"The Oxford History of the French Revolution" I

Pivoting off Empire Falls, the next book I'm going to knock off of the reading list is going to be William Doyle's The Oxford History of the French Revolution.  What? you say, they're clearly unrelated.  Au contraire!  That passage I quoted about the slowness of time from Empire Falls:

"Slow, Tick decides.  Things happen slow.  She isn't quite sure why this understanding of the world's movement should be important, but she thinks it is....Take her parents.  At the time, their separation had seemed a bolt from the blue, though she now realizes it had been a slow process, rooted in their dissatisfaction and need-in their personalities, really...

And that's the thing, she concludes.  Just because things happen slow doesn't mean you'll be ready for them.  If they happened fast, you'd be alert for all kinds of suddenness, aware that speed was trump.  'Slow' works on an altogether different principle, on the deceptive impression that there's plenty of time to prepare, which conceals the central fact, that no matter how slow things go, you'll always be slower." (Empire Falls, p. 441)

The essence of this passage is exactly why I turn to the French Revolution next.  Frankly, I don't get it.  As a historical event, it has always puzzled me.  Unlike the Russian Revolution, which is mostly the story of speed mortared with copious amounts of blood, the French Revolution has seemed to me from my limited understanding of it to have this really odd stop and start quality to it.

First, pressure builds for a hundred years as the economy and the political system seethe and stagnate under the ancien régime, all well and good. So then the King bends, calls in the Estates, things escalate, aaaaaaaaaand boom! the Bastille falls in 1789. All right, obviously I'm missing details, but with you so far. But then, what? It takes another three years for them to execute Citizen Capet? What the hell were they doing for three years? From there, we get the Reign of Terror, the levees en masse, and finally, the Directory and Napoleon. How did the Parisian street mob storming a prison climax with a Corsican burning Moscow, and end with that same Corsican ending his days in the Southern Hemisphere and the royal family reinstated? In other words, what the hell happened here people?

So, I aim to find out. This book is longer and denser than the previous two, so I plan to include a few more updates before I culminating with the usual book review.