I was comparing the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars with the 18th century standard of warfare (basically, the standards that held from the 1648 Peace of Westphalia until the French Revolution). It is true that some previous wars in European history had been just as awful, like for example the Thirty Years' war. However, the innovations brought by the French Revolution destroyed a century and a half long tradition of reasonably limited and civilized warfare. To see this, it's enough to look at the casualty figures of 18th century European wars prior to 1789 and compare them with the death toll of those in the period 1792-1815. It's an order of magnitude difference.
Moreover, some of your claims are wildly inaccurate. In particular, the first mass conscription (levée en masse) was levied in the summer of 1793, six years before Napoleon's Brumaire coup. And it was by no means "the whole [F]rench people" that stood behind the revolutionary regime. A very large percentage was monarchist and saw the Revolution as an illegal and tyrannical usurpation -- for which they had at least some good reason, considering that it immediately abolished centuries old traditional institutions of local autonomy and submitted them straight to the dictate from Paris. You yourself said that "there were many people inside France trying to destroy the Revolution from inside" because they didn't like the change. Does this mean that, according to you, these people deserved the Terror to be unleashed against them?
In some places, like the Vendée, the monarchists had overwhelming support -- which was crushed by the revolutionary regime in a campaign of mass atrocities whose scale and brutality would truly not be repeated in Europe until the 20th century totalitarians took over. (If you think my assertion about the Nazis is incorrect, can you name some campaign of atrocities in Europe between the French Revolution and the Nazis that rose to the same level? Perhaps some things that happened in Eastern Europe in the post-WW1 chaos would qualify.)
The assertion that "[t]here is no ethnic conflict that was started [or] inspired by the French Revolution" is also absurd. If anything, the German-French rivalry and revanchism that was to produce a series of cataclysmic wars in the next 150 years was a direct consequence of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Moreover, nothing like the European nationalist ideologies that would cause all the strife and wars in the subsequent 200 years existed before the French Revolution. The novel idea of a centralized and ethnically uniform nation-state that is the very essence of nationalism was at the center of the French revolutionary project. (This is especially obvious in the revolutionary government's policy of eliminating local languages and dialects and forcible imposition of linguistic uniformity.) Once such ideas start taking hold in ethnically diverse places, the consequences are terrible almost without exception.
In Haiti, the story is much more complicated than what you say, and altogether horrible -- certainly nothing like the idealistic story of successful abolition of slavery that you suggest. When the formal abolition came in 1794, the slave rebellion that would ultimately turn into all-out race war was already well underway. The bungling politics of the republican commissioners newly arrived from France, principally Sonthonax, certainly didn't help the situation. (It is true that the conclusive and most brutal events happened after Napoleon's unsuccessful invasion in 1801-02, but the situation had turned very nasty even before that.) And in any case, the worldwide slave trade was abolished by the Royal Navy prompted by British abolitionist politics. The French Revolution had nothing to do with that.
Your constant pointing out of all the nice and sweet things that the revolutionary regime was declaring on paper is rather absurd considering what this regime was doing in practice. (And a more in-depth analysis would in fact show that some of these nice-sounding ideas did in fact predictably lead to awful consequences when attempted in practice, while many of them weren't at all nice when one looks at what they really meant behind the lofty language.)
All in all, you seem to be repeating a very naive and cartoonish version of events. I suggest that you read more on this historical period if you'd like to discuss it seriously.
Correction: The first levée en masse was in February 1793, not the summer of 1793 as I wrote originally. This however goes even further towards the point I was making.
Since you are issuing a post, not a book, you had to leave out most of the crimes of the French revolution, such as the infamous red terror, which was the very essence of the French revolution and its most emblematic act, the prototype and original for all the many terrors and mass murders of the twentieth century, the inspiration for all our most evil intellectuals.
Among the many crimes you left out was two years of hyperinflation with price control between 1793 and 1795, which employed the most savage terror to control prices, and imposed widespread famine, which famine produced massive riots, which were in turn put down by measures of extraordinary brutality.
Scott Aaronson suggests that Many-Worlds and libertarianism are similar in that they are both cases of bullet-swallowing, rather than bullet-dodging:
Now there's an analogy that would never have occurred to me.
I've previously argued that Science rejects Many-Worlds but Bayes accepts it. (Here, "Science" is capitalized because we are talking about the idealized form of Science, not just the actual social process of science.)
It furthermore seems to me that there is a deep analogy between (small-'l') libertarianism and Science:
The core argument for libertarianism is historically motivated distrust of lovely theories of "How much better society would be, if we just made a rule that said XYZ." If that sort of trick actually worked, then more regulations would correlate to higher economic growth as society moved from local to global optima. But when some person or interest group gets enough power to start doing everything they think is a good idea, history says that what actually happens is Revolutionary France or Soviet Russia.
The plans that in lovely theory should have made everyone happy ever after, don't have the results predicted by reasonable-sounding arguments. And power corrupts, and attracts the corrupt.
So you regulate as little as possible, because you can't trust the lovely theories and you can't trust the people who implement them.
You don't shake your finger at people for being selfish. You try to build an efficient system of production out of selfish participants, by requiring transactions to be voluntary. So people are forced to play positive-sum games, because that's how they get the other party to sign the contract. With violence restrained and contracts enforced, individual selfishness can power a globally productive system.
Of course none of this works quite so well in practice as in theory, and I'm not going to go into market failures, commons problems, etc. The core argument for libertarianism is not that libertarianism would work in a perfect world, but that it degrades gracefully into real life. Or rather, degrades less awkwardly than any other known economic principle. (People who see Libertarianism as the perfect solution for perfect people, strike me as kinda missing the point of the "pragmatic distrust" thing.)
Science first came to know itself as a rebellion against trusting the word of Aristotle. If the people of that revolution had merely said, "Let us trust ourselves, not Aristotle!" they would have flashed and faded like the French Revolution.
But the Scientific Revolution lasted because—like the American Revolution—the architects propounded a stranger philosophy: "Let us trust no one! Not even ourselves!"
In the beginning came the idea that we can't just toss out Aristotle's armchair reasoning and replace it with different armchair reasoning. We need to talk to Nature, and actually listen to what It says in reply. This, itself, was a stroke of genius.
But then came the challenge of implementation. People are stubborn, and may not want to accept the verdict of experiment. Shall we shake a disapproving finger at them, and say "Naughty"?
No; we assume and accept that each individual scientist may be crazily attached to their personal theories. Nor do we assume that anyone can be trained out of this tendency—we don't try to choose Eminent Judges who are supposed to be impartial.
Instead, we try to harness the individual scientist's stubborn desire to prove their personal theory, by saying: "Make a new experimental prediction, and do the experiment. If you're right, and the experiment is replicated, you win." So long as scientists believe this is true, they have a motive to do experiments that can falsify their own theories. Only by accepting the possibility of defeat is it possible to win. And any great claim will require replication; this gives scientists a motive to be honest, on pain of great embarrassment.
And so the stubbornness of individual scientists is harnessed to produce a steady stream of knowledge at the group level. The System is somewhat more trustworthy than its parts.
Libertarianism secretly relies on most individuals being prosocial enough to tip at a restaurant they won't ever visit again. An economy of genuinely selfish human-level agents would implode. Similarly, Science relies on most scientists not committing sins so egregious that they can't rationalize them away.
To the extent that scientists believe they can promote their theories by playing academic politics—or game the statistical methods to potentially win without a chance of losing—or to the extent that nobody bothers to replicate claims—science degrades in effectiveness. But it degrades gracefully, as such things go.
The part where the successful predictions belong to the theory and theorists who originally made them, and cannot just be stolen by a theory that comes along later—without a novel experimental prediction—is an important feature of this social process.
The final upshot is that Science is not easily reconciled with probability theory. If you do a probability-theoretic calculation correctly, you're going to get the rational answer. Science doesn't trust your rationality, and it doesn't rely on your ability to use probability theory as the arbiter of truth. It wants you to set up a definitive experiment.
Regarding Science as a mere approximation to some probability-theoretic ideal of rationality... would certainly seem to be rational. There seems to be an extremely reasonable-sounding argument that Bayes's Theorem is the hidden structure that explains why Science works. But to subordinate Science to the grand schema of Bayesianism, and let Bayesianism come in and override Science's verdict when that seems appropriate, is not a trivial step!
Science is built around the assumption that you're too stupid and self-deceiving to just use Solomonoff induction. After all, if it was that simple, we wouldn't need a social process of science... right?
So, are you going to believe in faster-than-light quantum "collapse" fairies after all? Or do you think you're smarter than that?