Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution

Simon Schama
Viking, 1989
xx + 948 pages

How to review a tome that only covers the origins and the first five years of the French Revolution? By giving some general impressions and then focusing on two key arguments Simon Schama threads through his narrative.

Impressions. This is a fantastic book, but it is not for everyone. The average reader, new to the subject, will struggle. He should first look for a condensed survey and then return to Citizens for a deeper treatment. The French Revolution is one of the most complex subjects in modern history. Unlike National Socialist Germany for example, there is no one man to hang the history on. Moreover, there are deep undercurrents meandering through the revolution (economic, political, philosophical, cultural and artistic); these are difficult for the laymen to grasp even within a scaled down survey. Schama’s book is not scaled down and does not run from complexity; it embraces it. The undercurrents, along with a cast of characters running into the hundreds, will make the average reader’s head spin. I should add that the author also peppers Citizens with many French words and phrases sometimes without translation.

That said, I loved this book. Schama is an excellent writer, and his command of the historiography and primary sources is absolute. The bibliography runs to nearly thirty pages and is worth reading for its own sake. If I have one criticism, it is that the author drills down too deeply into art history at times. This is one of his great loves I know (see his wonderful documentary series The Power of Art); nevertheless, profundity sometimes detracts from the story. For instance, Schama delves into the paintings of Elizabeth Vigee-Lebrun for several pages when a few paragraphs would have sufficed for most readers. Her significance, and those of other artists, could have been streamlined. I have little doubt, however, that lovers of art history, who so often find their subject relegated to the background in political history (or ignored altogether) will disagree with me.

Historians of the French Revolution are divided on when the revolution ended. Some finish with Waterloo. Others stop with Napoleon’s coup on 18 Brumaire. I know of no one who ended his history with the Thermidorian Reaction in 1794. Why does Schama end here? Perhaps it was time constraints, as he wanted to get his book out for the bicentennial of the revolution in 1989. I suppose this is a criticism of a sort; however, it is really because I did not want Schama’s book to end! It is a shame he never followed up on Citizens.

So, what of Schama’s key arguments?

His book begins with a young Talleyrand going on a pilgrimage to meet his aging hero Voltaire. Schama does this to set up his contention that the revolution was not some bourgeois movement from below. Instead, liberal nobles, heavily influenced by Enlightenment philosophy, were the prime movers. Schama builds on this argument by tracing the radicalisation of young nobles back to the American Revolutionary War. Lafayette was just one of many who embraced the sensibility of “citizen-soldier” and brought this idea and much more back to France. The posthumous glorification of the noble Charles du Couëdic underscores Schama’s contention that:

it is at the top, rather than in any imaginary middle of French society, that the cultural roots of the Revolution should be sought. While any search for a conspicuously disaffected bourgeoisie is going to be fruitless, the presence of a disaffected, or at the very least disappointed, young “patriot” aristocracy is dramatically apparent from the history of French involvement with the American Revolution. (p. 40)

Moving towards the revolution itself, Schama proves that it was the liberal nobles who were the radicals, and the bourgeoisie was, in a sense, reactionary. Any student of the revolution knows that when the king called for the convening of the Estates General, lists of grievances, les cahiers, were drawn up by all segments of French society. Yet, what Schama reveals is that the commoners did not desire radical, liberal laissez-faire. Instead, they wanted more “paternalism,” which is to say state intervention to improve their lot:

The remedy for virtually all these ills was not so much freedom as protection. (Salt was the only exception.) A theme running through almost all the cahiers of the Third Estate was the need to turn the clock back and subordinate modern definitions of property rights to more traditional communal accountability. Where inheritance laws were mentioned, it was almost always to insist on the equal partition of land between heirs (even though it was precisely this customary practice that was producing unviable lots). The grain trade should be regulated once more and only those licensed with official brevets be permitted to sell, and then only at officially designated markets. The parish of Nôtre-Dame-de-Franqueville in Normandy even wanted wheat prices to be pegged “to a rate that the poor can afford.” (p. 316)

Even during the Terror many of the most radical Jacobins braying for blood were the one-time worthies of the Second Estate and the Ancien Régime. Take for instance Louis-Michel Lepeletier, who, although a regicide, “had himself been not just a conseiller but a president of the Parlements of Paris.” (p. 671) Lepeletier was no isolated case.

The other revisionist argument concerns violence during the revolution. Even those who have never read a book on the revolution may have heard of the Terror. After all, this became the model for revolutionaries from Lenin to Stalin to Mao to Pol Pot. Yet, most historians, certainly French historians, argue that the Terror was an aberration, a detour away from the true path of the revolution. Schama disagrees. Violence was always at the heart of the French Revolution. The mob violence in Grenoble, a full year before the Storming of the Bastille, was a harbinger for things to come. Similarly, a few months before 14 July 1789, a mob of three thousand Parisians, led by artisans who hated capitalist innovation, tried to attack the Réveillon paper factory with cries of “Death to the rich, death to the aristocrats.” (p. 328)

Added to this undercurrent of violence was a collective paranoia that gripped much of the country after the Bastille was stormed. This made further violence all but inevitable. It also explodes the contention that violence only emerged during the revolution’s radical phase:

The notion that, between 1789 and 1791, France basked in some sort of liberal pleasure garden before the erection of the guillotine is a complete fantasy. From the very beginning, the violence which made the Revolution possible in the first place created exactly the brutal distinctions between Patriots and Enemies, Citizens and Aristocrats, within which there could be no human shades of grey. (p.436)

The violence was always there. Schama lets the primary sources do their work. I agree with his conclusion:

The assumption that there was a direct relationship between blood and freedom – indeed (as Loustalot implied elsewhere) between blood and bread – is usually thought of as the standard language of punitive Jacobinism, of the Terror. But it was the invention of 1789, not 1793. The Terror was merely 1789 with a higher body count. From the first year it was apparent that 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. (p. 447)

It is worth applying some context to the above quotation. Elysée Loustalot, the editor of the radical newspaper Révolutions de Paris, gleefully wrote of the murder and mutilation of a so-called enemy of the revolution, “Tyrants, cast your eyes on this terrible and revolting spectacle. Shudder and see how you and yours will be treated.” (p. 447) This was years before the Terror. How any historian can argue that violence was simply an aberration is beyond me. Perhaps the revolution needs more interested but dispassionate observers to write the history?

Just as it begins, Schama’s book ends with Talleyrand. Why? It is to hit home his thesis that the revolution was driven from above rather than below. It was driven by elites and elites would still be there even after the Terror ate its own. Talleyrand, in quasi-exile during the radical phase of the revolution, returned to become foreign minister under the Directory. He held the same role under Napoleon and played a key role in the Bourbon restoration. Although Talleyrand’s story is the most dramatic, Schama proves that he was just one of many elites who agitated for change before 1789 and was still there after Thermidor.

I have only scratched the surface of the fascinating history you will discover in Citizens: tax farmers, the salt tax, the complex influence of Rousseau are just a few elements that I found edifying. This book will bring a wealth of knowledge to the reader.