I just hated the end. It worked out to de facto Communist propaganda. Communism is inspired by the French Revolution, and the word itself comes from the Paris Commune that if my math was right was roughly 20 years after the barricades in that movie, which would have been from about 1850.
We need to be clear that the Arc de Triomphe is a monument to wars following the French Revolution in which millions of people were killed. Napoleon did not pay his troops: he allowed them to rape, loot and pillage. Countless lives were damaged in addition to those lost outright. As in Communist nations there was a great deal of horror and little to redeem or justify it.
The Eiffel Tower is a monument to the original French Revolution, one which led directly to the Committee of Public Safety (does this not sound a bit like Department of Homeland Security) and, I forget the number, at least tens of thousands of deaths in all sorts of awful ways. In addition to the guillotine I remember reading about people being chained and sunk on boats, and placed in front of cannons and blown to bits.
All of this was always insanity. None of it ever led to anything that even remotely justified the suffering. The French Revolution turned virtually the entire nation into Javerts. If you didn’t wear the right colors or were accused by someone of some crime simply out of spite, you could get summarily executed with nothing even APPROACHING justice.
That stirring scene with Ann Hathaway, when she realizes all hopes of a better life are gone: this story was reenacted millions of times BECAUSE of the French Revolution. What happened to the farm wife whose husband was murdered by French Nazis, and who was gang raped, and all her lifestock killed or stolen? What happened to Russian peasants reduced to cannibalism to survive? What happened to those who supported the Revolution because they wanted bread, and who like Jean Valjean wound up slaves because they had to steal to survive, because NOTHING worked economically in that Alice in Wonderland world with real axes and real blood?
Those young men, the “idealists”, were weak. They wanted the world to be a certain way, and decided that they did not want to live if the world was not in fact that way. This is delusional. It is illness, pathology.
The world is the way it is, and if we want to improve it, we must start by understanding it. All the wishing in the world will not only not accomplish anything, but if you mistake wishing for reality, it leads to death and suffering which was unnecessary and which would not have happened if you had not happened along with your bad ideas.
We all want passion in life, but I would submit that the modest ones pursued diligently across a life are infinitely more useful than grand ones pursued violently. There are many ways to commit suicide.