Simon Schama

Covers the French Revolution from preconditions to the death of Robespierre. The subject is practically custom-made for this reader-friendly narrative format: a series of key plot points with spectacular imagery including the Tennis Court Oath, the Bastille, various marches and riots, the guillotine, the fate of the royal family, Marat in his bath, etc. Schama layers in several asides that add flavour and a strong sense of the period such as Jean Jacob, a spectacularly old man being hailed show more as the spirit of the nation, and Theroigne de Mericourt dressed in flamboyant red, marshalling the women's march. Eight hundred pages makes for a long saga but it is never stale, and the many inserted images (paintings, portraits, propaganda) help break things up.

In high school I'd imagined the Revolution as the act of a united people claiming their rights and freedoms, a designed and concerted effort to establish something new and modern - a mirror image of the American Revolution from a decade earlier. Now I see a monarchy overthrown almost haphazardly when it didn't deliver on promises that it didn't realize it was making; first by a nobility grown heady on Rousseau with visions of a utopian society, and second by population that perceived themselves the victims of royalist conspiracy - a designed-to-be-poor economy that starved them, backed with inconsistent taxation policies inconsistently applied.

When the new government - almost entirely composed of the upper classes - tried to right these wrongs, only then did they perceive the difficulties involved. Their solutions were more drastic than anything the king had tried, leading to finger pointing and recriminations among themselves as foreign powers threatened and the economy only worsened. The population remained restless, swayed by whoever accused loudest. One at a time weaker opponents were eliminated in the Revolution's name - royalists first, then moderates - until only those extremists were left who were willing to create a police state that at last harnessed violence. Eventually the monster ate itself, and it only remained for a man like Napoleon Bonaparte to pick up the pieces.

Schama wears his opinions on his sleeve, sometimes in flat assertions that he boldly states run counter to prevailing views, sometimes in amusing sarcasm when noting strategic errors: "If [the king] had wanted to invent reasons for journalists to accuse him of considering the rights of foreign dynasts over French patriots, he could hardly have done a better job." Being a bit too demanding for an introduction to the subject, my highschool memories provided just enough background. Where those lessons offered the bare bones, this book is the muscle. show less

Many of us were raised with a rather triumphalist account detailing the rise of modern vaccines: for untold generations, people suffered terribly from various illnesses, and over time scientists and doctors figured out how to vaccinate people to reduce disease intensity and mortality. This has been hailed as an unalloyed good, and we invest a lot of time and resources into attempting to develop even more vaccines to address even more illnesses.

For those maintaining such a perspective, the show more recent anti-vax movement seems as if it came from left field. The resistance to the COVID-19 vaccine seems baffling.

Yet, as Simon Schama well documents in Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines, and the Health of Nations (galley received as part of early review program, but full book read), there has been resistance and challenges as long as the concept of inoculation/vaccination has been around. Most of that resistance and challenge said more about the resisters than anything about the advancement of science and the welfare of mankind.

The author first explored the promotion of “inoculation” for smallpox in the early eighteenth century. He well demonstrated how many had died and been permanently scarred by smallpox. He detailed how on the periphery of “civilization,” west and east, some women had come to realize the power and value of inoculation, and would inoculate their children. Some came across it, saw its effectiveness, and promoted it themselves. It eventually reached the royal household.

And then there were those who resisted it. It was asked how giving the plague could save from the plague. Theological arguments were marshaled: who were these inoculators to stand in God’s place and render His power of judging by smallpox moot? And, of course, the sheer bigotry: it was done in poorer and “less civilized” regions, and so how could it have value in a later time?

Then the author explored the life and career of Waldemar Haffkine, a Jewish man from Odessa who would play a major role in developing inoculation for both cholera and bubonic plague at the end of the 19th and into the 20th centuries. The author profiles his origin and development, how he ended up in India, and the constant resistance Haffkine would experience at the hands of the medical establishment which was very much ensconced in the mentality sanitation would work better than inoculation. Even as the evidence multiplied, the establishment would find reasons to cast aspersions. When they could make a case against the vaccines, they would, and sunk Haffkine’s reputation for a season. The establishment worked hard to break him.

In the end, we celebrate the development of inoculation against smallpox, and the vaccines against cholera and bubonic plague, finally ending all of their reigns of terror over humanity. And it is right we do so, and understandable why we don’t learn as much about all those who worked against them. One of history’s judgments involves being forgotten, after all.

But when we forget, we become surprised when we see the same kinds of resistance rise up again in later times. Books like these are important to tell the story of how inoculations and vaccines developed. Those who worked to do so should be celebrated. But it is also good to see how much resistance they experienced, from whom, and why, and thus be prepared to see such kinds of resistance continue to manifest themselves even in our own day. show less

A thumping 875-page read, Simon Schama's three decade old 'chronicle of the french revolution' stands up to scrutiny as a sound and readable tale of one of the seminal events in relatively recent world history even if the book ends somewhat abruptily with the fact of the Thermidorian reaction.

This is understandable. The French Revolution dies with Thermidor and turns into something entirely different. Schama allows himself a very short disquisition on the meaning of everything he has written show more to that point as an epilogue but is not about to become a theoretician at the last hurdle.

On the other side of the story, the first third of the book is taken up with the Ancien Regime, building a picture of the France that was to be convulsed in violence, taking care to demonstrate the many continuities between the debates and events before and after 1789.

The book has to be seen in its historiographical context - as a deliberate and strong reaction against grand narratives that placed emphasis on abstract explanations such as class. It tries to turn the story back to a tale of people coping and making decisions in real time with limited information.

In retrospect, Schama may go too far in his reaction but it was a valuable corrective at the time. Marxist historians in particular had let theory get ahead of the facts. The author is also useful in bringing into play research that 'complicated' simple class analyses.

This book is not the last word on the French Revolution but it is an excellent starting point and (as it promises) a narrated 'chronicle' so that we at least have the facts in order and to hand before we can theorise. Theory should arise from facts and not be imposed as a prior framework upon them.

Schama offers a fundamentally top-down liberal view of events but this is not one entirely unjustified given the reality that peasants and workers were being pushed hither and thither (just as they pushed back in turn) by Lenin's infamous 'split in the ruling order'.

Ironically Schama's chronicle provides us with a great deal of evidence that Marxist-Leninist practical revolutionary analyses were to be perfectly correct - the revolution was driven by mass socio-economic dissent and the old order collapsed because its elite split and then kept on splitting.

Schama helps us to see how the revolution was built for violence from the beginning, whether the murder of kings and the 'rational' execution of chunks of the elite by their own or the brutal and murderous popular violence in the Vendee or Lyons.

He draws attention to successive revolutionary elites' problem being the same as that of the Ancien Regime - how to preserve legitimacy based on the prevailing ideology (whether monarchical or republican) and yet maintain the necessary level of executive authority to hold things together,

If there is evil in this tale (and there seems to be a lot of evil done to otherwise decent people that presages twentieth century horrors), it is the evil (mostly) of the grim 'logic of the situation' at each gruesome stage of collapse into mob and state violence.

Schama's sympathies tend to the losing side of elites (at least, until the revolutionary extremists get their come-uppance). He also tends to look downwards and outwards from Versailles, Paris and the educated as is the way of most modern liberal-conservative historians and intellectuals.

I shared those sympathies insofar as the royal family was treated abominably and random purges cruelly destroyed upper class and wealthy families while history wielded its scythe. But I also sympathised with the Vendeans and hungry peasants and workers under inept elites.

Schama is good in drawing attention to the seeds of the violence in the poor and worsening financial state of the French administration. These were in a parlous state precisely because France decided to dabble in the American Revolution in order to tweak the British imperial nose.

Back to our Marxist friends who might speak here of a classic internal contradiction - a monarchical irrational regime supporting a liberal quasi-democratic regime ostensibly based on reason and infecting its own elite with its ideals and the cause of ruining its own finances.

France was (quite simply) badly run from an administrative point of view. It would have done well to create a better basis for future prosperity before spending vast sums on military adventurism. Everything unfolds (as it did in the English Civil War) from financial weakness.

Revolutionary tyranny, which will end up as a plundering Bonapartism, emerges because only tyranny (the similarities with the state of Russia after 1917 spring to mind) can solve the problems of a nation faced with immediate enemies on its borders and a busted economy.

There is a brutal logic to both the overthrow of inept regimes and the necessity for successor regimes to walk all over the theory behind a revolution and its moral principles in order to survive. Revolutions arise from the ineptitude more than the malice of ancien regimes.

Being a good liberal, Schama will indulge in some moral comment but he keeps it restrained. He tends to let the facts speak for themselves so that we are shocked and horrified by what men (and women) will do to survive and promote their ideals. Some serious sociopthy emerges.

For the general reader, the book has the added interest that the author (who employed the technique successfully in a previous work on the Dutch Republic) not merely illustrates his history with imagery from the period but makes it relevant and part of the story.

Schama also corrects the dry refusal of 'theoretical' historians to take the magical thinking of intellectuals and activists at face value as important factors in decision-making no matter how irrational they may seem to us. He also writes very well. The book is, above all, readable if long.

There is some pandering to his American audience at the beginning and at the end of the book which may elicit a sigh or two but even this has some relevance in ensuring we understand how the American Revolution influenced events in France both as financial burden and inspiration.

It is the savagery of how things unfold in a surprisingly short period of time that startles us even today. It suggests that we would be wise not to be complacent about our own stability and that there may be activists and intellectuals in our society just as ready to wield the axe on us.

I look at the more extreme end of the increasingly potty environmentalist movement and dread to think what some of them might do if our own ruling order splits and introduces them into positions of power - and of how they might deal with a populist 'Vendean' revolt against their ideals.

Well worth reading, with exciting accounts of such events as the Fall of the Bastille, the trial and execution of Louis XVI, the power struggles of 1793/94 and the Robespierrean terror (which looks more reluctant and driven by events than we might expect). The book is strongly recommended. show less

This monumental study of Rembrandt, the product of what the author describes as “the attentiveness of an engaged beholder,” uses the recoverable facts of the artist’s life and close readings of his rich body of work in an act of mutual illumination. Both are set against a detailed description of the turbulent times: the war of independence from Spain and the decades of Amsterdam’s sway as the Venice of the North. By the time I finished, I was convinced that Rembrandt was indeed, as I show more suspected, the premier artist of the 17th century.
Rembrandt’s life followed an arc appropriate for such a towering artist: talent recognized early, spotted by an advisor to the Dutch court, the years of fame and lucrative commissions, the death of his wife, years of bankruptcy and scandal, and the masterpieces of the late years, scorned at the time since they were out of step with changing fashion.
He didn’t arise in a vacuum, any more than any artist does. In particular, he was inspired (and to a certain degree oppressed) by the example of his older contemporary on the other side of the new divide in the Spanish Netherlands, Rubens in Antwerp. Schama terms Rubens Rembrandt’s “paragon” in the full sense of the word, including both emulation and competition. To document this, Schama even includes a book within a book: a roughly two-hundred-page biography of Rubens.
Recurrent themes—physical blindness and spiritual insight, for instance—run through Rembrandt’s lifelong output. One feels his quest was not only artistic but also spiritual. In a time and place torn by confessional strife, Rembrandt remained the outsider. No record of his baptism has been found. He numbered among friends and clients Catholics, Mennonites, and Jews, as well as representatives of both sides of the quarrel over predestination and free will among the Protestants in the land. Schama calls him one of nature’s ecumenicals. Although not a church member, many of his best works have biblical themes. Among the thirteen canvases found in his studio in various stages of completion when he died are a pair, “The Return of the Prodigal Son” and “Simeon in the Temple with the Christ Child,” that, taken together, seems a final confession and absolution.
Rembrandt’s entire life and career took place after the Dutch, inspired by the Reformation, banished all images from their churches, influenced by the command to make no graven images. Yet Rembrandt created what Schama calls Protestant icons. I think he is correct. When I first visited the Rijksmuseum, fifty-five years ago, one of the reproductions I bought, mounted on beaverboard, was “Peter’s Denial of Christ,” despite my Puritan fervor at the time that convinced me it was wrong to have depictions of God or Christ. Nevertheless, that print has traveled with me through every move and has hung in every one of a succession of home offices.
Be careful when you read this book: it is large and heavy. You might avoid aching wrists if you place it on a stand when you read it. Other than that, the only quibble I have is that sometimes the writing is too fine. In particular, Scham enjoys opening a new section circuitously, novelistically. This was disorienting at times. Aside from that, this book is a remarkable achievement, worthy of its subject. show less