Explanation: “We should bring back the guillotine” or similar is a common internet quip in response to billionaires doing billionaire things, when in reality the guillotine was invented to provide equal and humane deaths to people of all classes, and from there it was always a tool of the state rather than the people. Not the best euphemism for “we should depose the bourgeoisie.” In fact plenty of Revolutionary justice folks were themselves offed by the guillotine during the Terror.
Not quite. While some transfer of power had taken place through venal office and purchase of noble titles, it was still aristocrats running things both in form and function by the time of the Revolution. The thing about the Ancien Regime was that everyone could agree it was broken but nobody could agree on what to do about it, so there wasn’t a strong enough force of reaction to prevent the calling of the Estates General, which marks the start of the Revolution. After the Estates General was called the bourgeois and liberal noble elements ended up with most of the power because that’s what you get with representative democracy. Imagine if a modern bourgeois state createed hyperlocal workers’ councils to make some decision that the state can’t make on its own, and if these workers’ councils then seized state power. That’s the French Revolution.