[In the following essay, Spitzer examines Schama's historical interpretation of the French Revolution in Citizens.]

The immense outpouring of works occasioned by the bicentenary of the French Revolution—many of them devoted to criticizing the event while celebrating its two hundredth anniversary—has begun to subside and to be succeeded by its “echo effect,” a critical reconsideration of the historical literature it has produced. The reevaluation of the influential contributions of François Furet, for example, has in itself become a minor genre in the historiography of the Revolution.¹ This essay is intended as a contribution to critical reflections on the recent literature with reference to the phenomenally successful narrative history of the Revolution by Simon Schama [in Citizens].

Schama's blockbuster has enjoyed a mixed response from academic historians—not always, I suspect, for avowable reasons. It is a best-seller that is fun to read, written by someone who has published on the period but has not been a lifetime toiler in the vineyards of the Revolution. Not one of the familiar authorities but a specialist in Dutch history has turned out the big book of the bicentenary that will grace the coffee tables of the upper-middlebrow reading public.

But Schama's Citizens is considerably more than a well-written retelling of a familiar tale crafted to the taste of the literate public. Its subtitle, A Chronicle of the French Revolution, scarcely does it justice. Celebrated as a “work of rare brilliance” and as “an intelligent book for intelligent readers that is also a delight to read,” it has been received in some quarters as something like the authorized version of the Revolution.² Therefore it deserves serious critical consideration.

Schama says both that his narrative “does not pretend to dispassion” and that it is “offered more as witness than judgment.”³ It is, in fact, a strongly argued interpretation of the revolutionary era that has taken the revisionist line at full tide.⁴ Methodologically, it reflects the pervasive influence of the linguistic turn, promising in its preface an emphasis on “revolutionary utterance.” The promise is certainly fulfilled in Schama's representation of the Revolution by way of political discourse and symbols of ritual and ceremony.

In this essay I will argue that it is not Schama's conclusions that are most vulnerable to criticism (although I disagree with many of them) but the manner in which he supports them—that is, through the tendentious manipulation of sources and the facile disposal of alternate interpretations that demand consequential refutation.

Recent contributors to the venerable controversy over narrative as an intellectually reputable mode of historical discourse have criticized an excessive distinction between narrative and “problem-oriented” history.⁵ The strongest version of this criticism recognizes no such distinction: inevitably, as in all historical writing, what is ordinarily called narrative embodies some sort of explanation as well as the values and interpretive perspectives of the historian.

To a considerable extent Schama's interpretive perspective is integral to his narrative. It is conveyed by rhetorical effect, by emphasis and exclusion, by the mining of a wide range of primary sources for the telling anecdote and the evocative vignette, by the ingenious selection of appropriate illustrations—but also by argument, in the conventional sense of posing and refuting other interpretations. Therefore an evaluation of such a work will tend to shift its grounds according to the form of discourse selected by the author. I have chosen three issues central to Schama's reading of the Revolution that entail somewhat different critical perspectives.

The first of these has to do with the viability of the Bourbon state in general and its failure to solve the fiscal crisis in particular—an issue that confronts anyone who wishes to argue that Louis XVI's monarchy was an essentially healthy system and at the same time tries to explicate its cataclysmic destruction. Such an interpretation requires the careful assessment of evidence and of contrary interpretations, whether set off in an analytic passage or embedded in the narrative.

Second, I will consider Schama's narration of the revolutionary experience, which locates the meaning of the Revolution in its violence and identifies a moral judgment in that meaning. Here the interpretation is carried by selection and exclusion, by the dramatic characterization of certain indubitable events and the cursory treatment or omission of others. One might think of Schama's technique as argument by synecdoche, skillfully exploited to personify in an individual or symbolize in a striking event general interpretations and fundamental judgments.

Finally, I will speak to Schama's assessment of the immediate and distant consequences of the Revolution. His assessment is clear enough—both implicitly in the choice of what to narrate and explicitly in the brief summary at the end of the volume—and it is clearly negative. The question of consequences has a great deal to do with what phenomena are emphasized in the course of the narrative and at what point in postrevolutionary chronology one chooses to assess the effects of the Revolution.

Academic historians rightly object to historical narratives that pass over “problems” featured in the recent literature because such narratives take for granted what ought to be argued. The problem for the historian who wants to write reputable history as story—as a sequential narrative—is that the story can easily bog down in the disposition of significant problems.⁶ Schama is well aware of this and handles it through the quite appropriate technique of weaving references to controversial issues into the discourse and supporting his own conclusions with references to selected significant contributions to the recent literature bearing on what the French call the state of the question. This is no easy task, and Schama carries it out with a skill that is not the least contribution to the readability of his work. However, the dexterity with which he introduces the reader to a particular problem of explanation or interpretation and its attendant literature is also applied to the disposition of the problem according to his lights—and therein lies the legitimate grievance.

I have chosen as an example of Schama's polemical dexterity his treatment of a problem central to any interpretation of the Old Regime, and therefore of the Revolution, and one that speaks to the assumptions of the “revisionist” school to which Schama subscribes. This issue can best be introduced by his own lucid and succinct formulation of the interpretation he must contest: “A phenomenon of such uncontrollable power that it apparently swept away an entire universe of traditional customs, mentalities and institutions could only have been produced by contradictions that lay deep within the fabric of the ‘old regime.’”⁷ Schama repudiates this emphasis on “structural faults,” as he must to sustain the cumulative force of a narrative that recounts the tragic destruction of an essentially healthy, indeed modernizing and reformist, regime.

As Norman Hampson said in his review of Schama's book, “if everything was working to the general satisfaction, where did the Revolution come from?”⁸ This is not Schama's problem alone; it has been perennial since the outbreak in 1789 and has been perennially answered—from the Abbé Barruel to Taine to Cochin to Furet—by reference to the corrosive effect of critical discourse. Contemporary historians prefer to eschew any reference to conspiracy while retaining some conception of the destructive role of ideas, or ideology, or, to be completely up-to-date, “language.”

Still, the universal solvent of language does not dissolve the evidence of specific problems whose intractability led to the fall of the Bourbon state. This is especially relevant to the fiscal crisis, identified almost universally (there is no perfect consensus in this historiography) as a consequence of the systemic failure of the old order and as the precipitant for the terminal crisis of the regime. Therefore, Schama devotes a chapter to the crisis and to interpretations that cut against the grain of his entire work. Here again he effectively summarizes the argument he intends to refute:

Historians have been accustomed to tracing the sources of France's financial predicament to the structure of its institutions, rather than to particular decisions taken by its governments. Heavy emphasis on both institutional and social history at the expense of politics has reinforced the impression of administrations hopelessly trapped inside a system that, some day or other, would be doomed to collapse under the strain of its own contradictions.

As we shall see, nothing of the sort was true.

In fact, Schama argues, “it was the domestic perception of financial problems, not the reality, that propelled successive French governments from anxiety to alarm to outright panic. The determining elements in the money crisis of the French state, then, were all political and psychological, not institutional or fiscal.”

Schama grants that the immediate cause of the collapse of the monarchy was a “cash flow crisis,” but one, he argues, that was not in principle insoluble. Rational solutions were frustrated by bad judgment and the pressure of a self-serving opposition—“It was the policies of the old regime rather than its operational structure that brought it close to bankruptcy and political disaster.”⁹

This interpretation is laid out in a section of the chapter “Blue Horizons, Red Ink” and supported by citations to recent works, or, rather, by a sort of capsule annotated bibliography, with some reference to authors opposed to, as well as supporting, Schama's thesis. My objection is not to the absence of conventional footnote apparatus but to Schama's appeal to sources, not all of which are prima facie correct, and some of which actually contradict his conclusions.

To Schama's credit, he does refer to important works such as the classic institutional history, “now somewhat dated,” of Marcel Marion, C. B. A. Behrens's Society, Government and Enlightenment: The Experience of Eighteenth-Century France and Prussia, and John Bosher's Government Finance, 1770–1795—works that, as he says, emphasize “the structural and institutional blocks to solvency” and therefore weigh against his general interpretation.¹⁰

His own case depends on other recent works, especially two articles that, taken together, “make an overwhelming case for revising traditional assumptions about the incidence and burden of taxation.”¹¹ These are “Taxation in Britain and France, 1715 to 1830,” by Peter Mathias and Patrick O'Brien, and “Budgets de l'état et gestion des finances royales en France au 18^e siècle,” by Michel Morineau. In addition, Schama cites as a corrective to Behrens's and Bosher's emphasis on the structural and institutional blocks to solvency the “exceptionally powerful if rather technical” work on the Seven Years’ War by James Riley.¹² These are all well-documented and tightly reasoned works, but their conclusions do not unarguably settle the issue in Schama's favor, nor are they prima facie correct.

Mathias and O'Brien plausibly qualify the traditional assumption that the per capita incidence of taxes was heavier and the burden more repressive in France than in England. Their complex and to some degree conjectural calculations do not speak to issues central to an understanding of the collapse of the French fiscal system. They ignore the effect of ostensibly local taxes that actually financed royal expenditures and admit that they do not consider questions regarding “the wide gap between payments made by taxpayers and revenue eventually received by the public exchequer” or the conditions for borrowing in the international money market.¹³

Michel Morineau's essay is indeed a root-and-branch refutation of the traditional assumptions of a “tragic flaw in the [fiscal] administration of the ancienne monarchie.” Contrary to the classic critique of Marcel Marion and other historians of finance in the Old Regime, Morineau argues that the Old Regime administration did have a budget that calculated ordinary receipts against expenses, that disorder was not a fundamental attribute of the system, and that mistakes of individual servants of the crown had no really significant effect. He concludes that the inability to solve the problem of the heavy burden imposed by extraordinary expenditures on the century's wars was due to “the invasion of political factors that suddenly at a certain moment totally transformed the problematic.”¹⁴

James Riley's book bears on the question of whether impediments to fiscal solvency were built into the system, particularly with reference to specific decisions regarding the debt. Riley concludes that responsible French officials assumed a considerably larger burden of debt service than that assumed by the governments of England, Sweden, and the Dutch Republic, which adopted more rational and effective principles of debt management. From this perspective, the failure of the regime was an intellectual failure, not only on the part of ruling circles but also, according to Riley, among those publicly concerned with the issue of fundamental reform.¹⁵

Although the approaches of Schama's authorities are by no means identical, and to some extent incompatible, they do share an emphasis on an issue that is central to any serious consideration of the actual possibilities available to the fiscal administration of an eighteenth-century state. This is a comparison with England, which also had to deal with the crushing burden of the century's wars—a burden that could never be handled by the “ordinary” budget. The fact that must be faced or disposed of is that England must have done something better. Schama himself makes this point: “The real difference between the British and French predicaments following that war [the American War of Independence] was that William Pitt could raise revenue from new taxes without threatening a major political crisis, an option that was not open to his French counterparts.”¹⁶

The articles by Mathias and O'Brien and by Morineau and Riley's book approach this issue from different angles. Mathias and O'Brien show that the British fisc was more dependent on indirect taxes, which, however regressive, were not as politically damaging. Morineau's interpretation is political. The British government had only to deal with the “handful of venal representatives sent to Commons by a few rotten boroughs,” whereas the French had to confront the parlements who construed themselves as identical with the nation and “drew down their rentes with their left hand while covering their heart with their right.”¹⁷ Riley emphasizes the intellectual failure that somehow kept the French from applying rational means of debt management.

None of this really disposes of J. F. Bosher's observation that the fiscal system of England's parliamentary monarchy had developed into “a truly public administration” in which government borrowing was no longer “a haphazard private enterprise. And by means of an annual budget the government was charting the course of finance more and more accurately.”¹⁸ The contrast in the operation of the two financial systems does reflect a different balance of political forces, but the political possibilities for and constraints on fiscal reform were built into the institutional structure of the Old Regime.

Schama also cites several works that essentially contravene his line of argument as if they supported it. François Hincker's Les Français Devant L'Impot sous l'ancien régime, a clear and helpful survey of the problem, according to Schama, describes how the French experienced and responded to Old Regime taxation. To the extent that the subject entails a discussion of the fiscal structure, Hincker accepts the traditional view of the system. Fundamental reforms were effectively resisted by those whose privileges were threatened by reform, because “the king had an endless immediate need for money and that inhibited reforms requisite for a system in which he would no longer have his back against a wall.”¹⁹

There is an even more striking discrepancy between Schama's interpretation and the conclusions of three American historians whose work he praises.

Gail Bossenga, whose research demonstrates how a variety of local taxes were actually extorted in the form of disguised loans or payments into the royal treasury, presents an incisive discussion of the contradictions inherent in the system of extraction of national income for the purposes of the state.²⁰ She concludes: “The ancien régime did not die from a lack of absolutism, that is, the inability of a reform minded government to force privileged groups to accept increased taxation. It died from its inability to extricate itself from a structure of credit backed by privileges that were incompatible with a rationalized tax base.”²¹

Schama cites George T. Matthews as his authority for a long and highly readable passage on the history of the Farmers General. He follows Matthews's excellent analysis almost, but not quite, all the way to its conclusion: “In the mid-eighteenth century all of the ways in which tax farming could be used as a source of credit were not only exploited but distorted in such a fashion as to make the elimination of tax farming an impossibility short of a total reformation of the entire fiscal and financial system of the Old Regime.”²² Indeed, the point at which technical solutions must amount to a total reformation is the point at which solutions became intrinsically political and potentially revolutionary.

Schama concludes the notes to his subchapter on the debt with reference to “the important contribution” on venality of office by David Bien in the recent influential volume, The Political Culture of the Old Regime, edited by Keith Michael Baker. Bien's is indeed an important contribution whose central argument is that the state increasingly extracted money from the constituted corps of those who had invested in various offices, taking advantage of the ability of the corps to borrow on better terms than those afforded the state. Bien concludes that the administration “would have preferred not to reinforce venal privileges by borrowing through them, but the system was in place and essential to dealing with the harsh financial reality that dictated its use to the end. From this follows a third point now so obvious as scarcely to need stating—within the existing framework reform was never a real alternative to revolution.”²³

My agreement with Bien does not extend to his conviction that the point is so obvious as scarcely to need stating. “The point,” which speaks not only to venality of office but also to the extraction of funds from the peasant communities and the urban corporations described by Hilton Root and Gail Bossenga in the same volume, as well as to the operation of the General Farms characterized by George Matthews, is not taken by those who believe that the fiscal problems were simply technical or that the elements determining the money crisis of the French state were political and psychological rather than institutional or fiscal.

But the works just cited support the conclusion that the eventual failure of the French financial system was inherent in the attributes that guaranteed its long history of success. The French government was financed not so much by taxes directly applied to the needs of the state as by an immense apparatus for the mobilization of credit, a complex of procedures and institutions that had paid for more than a century and a half of expensive government and even more costly war, without recourse to representative institutions on a national scale, and that by its very nature was unable to fulfill its functions in the last quarter of the eighteenth century.

From this perspective one might wish to substitute for Edmund Burke's metaphor of the French constitution as a dilapidated structure needful of repair but built on “the foundations of a noble and venerable castle” Jack Hexter's evocation of Galloping Gertie—the bridge across the Tacoma narrows that was destroyed by its own oscillations.²⁴ All of which is to say that fiscal history cannot be separated from its social, institutional, and political matrix.

Against this interpretation, which amounts to a version of the thèse de circonstances, Schama will argue the contrary-to-fact conditional implicit in any assertion of the essential soundness of the French fisc, to the effect that the monarchy could have sailed through the financial crisis into calm waters were it not for more or less understandable errors at the top and the self-fulfilling exaggeration of the crisis by self-serving elements inside and outside the government. This is certainly a reputable interpretation widely accepted at present, but it raises vexed issues that cannot be waved away by polemical sleight of hand.²⁵

Schama's characteristic technique is to pose the arguments for the position he is bound to oppose and to counter them by appealing to the authority of recent works, not all of which actually support his position. Where the criticisms of Old Regime finance are incontrovertible, he will raise the specter of the anachronistic fallacy: “The French system was no worse, and in some respects better, than that of contemporary states; to apply present standards of bureaucratic rationality to eighteenth-century society is to indulge in a ‘superior form of hindsight.’”²⁶

Now the anachronistic fallacy is no venial sin, but simply to assert it is not to guarantee that it is self-evident. To give an example of Schama's appeal to anachronism as an all-purpose debating point, twice in passing he refers to Prussia in order to provide a comparative perspective, implying that the image of the Prussian state as a model of bureaucratic rationality owes more to twentieth-century preconceptions than to eighteenth-century realities and affirming the actual superiority of the French financial administration over the Prussian system. The only authority that Schama cites who has something substantial to say about Prussia is C. B. A. Behrens, who scarcely supports this interpretation. Indeed, she quotes with approval a contemporary assessment of Frederick the Great's financial administration as “more orderly and more honest” than any other. Behrens believes that Frederick's policies, however flawed, “were designed to prevent, and succeeded in preventing, the practices which powerfully promoted a revolutionary situation in France.”²⁷ Schama's suggestion of the superiority of French fiscal institutions to those of Prussia rests on two examples—the “importation” of the French system of tax management called the régie and the superiority of the French corps of intendants to comparable Prussian local officials.²⁸ Actually, he is referring to the French institutions that were staffed by salaried officers—that is, relatively modern and “bureaucratic” exceptions to the prebendary structure of tax farming and state finance that reformers then, and critics ever since, have identified as the canker in the French fiscal administration.

Schama's dismissal of criticisms of the French system as anachronistic is undermined by the emphasis he and his sources place on comparisons with England. The very comparison indicates that there were contemporary alternatives to the French system. The French were well aware of these. Indeed, contemporary critics of the monarchy, including its own servants, raised virtually all of the objections remarked in two centuries of historical hindsight.

One historian's anachronistic hindsight is another's bar of legitimate judgment, before which Schama does not hesitate to summon self-deluded intellectuals, revolutionary crowds, and radical politicians. For example, the eighteenth-century sentimental style is treated with mild contempt: Rousseau's “heroes and heroines, beginning with himself, sob, weep and blubber at the slightest provocations”; Desmoulin's tract, La France Libérée, is a fine example of the “breast-beating, sob-provoking declamation then in vogue at the Palais Royal.”²⁹ The ideal of the free market is the timeless economic standard against which all policies are measured; therefore the institution of grain storage silos as insurance against times of dearth was “another great step backward,” and all demands for state intervention in the interest of urban or rural lower classes are “reactionary.”³⁰ Revolutionary violence and tyranny is directly linked to the political horrors of the twentieth century: the draconian decree of 22 prairial was “the founding charter of totalitarian justice”; Saint-Just is described as “the very clay from which Leninism was to be shaped”; in the Vendée there were “still more sinister anticipations of the technological killings of the twentieth century.”³¹

Schama's assumption of the historical teleology of totalitarian democracy is an aspect of his general interpretation of the Revolution, which locates its essential meaning in its violence. Violence is, variously, what made the Revolution possible, the motor of the Revolution, what made the Revolution revolutionary, and the Revolution itself. “Bloodshed was not the unfortunate by-product of revolution, it was the source of its energy.” Violence was the necessary condition of the Revolution, and that from the very beginning, from the summer of 1789.³²

Here Schama takes up a familiar theme in counterrevolutionary polemic reintroduced in the current historiography by François Furet and others. In Schama's provocative language, “Terror was merely 1789 with a higher body count.”³³ This is one answer to the question that Furet describes as central to the debate on the Revolution—what is the relation of 1789 to 1793?³⁴ And the answer, which long antedates Schama, is to understand 1789 in the light of 1793.

The argument that violence was inherent in the revolutionary project also contains a venerable explanation for the demise of the old order, refurbished in the era of the linguistic turn. Schama strikes the appropriate chord with his reference to “the deadly legacy” left by Rousseau, the “‘Divinity’ of the literary underclass.”³⁵ While he does grant the rationality and moderation of such figures of the late Enlightenment as Barnave, Talleyrand, and Condorcet, he concludes that theirs was not the language that would prevail. Ultimately, “the stokers of revolutionary heat … were guided neither by rationality nor by modernity but by passion and virtue.”³⁶ Schama conjectures that perhaps it was Romanticism with its fondness for the vertiginous and the macabre, its association of liberty with wildness, “that supplied the crucial ingredient in the mentality of the revolutionary elite.”³⁷ In this version of intellectual cause and political effect, Romantic emotionalism rather than the implacable abstractions of Enlightenment rationality was the ideological source of revolutionary excess. In whatever version, the emphasis on ideological source of revolutionary excess. In whatever version, the emphasis on ideology has been the indispensable component of explanations of the destruction of the old order that argue its essential soundness and deemphasize the conflict of material interests or the economic sources of popular discontent.

Prerevolutionary rhetoric and revolutionary violence are situated on a causal continuum. After admitting that it would be grotesque to implicate the generation of 1789 in the atrocities of the Terror, Schama adds that “it would be equally naive not to recognize that the former made the latter possible.” In fact, many were to perish by the logical application of their enthusiasm.³⁸ In answer to the argument that French popular culture was already brutalized before the Revolution.³⁹ Schama suggests the image of “the revolutionary elite as rash geologists, themselves gouging open great holes in the crust of political discourse and then feeding the angry matter through the pipes of their own rhetoric out into the open.”⁴⁰ And, inevitably, the exterminations in the Vendée were “the logical outcome of an ideology that progressively dehumanized its adversaries and that had become incapable of seeing any middle ground between total triumph and utter eclipse.”⁴¹

The emphasis on violence also establishes the axis for the history of revolutionary politics. The debates over constitutional issues in the National Assembly “boiled down to one great question: What is the relationship between violence and legitimacy? … Only when the state restored to itself a monopoly of force—as it was to do in 1794—would the question go away. In this sense, at least, Robespierre would be the first successful counter-revolutionary.”⁴²

Schama's conclusion that “revolutionary democracy would be guillotined in the name of revolutionary government” is actually not so far from Albert Soboul's conception of the inevitable conflict between the radical dynamism of the militant sans-culottes and the requirements of the revolutionary state, but what Soboul sees as political tragedy, Schama presents as historical irony.

It is also through the lens of violence that light is focused on the behavior, motives, and mentality of the urban and rural lower classes. Schama's rather minimal contribution to history from below does touch on what might be considered the rational motives of the peasantry and the urban poor, but he rapidly turns from such questions to the “politics of paranoia” and the reactionary instincts of the masses in contrast to the modernizing ethos of the Old Regime elite. Overstimulated by the Manichaean rhetoric of the revolutionary politicos, even the deserving poor turn to violence. But this is the broom of the sorcerer's apprentice, necessary to the survival of the Revolution but inimical to the consolidation of the revolutionary state.

“Confronted with evidence of an apocalypse,” Schama says, “it does historians no credit to look aside in the name of scholarly objectivity.”⁴³ Schama certainly does not look aside. His considerable narrative eloquence directs the reader to the real horrors of brutality in the name of abstract ideals: the head of Foulon on a pike, his mouth stuffed with straw (illustrated by the apposite engraving); the hetacombs at Lyons and Nantes in evocative detail; the chilling portrayal of the slaughter of the Swiss Guards on the day of August 10; some ten pages devoted to an unsparing description of the September Massacres.

I agree that no one should look aside in the name of scholarly objectivity and that we cannot and should not pretend to transcend the perspective of our own dreadful century. Nor is it possible for those of us who remain liberal fellow travelers in the revolutionary tradition simply to settle for Mignet's separation of the “durable benefits” of the Revolution from its “transient excesses.” That is to say, a history of the Revolution that marginalizes the random terror of urban and rural crowds or the systematic terror of the revolutionary elite is a very partial history. It is something else, however, to reduce the historical meaning of the Revolution to its violence, to read the entire history of the decade as incarnated in the year II, or (to apply a form of political discourse that Schama surely detests) to indict Condorcet or Lafayette or the Abbé Gregoire as “objective” terrorists.

To borrow the words of David Bien, “Is it true that it was the whole political culture of 1789 that best explains the Terror? No one, I suppose, would take the burning of the Albigenses, the Savonarola experience, or Jonestown for example as the reflections of the whole of Christian culture.”⁴⁴

Or to consider Schama's narrative strategy from another angle, imagine a Schamaesque introduction to a history of the Third Republic by way of a portrait of General Gallifet as he decimated suspected Communards in the juste milieu's version of the political apocalypse; or a metaphor for the history of the United States in a vignette of the Cherokee Nation starting out on the Trail of Tears; or a personification of the human consequences of pragmatic liberalism in capsule biographies of Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris or General Curtis Le May.

I do not suggest these comparisons in order to normalize the Terror. One history of atrocities does not justify another. The judgment on the mass killings in the Vendée in 1793 is not mitigated with reference to the official murders in the Père Lachaise cemetery in 1871. But to locate the meaning of the Revolution in the violence is to write an even more partial history than that of the classic optimistic version. Consider, for example, Schama's characterization of the September Massacres as exposing “the central truth of the French Revolution” in contrast to Georges Lefebvre's identification of the Declaration of the Rights of Man as “the incarnation of the Revolution as a whole.”⁴⁵ Lefebvre's reading is virtually excluded from Schama's history. The declaration itself is cited in a few scattered references and briefly characterized as spawning “a political culture in which the liberation of disrespect knew no bounds,” as well as “a polemical incontinence that washed over the whole country.”⁴⁶ That is about the extent of Schama's discussion of the document—no analysis to speak of, not even the currently popular approach, caricatured by Conor Cruise O'Brien in the New York Review of Books, in which the declaration's reference to the general will is the signpost pointing straight to Stalin.⁴⁷

The absence of attention to the declaration in Citizens is an example of interpretation by exclusion. Not only is that particular document given short shrift but in addition an entire body of legislation that laid out the democratic agenda for the next century is passed over or, where absolutely necessary, explained away.

As Schama predictably rejects any reading of the Revolution as class struggle—descriptions of the prerevolutionary conflict of bourgeois and aristocracy are “wholly imaginary”—he disputes the significance of legal reforms that seemed to transform social relationships. The abolition of privilege, for example, did sweep away certain “pre-modern” legal distinctions. “But since the general availability of titles was coming to be a matter of money and merit, not birth, eighteenth-century privileges seemed to have more in common with the honorific distinctions and forms common to all modern societies in the nineteenth and, in many cases, the twentieth centuries.” This disposes of the institution of equality before the law and trivializes the historiography of the Old Regime as a society of orders, corporations, and privileged bodies.

As for the liquidation of seigneurial dues, “if the Revolution abolished old forms of social dues on seigneurial estates, many of these dues had already been commuted into money and were simply converted into rent in the ‘new regime.’” Here again Schama seems to exempt himself from the strictures of the anachronistic fallacy, although in a subsequent passage he does concede that peasants were “thankful for the end of seigneurial exactions that imposed a crushing burden of payments on static rural incomes.” But in the event, he concludes, the imposition of rent and taxes left them as badly off as ever.⁴⁸

The same assessment is applied to the abolition of the guilds. Somehow Schama assimilates these conclusions to his characterizations of the Old Regime as an essentially progressive order confronted by the reactionary instincts of the urban and rural masses. Revolutionary reforms that are usually described as contributing to modernization, and that actually satisfied contemporary demands, are dismissed as negligible or pernicious.

This resolution of apparent contradictions is also applied to the reform of the fiscal system discussed in the first section of this article: “Had the Revolution, at the least, created state institutions which resolved the problems that brought down the monarchy? Scarcely. On the one hand, Tocqueville was right; it is easier to discern continuity than change. On the other hand, the creation of a paper currency was a catastrophic change, beside which the insolvencies of the Old Regime were almost picayune.” Eventually, Schama concludes, “post-Jacobin France slid inexorably back to the former mixture of loans and indirect as well as direct taxes.”⁴⁹ As it is difficult to think of a “post-Jacobin” state that has not financed itself throught that mixture, we might be led to suppose that no modern fiscal system represents an improvement over the Old Regime model. Yet no servant of the postrevolutionary Restoration monarchy, however nostalgic, proposed to return to the prerevolutionary system of state finance any more than they intended to funnel legislation through the finely meshed filter of reconstituted parlements.

An evaluation of consequences depends upon where one chooses to stop the historical film: at the Napoleonic “military-technocratic state,” as Schama does to some extent; at the political mystique of the Dreyfusards who believed that they acted in the spirit of the Declaration of the Rights of Man; at the Jacobin-authoritarian mentalité of the Parti Communiste Française; or at the millenarian idealism of the Résistance.⁵⁰

Though not the most dramatic, the Bourbon Restoration (1814–30) is not a bad point from which to undertake a provisional recapitulation of what the Revolution wrought and to identify what was irreversible in its legacy to the nineteenth century.

A brief list of the most obvious institutional and legal changes represents the tip of a substantial iceberg. Because the legitimate dynasty had not the least intention of returning to a system in which it was unable to finance itself, it was scarcely inclined to reconstitute the vast nexus of corporate bodies and vested interests that had stalemated fiscal reform. The Bourbon regime had become a monarchy with a constitution. The constitution stipulated a legislature with an elected lower house, equality before the law, due process, qualified freedom of the press, and freedom of religion. The Catholic religion remained the “religion of the state,” but Protestants and Jews were free to worship without restraint and to enjoy all of the rights of citizenship. French citizens were liberated from the vestiges of serfdom and from inherited personal obligations not stipulated by contract.

There is another consequence of the revolutionary era, recognized as irreversible by the Restoration regime but granted only part of one sentence in Citizens' 874 pages. It is also unintentionally embodied in a familiar statistic on the economic consequences of the Revolution predictably cited by Schama: “In 1795, the total value of France's trade was less than half of what it had been in 1789; by 1815 it was still at about sixty per cent.”⁵¹ The Revolution certainly did have an effect on French commerce. Something like a third of the worth of total exports came from the reexport of colonial goods, and most of these were the product of the slave economy of Saint-Dominique. The Haitian revolution, the first successful slave insurrection in modern history, dealt a crushing blow to this cornerstone of the French mercantile economy.⁵² Perhaps the antislavery ideologues, Brissot, Condorcet, Gregoire, Robespierre, and the rest, deserve little credit for the irresistible course of events in the Caribbean, but it is difficult to imagine the success of the Haitian revolution without the upheaval in France.

The independence of Haiti was one of the revolutionary transformations that successive regimes were forced to accept after Napoleon failed to reimpose French rule, and slavery, on the island. The emperor had better luck at home against the great legacy of humane legislation, which was liquidated under the consulate and the empire but reappeared in the twentieth century as a commonplace of a decent society.⁵³ This legislation might represent a delayed consequence of the Revolution—one delayed by a consensus of all of the elites, Bonapartist, royalist, and to some degree liberal, who wanted to preserve an effective governing apparatus in a stable social order secure from the threat of popular sovereignty and the pressure of popular discontent.

The long campaign to rationalize the overlapping and contradictory legal systems of the Old Regime into coherent civil and penal codes would be realized by Napoleon's magistrates in a far different spirit than that expressed in the legislation of the revolutionary assemblies. The institution of a more humane penal system would be replaced by the draconian measures of the imperial code. Some of the gains for due process would be consolidated in the letter of the law, if violated in practice according to the emperor's arbitrary will. On paper, at least, the lettre de cachet was gone. Schama grants the arbitrary nature of the lettre de cachet as an instrument of royal authority, then gives us that familiar list of the seven social deviants inhabiting the Bastille in July 1789 and describes in some detail the relatively benign administration of the prison regimen.⁵⁴ He is not the only one to miss the point that the use of the lettre de cachet to control “family delinquency” functioned as the keystone in the system of family law consolidated by the French state to guarantee the supremacy of the male head of the household.⁵⁵

The revolutionary assemblies put together a considerable body of legislation to qualify and humanize patria potestas, to liberate women and the young from total subordination to the male. Many of these reforms, including divorce, had something to do with the opening of civil space to women. Such reforms, aborted by Napoleon and his magistrates, suggest that the gender balance sheet of the Revolution should not be cast up solely with reference to Jacobin misogyny after Claire Lacombe and the Society of Republican Women supported the losing side in the factional struggles of the year II.

There is now a rich literature on the issue of gender in the revolutionary era that Schama ignores, which is not to say that he ignores the subject of sex.⁵⁶ The salacious side of prerevolutionary propaganda and of revolutionary behavior is given its due—with evocative illustrations. There are analyses of “the moral politics of the bosom” and the icon of “the republican breast.”⁵⁷ Along with skillful portrayals of Lafayette or Talleyrand or Mirabeau designed to convey a certain interpretation of Lafayette or Talleyrand or Mirabeau designed to convey a certain interpretation of events, we have vignettes of such women as Marie Antoinette and Théroigne de Méricourt, which virtually frame Schama's narrative.

In his early chapter “Body Politics,” one section entitled “Uterine Furies and Dynastic Obstructions” assigns seven pages to the Affair of the Diamond Necklace. There is nothing wrong with devoting disproportionate space to a fascinating tale. In this case the story of the malicious slander of Marie Antoinette for an escroquerie of which she had absolutely no knowledge is also intended to carry interpretive freight. Schama's emphasis on the scurrilous, mendacious, mean-spirited, and pornographic slander of the queen is aligned with one version of the intellectual origins of the Revolution—the version that would look less to the doctrines of the High Enlightenment than to the Grub Street pornography industry, that would locate the erosion of deference to crown and church less in the Diderots and Condorcets than in the literary lowlife and the marginal members of the lumpen intelligentsia.

The women of the Revolution proper are introduced during the “October Days,” in the subchapter “The Quarrel of Women, October 5–6.” With the women of the October Days we meet the “stunningly beautiful” Théroigne de Méricourt, sporting a plumed hat, a bloodred riding coat, armed with pistols and a saber, hailed as the “Amazon” of the Revolution, destined to be “the incarnation of a particular kind of pathetic revolutionary career.”⁵⁸ She is seen again in a salient role at the storming of the Tuileries on August 10, 1792, and is included in other brief references to that list of militant women such as Olympe de Gouges, Pauline Léon, and Etta Palm d'Aelders who regularly appear in brief surveys of revolutionary feminism.

The relationship of sex and revolution is recapitulated in the epilogue to Citizens, in which Théroigne de Méricourt reappears in the last vignette. After suffering a beating from female Montagnards in 1793, Théroigne seems to have shown increasing signs of mental derangement and was ultimately confined in various asylums until her death in 1817. Schama's last page, illustrated with an engraving of the sunken face and shaved head of Théroigne as she appeared at La Salpêtrière (ca. 1810), sums up the Revolution in her pitiful person. By now completely mad, refusing to cloth herself against the cold, torturing herself by soaking her straw bed with ice water, she is periodically heard to mutter imprecations against those who have betrayed the Revolution. “Sympathy seems out of place here,” he concludes, “for in some sense the madness of Théroigne de Méricourt was a logical destination for the compulsions of revolutionary Idealism. Discovering, at last, a person of almost sublime transparency and presocial innocence, someone naked and purified with dousings of ice water, the Revolution would fill her up like a vessel. In her little cell at La Salpêtrière, there was at least somewhere where revolutionary memory could persist, quite undisturbed by the quotidian mess of the human condition.”⁵⁹

And these are Schama's last words on the Revolution.

Whether or not Schama's last vignette is to be read as a metaphor for the Revolution, its tone is characteristic of the entire book. If that immense effort at human amelioration on which revolutionaries staked their lives and in the name of which they committed their crimes was in the light of our hindsight a failure, it was a tragic failure. In Schama's version the Revolution is emplotted not as tragedy but as melodrama.

Notes

1. See, e.g., the symposium, Robert Forster and Timothy Tackett, eds., “François Furet's Interpretation of the French Revolution,” French Historical Studies 16 (Fall 1990): 766–802; Isser Woloch, “On the Latent Illiberalism of the French Revolution,” American Historical Review 95 (December 1990): 1452–70; Suzanne Berger, “The French Revolution in Contemporary French Politics,” French Politics and Society 8 (Spring 1990): 53–64; Claude Mazauric, “Sur le Dictionnaire critique de la Révolution françois de F. Furet et M. Ozouf,” Stanford French Review (Winter 1990), pp. 85–103; William Scott, “François Furet and Democracy in France,” Historical Journal 34 (1991): 147–71.

2. Jim Miller, “So Glorious Yet So Savage,” Newsweek (April 3, 1989), p. 71; Eugen Weber, “Violence Made It Happen,” New York Times Book Review (March 19, 1989), p. 33. Weber grants that the book “has its biases.” George Steiner sums up his New Yorker review, “As a whole, however, once the evident fact is accepted that Schama's work is not intended to provide new theoretical or scholarly material, ‘Citizens’ is a formidable, often heartwarming achievement” (“Two Hundred Years Young,” New Yorker [April 17, 1989], p. 135).

3. Schama, pp. 6, xvi.

4. For criticism of Schama's position, see Jack Censer, “Commencing the Third Century of Debate,” American Historical Review 94 (December 1989): 1322—“Schama intemperately condemns the entire affair, veering toward the extreme views of Pierre Chaunu and company. Cobban and Cobb never went so far.” See also Norman Hampson, “The Two French Revolutions,” New York Review of Books (April 13, 1989), pp. 11–14.

5. For an emphasis on the distinction, see François Furet, “From Narrative to Problem-oriented History,” in his In the Workshop of History, trans. Johnathan Mandelbaum (Chicago, 1982), pp. 54–67. See also Laurence Stone, “The Revival of Narrative: Reflections on a New Old History,” Past and Present, no. 85 (November 1979), pp. 3–24; J. Morgan Kousser, “The Revivalism of Narrative,” Social Science History 8, no. 2 (Spring 1984): 133–49; Hayden White, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” in his The Content of the Form (Baltimore, 1987), pp. 1–25; David Carr, “Narrative and the Real World: An Argument for Continuity,” History and Theory 25, no. 2 (1986): 117–31; Arthur C. Danto, Narration and Knowledge (New York, 1985); W. H. Dray, “Narrative versus Analysis in History,” in Rationality, Relativism and the Human Sciences, ed. J. Margolis, M. Krausz, and R. M. Burian (Dordrecht, 1986), pp. 23–41; “Supplement: The Representation of Historical Events,” History and Theory 26, no. 4 (1987), pass.; Allan Megill, “Recounting the Past: ‘Description,’ Explanation, and Narrative in Historiography,” American Historical Review 94, no. 3 (June 1989): 627–53; and Andrew p. Norman, “Telling It Like It Was: Historical Narratives on Their Own Terms,” History and Theory 30 (1991): 119–35.

6. According to G. R. Elton, narrative histories need to be built around “lumps of analysis” (Political History, Principles and Practice [New York, 1970], p. 165).

7. Schama, p. xiv.

8. Hampson, p. 13.

9. Schama, pp. 63, 65, 66, 70.

10. Marcel Marion, Histoire financière de la France depuis 1715, 5 vols. (Paris, 1914–28); C. B. A. Behrens, Society, Government and Enlightenment: The Experience of Eighteenth-Century France and Prussia (New York, 1985); J. F. Bosher, French Government finance, 1770–1795 (Cambridge, 1970). Bosher's conclusion certainly supports an opposing interpretation: “When change came it did so in the course of the revolution and this fact may well lead us to think the financial administration an intrinsic and inevitable feature of the monarchy. Perhaps an efficient system of public finance was possible only in conjunction with other fundamental changes in the regime. It may well be that a republic, in the eighteenth century sense of the rule of law, was necessary to bring about the administrative reforms which eventually came in the French revolution” (p. 22). Bosher's recent general history of the Revolution is much closer to Schama's viewpoint. See Bosher, The French Revolution (New York, 1988). Quotation is from Schama, p. 881.

11. Schama, p. 881.

12. Peter Mathias and Patrick O'Brien, “Taxation in Britain and France 1715–1810,” Journal of European Economic History (Winter 1976), pp. 601–50; Michel Morineau, “Budgets de létat et gestion des finances royales en France au 18° siècle,” Revue Historique 264 (October-December 1980): 289–336; James Riley, The Seven Years’ War and the Old Regime in France: The Economic and Financial Toll (Princeton, N.J., 1986).

13. Mathias and O'Brien, p. 602; see also Morineau, p. 300.

14. Morineau, pp. 331–35.

15. Riley, pp. 193, 207, 221.

16. Schama, p. 67.

17. Morineau, p. 331.

18. Bosher, French Government Finance, pp. 22–23.

19. François Hincker, Les François Devant l'Impot sous l'ancien régime (Paris, 1971), p. 34.

20. Gail Bossenga, “Taxes,” in A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, ed. François Furet and Mona Ozouf, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), pp. 582–89, and “City and State: An Urban Perspective on the Origins of the French Revolution,” in The Political Culture of the Old Regime, ed. Keith Michael Baker, vol. 1 of The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture (Oxford, 1987), pp. 115–40. Schama writes, “Gail Bossenga has extended David Bien's methods to create a fresh and exceptionally illuminating approach to the social and political history of institutions in this period” (p. 884).

21. Bossenga, “Taxes,” p. 588.

22. George T. Matthews, The Royal General Farms in Eighteenth-Century France (New York, 1958), p. 248.

23. David D. Bien, “Officers, Corps, and a System of State Credit: The Uses of Privilege under the Ancien Régime,” in Baker, ed., p. 111.

24. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (New York, 1955), p. 40; Jack Hexter, “Galloping Gertie and the Insurance Companies, or Analysis and Story in History,” in The History Primer (New York, 1971), pp. 110–48. For another borrower of Hexter's metaphor, see Paul W. Schroeder, “World War I as Galloping Gertie: A Reply to Joachim Remak,” Journal of Modern History 44 (September 1972): 319–45.

25. See, e.g., the recent article, Eugene Nelson White, “Was There a Solution to the Ancien Régime's Financial Dilemma?” Journal of Economic History 29 (September 1989): 545–68.

26. Schama, p. 71.

27. Behrens (n. 11 above), pp. 81–82.

28. Schama, pp. 65, 67.

29. Ibid., pp. 150–51, 380.

30. Ibid., p. 757.

31. Ibid., pp. 836, 767, 789. For a discussion of the recent French historical literature that reads, “the meaning of the Terror in the light of the death camps and Gulag,” see Berger (n. 1 above), p. 62.

32. Schama, pp. 725, 859, 447, 615, xv.

33. Ibid., p. 447.

34. François Furet, “La Révolution sans la Terreur?” Le Débat 13 (June 1981): 40. “Car l'exécution de Robespierre a poséme du jacobinisme en des termes qui vont dominer pour longtemps, peut-être jusqu’ à nous, la réflexion politique et intellectuelle sur la Révolution; problème qui peut s'exprimer en termes chronologiques sous la forme: qu'est-ce qui lie ensemble 89 et 93? Ou bien, en termes philosophiques, à travers l'interrogation sur la nature du rapport entre la révolution libérale et la terreur jacobine.”

35. Schama, pp. 665, 161.

36. Ibid. p 291.

37. Ibid. p 861.

38. Ibid. p. 859.

39. This issue has been reopened by Daniel Roche, “La violence vue d'en bas: Réflexions sur les moyens de la politique en période révolutionnaire,” Annales, Economies, Sociétés, Civilizations 44 (January-February 1989): 47–65.

40. Schama, p. 860.

41. Ibid., p. 792.

42. Ibid., p. 445.

43. Ibid., p. 792.

44. David D. Bien, “François Furet, the Terror, and 1789,” French Historical Studies 16 (Fall 1990): 777–83.

45. Schama, p. 637; Georges Lefebvre, The Coming of the French Revolution, trans. Robert R. Palmer (New York, 1957), p. 182. I believe that it is this reading of the meaning of the Revolution more than Lefebvre's qualified neo-Marxism that is what is essentially rejected by the recent revisionists.

46. Schama, p. 521.

47. Conor Cruise O'Brien, “The Decline and Fall of the French Revolution,” New York Review of Books (February 15, 1990), pp. 46–51.

48. Schama, pp. 290, 185, 853–54.

49. Ibid., p. 855.

50. Maurice Agulhon (“Debats actuels sur la Révolution en France,” Annales historiques de la Révolution Française 279 [January–March 1990]: 3, 4) observes that in 1889 conflicting interpretations of the Revolution reflected the division between republications and antirepublicans; in 1989 the issue of the Republic is closed and the Revolution is criticized qua revolution.

51. Schama, p. 185.

52. Fran¸ois Crouzet, De la supériorité de l'Angleterre sur la France: L'économique et l'imaginaire, XVIII^e-XX^e siècle (Paris, 1985), p. 29.

53. For a survey of this legislation, see the grand old work of Philippe Sagnac, La législation civile de la Révolution française: Essai d'histoire sociale (Paris, 1898).

54. Schama, pp. 389–99.

55. James Traer, Marriage and the Family in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca, N.Y., 1980); Sarah Hanley, “Engendering the State: Family Formation and State Building in Early Modern France,” French Historical Studies 16 (Spring 1989): 4–27.

56. For a recent survey of this literature, see Karen Offen, “The New Sexual Politics of French Revolutionary Historiography,” French Historical Studies 16 (Fall 1990): 909–22.

57. Schama, pp. 145–49, 768–69, quotes on pp. 147, 769.

58. Ibid., pp. 462–63.

59. Ibid., p. 875.