>>509844598 (OP)
>The French revolution was based, and redpilled, and I'm tired of pretending it wasn't.
It was the beginning of French nationalism. Before the revolution, the French language was a collection of dialects in different regions that bordered on being different languages, some of them were so alien to one another. The Revolutionaries required the standardization of French as a way to unify France.
Also, most loyalties before the Revolution were to the local lord, not to France. The Revolution changed that as well.
The Revolution also destroyed the power of the Catholic Church in France, leaving behind another relic of the medieval period. From then on, the nation took preeminence over religion. During the whole period of rising nationalist sentiments across Europe during the 19th century, the church was weakened and public messaging by the state emphasized the importance of one's first loyalty being to the nation and the state.
Eugen Weber's book "Peasants into Frenchmen" is a good read about all of this. Before the Revolution, most people in France were just peasants bound to their lord. They didn't begin to identify as French until after the Revolution.
Nationalist fervor, unleashed by the Revolution, is the whole reason why Napoleon was able to build his gigantic Grande Armee. Before the Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, European militaries were small and profession and well paid. After the Revolution, European countries turned to conscription of giant cannon fodder armies that were barely paid and that consisted of men told that they have to serve out of national loyalty as a service to the state.
The rising tide of nationalism that began with the Revolution and the contemporary Romantic Era grew until the first half of the 20th century, culminated the Two World Wars, and then didn't begin to decline until the unrest of the 1960s against "the system."