STEVEN MARCUS
357
sciously played out their momentary parts. They are indeed momentary,
and Schama specializes in the presentation of fragments of discontinuous ac–
tion. Here, for example, is a moment from the extremely bloody day of
August 10, 1792. Early in the morning, before the fighting had begun in
earnest, the King went to the Legislative Assembly, which was meeting in
the Manege near the Tuileries, to place his own person in its trust:
Once in the Manege, where a handful of deputies remained ... the
King was left waiting while a place was found for him and his family
compatible with the prohibition on his presence during debates. To–
gether with his sister Elizabeth, Marie-Antoinette and their children,
they were finally rushed into the little caged space of the Logographie,
assigned to reporters I-eco rding the proceedings. Inside this stuffy lit–
tle hole, their faces shadowed by the cell-like grille, what was left of the
French monarchy waited, helplessly, on its fate.
This paragraph is a representative sample of Schama's narrative style.
It may not be excessive to suggest that it owes something substantial to
television broadcasting, and that it is a TV news-spot in prose, a kind of im–
age bite. Indeed in its unself-conscious emphasis upon the intermittent in its
representations of extended action, there is something of what might be
called academic postmodern history attaching
to
the book as a whole.
With the fall of the Bastille the Revolution emerges into its most
significant symbolic life. The bloody fighting in Paris and the public display of
"punitive sacrifice[s]" that it entailed constituted "a kind of Revolutionary
sacrament." Even more , it was the event in which for Schama there was
sealed "the modern compact by which power could be secured through vio–
lence." It isn't evident what is specially or particularly "modern" about this
circumstance. Violence exists at the heart of organized political life, particu–
larly as we observe that life in the nation-state and those associations which
have been its predecessors. And it exists as well at the center of the political
theory upon which Schama entirely and inexplicitly depends, the theory of
Max Weber. The state, Weber writes, is "a human community that
(successfully) claims the
monopoly of the legitimate 'USe oj physical Jorce
within
a given territory." It is "a relation of men dominating men, a relation
supported by means oflegitimate (i. e. considered to be legitimate) violence."
On these terms Schama understands the great events of the Revolution as
exposing a "vacuum of authority ... at the heart of the French government."
In other words, the Revolution was, among countless other things, an im–
mense and protracted crisis oflegitimacy. But having said this, Schama then
