I see two sides to that.
On the one hand, the ancien regime was well past its sell-by date. Feudal monarchy no longer made sense in Western Europe of the late 18th century.
On the other hand, the people who got into power were a mixed bag indeed, with some outright crazy elements. Napoleon was indeed the saner option - if he could have avoided going on a rampage across Europe.
The irony is that over the Channel, the English had been there, done that, about a century earlier. King Charles and the Cavaliers, the Roundheads, the Calvinist Theocrats, Oliver Cromwell cracking heads and restoring order, finally the Restoration.
And the Puritan theocrats, even at their most extreme, were in practice far, far less bloodthirsty or destructive than the French devotees of the Cult of Reason turned out to be.