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Ferocious Fraternity
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15963 |
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BOOK WORLD
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7 / 1989 |
3,899 Words |
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Robert Royal
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CITIZENS
A Chronicle of the French Revolution
Simon Schama
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989
948 pp., $29.95
The temptation to extract simple lessons from the French Revolution has often seduced minds stronger in ideological zeal than in historical sense. Marxists and other leftists tout 1789 as the first in a series of inevitable and exemplary modern upheavals. With few exceptions, notably Edmund Burke's magisterial Reflections on the Revolution in France, and Tocqueville's L'Ancien Regime et la Revolution, conservatives have been almost equally reductive in simply writing off the event as instructive in a different sense--as a warning of what revolutions should not be, but usually are. The latter view is closer to the truth and generally admitted even in France, where celebrations of the bicentennial of the Revolution have had to be carefully crafted to divert attention from the Terror, Napoleon, and the century and a half of struggle between republicans and monarchists that derived from 1789. Only in the last few decades have the French gotten over the conflicting passions released by the Revolution; with very few exceptions today they accept modern democratic France.
Passion is probably necessary to good history, though much depends on the nature of the passion. A historical evaluation of the Revolution under the auspices of better passions, however, has barely begun. Some French historians have bravely tried to weigh more justly the good and evil released by the momentous events of the Revolution. On this side of the Atlantic, Simon Schama has initiated a whole new way of approaching the period in his impassioned and luminous Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution. The long-accepted explanation for the Revolution is that the traditional social restraints and anachronisms in the French system made an explosion unavoidable. In this view, the Revolution is virtually determined by socio-historical "forces," mostly identified with a rising bourgeoisie, pushing inexorably against outmoded restrictions toward the modern world. In striking contrast to traditional histories, Schama shows how much the Revolution was the reaction of a radical intellectual elite to modernizing currents.
The myth of a closed nobility trying to hold back a rising bourgeois tide is false, says Schama, because those pressing to get into power and prestige were pushing against an open door. It was far easier for a rising Frenchman than his British counterpart to enter the nobility. The aristocrats themselves in France often worked for a revolutionary vision of the future. Schama writes:
Though, numerically, aristocrats did not dominate the
Assembly, the working committees that drafted the
constitution and provided France with the shape of its new
institutions were monopolized by a relatively small
intellectual elite, many of whom had known each other
before the Revolution and a striking number of whom had
been officers of the old monarchy or either the army,
judiciary, government, or church. The one thing
...
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