SUSAN DUN '
35 1
Hugo's, wrote their own script - they controlled the course and outcome of
the Revolution, and the crucial decisions they made were personal and arbi–
trary. For example, one ofthe most important decisions affecting the origin of
the Revolution was Louis XVI's willingness to support the Revolution in
America. This policy had profound economic and social consequences in
France, and yet it was anything but preordained. Turgot had argued bitterly
against intervention in America, predicting that overwhelming costs would
force the postponement of necessary reforms. But the case was won by the
powerful Foreign Minister Vergennes, whose foremost goal was the embar–
rassment of the British crown in America. Ultimately, the consequences of
French involvement in the American Revolution were subversive and irre–
versible.
Schama attributes unusual importance to the flirtation with armed free–
dom of a section of the aristocracy that was powerful and influential. And, of
course, the American affair was also the source of more debt for a regime
already plagued by grave financial problems. In a single year, 1781 - the
year of Yorktown - 225 million
livres
were spent on America, five times the
amount customarily allotted for the peacetime navy. Here too, Schama
views the debt not as an immutable problem inherent in the structure of the
institutions but rather as the result of pal"ticular decisions made freely by in–
dividuals. Taking issue with Tocqueville, for whom French institutions were
themselves intrinsically incapable of solving the regime's fiscal problems,
Schama believes that there were a number of possible approaches in coping
with French finances and that the trouble lay in the political and psychological
difficulties in sustaining policy decisions rather than in the regime's institutional
and operational structure. He takes the approach that, in August 1788, it
was Brienne's government, not France, that was bankrupt, as the speed with
which his successor, Necker, raised loans of all kinds amply bore out. Ulti–
mately, the cause of the downfall of the monarchy was the politicization of
the money crisis that dictated the calling of the Estates General. However,
this very calling of the Estates General also hinged on personal decisions. In
describing the last hours of Malesherbe , the King's Minister and, in 1793, his
defense lawyer, Schama goe so far as to leave history's text to invent his
own: "Of all the cruelties visited on the old man, the most painful was the
likely reflection that by not heeding his younger daughter's advice to emi–
grate he had somehow ... destroyed his family. And did he ponder whether,
if Louis had listened to his counsel and had abandoned the Estates General
altogether in favor of an entirely new constitution that might have avoided
the polarization of the orders, the worst calamities of the Revolution might
have been averted?" "Likely reflection"; "... did he ponder?"; "... if Louis
had listened"; "... might have been" - this is Schama as novelist-historian,
