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goes on at once to declare that it was "violence which made the Revolution in
the first place," which is to curtail and obscure the sequential relations be–
tween the breakdown of legitimate authority and the breaking out of
revolutionary violence.
And he does this repeatedly. One great question, he writes, dogs the
French Revolution through its entire history. "What is the relationship be–
tween violence and legitimacy? ... Only when the state restored to itself a
monopoly of force - as it was to do in 1794 - would the question go away.
In this sense, at least, Robespierre would be the first successful counter-rev–
olutionary." Fair enough, one responds, if not too clever by half - as Schama
plays hob (not to say Hobbes) with certain received notions. Yet two pages
later he asserts, "The Terror was merely 1789 with a higher body count.
From the first year it was apparent that violence was not just an unfortunate
side effect from which enlightened Patriots could selectively avert their eyes;
it was the Revolution's source of collective energy. It was what made the
Revolution revolutionary." Like Lady Macbeth's spot, this won't wash. To
begin with, violence in this context tends to expand and become everything,
both revolutionary and counter-revolutionary, in its destructive inclusiveness.
In addition, Schama attributes to violence, both here and elsewhere in the
book, a kind of mysterious autonomy, or sovereign causal potency, that he
simply asserts but neither explains, argues, nor tries
to
demonstrate.
Through such an ascription, Schama virtually makes violence into the content
of the Revolution rather than the decisive or specific means for politics itself
that it is. And this maneuver permits him as well to avoid having to deal with
the role of violence, implicit and overt, in everyday political life as well as in
the historic life of the Old Regime, and indeed of European political society as
a whole in the eighteenth century.
To be sure, Schama cannot entirely overlook such actual revolutionary
transferences of social power as those that were entailed in the expropriation
and sale at auction of the enormous properties of the Church, although he
makes very little of them. Nor does he direct much attention to such other
Enlightenment-inspired reforms as the changes in the calendar, in weights and
measures, in the geographical redistricting of France, or in the system of
assignats.
Instead he focuses upon the public drama and the heightened
rhetoric, the spectacles and collective self-displays of revolutionary France. If
in a social sense the Revolution "merely accelerated trends that had been
taking place over a longer period of time," in the sense of political behavior
the changes were much more radical , and brought forth "a political culture in
which the liberation of disrespect literally knew no bounds." A "polemical in–
continence" washed over, or flushed through , the entire nation. If this makes
the FI-ench Revolution seem like an early, large-scale preview of the 1960s,
