Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution

'...they were given neither shelter nor quarter. Hunted down, they were mercilessly butchered: sabbered, stabbed, stoned and clubbed. Women stripped the bodies of clothes and whatever possessions they could find. Mutilators hacked off limbs and scissored out genitals and stuffed them in gaping mouths or fed them to the dogs. What was left was thrown on bonfires, one of which spread to the palace itself. Other bits and pieces of the six hundred soldiers who perished in the massacre were loaded haphazardly onto carts and taken to common lime pits. It was, thought Robespierre, "the most beautiful revolution that has honoured humanity."'

Here's a massive opus, starting from the coronation of Louis XVI up to the death of Robespierre. show more Clocking at about 900 pages, 'Citizens' is obviously a huge and vast chronicle of the French Revolution! The flow is alright. The problem is that the author may have tried to chew way more than he could, and, so, might be a bit dull at times despite unfolding it all like a dramatic action movie for the most part. The issue is, he focuses so much on violence that he tends to downplay its heritage.

It starts fine. Describing the financially exhausted France before the revolutionary earthquake that would shatter it, he reminds us of the impact of feudalism. Yet, he counterbalances it by showing such a system might have been on its way out anyway, not least because of the shy nascent of capitalism. It's a fine start, echoing Tocqueville in its conclusion:

'...elite were not a creation of the Revolution and the Empire but of the last decades of the Bourbon monarchy, and... it marched into the nineteenth century not as a consequence of the French Revolution, but in spite of it.'

He then goes on into narrating the Revolution itself, intricate events after intricate events. No matter how detailed and in length, though, this is where things go a tat off track. Simon Schama is of the opinion indeed that 'violence was the Revolution itself', not a by-product of it:

'violence was not just an unfortunate side effect from which enlightened Patriots could selectively avert their eyes; it was the Revolution's source of collective energy. It was what made the Revolution revolutionary.'

Now, don't get me wrong! Of course, the violence underpinning such events should not be under-estimated, and, as he rightly insist, it has been unjustly downplayed by other historians whereas it should be fully part of its historiography. But the problem with Schama is that he doesn't critically analyse it. He just displays it, in all its gruesomeness (my opening quote about the storming of the Tuilerie palace is one of his typical retelling...). As a result, here's a tale of gore, blood, lust, and pride, where violence is seen as a tool for fanatics groups after fanatics groups to topple each others in a self-interested power struggle. Revolutionary leaders don't care about the people but themselves, and the Revolution was nothing but a brutal bloodbath not even that necessary (again, his argument that French society didn't change that much after it all...). Is Simon Schama a modern-day Edmund Burke? It's far-fetched, but his portrayal of bloodthirsty mobs going berserk stands in sharp contrast to his depiction of a dignified royal family, whose fate especially in the prison Temple and at their trial visibly moved him more than the fate of the people under an absolutist regime... I have nothing against a revisionist approach, far from that! But, being French, I found his English cynicism quite over the top. In fact, he can't restreint himself, even when dealing with overlooked topic deserving more attention, like the civil war that had engulfed the Vendée. One third of the entire population of the region was indeed put to death, and, if a raging debate still goes on about the fate of such a turn of events in there (was it a genocide?) Schama just dumps his simple view:

'[Vendée was] the logical outcome of an ideology that progressively dehumanised its adversaries and that had become incapable of seeing any middle ground between total triumph and utter eclipse.'

He is referring to the Jacobins of the Terror, but, in light of the whole book, he might as well be referring to the whole Revolution itself; to him no doubt more of an 'utter eclipse' than a triumph. The fact he ends it all with the death of Robespierre is itself telling of his views. What about the more peaceful Directory? What about the rise to power of Bonaparte - maybe where the Revolution actually ends? Ha! But, again, as a Frenchman I don't see Bonaparte merely as an evil and bloodthirsty tyrant, whereas him, as an Englishman... But I digress!

'Citizen' is a massive opus, so big in fact that it at times lose itself into painful details and boring asides. That's its own downfall. The focus on violence is an angle that deserves to be analysed, but this book doesn't do that. It just thrusts violence at your face for the sake of thrusting violence at your face. Entertaining perhaps, but not that much serious. If you want a clear overview of the French Revolution, well, I am sure there are other books out there way shorter and more critical! For a revisionist approach, William Doyle is another English historian coming to mind... Personally, I would recommend this one only if you are well-interested in the topic to start with. show less

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 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 show more 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

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 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 show more 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

Wow! Schama is quite a writer, and the French Revolution gives him a lot of good material to work with. Schama's thesis is that brutal violence was not just an unfortunate aspect of the Revolution but lay at its very heart. With the caveat that Schama sometimes addresses adult themes (like, in this book, the sexual slanders made against Marie-Antoinette), I give his work an enthusiastic recommendation.

1000-page book that can be overdone at times, but also can be tremendously eye-opening in its discussion of the culture prior to the killings. Somehow no history class I ever took didn’t basically condense the French Revolution into the taking of the Bastille and the killing of the royals. This book blows that apart and gives a wonderful background to all the various moves amongst all the various players that went on for years. I never knew that the King was considered by the populace for quite a while to be an essential part of the Revolution.

The hysterical hatred for the Queen prior to her killing (pamphlets were voraciously consumed across the nation that portrayed ‘the Austrian Bitch’ being constantly engaged in orgies and show more sexual depravities of all kinds, sometimes including her own children) mimics the current hysterical hatred for Trump now. Smears ran rampant, with no concern for whether they were true or not.

“This is not to imply however that nothing of consequence changed as a direct result of the first phase of the French Revolution. The liberties enshrined in the Declaration of the Rights of Man for the protection of free speech
publication and assembly had brought forth a political culture in which the liberation of disrespect literally knew no bounds. It was by far the most dramatic creation of the Revolution.” show less

An exceptionally well-written an accurate history. Schama's incredibly deep knowledge and understanding of the events and key figures of the French Revolution is translated into a colorful and enlightening epic. One gets the feeling that the author's insights have led you to a balanced understanding of the reasons for how and why those tumultuous events unfolded the way they did. Although the Terror has traditionally been portrayed as mob violence, Citizens gives a more insightful perspective, taking into account the treason of the French monarchy, the impending threat of invasion by the monarchies of other countries, and the royalist uprisings outside of Paris intended to thwart the rise of liberty in France. It was not surprising that show more desperate and ruthless measures were taken to protect that which the people had fought so hard to achieve.
A wonderfully enjoyable read. show less

I've been immersed in this history of the French Revolution, and the period immediately leading up to it, for nearly two months, 875 pages of dense, albeit readable and often witty, prose, enlivened by many contemporary illustrations. Schama announces in his preface that he is taking a revisionist approach to the history, and that he is reverting to a 19th century style and writing it as a narrative. I am not sufficiently versed in the history of 18th century France (actually, I'm not versed in it at all) to evaluate his analysis, except to say that it seems to make sense as he tells it, but I definitely appreciated the chronological (as opposed to thematic) organization, even though I sometimes completely lost track of who people were, show more as Schama brings in dozens, if not hundreds, of secondary characters. In the end, although I enjoyed and learned a lot from the book, I often felt as though there were lots and lots of trees and it was hard to see the forest.

So what is Schama's revisionist approach? It takes a variety of forms. He argues that the prerevolutionary period, far from being only a deadening morass of ancient customs, was actually a time of great change. spurred by news of the American revolution, enlightenment philosophy, the writings of Rousseau, scientific exploration and experimentation (including, dramatically, hot air balloons), early steps towards manufacturing and industrialization (which upset the guild system), and more frequent and rapid transportation of goods around France. Often nobles, more than the bourgeoisie or the peasants, were the ones behind these advances (after all, they had the time and the money). He also argues that "a patriotic culture of citizenship was created in the decades after the Seven Years' War, and that it was thus a cause rather than a product of the French Revolution." In fact, he spends so long on the prerevolutionary period that it takes him 368 pages to reach the storming of the Bastille.

Schama believes that violence was built into the revolution from the beginning, that "it was not merely an unfortunate by-product of politics, or the disagreeable instrument by which other more virtuous ends were accomplished, or vicious ones were thwarted. In some depressingly unavoidable sense, violence was the revolution itself." Some examples: the "September massacres" of some 1400 Parisian political prisoners, the brutal repression of the brutal uprising in the Vendée and elsewhere, and later, during the Terror, with perhaps one-third of the population killed in certain regions, and with some of the revolutionary military leaders coming up with ideas (unused) that were "sinister anticipations of the technological killings of the 20th century."

Another of Schama's ideas is "the problematic relationship between patriotism and liberty, which, in the Revolution, turns into a brutal competition between the power of the state and the effervescence of politics." Indeed, the chaos of the Estates General and its successors soon turns into absolutism and the need to exterminate enemies. "Revolutionary democracy would be guillotined in the name of revolutionary government." The analogy with the Russian revolution is obvious.

Economically speaking, the Revolution didn't really help the peasants or the poor in the cities, and the revolutionary government still had to deal with bread prices; indeed, in some ways the revolutionary years were harder on the poor than the prior old regime. Schama also makes a convincing argument that "the "bourgeoisie" which Marxist history long believed to be the essential beneficiary of the Revolution was, in fact, its principal victim" because of the attacks during the Terror on mercantile and industrial enterprises in port towns on the Atlantic and Mediterranean and in textile centers in northeastern France.

Perhaps most importantly for the way he tells the history, Schama argues for the importance of individual actions as opposed to theories of the inevitable progress of history. As he writes in the preface, "Nor does the Revolution seem any longer to conform to a grand historical design, preordained by inexorable forces of social change. Instead it seem a thing of contingencies and unforeseen consequences . . . For as the imperatives of "structure" have weakened, those of individual agency, and especially of revolutionary utterance, have become correspondingly more important." Throughout the book, Schama uses quotes from people involved in the actions to illustrate what they were thinking.

I only knew the broad outlines of the revolution before reading this book, and became interested in reading it after I read Hilary Mantel's novel about Robespierre, Desmoulins, and Danton,A Place of Greater Safety, several years ago. So there was much I didn't know anything about, much I learned that was quite fascinating (the origins of the Marseillaise, for example), and much I learned that was quite depressing, especially when Schama focused on the widespread and obsessive violence.

This is such a complex book that I really can only touch on some on the major themes. Schama weaves together a vast number of contemporary sources: philosophical musings, letter-writers, records of speeches, newspaper articles (the revolutionaries were prolific writers), diaries, and more, in a remarkably impressive way. The illustrations of contemporary artists and political cartoonists add immeasurably to the book. Finally, Schama also has a wonderful way with words. show less