> France, in spite of all the beheadings, never really lost its aristocracy. The popular imagery of the French Revolution, at least outside of France, was that

> France, in spite of all the beheadings, never really lost its aristocracy. The popular imagery of the French Revolution, at least outside of France, was that the peasants rose up to destroy the aristocracy by chopping all their heads off. While some people certainly had this motivation, especially the sans-culottes and extremists like Marat, as a means of describing the entire revolution this framework falls far short of reality. A large portion of the early revolution was actually supported by factions of the French nobility, including the liberal sons of old noble families. These nobles saw their current privileges as destabilizing, and wanted to move the country in a more meritocratic direction where they could dominate based on their education rather than their birth. Furthermore, the near universal opinion of the political class early on was that they wanted a constitutional monarchy, even Robespierre opposed a republic early on during his revolutionary career. It wasn’t until after the execution of the king did the purely anti-noble sentiment get going (and executing), but for a variety of reasons (read: civil war), they killed a lot more French peasants than they killed aristocrats. Later historians would typically call this period the “bad revolution”, while the partially aristocrat led early phases the “good revolution”. A later King of the French (yes, they came back) actually ponied up a huge amount of money to restore property to the nobility that had fled, effectively returning the nobility to their pre-revolution economic power. tl;dr: the French Revolution was never a unified anti-aristocrat operation, which explains why semblances of the aristocracy remain to this day. It was effective at eliminating the king, but it was partially led by aristocrats, and ineffective at killing off or making the aristocracy permanently poor.