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market. Far from wanting the state to dismantle all customary protection ,
they wanted a more interventionist policy and were presumably satisfied
with the economic Terror. (It was this authoritarian, anticapitalist, and
protectionist aspect of the Terror that Louis Blanc had so admired.) Some
revolutionaries were therefore not only indifferent but hostile to many ofthe
modernizing and reformist enterprises embarked on, first by the monarchy
and then by successive revolutionary regimes.
It
is unfortunate that Schama does not develop in more depth this in–
triguing and original theme of antimodernism. One can only speculate as to
the reasons. Perhaps in a work that is chiefly synthetic rather than based on
original research, he lacked the evidence to develop this point further , or
perhaps he feared that, had he continued along this line of argument, he
would have found himself trapped by his own hypothesis in a Hegelian
model that emphasizes a dialectic of economic forces controlling history, a
paradigm at odds with his preferred vision of random individual agencies. At
any rate, the implications of his theory of an antimodernist revolution are
potentially far-reaching. I wonder whether this reactionary spirit is not the
other side of the idealistic and humanitarian tradition of the Revolution and
whether these two trends, one regressive and one progressive, both rooted
in the Revolution, do not continue to characterize French political life. Here
categories ofleft and right mislead rather than elucidate; the antimodernist
spirit can belong to the Revolution, as Schama has shown, as well as to the
most counterrevolutionary elements in society. The protectionism and
paternalism that Louis Blanc praised as the harbinger of socialism implied, in
the 1880s, nationalism, xenophobia, the cult of the French soil, as well as
anticapitalism disguised as and nourished by anti-Semitism. Mid-nineteenth–
century socialists on the left as well as late nineteenth-century conservatives
on the right, allied with a petty bourgeoisie hostile to capitalism, could both
appeal to a similar nostalgia for the past and similar fear of a future deter–
mined by a free international marketplace economy dominated by mercantile
Anglo-Saxon nations.
Nevertheless, the breadth and depth of Schama's achievement are re–
markable. In essence, he has succeeded in masterfully fusing the two principle
traditions in the historiography of the French Revolution - Michelet's narra–
tive strategy of resurrecting the past in all its color and particularity and
Tocqueville's analytic examination of institutions and trends. Bringing to–
gether Michelet's emphasis on individual lives and personalities and Toc–
queville's conservative reflections, Schama has written a brilliant and com–
pelling chronicle ofa Revolution in which change was an illusion and violence
the reality.
