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"bourgeoisie," since that class, "which Marxist history long believed to be the
essential beneficiaries of the Revolution was, in fact, its principal victim." If
one has to find a beneficiary it is that problematical creation of the Revolu–
tion, "the juridical entity of the citizen." Such a creature is problematical for
Schama because "no sooner had this hypothetical free person been invented
than his liberties were circumscribed by the police powers of the state." And
that state, which was a new "military-technocratic" entity of "immense power
and emotional solidarity" went along with "a political culture" that simultane–
ously challenged it. What happened between 1789 and I 793 was "an un–
precedented explosion of politics - in speech, print, image, and even music."
Frenchmen (and some women) found their voice, but they did so finally
through violence, "which was the motor of the Revolution." The theatrical
posturings of 1789 made the public atrocities of 1793 possible. The political
culture of both was tinctured with "the same morbid preoccupation with the
just massacre and the heroic death ... with the Romanticization of violence."
These less than satisfactory closing remarks are more in the way of
summarizing repetition than they are conclusions to a persuasively coherent
narrative/analysis. Schama's work is, as I have said, the first widely popular
example of a reorientation that has occurred during the past twenty years
among historians of the French Revolution. A generation ago there was
something like a consensus among historians on the correctness of a funda–
mentally social analysis of the Revolution. That convention has been largely
eclipsed - particularly through the works of such writers as Franc;ois Furet
and Norman Hampson - and has been replaced by an agreement on the
primacy of a fundamentally political analysis. This shift has been described as
representing a movement from Marx to Tocqueville, and it has also been
understood as a refraction of alterations in the ideological climate of the pre–
sent. I see no reason to doubt the reasonableness of such suppositions or to
impugn the importance of the contributions that this change in perspective has
enabled historians to make. In the instance of Schama's book, however, the
matter is less certain, in part at least because the shift of perspective in it is so
much in the foreground. But such an emphasis serves only to bring forward
another problem.
For this kind of thing has been done before, and since it was achieved in
the work of the same great historical analyst whose political categories have
proved decisive for Schama, the coincidence is doubly telling. In I904-5,
Max Weber published the first version of
The Protestant Ethic and the
Spirit of Capitalism.
This work was also in some important measure
undertaken as a polemic against and corrective to certain Marxist views of
both the Reformation and the formation of modern capitalism. At the end of
his famous chapter on Luther's notion of the calling, Weber pauses to
