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compelling circumstances and Blanc's praise of a strong protectionist state.
Marxists defend the Terror as a dictatorship that succeeded in cleansing the
nation of socially nonassimilable elements, restoring authority to the govern–
ment, developing a sense of national solidarity, and controlling the economy.
Historians of the political right have always been able to criticize the
Revolution while remaining within the parameters of counterrevolutionary
thought. It has been a far greater challenge for pro-republican historians like
Michelet and Marxist historians to voice doubts about the Revolution, for
they risked calling into question the legacy and myth of the Revolution as
well as the republican system of values and beliefs. In our own century, po–
litical terror emanating from the left of the political spectrum has led modern
historians to abandon such inhibitions and reevaluate and reinterpret the
Terror, to fathom the relationship between revolutionary, humanitarian ide–
ology and political persecution. Criticism of the French antecedents of totali–
tarianism and political violence is no longer the sole province of the right.
Simon Schama's marvelous and monumental work,
Citizens:
deliber–
ately places the Terror at the center of the Revolution - it is its motor, its
energy, its driving force. His is a complex and original vision of a Terror
emanating not only from institutions such as the Comite des Rapports and the
Comite des Recherches, that were already set up by the end ofJuly 1789
and would come to represent the centralized and arbitrary powers of a rev–
olutionary police state, but, in a more profound sense, from the very
lan–
guage
of revolution. By examining the rhetoric of violence - idealistic, histri–
onic, enraged, and paranoid, Schama is able to portray the Terror, not as a
mistake, an aberration, a policy compelled by circumstances, or the acting out
ofJacobin ideology, but instead as the essence of the Revolution itself.
During the first months of the Revolution, the time of the Estates
General, the two dominant and opposing trends in revolutionary thought
were already apparent: rationalists, like Talleyrand and Condorcet, were
exponents of modernity, constitutional monarchy, a liberal economic and legal
order. Their language was reasonable and their tempers were cool. On the
other hand, there were those who were guided neither by rationality nor by
modernity but by passion, virtue, and patriotism. Their language, tuned to a
taut pitch of elation and anger, was visceral rather than cerebral. From the
beginning, this kind of revolutionary rhetoric divided the nation into patriots
and traitors, citizens and aristocrats, categories which allowed for no human
shades of gray. The new community of citizens would be tender to its chil-
•Citizens, A Chronicle of the h"ench Revolution.
By
Simon Schama. Alfred
A.
Knopf.
$29.95.
