I don't know if the stages of history are actually a true understanding. The 19th Century saw the rise of Historical Determinism. Marx is now the most well-known, but others and especially Oswald Spangler, and Arnold Toynbee believed they had discovered the "Laws of the Rise and Fall of Civilizations". Marx had gotten it completely wrong. And so too the others who did not understand the impetus of the Middle Class.
The Modern Age is synonymous with the rise of the "bourgeoise" or Middle Class. Its origin in the Italian city-states of the Renaissance swiftly moved on to Northwestern Europe.
The congruence of the maps of the early Middle Class and the victory of the Protestant Reformation is not happenstance.
Perhaps the only determinist description of the 19th century that still holds water is that of Max Weber. His "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism" is worth the effort. (As with most English t***slations of German philosophical musings, the complexity of sentence structure renders much of it nearly too dense to read!) But in it my own observations were confirmed.
There is something about Protestantism that powerfully interacts with economic decisions and impels the development of the Modern society.
The Anglophone World defined itself as being the Protestant bulwark against Continental Roman Catholicism. The British North American colonies inherited the fear of Catholic France in Quebec, and Spain in Florida, the t***s-Mississippian region and the southwestern regions of N. America.
It was only after the actual first worldwide war, The Seven Years War (called the French and Indian War in America) that the English colonies were relieved of the ominous presence of Papist France looming over New England. This was no r****t or bigoted notion. The English sense of sovereignty was cemented during the reign of Elizabeth I. It was during her reign that the French Protestants (The Huguenots) were massacred in Paris and throughout France (St. Bartholomew's Day). The few survivors emigrated to England and to America and they reveal a different France that may have been if the Protestant Reformation were to have triumphed. Paul Revere, The Duponts and many other illustrious names in American history were of Huguenot origin.
The comparison between the English (British) Civil Wars and the French Revolution is a perfectly constructed thought experiment.