That's delving into the classical debate of whether progress can be achieved within continuity or through a clean break. The debate on the French Revolution is spread across books and centuries, but the reason for the fascination is that a whole lot of political experimentation happened within the course of half a decade, mostly ending in failure, and mostly being circumscribed to the Paris and its direct area, but nevertheless sparking a lot of ideas and carrying a fair amount of influence on the subsequent emergent political ideologies.
As there's been a fair amount of ideas and paradigms clashing with each other during those five years, everyone can kind of take their pick as to their favourite and argue that, had it gone their way, things would have been much better. It's a sort of high concentrate of alternate history.