Describe the process by which the French Revolution evolved from moderation, to terror, to empire.

Well, this
is certainly a big question. Entire books have been written trying to make sense of it, and
there have been entire debates in scholarship over this subject. So, first of all, a brief
disclaimer: neither this answer, nor any other you'd find on this website, can give a truly
satisfying answer to it. The subject's too big and significant for anything less than a book to
fully approach.

That said, I would question whether one could accurately
call the French Revolution at any point a "Moderate Revolution." By this wording, one
usually refers to the Revolution's "first stage," which resulted in the Constitution
of 1791, but even if we were to call it "moderate" in contrast to the Revolution of
the Terror, taken in isolation, the Revolution of 1789 was itself an incredibly radical
departure from the Absolutist State that preceded it. We see in these years the abolition of the
Absolute Monarchy (replaced by a Constitutional Monarchy), and the complete restructuring of
French...