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insisting upon his actors' free will and fallibility, humanizing history's march
and persuading his readers that in history, as in the novel, alternative texts
are possible.
This narrative of the Revolution permits Schama not only to emphasize
the central role of agents acting freely, self-consciously, and arbitrarily, but
also to create an underlying impression of continuity in time. Like Toc–
queville, he sees the political aspirations of the Revolution not as the sign of a
new beginning but rather as the continuation of policies and reforms initiated
by the Old Regime. The Revolution merely accelerated the process,
crystallizing trends that were begun under a dynamic and energetic Old
Regime. From the king downward, the elite under the Old Regime was less
obsessed with tradition than with novelty and less preoccupied with feudalism
than with science. Well-disposed to the Old Regime, Schama considers it a
conscientious government eager to busy itself with the public good.
It
follows that the consequences of the Revolution from 1789 to the
Terror were, for the most part, socially conservative. The effects of much of
the legislation of this period played directly
to
the interests of groups who had
done very well at the end of the Old Regime and were now given further
opponunities to do even better. With the momentous exception of the
expropriation of the Church, between 1789 and 1792 the Revolution pro–
duced no significant transfer of social power; it signified neither a new begin–
ning nor a radical transformation of society.
In
fact, one of Schama's most in–
teresting - although not sufficiently developed - hypotheses affirms that the
Revolution was a source of antiprogressive as well as progressive tenden–
cies. Certain key elements in the Revolution had attempted to arrest rather
than hasten the process of modernization begun under the Old Regime.
Though the Jacobins were great respecters of property, they feared and
opposed commercial capitalism. Their incessant rhetoric against "rich egoists"
and the incrimination ofcommercial and financial elites meant that mercantile
and industrial enterprise was itself attacked. Not surprising, then, that the
textile towns and great ports were the major casualties of the Revolution.
Much of revolutionary energy was fueled by gloom and foreboding
over modernization and capitalism. The hatred of the Old Regime was
paradoxically directed not against what it preserved, but what it had de–
stroyed. For people such as the independent artisans ruined by machines, the
onrush of a modernizing monarchy had aggravated, not alleviated, their con–
dition. Many of the Convention decrees, such as the one voted to regulate
the grain trade, went straight back to Old Regime paternalism, a classic in–
stance of the French Revolution's yearning for security over fi-eedom, for the
values of paternalism over those of individualism. Much of the radicals' anger
had been a reaction against the unpredictable and impersonal operation of the
