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What it argues
Simon Schama's Citizens was published to mark the bicentennial of the French Revolution in 1989 and immediately became one of the most controversial histories of the event in decades. Written against the grain of the dominant Marxist historiography, which interpreted the Revolution as a class struggle that expressed the rising bourgeoisie's conflict with a feudal aristocracy, Schama argues that the Revolution was not inevitable, not progressive in any simple sense, and that the Terror was not an aberration but an expression of tendencies present from the very beginning of the revolutionary impulse.
The book begins before 1789. Schama spends nearly a third of his pages on the last decades of the Ancien Régime, arguing that France in the 1770s and 1780s was actually modernizing — economically dynamic, culturally vibrant, increasingly literate and prosperous. The crisis that produced the Revolution was not a society at the end of its rope but a society in rapid, destabilizing change, whose expectations had outrun its institutions. This reverses the conventional story: what needed reforming was not intolerable stagnation but the failure of reform to keep pace with rising aspirations.
What it gets right
- 1.
The French Revolution was not the inevitable result of intolerable feudal oppression. France in the 1780s was economically dynamic and increasingly prosperous, but its rising expectations had outrun its institutions.
- 2.
The Terror was not an aberration from the Revolution's founding ideals but an expression of tendencies — the embrace of civic violence, the demand for ideological purity, the cult of the general will — present from 1789 itself.
- 3.
The Ancien Régime was more culturally and economically vital than the revolutionary narrative of corrupt decadence allows. Schama's revisionist starting point is that reform was possible and was being attempted.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Simon Schama is a British historian and professor at Columbia University, where he has taught since 1993. He is one of the most prolific and publicly prominent historians of his generation, having written on Dutch art and culture, American history, the history of the Jews, and landscape and memory, as well as presenting numerous historical documentary series for the BBC. Citizens, published in 1989, established his international reputation and set the terms of a historical debate about the French Revolution that is still active. His prose style — densely detailed, novelistic, unapologetically opinionated — has made him both celebrated and criticized within the academic profession.
