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dren, but punitive and pitiless to its foes. For Schama, "the notion that, be–
tween 1789 and 1791, France basked in some sort of liberal pleasure gar–
den before the erection ofthe guillotine is a complete fantasy." The language
and politics of paranoia that would eventually engulf and drown the entire
Revolution can be traced to its first months.
During the summer of 1789, moderates were alarmed not just by
spontaneous popular retribution and murderously festive crowd actions but
by the verbal and journalistic violence that seemed to encourage such
demonstrations. The protection of free speech, publication, and assembly en–
shrined in the Declaration of the Rights of Man brought forth a political cul–
ture whose vituperation and boundless disrespect reached an unprecedent–
edly broad audience. Schama stresses that this necessarily unsatisfied
rhetoric, suffused with the chronic obsession with exploitation, conspiracy, and
public punishment, mobilized angry and powerful crowds, decisively affecting
the course of events and ultimately making revolutionary government un–
workable.
Political compromise and sage deliberations about practical government,
in the manner ofthe American Constitutional Convention, never took place in
revolutionary France. "Croaking toad ," shouted the deputy Guadet in one
heated exchange. "Vile bird ," yelled back Marat. Another deputy had de–
manded that the tribune be disinfected after every speech by Marat, who
then returned the compliment by characterizing his enemies as charlatans,
hypocrites, maniacs, and stool pigeons. Reasoned debate, self-restraint, civil–
ity, and discipline were, in France, entirely beside the point.
Power resided in words, in oratory skill, verbal abuse and intimidation.
Public utterance and the ability to sway audiences made the difference be–
tween life and death, triumph and disaster. Conversely, failure to be heard
could be a death sentence. When Robespierre was shouted down and his ar–
rest called for, the standard devices of his rhetoric were ridiculed. He was
struck down by the one weapon against which he was helpless: laughter.
Public diction was public power. Schama perceives no real difference between
verbal violence and the real thing, between screaming for blood and its copi–
ous shedding. The Vendee war and the September massacres, were products
of the Manichean language that everywhere identified monsters and
incarnations of evil. The drownings and mass exterminations of the Terror
were the logical outcome of an ideology that verbally dehumanized its
adversaries.
At the end of
Citizens ,
Schama poses the fundamental question of why
the French Revolution was powered by brutality, why violence was its mo–
tor. He offers the hypothesis that, in a sense, the revolutionary elite were
"rash geologists, gouging open great holes in the crust of polite discourse and
