citizens a chronicle of the french revolution by simon schama

Why did this happen in the way it did? Here Schama falls back upon two huge words- reason and romanticism -which he bounces off each other hoping that their resonances will pass for explanation.

The Citizen becomes collectivized (Schama often uses 20th-Century concepts in describing 18th-Century France) and is set against the “Uncitizen.” The main means of doing this are spectacle, rhetoric, and exterminating violence. He warns us that his book “may well strike the reader as story rather than history.” But the reader should also be warned that Schama’s considerable literary gusto dissolves at the end of this huge tome into a few meager ideas. Schama simply yokes these ideas loosely together and leaves us to make the connections. If during the revolution there was a “brutal competition” between “the power of the state and the effervescence of politics,” Schama suggests we analyze the “problematic relationship between patriotism and liberty.” If “revolutionary behavior” is what he suggests it is-a kind of madness-then perhaps we shall find a “clue” in the “eighteenth-century belief that citizenship was, in part, the public expression of an idealized family.” Patriotism, liberty, the family and revolutionary violence are connected ideas to be analyzed in an explanation of violence, but nowhere does this explanation convincingly materialize. Violence is what made the revolution revolutionary.” Violence of the streets and of the state, then, is Schama’s central subject, which he confronts with both high moral seriousness and appalling superficiality. Worst of all, it was a vast spectacle of horror held together from beginning to end by popular savagery and official atrocities-”bloodshed was not the unfortunate by-product of revolution, it was the source of its energy. The revolution was a bizarre process of demanding human rights only to suppress them. Rather, it interrupted the bourgeoisifying of France, impeded modernization, and established human rights only to suppress them.

The revolution was not, (as many other historians point out) bourgeois, a mere fantasy of Marxists. For the bicentennial of the French Revolution, Simon Schama sings no birthday songs, only litanies on the “normalization of evil.” Following some recent French historians, and ideas that go back to Alexis de Tocqueville’s “The Ancien Regime and the Revolution” (1856), he argues that much of what was progressive in the Revolution was already developing in the 18th Century.

Citizens a chronicle of the french revolution by simon schama