- Schama, Simon. Citizens: A Chronicle of the
French Revolution. New York: Vintage Books,
1989. ISBN 0-679-72610-1.
- The French Revolution is so universally used as a metaphor
in social and political writing that it's refreshing to come across
a straight narrative history of what actually happened. The
French Revolution is a huge, sprawling story, and this is a big, heavy
book about it—more than nine hundred pages, with an enormous cast of
characters—in large part because each successive set of new bosses cut
off the heads of their predecessors. Schama stresses the continuity
of many of the aspects of the Revolution with changes already underway
in the latter decades of the ancien régime—Louis
XVI comes across as kind of Enlightenment Gorbachev—attempting to
reform a bankrupt system from the top and setting in motion forces
which couldn't be controlled. Also striking is how many of the most
extreme revolutionaries were well-off before the Revolution and,
in particular, the large number of lawyers in their ranks. Far from
viewing the Terror as an aberration, Schama argues that from the very
start, the summer of 1789, “violence was the motor of the Revolution”.
With the benefit of two centuries of hindsight, you almost want
to reach back across the years, shake these guys by the shoulders,
and say “Can't you see where you're going with this?” But then you
realise: this was all happening for the very first time—they
had no idea of the inevitable outcome of their idealism! In a
mere four years, they invented the entire malevolent machinery of the
modern, murderous, totalitarian nation-state, and all with the best
intentions, informed by the persuasively posed yet relentlessly wrong
reasoning of Rousseau. Those who have since repeated the experiment,
with the example of the French Revolution before them as a warning,
have no such excuse.
October 2004 