there's little doubt that schama is a master-storyteller. However, I would have prefered that he made the whole subject a little more exciting. It was too dull for me. ( )

One of the most readable history books that I have ever read. Reads like a novel. ( )

How did we get citizens in the West? The short answer is that we have inherited death and taxes in service to the nation state. Though, there are a few advances, such as Baron Turgot's handling of the corvee.

"The corvee is the force labor service, which commoners owed to the state and from which much of its road building program had been named. Turgot was quite right o suppose that the corvee was generally loathed in the French countryside for abducting a precious (indeed often the only) source of manpower from a tiny family farm precisely at the time when it was most needed for crucial labor, such as plowing or harvest. The corvee could be commuted by the payment of a sum of money, but that presupposed that the peasant belonged to the kind of cash economy where this was feasible, and for the vast majority of the French peasantry nothing of the sort was true (p. 85)."

Turgot eliminated corvee so at least the peasants were better off in at least one respect.

A book I waited over ten years to read, having seen it reviewed when it was published in the later 1980s and wanting to read it then, but not actually doing so until recently. Schama's voice, so well-known now from his "A History of Britain" television series, is on display throughout this book. Schama's deep investigation of the intellectual underpinnings of the Revolution and his criticism make this a fascinating account and a tough read. At times, Schama expects a familiarity by the reader with topics a casual student might not be aware of, but this book is far beyond a simple chronicle, despite it's subtitle. ( )

2512 Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, by Simon Schama (read 19 Jun 1993) This 1989 book by a French-born Harvard history professor is a study which spends a lot of time on the years before 1789 and tends to be somewhat episodic in its treatment of the Revolution itself--and decidedly so after Robespierre's death. He is quite condemnatory of much about the Revolution--as I always also have been. Particularly disturbing of course is the vicious treatment of the Church during the Terror. This is a good book, but I have read a lot on the Revolution and I am not sure I needed another chronicle thereof. ( )