsworth put it.

Over the years I started noticing things about the French revolution. It never got mentioned without the accompanying phrase 'not since the worst excesses...' The French revolution has become a byword for tyranny in the English speaking word. The most famous actor in it is not Robbespierre or Marat but the Scarlet Pimpernel. A fictional character from 1905. More than a century out of whack. I had read discipline and punish by Foucault and knew that the rate of execution during the 'Reign of Terror' and the French Revolution was slightly lower than that during the last days of the ancien regime. I knew that the people they killed were dedicated to overthrowing the state, and sought allies abroad to bring this about. I knew that the number killed in the 'Reign of Terror' was, from other reading, about a third of the number massacred after the suppression of the Paris Commune. But they weren't toffs. The guillotine was regularly held up as an example of the inhumanity of the revolutionaries. Yet, I also knew that the guillotine was a device scientifically designed to minimise suffering and get the ugly business over quickly. As distinct from the ancien regime's pageantry of torture, degredation, humiliation, and day-long executions. This is the pageantry of a regime that has lost control. An interesting side note on the cruelty of the guillotine is that I have read several times that the disembodied head remained conscious for some time (why only with the guillotine? Why not with hacking a head off with an axe, or pulling it off with a rope?), and that this was an unconscionable cruelty. I happened to be reading some scientific and medical history some years back and came across Roselyne Rey's History of pain which refers to the late eighteent to early nineteenth century controversy over where pain came from, the nerve endings or the brain itself. In it there is reference to correspondance between a rural French doctor and a rather more important one in Britain. In the letter he makes reference to having heard an account of the execution of a Duchess(?) and that after her head came off it was picked up and slapped. His sources said she blushed. The eminent doctor in a reading to the Royal Society cited this as evidence that pain came from the brain (for if sensibility - but only the rarified sensibility of a Duchess mind - remained after the body was severed from the brain, so did pain). Obviously hearesay is hardly a source of scientific opinion: it is however a source of public opinion. And it is one that has stayed with us in the English speaking world.

Vive la revolution!