How would you explain why the French Revolution was not worth its human costs?

I have to prove why the French Revolution was not worth the human costs. Does anyone have ideas for questions I could ask [a presentation] or how I can explain why it was not?How would you explain why the French Revolution was not worth its human costs?
It's very simple.



It cost a lot, in lives, suffering and of course money, but led to no increase in human happiness.



The cost first. Everyone knows about the guillotine, but not many know that many of those executed were by no means opponents of the revolution. Six of them (to give just one example) were illiterate peasant women visiting Paris who for some obscure reason were arrested and condemned; one of them was actually suckling her baby for the last time in the prison yard before being put into the cart to go to her death. What became of the baby is not recorded.



In addition there were the 'noyades' at Nantes where some two thousand people were murdered by drowning; barges were crammed with them and then sunk. Some of the condemned were further mocked by being stripped naked and lashed face to face in couples, in a so-called 'republican marriage.' Special noyades were organised for the children: in addition, around 100 children were also among the 2,000 or so Vend茅ens massacred in Noirmoutier after surrendering.



The September massacres involved chopping people (political opponents but otherwise innocent of any crime) into pieces, some with swords, some with butchers' cleavers. Some of the details are truly gruesome, especially when involving women (e.g. the Princesse de Lamballes who was totally innocent apart from being a princess) - look up some contemporary accounts by revolutionaries if your stomach is srong enough.



Financial loss was suffered by the working class, who had to endure a week of ten days with only one day off, as opposed to the normal one day off in seven, and the loss of the traditional religious holidays, with no increase in pay. They were near starvation in 1794 when food prices rose sharply, but pay did not. There was galloping inflation throughout the revolutionary period (again no increase in working-class pay). However, their bourgeois leaders (Robespierre et al) did not suffer hunger: they continued to live a comfortable lifestyle with servants to tend them. So that was all right, then.



Politically things went from bad to worse. Any sort of personal liberty was just a memory; they needed an internal passport to travel from one town to another, and these were assiduously checked by the police. The Republican government was quick to declare war: first on Austria and Holland, then a year later on Great Britain, with all the loss of life, limbs, comfort and money that wars usually entail. The Government changed hands often (usually following the guillotining of some of its members). The poor old French ended up with government by junta (La Directoire) then with a military dictator (Bonaparte) and yet more aggressive foreign wars, yet more hundreds of thousands of deaths, which only came to a final end with the crushing defeat in 1815.



A Bourbon king returned - not peaceable, passive old Louis XVI (they had guillotined him) but the aggressive revanchiste Louis XVIII. With him the Revolutionary period was definitely over, but the distresses of France were not - that troubled era left a long shadow right down to the 1WW and arguably beyond.



While I have been typing I have been racking my brains to think of one benefit the Revolution brought. I cannot think of one. It changed a bad political system for one much worse. It cost thousands of lives - millions if you include all the military and civilian deaths in the Revolutionary/Napoleonic wars. It bankrupted France. It abolished the rule of law for years.



As far as I can see, it's no contest. The Revolution was a Bad Thing.