My point wasn't to claim that revolutionary states are always more democratic or better than the states that proceeded them. My point is that revolutionary states engage in state terror when they feel threatened by external or internal actors. States in general don't decide to clamp down on dissidents because they just feel particularly autocratic that morning. More often than not, states prefer the
threat of violence than it's actual exercise: violence is messy, unpredictable and most importantly: can result in backlash. Now of course, whether you feel if that threat is actually justified or not, that's up to you, but states, especially revolutionary ones, do not have the benefit of hindsight: if they feel threatened, they will act accordingly.
Also: for the ten year period most people identify as the "French Revolution", the Jacobins were only in power for two of them: most of that time France was either a constitutional monarchy or a counter-revolutionary autocracy, which led directly to the take over of Napoleon. I'd hardly call that "handing power to the most extreme and violent of the revolutionaries."
I concede, I didn’t really think about the Directory.
The Left-Opposition didn't exist until after Lenin fell ill a year before he died, unless you're referring to other left wing parties in which case... eh? Most of the left wing parties either broke with the Bolshevik parties first or were integrated entirely. And even the Bolsheviks weren't a monopoly in that regard: there were Bolsheviks who wanted to preserve Soviet/multi-party democracy.
I misclicked, I meant left-wing opposition, mostly I was referring to the Kronstadt Rebellion, basically the Bolshevik’s fear of an anarchist and other opposition groups.
Depends how you mean "opposed": Both endorsed the White government and sent military observers but other than that they couldn't really do much for various reasons: The Russian Civil War had already shown intervention doesn't turn out well for you, these countries have their own leftist movements to contend with and have social democratic governments, and they were not in any real position to intervene even if they wanted to.
But they did supply MacAuthur, no?
The revolution in Reds! occurs when a popular front alliance between the WCP and DFLP is democratically elected and overthrown. Anti-Putsch Republicans and Democrats cooperate with the Provisional Government which (at first anyway) seeks merely constitutional restoration and form a major party after the Revolution concludes in the Democratic-Republicans. The Civil War only turns explicitly revolutionary because the WCP's conciliatory right is murdered in the Putsch anyhow.
How would that stop them from becoming more authoritarian? Democratically elected governments become dictatorships quite often and banning other political parties isn’t even all that rare, even in democratic governments.
Why are you even mentioning Mussolini? He was by no means a revolutionary and hadn't been since he was expelled from the PSI in 1914: the Blackshirts were used as explicit counter revolutionaries by landlords and industrialists attacking workers who were going on strike in the Bienno Rosso.