Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution.

THIS BOOK is especially impressive because of the vast amount of reading, none of it superficial, that informs it. Professor Schama has an eagle eye for details, drawn from this odd work or that, which are significant and connectable; he also writes well, except when he declines into trendiness. Citizens is a valuable, intelligent, often interesting, and at times witty grab-bag of information about the French Revolution; a "chronicle," however, it is not. Rather, it is a series of sub-chapters about people and events in France, ending with July 1794 (which was not when the French Revolution ended), that at times amount to nothing more than vignettes, as when Schama concludes his Epilogue with a sketch of a deranged harpy, Theroigne de Mericourt. (He should have ended with an impression of Bonaparte in that year.)

Schama is one of those promising historians from Britain whom Harvard, Yale, and Princeton were snapping up a few years ago and who (I am thinking particularly of Paul Kennedy and John Keegan) thereafter, in America, wrote books that have been considerable publishing successes but that are also distinctly second rate by comparison with earlier of their works publisbed in Britain (a consequence of the relative ease of academic living in the United States, no doubt). Citizens is not second rate; still, as I have suggested, tasteless modernisms do keep creeping in. Schama is greatly taken with the term "modernization" itself and indulges his fondness to the point of meaninglessness. In his Preface, for example, he attributes to Tocqueville an "understanding of the destabilizing effects of modernization before the Revolution"-which is almost nonsense. (Tocqueville was concerned with the effects of centralization.) On several occasions, Schama uses the phrase "semantic freight" or "semantically freighted"; sub-chapters bear such titles as "End Games" and "Damage Control." Before translating himself to Harvard, Schama did not write such stuff.

In a broader sense also Citizens is a product of its time, though at the more general level the influence is for the better. "An idea whose time has come" is one of Victor Hugo's lamentable phrases; an idea whose time has come is usually no good-usually, but not always. In the present instance, the time has finally arrived to deplore much (though not everything) that occurred during the French Revolution. That the terror and the violence and the destruction engendered were dreadful is scarcely a new thought; it has been presented, in fact, for two hundred years, and not only by "conservatives" (a political term that two centuries ago did not exist) but also by Burkean Whigs and even by moderate liberals. Yet the conclusion that thc French Revolution was productive of more bad things than good ones was unthinkable-and certainly unspeakable -among most professional historians in France as well as in the United States until relatively recently. It was not until the Hitler period that some people began to see in revolutionary France certain features of the totalitarianism to come. This trend in perception is now increasing, even among French historians, whose predecessors should have taken note of what the young Simone Weil wrote more than fifty years ago: "It is not religion but revolution which is the opium of the people."

I believe that there is another reason for the present re-evaluation of the French Revolution, and that this reason has to do basically with style. There is something about the rhetoric and the posturing, the oratory and the symbolism of the revolutionary era that strikes us today as immature and naive at best, crazy and imbecilic at worst, and often ludicrous to boot. I am not an American nationalist, I find much of Benjamin Franklin's prose deplorable, and I even think some of Thomas Jefferson's statements in the Declaration of Independence are hyperbolic and untrue. Yet I find the rhetoric of the American patriots entirely more reasonable-and enduring -than that of the French revolutionaries, including even some of their more moderate statements. The sagacity displayed by George Washington and the Constitutional Convention in 1787 remains much more impressive than the oratory that took place in the Estates-General during 1789; while the Constitution of the United States -even weighed down as it has become with many unnecessary and cumbrous amendments-is today a strong guarantee of American liberties. It is not antiquated; whereas there is something in the French Revolution that gives us the impression of being hopelessly outdated, something that can no longer convey inspiration-something so old that it properly belongs in an historical museum.

The best thing to be said of the French is that they know when to change their minds. In 1794 they executed Robespierre. Thereafter the course of the Revolution shifted, a subject I wish Schama had chosen to discuss here since he knows much about the topic: some of his earlier, excellent work in England deals with Bonaparte and the Dutch republic. If only the Russians had dealt similarly with Lenin in 1922. But they didn't. Every people, it is said, has the history it deserves as well, of course, as the historians.