The ten years between the storming of the Bastille in July 1789 and Napoleon's coup in November 1799 remade the political imagination of the West. The Estates-General, convoked by a bankrupt monarchy, became a National Assembly; feudal privilege was abolished in a single August night; the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen proclaimed liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression as universal. By 1793 the king had been executed, revolutionary France was at war with most of Europe, and the Committee of Public Safety was presiding over the Terror. By 1799 Napoleon was consolidating much of what the Revolution had done and undoing the rest.
Almost every subsequent political tradition defined itself by its relation to the Revolution. Edmund Burke's Reflections (1790), written while the guillotine was still unbuilt, became the founding text of modern Conservatism. Thomas Paine's Rights of Man made the case for the other side. The Revolution's ideological children — liberal constitutionalism, republican nationalism, socialism, anarchism — fought out 19th-century European politics between them. Alexis de Tocqueville's Old Regime and the Revolution later argued, against both celebrators and denouncers, that the Revolution had continued rather than broken the centralizing logic of the Bourbon state.
Its intellectual ancestry includes Jean-Jacques Rousseau (the general will, popular sovereignty), the philosophes, and a century of accumulated resentment against a creaking feudal order. Its legacy is everything that came after.