Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution.

Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution,

THE YEAR just passing marked the two-hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution, or, more precisely, of the fall of the Bastille. The commemorations were in many ways peculiar. In Paris the celebration was without discernible content, some amorphous patriotism plus a prolonged fashion show. In London, a realistic reconstruction of the guillotine had to be removed from the British Museum because it was too frightening to schoolchildren. The democracy movement in Peking appealed to both the French and American Revolutions, though more to the latter.

It is only for convenience's sake that the fall of the Bastille may be regarded as the beginning of the Revolution. History is a continuous drama with no intermissions and a first act lost in the mists of time, and there are as many theories of the French Revolution as there are historians: it was caused by either rationalism, skepticism, or romantic emotion; it was precipitated by poverty or by middle-class affluence; the nobility began it, or the philosophes did; the Terror was due to ideology or political necessity. In the popular view, Louis XVI was a reactionary tyrant. In truth he was an enlightened reformer; when the mob invaded Versailles, he was too self-subverted to have them slaughtered, even though Lafayette and the National Guard were standing by. A decade earlier, the government of George III had not so dithered over the Gordon riot in London, a protorevolutionary urban riot summarily dispersed by musket fire.

A wise professor once advised me, "Hart, if you write the history of anything, don't begin with the French Revolution." One year, in England on a fellowship to work on Burke, I unwisely decided first to "acquaint" myself with the scholarship on the French Revolution. Eight months later, I hadn't written a word on Burke's Reflections on that cluster of events.

One thing the commemoration did achieve was the publication of a remarkable number of fine books, both specialized studies and wider syntheses concerning the Revolution. First among these in my view--pace John Lukacs, who reviewed the book for NR [July 14, 1989]--is Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, by Harvard historian Simon Schama.

The word "Chronicle" in that subtitle possesses philosophical content of great importance, with application beyond what we are accustomed to calling the "French Revolution."

Let us view the issue in outline. What we neatly categorize as the "French Revolution" was in actual fact a tumultuous series of events that lasted about 12 years, that is, from the failed harvests of 1787 through bread riots, inflation, international war, the rise of the Jacobins, the execution of the king and his wife, the Terror, the Directory, the Consulate, and the emergence of Napoleon.

Among historians, for about the last fifty years the dominant tendency--most notably among the Marxist or Marxoid followers of the great Georges Lefebvre of the Sorbonne--has been to impose a conceptual "order" or "logic" upon these vast events. These historians have done magnificent work in essays and monographs, much of which has had the unintended consequence of undermining their own conceptual framework.

That is to say, they wished to discern in the events of 1787-1799 an innder "scientific" logic that explained why what happened happened. Following Marx himself, they saw it as an expression of "class struggle," which of course was the key to history: bourgeoisie against nobility and clergy, then peasents and workers against bourgeoisie. For the Sorbonne Marxists, seeking such a "logic" in events might ironically be seen as a bow to the Logos; that is, a desperate desire for order amid the evident chaos.

But all the while Nemesis was waiting in the wings, mostly in the form of British and American historians. These historians stressed contingency, economic fact, coincidence, individual character, even luck. For all of the industry and logic of the French historians, the dialectic could not explain a crop failure. It could not explain the failure of Louis XVI to disperse the mob at Versailles. The dialectic/Logos could not account for his discovery and arrest at Varennes, or the moral and intellectual power of the ideas of Rousseau and the ideal of the ancient Roman republic.

Professor Schama's chronicle amounts to a summa of the counter-Sorbonne British/American tendency. In reading it you feel the actual life of history breaking through the conceptual walls of schematic historiography. Professor Schama must feel as if he had torn down the Bastille once again.

Everywhere you touch this vast event that we call the "French Revolution" you encounter irony, which is the smile of contingency. For example, 84 per cent of those guillotined were of the Third Estate: bourgeois, peasants, artisans. Most of them did not know why they were being executed. But to guillotine a commoner was an egalitarina measure: under the old order, nobles had been beheaded, commoners hanged. Marx, call your office. Robespierre--and remember that Hilaire Belloc celebrates him--was a state-educated scholarship boy. Robespierre, "the Incorruptible," was corrupted by "virtue" and power. Professor Schama in his chronicle brings before us Jean-Paul Marat, an enrage bedeviled by pus (which necessitated treatments in a warm bath), and his murderer, Charlotte Corday, who killed him in his bathtub on Rousseauistic principle; Georges Danton, the "Liberator," who was guillotined by robespierre for "corruption" (the Incorruptible was soon to be guillotined himself); Philippe Fabre d'Eglantine, the stuttering lawyer who was relieved of this disability at the storming of the Bastille, and became a great orator; and the chilling Louis Antoine de St. Just, a young man of Roman countenance and ideal imagination who thought that anyone who stood in the way of republican virtue should be annihilated. St. Just went to the guillotine with appropriate stoic impassivity.

If there is any pattern in this vast convulsion, Professor Schama discerns it in a nexus between power and violence. The ancien regime was not despotic but fragile, and when the barriers were breached all hell broke loose. Violence reinforced new power, and killing led to killing, treachery to treachery.

This argument is very persuasive, but, as is the habit of great books, Citizens leads on to other refections. "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven." In the Western world, as the eighteenth century came to an end there was a sweeping desire for change. Burke himself--see the magnificent footnotes to his collected correspondence--desired change in France until he saw its radicalization. Similarly George Washington, seeing the nature of the change, warned his fellow citizens against "foreign entanglements," and he was referring specifically to Jefferson's Francophile sentiments. Tom Paine was a revolutionary enthusiast, but when he showed up in France he was surprised to be thrown in prison as a spy. It remains true that many of the most refined spirits of the time felt emotionally "liberated" by the French Revolution.

Talleyrand, the great survivor, who live through the Revolution and continued in power, remarked that no one born after the Revolution could know how sweet life can be. He meant the old regime. And there is an important interpretation of Rousseau to the effect that his perception of "natural" human goodness was based upon his observation of peasants who had been nurtured by the experience of their "station" under the old system and understood the reciprocal obligations owed to them. When Napoleon seized power in his coup, he spoke the language of raw modern power: "The Revolution is over. Its goals have been accomplished."

For a book to counted a masterpiece the style must be equal to the subject, and Professor Schama's surely is. I quote him on Robespierre, astonishing in his own time but all too familiar today from later Red Guardish incarnations:

Robespierre [as a lawyer] made his clients embodiments of general principles: victims in a Manichaean struggle between virtue and vice, freedom and tyrranny. This kind of righteous indignation became his natural form of utterance, no less dramatic when spoken, as it often was, in tones of threatening and studious calm. And it found a responsive audience beyond the Assembly in a whole generation of like-minded young Ciceros and Catos waiting for the republic of virtues to be inaugurated. As early as August 1789 Robespierre received an adoring letter from one such obscure devotee, Antoine St. Just; . . . "You are not merely the deputy of a province, you are the representative of humanity and the republic."

Important debates will continue among the historians. Was the Revolution a French or a European phenomenon? The historian R. R. Palmer says the latter, and includes the American rebellion against George III's government. Burke says that there was no English revolution, not mentioning in his Reflections the execution of Charles I in 1649 and the ensuing ascendancy of Parliament. The case for "American exceptionalism" remains arguable. Taxonomists of history cite the absence of feudal remnants here. Unlike 1649 in England and the revolutionary period in France, there was no massive social convulsion in the American colonies, and the Framers were men of colonial legislative experience; they were not "new men." Palmer would argue that we in effect "executed" George III. On the other hand, there was a widespread desire to crown another George, Washington, as king. And in the event, the American system is not a parliamentary one, but an elective monarchy. Theoretically, Margaret Thatcher could be removed tomorrow. George Bush cannot. President Bush can exercise an imperial veto denied to Prime Minister Thatcher.

Professor Schama's chronicle is not only an important contribution to this discussion but a literary and philosophical event of the first order. What he has done is overthrow Marxist historiography, even as--"no accident," as the Marxists used to say--Marxism is being overthrown around the world