Today marks the celebration of the storming of the Bastille. While today many liberals will celebrate this moment in history as 'progress' for mankind (as will many 'conservatives'), today should really be marked as one of the moments in history that lead to a decline in the West.
The French Revolution led to regicide, the September Massacres that started with the priests, the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Catholics in the Vendee region of France, the Terror, and almost two decades of Napoleonic wars. This situation would not be replicated until Robespierre's great disciple would take power in Russia in 1917.
And what was the moral ground for the French Revolution? The men of the Enlightenment, such as Voltaire who signed his letters with "Escrasez l'infame"- "Wipe out the infamy" i.e. the Church, Diderot who declared, "Mankind will not be free until the last king has been strangled with the entrails of the last priest," along with Rosseau who declared, "Man is born free but everywhere he is in chains." Even the great democrat Thomas Jefferson seemed to sanction terror, "The tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure."