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it is no accident; such teleologies are integral to Schama's design. For him, the
Revolution was both inevitable and revolutionary, but it was almost without
exception for the bad and the worse.
Part ofthe problem with such an extraordinarily uniform view is to be
located in Schama's conception of the modern and the antimodern. He re–
gards the modern in the context of
1789-1794
as those views that would
have led to further physiocratic and capitalist reforms and
to
a "rational,"
market-governed economy and society. And he sees antimodernism as ex–
pressed in those radical groups that strove for short-term "economic and so–
cial justice," and who used the rhetoric of Rousseau against the financiers and
plutocrats who had come to power during that epoch. One difficulty with this
reading has to do with the restricted notions of both the modern and
Rousseau that it conveys. For it is at least equally true to say that Rousseau
was one of the first of modern thinkers as it is to say that he was opposed
to
modernizing tendencies. Like Burke, who was of course antagonistic to him
on other grounds, Rousseau was intransigently hostile to certain Enlighten–
ment and rationalistic tendencies that were often carried to excess in the
eighteenth century. His modernity is in part to be found in the circumstance
that - again like Burke - he is one of the first writers of transcendent
intellectual gifts consciously to enlist the powers of the mind against the mind
itself - to use his exceptional literary powers even to excess against the
powers of rationalism and its excesses. Because Schama underemphasizes or
overlooks the hypertrophic rationalism ofcertain tendencies in the Revolution
("The Sleep of Reason Gives Birth to Monsters") and concomitantly regards
its course as essentially a series of Romanticist effervescent outbursts, he
gives us a view of that immense development that is both teleological and in
part misleading.
This discrimination may to a certain degree explain the otherwise in–
explicable independent power that Schama insistently attributes to t11e role of
violence in the Revolution. "Bloodshed was not the unfortunate by-product of
revolution," he typically reiterates; "it was the source of its energy." We
understand these unsupported sentiments better if we recognize that for
Schama the French Revolution leads directly to modern totalitarianism, and
not so much to Stalinism as to Nazi Germany - his analogies almost uni–
formly tend in this direction. for example, the Terror and the massacres in
the Vendee involve a whole set of "sinister anticipations of the technological
killings of the twentieth century." The industrialization of mass murder has
really only one modern referent. Similarly, the case against Marie Antoinette
and those who followed her to the guillotine during the Terror was based on
the idea that she was essentially "impure" in body, thought, and deed. The
idea of purity resonates with the myth of racial purity rather than with
