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folding of human activity. Like his teacher Richard Cobb, Schama regards the
Revolution not as a march of abstractions and ideologies, but as a human
event of complicated and often tragic outcomes.
And, as Schama himself notes, narrative form corresponds perfectly to
his view of the historical figures themselves, self-conscious heroes and actors
who fully realized that they were shaping their destiny and the destiny of
France. These were public men aware of being on the stage of world his–
tory, men who had an overdeveloped sense of past, present, and posterity,
who looked to Cato, Cicero, and Junius Brutus for models. An appreciative
sense of the theatricality of revolutionary politics suffuses Schama's vision of
the Revolution. Even before July 1789, theater had moved from its
customary space onto the street where it imposed its serious drama on the
world of mere
divertissement.
Audiences were now required to give the
Revolution their full attention. Although the National Assembly was, in prin–
ciple, committed to giving France new institutions of government and repre–
sentation, it functioned as political theater: the place where oratory and ges–
ture would dramatize the principles of the Revolution. The Revolution's
leaders cultivated rhetorical devices, consciously and effectively using them to
wield power. Robespierre rehearsed a distinctive style of righteous indig–
nation always accompanied by an account of his personal life, an "oratory of
tl1e ego" that corresponded brilliantly to the confessional manner invented by
Rousseau. Saint-Just cast himself in the role of the Roman stoic. Danton em–
ployed his great, deep voice to testify to resources of virile power that re–
publican culture associated with virtue. Marat, in addition to being pathologi–
cally profane, attended to his costume, affecting ostentatious simplicity: bare–
throated, unkempt black hair, an old ermine scarf thrown over his shoulders.
Even his assassin, Charlotte Corday, a descendant of Corneille, seems to
have self-consciously cast herself in the tragic role of patriotic martyr. In a
final gesture of self-dramatization, she asked to have her portrait painted be–
fore her execution. From Mirabeau to Marat, Schama views the cast of
revolutionary characters as theatrical beings who felt themselves framed
within a brilliantly lit Historical Moment.
In his great novel,
Ninety-Three,
Victor Hugo conceptualized the
Revolution not as the product of the activity of free agents, something one
might expect from a novelist, but rather as irresistible process and the will of
God: "Revolution is an action of the Unknown. Events spend, men pay.
Events dictate, men sign. July 14th is signed Camille Desmoulins, August
10th is signed Danton, September 2nd is signed Marat, January 21st is
signed Robespierre; but Desmoulins, Danton, Marat, and Robespierre are
mere clerks. The immense and awful author of these great pages has a
name, God; and a mask, Fate." But Schama's revolutionary actors, unlike
