Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution

"Yes. I have many reservations about Simon Schama’s book, but it had a huge readership in 1989 when it came out. That’s because he has done something that a few other historians have been able to do – and only a few – and that is to tell a story that’s sufficiently absorbing that people want to read it. It’s completely different from the other books. It’s all narrative. There’s very little analysis. He maybe veers towards the Furet position, but it doesn’t have any of the analytical panache of either Tocqueville or Furet, because he’s telling a story, and wants to tell an interesting story. So it’s filled with incredibly interesting titbits and anecdotes and characterisations of people. It’s generally negative about the revolution, because it’s basically about how the revolution is really, really violent. My problem with most of the stories is that they tend to be fairly negative. They’re about how people end up doing things that seem crazy to us in retrospect. He writes about the woman activist Theroigne de Mericourt , who goes mad. That’s a great story. But as a representation of what the revolution is about, it’s a problematic choice. As a view of the revolution, Schama’s book is anathema to Eric Hobsbawm. That’s because Schama is really not interested in an extremely important part of it, which is that there are thousands of people who get involved in the revolution. They hold office, they go to meetings, they are sincerely motivated by the idea of establishing a democratic and republican form of government, because it will lead to more equality, more political freedom and more social justice. They are completely serious and sincere and authentic about wanting to do that. Those people are not in Schama. To me, the revolution is filled with hundreds of thousands of stories of people who find their lives transformed for the better. They want to make something of it, and come up against a lot of obstacles. No. He was originally a specialist in Dutch history. Since then, he’s become interested in art history , he’s done a lot on the history of Britain, which also was not his speciality originally. Simon is a very quick study and a fantastic writer and speaker. He’s an incredible enthusiast."

"Citizens is the work that spoiled the party in 1989, the Bicentennial of the French Revolution. In it, Schama argued that the French Revolution was not the great festival of human liberty that everybody was celebrating. He got a huge amount of stick. In fact, tucked into the back of my copy of Citizens, I have an article by Schama from the Sunday Times , written at the end of the year, where he describes the reaction to his book. It begins with, “If I wanted a quiet life, obviously I shouldn’t have written Citizens . A book tactless enough to offer a critical view of the French Revolution in the year of the Bicentennial was bound to attract its fair share of criticism, but I was taken aback by the eagerness with which it was seized as a bludgeon by the warring parties of revolutionary history to beat each other (and me) over the head…History isn’t just a stroll down memory lane.” And that was a risk, that the Bicentennial would be a stroll down memory lane, celebrating all the values that people wanted to celebrate and reading them back into the French Revolution. “Authorities have a mentality that it’s either obedience or it’s rebellion. It’s actually extraordinarily difficult for them to cope with nonviolent resistance” What Schama demonstrates is that while the French Revolution was supposed to be about the rise of the bourgeoisie, of what was rational, what was democratic, what was modern, it was actually the monarchy that was modernising in the 1770s and 80s. It was the French monarchy that was attempting to reform its tax system, its revenue, its government, trying to create a modern bourgeois state, to tap into the wealth of the economy in a much more rational way. But the political price and the taxes that people had to pay were simply intolerable. In a way, the French Revolution can be seen as an idealistic, nationalistic, romantic reaction against a modernizing project from above. It’s not just out of control, sometimes it’s in the control of people who want bloodbaths and massacres and civil wars. That’s the irony of it. The way I was taught French Revolutionary history was essentially that it was about modernizing, it was about the working class, it was about progress and rationalism and democracy and so forth. There were, understandably, excesses, but they had a lot to contend with. There was a certain amount of over-enthusiasm, and one or two wrong political lines taken, but that was understandable. That whole narrative is exposed by Schama as a fantasy. He shows that the dramas, the murders, the civil wars, the bloodbaths were actually central to the drama. When, for example, Charlotte Corday stabs Marat, the Jacobin leader, in his bath, it’s been portrayed as a betrayal of the Revolution by an angry woman with an axe of some sort to grind. In fact, she reads a list to him, while he’s in the bath, of yet another list of plotters against the regime of the Terror that he stands for. He simply says, ‘Yes, I’ll have them up on the guillotine in a few days’ time’ and then she stabs him to death. The right of government to practise terror is absolutely central to what the Revolution is about. In his conclusion, Schama talks about how the bourgeoisie were actually the principal victims of the French Revolution. The Atlantic economy, the textile districts, the ports, the economy of Lyon were all devastated by what happened. He says the Revolution created the judicial entity of a free citizen, some idealized person who ought to exist but didn’t. No sooner had this hypothetical free person been invented than his liberty was circumscribed by the police power of the state, and this in turn created the militarized nationalism that gave you Napoleon and dictatorship, the war against all Europe and so forth. It was this romantic, militarized nationalism that was the legacy of the French Revolution. It was not an unintended consequence. It was the heart and soul of the Revolution. Schama sees the French Revolution as a kind of leftist populism. These days reading Slavoj Žižek, the Marxist writer, resurrecting the old, repulsive apologies for revolutionary violence is quite extraordinary. I don’t know how somebody, in this day and age, can see the massacres, the murders, the civil wars of the French Revolution as some regrettable but necessary stage in a path to order and progress. It’s completely beyond me. We need to be on our guard against that kind of thing and I think Schama is on the side of citizenship and democracy, not Žižek. Obviously all major historical changes and upheavals are going to involve conflict and protest and repression and struggle and there will probably be violence somewhere along the way. But I think what is achieved will always be achieved in spite of the violence and not because of it. If anybody is telling you that in order to achieve something good and democratic you have to use means which are evil and undemocratic, I would just stop and pause for a very, very long time. I think the idea that one person’s violence is somehow necessary to everybody is extremely dangerous. I can’t think of a single instance, actually, where I would go along with that other than, perhaps, resistance to enemy occupation. Maybe in utterly impossible conditions like that."