★★★☆☆ Although erudite and often beautiful, the author’s liberal sympathies prevent him from fully developing his ‘thesis of violence’.

If you consider Mike Duncan’s Revolutions Podcast: French Revolution series to be equivalent to a book, then Citizens is my third book on the French Revolution, the second being William Doyle’s Oxford History of the subject. At this time, I believe I have read widely enough to make a definitive statement on the matter – the French Revolution is complex and complicated as all hell. It is this richness and complexity that makes Simon Schama’s survey so delightful and infuriating. An art historian by training, Schama has written a history of the Revolution informed by paintings and pamphlets, songs and speeches, and firsthand accounts from a variety of notables, from Barnave and Talleyrand through Malesherbes and Marie Antoinette. The result is an engrossing character-driven account of the glory days of 1789 to the Terror of 1793 and the Thermidorian Reaction of 1794. His decision to end his account here underscores the main achievement and failing of the book – although he tells a good story about how the violence of 1789 bleeds through to the Terror of 1793, this story fails to include a number of inconvenient details, such as a basic account of Robespierre’s justification for his actions in 1793-94 (no, an obsession with the ‘Republic of Virtue’ is not at all sufficient). 

These omissions are especially frustrating because they compromise what is otherwise a brilliantly argued thesis – that violence, rather than being incidental to the Revolution, was its great driver and intensifier. Schama skillfully shows how the rapid radicalization of the Revolution was primarily driven by the streets of Paris, who were vocal in their denunciations of failed regimes and unafraid to use threatened or actual violence to replace said regimes with representatives who promised to better advance their own interests. As he demonstrates, it was only when Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety were able to recapture the state’s monopoly on legitimate force that this radicalization was halted and eventually reversed. However, rather than examine the actual dilemmas faced by these men, Schama is content to devote a tiny handful of pages to criticizing a strawman Republic of Virtue before tying up his account with a nice liberal bow. Perhaps he had no more room in the manuscript after devoting hundreds of pages in the beginning to the cultural, scientific, industrial, and financial pursuits of the upper crust pre-Revolution. If Schama had adequately analyzed the Great Terror (and subsequent White Terror, a topic even more shamefully neglected) through his ‘thesis of violence’, the result would have been one of the more powerful contemporary interpretive frameworks for 1789-1794. Instead, what we are left with is a fascinating group portrait of notable men and women of the time, but one which fails to develop a coherent narrative of the Revolution outside of these individualist accounts.