Name: Simon Schama
Lived: 1945-
Nationality: British of Jewish-Lithuanian origins
Profession(s): Historian, academic, TV presenter
Books: Citizens (1989)
Perspective: Conservative-liberal
Schama’s 1989 account of the French Revolution, Citizens, was written on a publisher’s commission, for public consumption more than as a contribution to academia. In Citizens, Schama returns to the epic narratives employed by historians like Carlyle, focusing on people and events.
Despite this, Schama’s own interpretations are evident beneath the story. He is more sympathetic to the Ancien Regime than traditional historians, seeing it not as stagnant and devoid of reform, but full of modern ideas, invention, innovation and dynamic change. The much-demonised Louis XVI (who Schama describes as “lively”) and his wife Antoinette are treated with less hysteria.
The French aristocracy too are given friendlier treatment. Schama describes them as a “fluid and heterogenous” class who had embraced capitalism. French elites were changing with the times. They had embraced progress and modernisation, and social mobility was increasing; they were not clinging stubbornly to feudalism as so often depicted.
Schama thinks the causes of the revolution were weak and confected. It was begun by what he calls a “literary conspiracy”, cooked up in the salons and political clubs. Once the revolution was underway, violence became its great driving force; once violence was used to manufacture political change, it was destined to be used again. This violence expanded and consumed many of the revolutionaries themselves during the Reign of Terror, which is where Schama conveniently ends his book.
Schama’s tone is undoubtedly conservative and reactionary, reminiscent of Edmund Burke or Alexis de Tocqueville. His Marxist critics have pointed to elements of hypocrisy in Schama’s arguments. He denies the importance of social structure and class as causes of revolution, yet spends some time discussing each. He also decries violence yet celebrates when the Hebertists are beheaded or when Corday assassinates Marat, a figure Schama loathes.
“A noble was nothing more than a successful bourgeoisie.”
“The one thing the Constituent Assembly was manifestly not was bourgeois.”
“This book attempts to confront directly the painful problem of revolutionary violence. Anxious lest they give way to sensationalism, or be confused with counter-revolutionary prosecutors, historians have erred on the side of squeamishness in dealing with this issue. I have returned it to the centre of the story since it seems to me that it was not merely an unfortunate by-product of politics, or the disagreeable instrument by which other more virtuous ends were accomplished… In some depressingly unavoidable sense, violence was the Revolution itself.”
“[Violence] was the Revolution’s source of collective energy – it was what made the Revolution revolutionary. Bloodshed was not the unfortunate by-product of revolution, it was the source of its energy.”
“[The revolution] depended on organised killing to accomplish political ends.”
“It seems to me that much of the anger firing revolutionary violence arose from hostility towards modernisation, rather than impatience with the speed of its progress.”
“Marat, the vituperative physician-inventor turned journalist, [tested] the limits of free speech by repeatedly denouncing as “public enemies” Necker, Lafayette and Bailly…
“It was in these [political] clubs that the dichotomy in the character of the French Revolution was most starkly exposed. The rage which bounced off the crossed daggers and production line busts of Brutus, the table-pounding choruses of Ca, Ira! and “All the aristocrats will hang” corresponded exactly to the kind of anti-capitalist, anti-modernist fury that antedated the Revolution.”
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