[Update: My conflation of the Girondins and the Society of the Friends of Truth was a Mistake and Brissiot was ultimately a Liberal. But it is still true that the primary perpetrators of the Terror were not the Communists and the people who were became victims of it.]
The Oversimplified series on YouTube is supposed to be an ironic name, the videos are in fact trying to show things aren't as simple as good guys vs bad guys but still in an easily digestible summary. But their series on The French Revolution is still genuinely way to over simplified. And maybe I'd have the same issues with their Russian Revolution series if I were more informed on that subject, but I'm currently not.
Even the frequently praised Revolutions Podcast still leaves important things out. Marco DiLucheti's book is useful but he still has personal biases one needs to take with a grain of salt. The way most Conspiracy Theorists tend to talk about it is still heavily influenced by Nesta Webster who was a Fascist, I don't mean that as shorthand for politics I don't like, she was a member of two parties that openly called themselves Fascist, her status as a Fascist is less disputable then the Nazis.
BadMousePorductions videos are not watchable anymore for some reason, but in their video on the Paris Commune they refereed to that as the first true Leftist Revolution, and while that is kind of true, giving the impression the prior French Revolutions had no one who would fit a BreadTuber's standard of Leftist is a problem for me.
However the big problem is that the internal disputes of the Revolution were more complicated then just some people being more "radical" then the others. The conservative and centrist critics of the French Revolution want to blame The Terror on Leftist radicalization, however that is absolutely not the case, the proto Communists and Socialists of that era were generally more likely to be victims of The Terror then perpetrators of it.
The origin of using the words "left" and "right" to describe political ideologies comes from the French Revolution, how people tended to be seated in the Assembly. However what Left and Right meant then is not quite compatible with the way anyone uses them today. The Right were the Royalists, but by that I don't just mean the literal definition of Monarchy, in order to be considered on the Right Wing of the Assembly you had to support keeping King Louis on the Throne (and his Heirs after he died), and even then you might fail to qualify if you were too much of what we'd today call a Constitutional Monarchist. In other words no one in Modern American Politics would manage to be Right Wing by that standard.
The people in the French Revolution who were Leftists by any modern standard were Brissiot (who said "Property is Theft" before Proudhon and founded France's Abolitionist movement) Nicolas Bonnevile (who called for Communal ownership of land and Religious Tolerance), Pierre-Antoine Antonelle, Sylvain Marechal and Francois "Gracchus" Babeuf of the conspiracy of the equals, Olympe de Gouges, Thomas Paine, Condorcet (who proposed a form of UBI) and his wife Sophie, Nicola Restif de la Bretonne and Victor d'Hupay (in reference to whom the word Communist was first used in it's modern sense) and finally Philippe Buonarroti. To some degree all future Communist, Socialist and Anarchist revolutionaries descend at least in part from this group. Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier and Etienne Cabet were alive during the Revolution but were very young and mostly wrote during a later period, they were soon followed by Amand Bazard, Philippe Buchez, Pierre Leroux, Flora Tristan, Eugene Sue, Louis Auguste Blanqui, Theodore Dezamy, Albert Laponneraye, Jean-Jaccques Pillot, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Martin Bernard, Armand Barbes, Louis Blanc Joseph Dejacque, Charles Lonquet, Paul Lafargue and Jules Guesde.
Brissiot voted against executing the King because he opposed The Death Penalty period (as did Thomas Paine), but was labeled a closet Monarchist by his enemies for that and that is where the derogatory Girondin label comes from. The same unfair condemnation befell Henry Vane during the English Revolution though I wouldn't call him a Socialist. Yet even Wikipedia falls into the trap of calling Brissiot more "moderate" then his killers. [Update: and I'm starting to feel the reputation of the Russian Mensheviks and Left SRs may be the same situation.]
The Reign of Terror had three phases the way I look at it.
The first phase was mainly driven by the Hebertists of the Committee of Pubic Safety who wanted to forcibly DeChristianize France. Their status as Atheists may have been inherently radical at the time, but today these people would be with the New Atheist YouTube Skeptics who protest to much to being associated with the Alt-Right. Most if not all of the Socialists I refereed to above were Atheists (or Deists) but they understood the wrongness of trying to abolish religion by force and so opposed the forced DeChristianization, Nicolas Bonnevile wrote a book about it.
The second phase was the period where Maximilian Robespierre was basically an absolute dictator, which fully starts in March of 1794. It's hard to define Robespierre ideologically as he kind of flip flopped on almost everything. But during the height of his power I am more then willing to say that he was a Proto-Fascist Demagogue, if anyone pre-1889 is worthy of being described that way it's him. He constantly accused his enemies of colluding with foreign threats, and was among those who saw the Revolution as restoring some mythical pre-Roman Celtic Utopia, meaning it fits the Palingenetic Ultranationalism test. And remember both Mussolini and the early Nazis used quasi Socialist rhetoric to get popular support. But ultimately the economic policy of Robespierre was at best a Bourgeoise Welfare State.
I also get annoyed at how often dramatizations of the Revolution will make Robespierre seem important a lot sooner then he actually was, he wasn't even on the original Committee of Public Safety, his time from first joining it to his overthrow was exactly one Gregorian Year. The Rose of Versailles adaptations have a tendency to make him the leader of the third estate even before the Bastille was sieged, I don't know if that began with the original Manga. The truth is he was around but no one knew who he was yet, it was years still before he became a leader of any faction. And the faction he rose to power in was never that powerful while the King still had his head. Bonnevile and Brissiot were the real leaders of the early Revolution.
The third phase was The Directory, which can often be written off as the most boring phase of the Revolution since most people don't know about The Conspiracy of The Equals. But basically the Directory was a regime of moderate enlightened centrists afraid of the ramifications of extremism. So they killed anyone wanting to make further change or progress, either to their Left or their Right. They were Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. On this assessment even the Revolutions Podcast agrees with me. They actually killed more people then the earlier phases combined. [Update: This paragraph was problematic since I conflated the actual Directory with the post Thermidor Committee of Public Safety. But they were controlled by the same party anyway.]
In the wake of George Flyod's killing many people have become more willing then they were previously to express sympathy or outright support for violent rebellion and point out the limitations of Ghandi/MLK style peaceful protests. And with that I agree, on another blog I wrote "you can't change the world without getting your hands dirty". But some of these protesters have in turn brought out make shift Guillotines and that bothers me.
The Reign of Terror was not violent Rebellion, it was people who were no longer the rebels carrying out state sanctioned violence, and that is something I will oppose without exception. BTW another little known fact is that the Nazis actually killed more people by Guillotine then the French Revolution did.
Some Revolutionaries feel the need to execute a captured and helpless King because of the fear that his symbolic value to counter-revolutionaries and foreign powers that may invade on their behalf makes him too dangerous to be kept alive. But it always backfires, those forces can always find another heir to the Throne while you've simply made this deposed king a Martyr only increasing his symbolic value. Yes, the "Gandhi Trap" can work for the Right as well.
And yes I apply that even to Nuremberg, those convicted should have had to live with what they did, executing them only made them Martyrs to the true believers even to this day.
The Neo-Liberal Centrists are those who would say the French Revolution went wrong the moment they stormed the Bastille, that sentiment I will never support.
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