But didn't the French revolution have highly intellectual leaders that sought to create an entirely new government?

I doubt they decided their rules of law while feeling panic. It was likely done over a long period of time with careful thought and consideration.

That ‘careful thought and consideration’ let to the Reign of Terror.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror

The road to hell, & etc.

This "Reign of Terror" (La Terreur) is becoming highly controversial amongst academic historians. Don't believe everything on wikipedia, even if it fits your views.

Furret and Soboul are most likely the cause of those, but better, or at least more descriptivist/scientific historians like https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Biard or https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Cl%C3%A9ment_Martin are probably closer to the truth.

I'm not saying that Furret is a bad historian: he is the reason why we can be closer to the truth, now. By disproving some of the marxist interpretation claims and advancing his own interpretation, he allowed younger historian to do the same to his own, finding proofs through legislative archives that some "French revolution facts" were not really facts, and especially, the legend about the assembly: "La Terreur est a l'ordre du jour".

French textbook still have not been updated, and neither was wikipedia :/

Sorry, i'm an history nerd.

Other countries managed to abolish feudalism without quite so many mass executions or consequent authoritarian strongmen plunging their continents into devastating series of wars.

... often just because rulers were so scared by the French experience, that they caved at the first demand for better forms of government.

In a similar way, a lot of worker rights gained in the XX century were introduced only because elites were utterly scared by the Soviet experience.

Sometimes it helps to have a reference, so to speak.

Speaking of which, before the revolution in which Soviets came to power, we had serfdom in russia - basically our version of a feudal system

Serfdom was abolished in Russia in 1861.

Eh... _kind of_. It was abolished in such a way that in practice it kept more or less functioning for a very long time afterwards.

If you mean that peasants still had to rely on the land owned by somebody else to survive, then yes. But this had been the case in every country that had serfdom and abolished it, usually until industrialization funneled all those peasants into the cities.

But serfdom is a lot more than that - it's literally treating people as slaves, selling them etc. That part was decisively abolished.

By 1917, when the Revolution happened, peasants' primary concern was access to and control of the land, not personal freedom.

As I understand it, many emancipated serfs and their descendants were still paying off a substantial tax intended to compensate landowners into the 20th century, often by working for the same landowners. It was clearly an improvement over serfdom, but likely a worse situation than contemporary peasants elsewhere.