The importance of the French Revolution

I often wondered why Wil Durant's great Story of Civilization series ended where it did. I understand that Durant died in 1981, a mere six years after the Age of Napoleon was published, but I always figured there was more to the story than that. As I begin teaching Rousseau's Social Contract for the third time in my teaching career, I think I've figured a little bit of that out. To Durant, the French Revolution and the imperial reign of Napoleon was a much more important event than it is to most modern minds. The French Revolution has been eclipsed, to a degree, by the twentieth century. In essence, Marx stole Rousseau's fifteen minutes of fame.
I have often heard Rousseau called the architect of the French Revolution. I don't doubt this one bit. It is pretty sad for him that he died eleven years before the Revolution took place. Nonetheless, it would be hard to have had a Marx if Rousseau had not laid some serious intellectual groundwork. Rousseau codified, to a great extent, what George Grant calls "the revolutionary faith."
The bottom line, I guess, is that one event is inevitably eclipsed by another. The French Revolution was eclipsed by the World Wars of the twentieth century. The Social Contract was eclipsed by the Communist Manifesto. I wonder what is the dominant statement of our day and what will (has) eclipse it?