STEVEN MARCUS
355
Schama begins in the conventional way by setting the general pre–
Revolutionary scene, which was characterized by unremitting and intractable
fiscal crises.
As
a res ult of an accumulation of myriad circumstances, notable
among them the wars fought by France in orth America, the French gov–
ernment was more or less going broke. Deeply in debt, the government was
unable to borrow new money to keep itself going or to service the interest
on what it already owed. Repeated efforts at fiscal reform were uniformly
unavailing. At the same time, however, pre-Revolutionary France was the
scene of both social and cultural changes that were revolutionary in magni–
tude and implications. The sources of social change were located not in a ris–
ing middle class or unenfranchised bourgeoisie but in a relatively youthful and
disaffected aristocracy. This aristocracy was also liberal, rationalistic and
modernizing in its attitudes. Such a nobility had already been thoroughly
"colonized by what modern historians think of as 'bourgeois' values: money,
public service and talent." At the very heart of the French elite, then, was "a
capitalist nobility." This group, for all practical purposes indistinguishable fi-om
the opulent bourgeoisie, was willy-nilly going to lead France toward revolu–
tion; in its commitment to reform it would unconsciously prepare the way for
the dismantling of the old order of which it was itself a leading element.
In the illimitable realm of culture, changes of analogous substantiality
were occurring. France was becoming a vast, open, public theater. There
was a pervasive shift in taste toward styles and behavior that were taken to
be expressive of inner "sensibility," tenderness of emotion and "naturalness"
of res ponsiveness and self-representation. The chief causal agency in this
context is to be found in the figure, writings and cult of Rousseau - from the
public campaign urging mothers to breast-feed their infants to the new ideas
of child-rearing, education, religion and public virtue, Rousseau was the sym–
bol of a proto- Romantic tidal flow offeeling and intensity that was also to be
revolutionary in its influences. This tendency , essentially counter- or anti–
Enlightenment in its impulsions, was to become dominant in the life of the
Revolution itself, and it occupies the forefront of Schama's account as well.
That account does not in effect regard the Revolution as in some superordi–
nate sense an outcome of the Enlightenment. For in Schama's view, the Old
Regime was itself the Enlightenment's chief institutional embodiment; it was,
all things considered, progressive, reformist and modernizing, and was con–
vinced of the su perior usefulness of the capitalization of property and the
overriding efficacy of economic rationality. The Revolution , however, was on
this score anti modern in the sense that it was at key moments of decision
opposed to the specific kinds of reforms that modernization required. Put in
this way, one can already apprehend certain doctrinal leanings.
In any event, by 1787, according to Schama, it was fairly clear that
