Steven Marcus
REINVENTING THE REVOLUTION
Citizens, A Chronicle of the French Revolution
by Simon Schama
has made a great popular success, and it is largely a merited one. It sums up
and brings to bear in one volume a generation of revisionist historical
research on the French Revolution and puts it forward in spirited and
sustained form. Whatever critical observations I have to make in what
follows, and they are considerable, should not be regarded as ingratitudes but
as the questionings and perplexities of an improved and sympathetic reader.
Schama's intention, he lets us know from the outset, is to present his
work "in the form of a narrative." Instead of arguments embodied as
"structural" analysis, he presents us with arguments imbedded in accounts of
human behavior - speech, action, dress, manners, writing, painting. And since
the Revolution was in such considerable measure a "haphazard and chaotic
event," he does not actually write a single, encompassing narrative as he at
first appears to claim. The book is a kind of immense mosaic, put together out
of highly selected but brief narrative-like episodes, many disparate stories
aspiring to become something larger than a connection of anecdotes. Schama's
descriptive subtitle, "A Chronicle of the French Revolution," requires similar
commentary.
Citizens
does indeed in general pursue events in chronological
order, but it is not a chronicle in the traditional and slightly archaic use of that
term, in which chronicles stood somewhere along a developmental line
between annals (which were driven by chronology alone) and fully evolved
and conscious historical writing. Schama's work is in fact largely made up of
exceptionally dense and often elliptical verbal representations. Its narratives
are frequently occluded, and the book would have profited from the
chronological charts of dates, names, and events that earlier histories
sometimes included as an aid in dispelling the opacity of historical action.
Hence, despite its fleeting disclaimers,
Citizens
is a full-fledged historical
reading of the French Revolution. It argues a thesis, or set of theses, by
means of its truncated or fragmentary narratives; and if, unlike its nine–
teenth-century precursors, it is not epic in either form or intention - indeed it
is a kind of anti-epic - it nonetheless conveys an elaborate and self-conscious
historical interpretation and is a work ofconsiderable ideological impetus. Al–
though Schama pays due lip service
to
the "contingencies" of historical phe–
nomena, there is not enough contingency in his accounts of them. He is all
certitude and polemical fervor, often though not always to startling effect.
