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Maybe this is meant as a broader point including communists and Nazis, but in what sense was the French Revolution built on race? Didn't it explicitly found the tradition that the French state still insists on of not enquiring anything about ethnic heritage? And with regards to class, I don't think that pre-Revolutionary France can be described as a society not based in significant amount of class. A core grievance fueling the revolution was the perceived decadence of the nobility, a social class that justified its position at least partly using class based ideology like the divine right to rule.
Broadly looking at the pre-modern West class ideology permeates everything. Greece had all the politicking about who gets to be a citizen, Rome had the patricians and the plebs, the Migration Period sees a bit of a flattening of class hierarchies due to the general anarchy and Germanic influences but emerges into the Middle Ages as highly rigid and stratified societies. Maybe I'm misreading what you mean by "class based", but I don't see any kind of ideological novelty when French radicals and later socialists start thinking in these terms in the 19th century, just that it's now coming (at least partly) from below rather than exclusively from above.
It wasn't. It was based on Class. My point is that race and class are two variants of the same thing, and because of this shared commonality, ideologies based on race run into similar problems as ideologies based on class.
All societies have some sort of class divisions, just as all societies have something approximating race divisions. The French Revolution centered its ideology on class conflict, on dividing their population into good classes and evil classes, in the belief that all problems could be solved by the former destroying the latter. Pre-revolutionary aristocrats were not in fact trying to destroy the peasant class, and while "divine right of rule" is wrong, it's considerably less wrong than what the Revolutionaries replaced it with.
The French revolution is different from what came before, because it embraced a specific, novel ideology: that through the power of Reason, its adherents had, immediately available to them, every tool necessary to fix every problem they faced. This is the core axiom of Enlightenment ideology, and it is both highly novel and absolutely destructive.
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