Aux armes, citoyens!

BOOK REVIEW: Simon Schama, Citizens

The French Revolution possesses a certain mystique -- positive or negative -- in the American historical consciousness. Thomas Jefferson famously saluted it and saw it as an extension of the American Revolution, overlooking even its most violent excesses as part of the price of liberty. Far more cautiously, John Adams was repelled by its hostility to Christianity, law and order (except as defined by the National Assembly), and the bloody vengeance of the "national razor" (guillotine). Most average Americans seemed to have harbored strong francophile sympathies -- a carryover from the role of Louis XVI's government in support of the nascent United States during the War for Independence -- until the extremes of the Terror and the perfidy of the Directory (crystallized in the "XYZ Affair" and the Quasi-War during the administration of the elder Adams) soured them on the French.

Even today, confusion tends to reign in American memories and perceptions of the French Revolution. I can remember being taught about the excesses of the late Bourbon monarchy, the massive exemption from taxes enjoyed by the nobility, and the "let-them-eat-cake" attitude of an out-of-touch court. (There is no evidence that Marie-Antoinette ever said that, by the way.) "It's no wonder they had a revolution," seems to have been the attitude of my teachers. Yet without the French monarchy -- and the military leadership and connections of men like Rochambeau, de Grasse, D'Estaing, and (let us not forget) Lafayette, there would have been no victory over the British, no Yorktown. The same schizoid attitude prevails for later periods, as well: Wellington's victory over Napoleon at Waterloo is remembered as a great moment, yet that same British Army not a year before had been gloriously repulsed at Baltimore Harbor in a shelling that is immortalized in "The Star Spangled Banner". If we are conflicted and confused on our attitude toward Great Britain during this period, how much more about France, veering as it did from friend and ally to false friend to near-foe, as its political gyrations lurched from absolute monarchy to constitutional monarchy, to republic to dictatorship, to monarchy again, to empire, and back to monarchy before settling on a second republic?

Enter Simon Schama for a note of reason. His Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution is a thorough but highly accessible and generally very readable assessment of the confusing period from the reign of Louis XVI through the Terror. In so doing, he covers a great deal of material with depth and color, from the pornographic politics that swirled around Marie-Antoinette to the various permutations of how the ci-devants (former nobles) adapted to the new revolutionary realities (or didn't), to the campaign of hostility against Christianity, to the great struggle between the Girondins and the Jacobins.

For me, there were several striking take-aways from the book. One was that the general bankruptcy, which was the true proximate cause of the fall of the absolute monarchy, came about not as a result of taxation policy per se, but as the result of the adventure of a foreign war in America. We got a republic; Louis got the guillotine. Some of the myths around the royal family's flight to Varennes were nicely exploded, as well.

Throughout, Schama makes a convincing case (though he has been roundly criticized for this) that violence was not merely incidental to the French Revolution or an unfortunate byproduct of excessive energy; rather, it was the engine of revolution. He also goes into detail concerning matters which we tend to hear too little about in America: the September massacres, the revolt in the Vendee (which left perhaps 250,000 dead), and not only the Terror but the Counter-Terror. True followers of Jefferson, Americans tend to be naive and assume an exculpatory stance toward the ghastly excesses perpetrated by the French one upon another. Schama's contribution is to show how this violence and death was, from the first days of the liberation of the Bastille in July of 1789, endemic to the Revolution. I also very much appreciated the ambiguity and texture that the book brings to its portrayal of figures such as Talleyrand, Robespierre, Malherbes, and even the King and his brothers the dukes.

Citizen is a true tour de force (in every sense of that term!), and a worthy addition to the reading list of every American who is interested in France, the Revolution and the period leading up to the Directory, and an understanding of how political movements -- even those, like the French Revolution, which are rooted in the reforming aristocracy as much as the masses -- can become daemonic with a life of their own.

A really good and informative read.

[Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronology of the French Revolution. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989. Pp. xx + 948.]


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