Maybe it's that cultural revolutions are like this, and there's very, very few non-cultural revolutions - maybe only independence revolutions? I literally do not know so like if you know one, put forth the Wikipedia link?
> Americans sometimes forget that what we call our “revolution” was not an anti-elite revolution but an elite-led regional separatist movement coordinated by the local governments acting in concert, and so avoided many of the challenges found in genuine revolutions.
After the war, Americans ended up with a government and distribution of material wealth very similar to what they had before.
From 1789 to the first Empire was only 15 years; to the Thermidorean Reaction even shorter.
> The French revolution was attempting to terrorise a political ellite.
That's a very generous interpretation. It's certainly what Robespierre would say, sure, but it's just as much what Lenin would say.
I am not trying to defend the French revolution, which actions were the antithesis of the values it pretended to promote. But for all its horrors, the french revolution wasn’t in the business of mass slaughtering its own population.
The French Revolution was strangled in its crib while it's mass killing was still accelerating, and it's leaders themselves killed en massé by counterrevolutionaries; it wasn't in business very long for that reason, a fact that future revolutionaries were keenly aware of and eager to avoid.
The stated ideology of the 1790s Paris Commune might be more attractive to modern democratic capitalists than that of the Bolsheviks, et al.,, but the main reason that the former has less of a history of violence than the latter is that they lost very early on in their program of exterminating an ever-expanding list of perceived enemies of the revolution, not some greater humanitarianism.
The modern revolution in Czechoslovakia turned out fairly free of violence, at it was not communist.
Oh, that's neat about the Czech revolution. I know, oh hmm, literally nothing about it. <looks it up> - The "Velvet" revolution? This is super cool, had no idea something like this happened, thanks!
In other words, AFAIK (which isn't far), it's a trait of revolutions, not of communist movements.