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Revolutionary orthodoxy or loyalty to the Party line. J acques Louis David's
plan for relandscaping the Champs Elysees as a J ard in National for mass
spectacles and patriotic games brings forth the comparison to Albert Speer.
And Fouquier-Tinville, the methodical hatchet-man of the Revolutionary
Tribunal, is compared to the inevitable Eichmann: "twentieth-century read–
ers will recognize an ideal instrument of mass killing in the mild-mannered
family man who pleaded that he had always obeyed the law and done his
duty." These comparisons are telling because they emerge out of Schama's
fundamental interpretation of the Revolution, wh ich is to read it as primarily
a sequence of momentary triumphs of irrational impulses and not as well as a
series of rationalisms gone desperately astray.
Modern opinion in general has held that if there is a mediated line of
inheritance that descends from the French Revolution , it issues in our own
century in the Russian Revolution and in its subsequent monstrous perver–
sions not on ly of the ideals of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, but also of
the entire tradition of radical , secular, social, and socialist idealisms. Schama is
of course no apologist for tyranny of any sort - and he is, of course, anti–
Marxist - but his book tends on the whole, though not altogether, to skirt this
filiation. Because he depicts the French Revolution in the main as an enor–
mous conglomeration of woeful disasters and tawdry, bloody messes, he is
unable to imagine it as a historical tragedy. Accordingly, Schama is at his best
in his accounts of the most radical period, from August 1792 to July 1794,
when the Terror ends in Thermidor. We get a very good sense of how
through the Committee of Public Safety a strong, centrali zed authority
substituted the violence of the revolutionary state for the popular violence of
the revolutionary street crowds. We do not, however, get much sense of
how France was actually governed during this period, as we do from such a
volume as R. R. Palmer's
Twelve Who Ruled: The Year oj the Terror in the
French Revolution.
Instead we get a gripping set of descriptions of trials,
judicial and nonjudicial murders, beheadings, desperate speechifyings and
hysterical last hours, and of the gigantic, and mostly shabby, public festivals of
the civil religion of the Revolution that also marked this unexampled historical
era. Schama creates an extraordinary rendering of the murder of Marat by
Charlotte COl-day and of David's super-spectacular production of Marat's
posthumous rites. He surveys the new "empire of images" that Robespierre
and his associates attempted to realize in their " Rousseauan cultural
revolution." Yet it is telling once again that in his discussion of the revolu–
tionary calendar, the most arresting bit of evidence that Schama brings
forward is "the voluptuous incarnations of Salvatore Tresca's illustrations,"
namely, the first calendar girls.
What was it all in aid of?
It
was certain ly not in behalf of the
