Perhaps, but the Revolution can hardly be considered "politics as usual" from a modern perspective. In fact, it seems to me that the main goal of the most principled of the Revolutionaries (whatever party they belonged to) was to make sure that it never became what we now see as "politics as usual"; they were trying to create a new kind of political reality, where people would be shaped by the new institutions to feel that political participation was every citizen's duty, and not a way of accruing wealth and power. One might well decide that this dream was foolish, but that is, first, to have the hindsight of more than two hundred years, and second, to declare that something is not worth doing simply because it has failed a few times in the past.

I don't think what Robespierre "thought he had to do" (I assume by that you mean the Terror) was so much a personal decision based on what he thought would be necessary to achieve "his" dream, but rather a course chosen by all the conventionnels based on the very real necessities of the foreign and civil wars and the other hardships facing France at that time.

I've read the Social Contract, but I think it's wrong to assume that just because many of the Revolutionaries had that they were modeling their actions on anything other than its most general of principles; they certainly weren't trying to implement its ideas literally--that sort of dogmatism is a feature of later Revolutions and has no relation to this one.