Spectacular panorama of a watershed
Review of Citizens- A Chronicle of the French Revolution by Simon Schama
Unlike Schama’s other books, which all too often get lost in sensuous detail, this book is a perfect balance of analysis and portraits of the quirkiness of the human condition. You get a flavor for the vast array of people involved, while the narrative follows well trod lines. It is an immensely complex story.
Schama's take on the French Revolution is that what happened was far more richly textured than the crude class-based analyses that have held sway for too long. In what I believe is a convincing performance, he shows that not only was (the politically inept) Louis XVI pursuing many progressive agendas for change, but that it was the aristocrat-intellectuals who formed the basis of the Revolutionary leadership and not bourgeois or working class heroes. What made it so violent, in this reading, was the collapse of the old order and then the struggles that ensued for the control of the instruments of military and police power. It was the birth of the popular army, he concludes, and not the abstract ideals enshrined in official propaganda, that was the real legacy of the Revolution and the basis for Napoleon's later military dominance.
What makes it a watershed event was that it was the first example of the passions unleashed by nationalist fanaticism: the Jacobins led directly to the communards and then the more purified revolutionary violences of fascism and Marxism-Leninism. Reading of the horrors of the Terror, this is also convincing (and frightening).
One of the greatest pleasures of this book are the personalities that Schama describes in loving detail, as they appear and re-appear at crucial moments. You get the heavyweights Lafayette and Talleyrand, but also innumerable lesser known characters, whose lives and fates the author takes to symbolize the Revolution's legacy. If you know Paris, you learn who a lot of the people were whose names are on the streets and the institutions, such as Necker and de la Tour du Pin. That made it especially fun for me, but that is personal.
That being said, the book is occasionally uneven. Though Schama tells a great story in the most elegant of prose, there are sections that read as if it were written too fast. Moreover, the story is so complex that some basic details, such as what the people in the various factions actually thought and stood for, are lost or obscured by the endless succession of stories.