Citizens

...Such rebels did not enjoy what Robespierre called the "merciful solicitude" of the guillotine...

...Feelings were let loose, as it were, on principle and the restraints of reason felt to be intolerable burdens...

...Schama also gives a thrilling account of Charlotte Corday's assassination of the odious Marat, one of the few acts of violence in the Revolution that was redeemed by courage, indeed nobility...

...Rousseau is a name that occurs often in this book, and there can be no denying that that tormented philosopher did much to inspire both the popular contempt for the Old Regime and the popular fervor for the republican innovations that developed in France...

...Again, as opposed to the liberal textbook myth of an ordinary civil war in the Vendee, Schama shows that the Vendean resistance was not merely suppressed but answered with systematic genocide, whole populations being cruelly exterminated and their villages, crops, and forests razed in the names of liberty, equality, and fraternity...

...more were ordinary people, as were the victims of the Terror in the region of the Vendee in western France, where Catholic country folk, opposed to the de-Christianizing vandalism of the Paris regime, rebelled in substantial numbers...

...France was as sound economically as England...

...Again, as opposed to the liberal textbook myth of an ordinary civil war in the Vendee, Schama shows that the Vendean resistance was not merely suppressed but answered with systematic genocide, whole populations being cruelly exterminated and their villages, crops, and forests razed in the names of liberty, equality, and fraternity...

...While he clearly disapproves of romanticism, he himself brings out the theatrical and colorful features of the Revolution as vividly as a novelist...

...Late eighteenth-century France was in the grip of romanticism...

...French people had ceased to think of themselves as subjects, and henceforth thought of themselves as citizens...

...Moreover, there are rather too many careless mistakes...

...The freedom of the press (while it lasted) was rather more abused than used...

...When Hebert's own turn came to mount the scaffold, he exhibited all the hysterical fear and cowardice he had attributed in print to the "aristos," who had in fact faced death with exemplary dignity...

...The title of Citizens for Professor Schama's "chronicle" is well chosen...

...Even when Philippe Egalites son was put on the throne as Louis-Philippe in 1830, he was required to swear allegiance to the "sovereignty of the nation...

...Schama's general explanation of the Maurice Cranston is professor of political science at the London School of Economics, and a biographer of Jean-Jacques Rousseau...

...and to be correspondingly impatient with the naive, such as Lafayette, and the oafish, such as Thomas Paine...

...Late eighteenth-century France was in the grip of romanticism...

...and to be correspondingly impatient with the naive, such as Lafayette, and the oafish, such as Thomas Paine...

...It is ironical that a young girl should have been the Brutus of a revolution that did so little for women...

...and far from there being any class struggle between aristocracy and bourgeoisie, individuals and groups within every estate in the nation were at odds with their co-equals...

...Schama also gives a thrilling account of Charlotte Corday's assassination of the odious Marat, one of the few acts of violence in the Revolution that was redeemed by courage, indeed nobility...

...After Varennes, revolutionary passion took over from revolutionary reason...

...Professor Schama begins by refuting the familiar theory that the Revolution marked the painful transition of France from a feudal, bankrupt Old Regime to capitalist, bourgeois modernity...

...French people had ceased to think of themselves as subjects, and henceforth thought of themselves as citizens...

...makes this explanation improbable...

...Professor Schama begins by refuting the familiar theory that the Revolution marked the painful transition of France from a feudal, bankrupt Old Regime to capitalist, bourgeois modernity...

...While he clearly disapproves of romanticism, he himself brings out the theatrical and colorful features of the Revolution as vividly as a novelist...

...France was as sound economically as England...

...The freedom of the press (while it lasted) was rather more abused than used...

...The book is an unusually long one, but the reader can only wish there were more of it, for it stops short at the end of the Terror in 1794, leaving several more years of revolutionary (if admittedly more orderly) government to come...

...Even royalty was divided, with Louis XVI's two brothers being squarely counterrevolutionary while his cousin Philippe d'Orleans (who changed his name to Philippe Egalite) was so pro-revolutionary that he voted for the execution of a king who dithered between supporting the Revolution and opposing it...

...The Revolution, in its constitutionalist phase between 1789 and the flight of the King to Varennes in 1791, was no more successful in setting up the institutions that would put into practice the ideas it had taken from Montesquieu...

...The flight of the King to Varennes, for example, is not simply discerned as a turning point, when all hope of the Revolution maintaining some vestige of moderation was lost and the initiative passed to the Jacobins and the mobs: Professor Schama narrates it as a personal story, even a personal tragedy for an all-toohuman king and queen for whom bad luck seemed to assume the form of a hostile fate...

...It was in the provinces that the violence was most atrocious, and Schama brings to light something liberal historians have always tried to veil, namely the extent of the repression against "federalists," or citizens who opposed the dictatorship of Paris, in places such as Lyons, where the guillotine could not kill enough dissidents, even at the rate of twelve heads every five minutes, and where groups of as many as sixty were roped together and shot at with cannon...

...rather than "The Haddon Craftspersons, Inc...

...rr he book is not, however, without 1 its imperfections...

...It was in the provinces that the violence was most atrocious, and Schama brings to light something liberal historians have always tried to veil, namely the extent of the repression against "federalists," or citizens who opposed the dictatorship of Paris, in places such as Lyons, where the guillotine could not kill enough dissidents, even at the rate of twelve heads every five minutes, and where groups of as many as sixty were roped together and shot at with cannon...

...29.95 Maurice Cranston rr his "chronicle" of the French .1 Revolution became an instant bestseller throughout the English-speaking world, and it deserves to be, because it takes that revolution out of the hands of sociologists, miniaturists, and historical determinists to tell the story as one of political and personal experience, and to tell it extremely well...

...Rousseau is a name that occurs often in this book, and there can be no denying that that tormented philosopher did much to inspire both the popular contempt for the Old Regime and the popular fervor for the republican innovations that developed in France...

...Such rebels did not enjoy what Robespierre called the "merciful solicitude" of the guillotine...

...The storming of the Bastille and the lynching of its governor by the Paris mob on July 14, 1789, began a cycle of violence that ended, as Schama puts it, "in the forest of guillotines...

...The Revolution, in its constitutionalist phase between 1789 and the flight of the King to Varennes in 1791, was no more successful in setting up the institutions that would put into practice the ideas it had taken from Montesquieu...

...Cures (vicars), for example, are muddled up with curates (vicaires...

...Of the year 1799, which witnessed the ascendancy of Napoleon and a completed decade of revolutionary government, Schama briefly observes that it found the rural poor no better off than they had been under the Old Regime, while the "fat cats," as he calls the rich, were fatter than ever—despite the fact that all the progress in industry and commerce that had developed under the Old Regime was halted by the Revolution...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1989 39 CITIZENS: A CHRONICLE OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION Simon Schama/Alfred A. Knopf/948 pp...

...After Varennes, revolutionary passion took over from revolutionary reason...

...makes this explanation improbable...

...The title of Citizens for Professor Schama's "chronicle" is well chosen...

...Hebert, for example, prepared the way for the trial of the more celebrated prisoners of the Revolution, and notably of the Queen, with such scurrilous and obscene character assassination as to make the "fair trial" promised in the Declaration of the Rights of Man—the Revolution's most sacred text—a sickly farce...

...capitalism, with as much noble as bourgeois participation in its enterprises, was already in place...

...feudal lords were already turning into modern landlords...

...and there are faults in the 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1989 French...

...rather than "The Haddon Craftspersons, Inc...

...Feelings were let loose, as it were, on principle and the restraints of reason felt to be intolerable burdens...

...collapse of the Old Regime is that while Louis was sincerely eager to introduce reform, his government was unable to create representative institutions that could execute its program of reform...

...The storming of the Bastille and the lynching of its governor by the Paris mob on July 14, 1789, began a cycle of violence that ended, as Schama puts it, "in the forest of guillotines...

...It is possible that the transposition of masculine French words (e.g., Page) to the feminine gender is the work of some overzealous feminist presence at the printing works, although the statement on the last page that the book has been set up in type by The Haddon Craftsmen, Inc...

...Of the year 1799, which witnessed the ascendancy of Napoleon and a completed decade of revolutionary government, Schama briefly observes that it found the rural poor no better off than they had been under the Old Regime, while the "fat cats," as he calls the rich, were fatter than ever—despite the fact that all the progress in industry and commerce that had developed under the Old Regime was halted by the Revolution...

...The most substantial change he notices is psychological: the national self-image had been revolutionized...

...His idol, Malesherbes, for example, was undoubtedly a staunch defender of the King at his trial as well as the cause of freedom in general, but it is evident from the researches of his biographer Grosclaude that Malesherbes was not, as Schama claims, "virtually incapable of insincerity": he was utterly deceitful, for example, over the publication of Emile...

...capitalism, with as much noble as bourgeois participation in its enterprises, was already in place...

...Of some 2,000 Lyonnaise thus liquidated, only a handful were of the upper classes...

...And not only guillotines, for the rasoir national was a relatively humane instrument which in Paris, at any rate, terminated the lives of almostas many revolutionists (including Philippe Egalite as well as Robespierre, Danton, Hebert, Desmoulins, and so on) as of antirevolutionaries...

...feudal lords were already turning into modern landlords...

...rr he book is not, however, without 1 its imperfections...

...The book is an unusually long one, but the reader can only wish there were more of it, for it stops short at the end of the Terror in 1794, leaving several more years of revolutionary (if admittedly more orderly) government to come...

...The flight of the King to Varennes, for example, is not simply discerned as a turning point, when all hope of the Revolution maintaining some vestige of moderation was lost and the initiative passed to the Jacobins and the mobs: Professor Schama narrates it as a personal story, even a personal tragedy for an all-toohuman king and queen for whom bad luck seemed to assume the form of a hostile fate...

...There was nothing structurally wrong with the Old Regime, he argues...

...Moreover, there are rather too many careless mistakes...

...the survivors being finished off with bayonets and rifles...

...It is ironical that a young girl should have been the Brutus of a revolution that did so little for women...

...and far from there being any class struggle between aristocracy and bourgeoisie, individuals and groups within every estate in the nation were at odds with their co-equals...

...And passion, according to Schama, is what distinguished the French Revolution from those that took place in England in 1688 and America in 1776...

...Violence thus emerged early in the proceedings...

...Of some 2,000 Lyonnaise thus liquidated, only a handful were of the upper classes...

...And passion, according to Schama, is what distinguished the French Revolution from those that took place in England in 1688 and America in 1776...

...Schama's general explanation of the Maurice Cranston is professor of political science at the London School of Economics, and a biographer of Jean-Jacques Rousseau...

...The author is sometimes carried away by his admiration for the character he delineates...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1989 39 CITIZENS: A CHRONICLE OF THE FRE...

...V iolence in action went together with violence in words...

...There was nothing structurally wrong with the Old Regime, he argues...

...Schama is particularly good at describing such scenes as these: he has a marvelous sense of the dramatic...

...and there are faults in the 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1989 French...

...Cures (vicars), for example, are muddled up with curates (vicaires...

...V iolence in action went together with violence in words...

...And not only guillotines, for the rasoir national was a relatively humane instrument which in Paris, at any rate, terminated the lives of almostas many revolutionists (including Philippe Egalite as well as Robespierre, Danton, Hebert, Desmoulins, and so on) as of antirevolutionaries...

...The most substantial change he notices is psychological: the national self-image had been revolutionized...

...His idol, Malesherbes, for example, was undoubtedly a staunch defender of the King at his trial as well as the cause of freedom in general, but it is evident from the researches of his biographer Grosclaude that Malesherbes was not, as Schama claims, "virtually incapable of insincerity": he was utterly deceitful, for example, over the publication of Emile...

...Julie de Lespinasse, the real-life (platonic) mistress of d'Alembert is confused with Julie d'Etange, the fictional (and less platonic) mistress of StPreux...

...The author is sometimes carried away by his admiration for the character he delineates...

...29.95 Maurice Cranston rr his "chronicle" of the French .1 Revolution became an instant bestseller throughout the English-speaking world, and it deserves to be, because it takes that revolution out of the hands of sociologists, miniaturists, and historical determinists to tell the story as one of political and personal experience, and to tell it extremely well...

...It is possible that the transposition of masculine French words (e.g., Page) to the feminine gender is the work of some overzealous feminist presence at the printing works, although the statement on the last page that the book has been set up in type by The Haddon Craftsmen, Inc...

...Even royalty was divided, with Louis XVI's two brothers being squarely counterrevolutionary while his cousin Philippe d'Orleans (who changed his name to Philippe Egalite) was so pro-revolutionary that he voted for the execution of a king who dithered between supporting the Revolution and opposing it...

...Even when Philippe Egalites son was put on the throne as Louis-Philippe in 1830, he was required to swear allegiance to the "sovereignty of the nation...

...collapse of the Old Regime is that while Louis was sincerely eager to introduce reform, his government was unable to create representative institutions that could execute its program of reform...

...the survivors being finished off with bayonets and rifles...

...Generally, Schama is apt to be overlenient toward the sophisticated, toward men such as Mirabeau and Talleyrand, who were as urbane as they were unprincipled...

...Hebert, for example, prepared the way for the trial of the more celebrated prisoners of the Revolution, and notably of the Queen, with such scurrilous and obscene character assassination as to make the "fair trial" promised in the Declaration of the Rights of Man—the Revolution's most sacred text—a sickly farce...

...Schama is particularly good at describing such scenes as these: he has a marvelous sense of the dramatic...

...Violence thus emerged early in the proceedings...

...Julie de Lespinasse, the real-life (platonic) mistress of d'Alembert is confused with Julie d'Etange, the fictional (and less platonic) mistress of StPreux...

...When Hebert's own turn came to mount the scaffold, he exhibited all the hysterical fear and cowardice he had attributed in print to the "aristos," who had in fact faced death with exemplary dignity...

...Generally, Schama is apt to be overlenient toward the sophisticated, toward men such as Mirabeau and Talleyrand, who were as urbane as they were unprincipled...

...more were ordinary people, as were the victims of the Terror in the region of the Vendee in western France, where Catholic country folk, opposed to the de-Christianizing vandalism of the Paris regime, rebelled in substantial numbers...