Foudroyant(e)

While looking up a word from my French textbook, I came across the word ‘foudroyant(e)’, which immediately struck me as an interesting and strangely attractive word. It's not like "inoubliable", which has history for me, or "soixante", which just sounds beautiful, but there was something about it that meant I felt that I had to find out what it means, a phrase that I am hesitant to use after my lecturer's "French and English are not the same" explanation but will still do so as I was searching for its meaning, it's just that the most basic form of that is an attempted direct translation to English.
 
Its meaning? Lightning (progress)/stunning (success)/violent (illness, poison).  The idea of the same word meaning lightning, stunning and violent (I didn’t contextualise them at first and so assumed it meant the noun and the adjectives in general) seemed fitting. After all, what is lightning but a beautiful-from-a-distance-but-crazy-scary-up-close phenomenon? It makes even more sense when contextualised – something describing speed, forceful/even aggressive impressiveness (after all, literally stunning someone would be an aggressive act) and striking out. There’s not really a point to this, except for an observation on lightning: it’s fast and it’s aggressive and it’s uniquely beautiful. The noun to which this French word does not apply is aptly described by all facets of said word's meaning. At least as far as the facets presented by my dictionary.

Edited (from notes on phone from 6 March):
I was thinking about the word foudroyant again when getting ready for bed last night and realised that my conclusion about how foudroyant aptly describes lightning is wrong for the express reason that stunning is contextualised to mean success, and so it's expressly not the literal hit-you-over-the-head-and-stun-you type, and so I was making the aforementioned mistake of comparing English and French too much. I knew that foudroyant didn't refer to stunning blows or violent in the sense of a human or action being violent, although it could refer to the rapidity of progress. I understood the word, but then took its English approximations. Linking them to the noun lightning was fine, but I then stated how foudroyant doesn't mean lightning but aptly describes it, when really it doesn't mean it but the other meanings of its English approximations aptly describe it.