I know that the idea of the French Revolution was to end the tyranny of the aristocracy and monarchy, but did your average individual support the cause/actively participate in revolutionary events?
During the initial years of the French Revolution (1789-1790), the average individual did support the cause and actively participated in (or more often spectated) revolutionary events.
The initial policies of the Revolution of 1789 garnered significant support amongst the population of France. Furthermore, the ideas the revolution represented, such as liberty and equality, were popular as well (although just how to define these popular concepts was bitterly debated).
Seeking ways to celebrate the revolution and demonstrate enthusiasm for the new order, multiple revolutionary traditions and customs were created. These included:
The significant enthusiasm displayed in the adoption of these traditions and customs reinforces Historian Boyd Shafer's claim that France is the home of modern popular nationalism.
"If, in fact, popular national patriotism can be said to have a birth year and a birth place, it was 1789-90 and in France…. No similar widespread outburst of national patriotism had ever occurred in previous history, nor one as significant for the later development of popular nationalism.”
- Boyd Shafer, 1943
To dive further into your question, some of these new traditions, such as the federations, have been criticised by historians because they excluded the "average" citizen. For example, many federations prominently featured National Guard battalions, and guardsmen were often middle class "active citizens". The average "passive citizen" could thus only be a spectator at these ceremonies. However, as demonstrated by the fact that tens of thousands of passive citizens volunteered to help prepare the Festival of the Federation in Paris in July 1790, the support for these revolutionary events was still significant. Furthermore, the crowd at this federation numbered 400,000 despite terrible rain all day, reinforcing the popular support the event possessed.
Historian Simon Schama defends the popularity of the federations, despite the exclusions they contained, and notes the wide-spread support the revolution of 1789 enjoyed.
“While the manifestations of the new revolutionary religion – the cult of Federation – were theatrical and necessarily ephemeral, they were no less important for being that. In the emotive climate of 1790 they arguably made more of an impact through arresting spectacle than any of the elaborate institutional alterations on which historians have, until quite recently, concentrated. And it would be quite mistaken to see them as so much orchestrated mummery, staged by defensive politicians to disguise the frailty of their legitimacy. Overwhelming evidence from many regions of France suggests not only that many of the “federations” of 1790 were spontaneous, but also that they engaged enormous numbers of people in their dramatizations of shared patriotic enthusiasm. Notwithstanding the fact that the organizing forces were always National Guardsmen who, at this time, were better-off “active citizens,” the numbers of those involved both as participants and spectators make a better case for regarding the revolution of 1790 as more of a “popular revolution” than the coercive Jacobinism of 1793–94 to which the term has been more frequently applied.”
- S. Schama, 2004
If you would like to know more about the range of customs and traditions created in 1789-90, and hear from eye-witnesses and historians about these revolutionary events, feel free to check out this week's episode of the Grey History podcast (Episode 1.18, "A Popular Revolution").
Sources:
Shafer, B. (1943). When Patriotism Became Popular: A Study of the Festivals of Federation in France in 1790.
Schama, S. (2004). Citizens: A chronicle of the French Revolution.