Oh, Marianne

I just finished reading Citizens, by Simon Schama, subtitled a chronicle of the French Revolution.  What a story!  After getting through it, I can’t believe I got as much out of all my undergraduate modern history courses as I did without having studied the French Rev in more than a passing and tangential way.  So many of the topics I was engrossed by—the rise of anti-colonial nationalism, the Russian revolution and what came after, the totalitarian states of the twentieth century…. I could recognize the roots of so much of that in what I was reading about the events of 1789-94.

This is not to say that I am giving up my previously-held conviction (a belief instilled in my and my classmates by the ghost of Edward Said, who I am fully convinced still paces the halls at Columbia, leaking ectoplasm and causing the lights to flicker when people mention the canon) that it is fundamentally wrong to see modern history as based on a central narrative driven by a progression of key events in Western history…perish the thought!  But, (and, as my 7^th grade teacher would say, “this is a big but—”) there were so many things—the rapid transformation from revolutionary chaos to police state; the attempt to completely remake society on the basis of a new set of ideals; the desire to claim for as the revolution’s heritage an “authentic” idea of the national past; the movement towards a systematized, “scientific” method of eliminating the people deemed dangerous to the new order as quickly as possible—in which I saw amazingly-prescient echoes of so much that I had studied from the last two hundred years.

It also helped that Schama is a very engaging writer.  He was clearly writing the book to appeal to a wider audience than just his peers of the academy.  For one thing, he translated all quotes—a sure sign that this is not a book meant only for grad students to be able to regurgitate during exams.  Although part of me was sorry not to be able to get more of a taste of the historical figures whose words he made use of (since I think some of them would be quite entertaining to read in their own right), I really enjoyed Schama’s relaxed writing style, which walked the line between conversational and informational.  His confessed aim was to make the book a “narrative” of events, and I definitely had to stifles feelings of, “Wait! The story can’t be over yet—” when he tied off his account with the fall of Robespierre and the end of the Terror. He really made the characters of the time come alive.

Of course, it helped his case that there were some truly larger-than-life characters adding their influence to those events.  Not just Robespierre, who Schama painted as an almost evangelical figure, wanting to cleanse French society using the dual principles of terror and virtue, but the rake-Bishop Tallyrand, the self-aggrandizingly heroic Lafayette, the fatally waffling Louis XVI, the ice princess Charlotte Corday, the fatally world-weary Malesherbes.  I think my favorite was actually Danton.  Not that he was really any less of a violent rabble-rouser than any other member of the revolutionary government in its various iterations, but you have got to respect someone whose final words on the steps of the guillotine were, “be sure to show my head to the crowd afterwards.  It is well worth the effort.” The man had cajones.