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Notes -
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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