Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution by Simon Schama (review)

Book Reviews267 Lee, Hamlin, and Kael are not, thankfully, the exception in Taking Stock. Although there are some inaccuracies in some of the essays in this casebook (Homer had two Longhorns, not one), and despite the fact that some of the essays are almost as windy as West Texas, most of the writing is informative and acceptably scholarly, and many are well written and a delight to read. Both the seasoned student of McMurtry and the novice will find Taking Stock valuable for precisely the reasons Reynolds hoped: it does indeed make much of the most important and interesting criticism of McMurtry accessible. JUDITH HAGAN Boise State University SIMON SCHAMA. Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution. New York: Knopf, 1989. 948 p. This much heralded study provides a highly complex and extensive kaleidoscope of the French Revolution and the events leading up to it. What is most impressive about Schama's book is how readable it is. He has amassed an enormous number offacts and details to illustrate his interpretation ofthe Revolution, yet his narrative remains clear, ordered, and unflaggingly interesting. He combines the most serious scholarship with a remarkable talent for recounting anecdotes which reveal the human side of famous people. Schama goes against recent trends in historiography initiated by Tocqueville which attach the greatest importance to impersonal social forces in the shaping of events. Instead he emphasizes the role of individuals in the preparation and playing out ofthe French Revolution. In addition to dealing with a particular crisis or event, each chapter is built around the biographical and ideological portrait of a particular individual (whether politician, thinker, writer, artist, or "average" person in the street) who was personally involved in that moment of history. Thus Schama's book reads somewhat like La Bruyère's Caractères in its presentation of differing personalities, outlooks, and social types. Particularly revealing are the contrasting depictions of Lafayette and Talleyrand with which he opens and closes the book. By this technique, the author gives a sense ofhuman significance and unity to his analyses. He also makes clear the virtues, foibles, and inconsistencies of the men and women who make the Revolution. At least a third ofthis book deals with the period ofLouis XVI's reign which preceded the convocation of the États-Généraux in 1789. Schama dwells at length and with obvious relish on the social, technological, and intellectual accomplishments of France under the monarchy. Correspondingly, he dispatches the events following the abolition ofthe royal government in 1792 with relative haste. He ends his account of the Revolution with the fall of Robespierre in July 1794, and does not deal at all with the Directoire or the rise to power ofNapoleon during the last six years ofthe decade. This ordering of his material is reflective of his thesis that the progressive tendencies often associated with the French Revolution had begun to manifest themselves at the highest levels of French society as early as the 1770s. He convincingly 268Rocky Mountain Review demonstrates that the reform movement in France started at the top, among enlightened aristocrats, and only later worked its way down. He also shows that French society on the eve of the Revolution was a very open one which allowed for unlimited upward mobility for the enterprising individual. The line between the upper bourgeoisie and the nobility was becoming increasingly blurred, as the former bought or married their way into the higher class and the latter engaged more and more in the business and commercial activities traditionally associated with the middle class. Another key point made by Schama is that the Revolution itselfrepresented in many ways a protest against the progressive tendencies of the time and the desire to go back to an older, more protectivist regime. The revolutionaries themselves were far from being of one mind about this. Those who dominated the early years ofthe Revolution (1789-91) were aristocratic progressives like Mirabeau, Lafayette, and Talleyrand. They were eventually swept from power, however, by the more radical bourgeois representatives like Marat, Danton, and Robespierre, who instituted a system of government far more repressive and invasive of the individual's personal life than anything seen under the Old...