Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution

Rating:
Summary: Excellent!
Review: I became aware of Simon Schama through the conversion of his works into a pair of programs for the History Channel. Picking up a copy of this book in a used book store, I found that Schama is not only an excellent narrator, he is a first rate author. I fully intend to acquire other books by him now.

I have never been particularly interested in French history, so this was my first exposure to many aspects of the Revolutionary period. I found it to be a fascinating drama. Schama has not only paid careful attention to creating a readable history, he also paid provided information for the scholar, making frequent references to the past studies of others on particular points of the period. One walks away with an excellent understanding of both the Revolution and the study of the Revolution.

Rating:
Summary: A masterpiece
Review: I have never read a book like this. After two readings in as many years, I am still haunted and provoked by this magnificent telling of the revolution. I am not an historian, and I cannot say whether Schama is biased to the left, right, up, or down. It does seem to me as if his uncompromising analysis of the facts and relentless attention to detail would stir up anyone comfortable in her understanding of this time. This book rocked my understanding of ALL revolutions, especially the Bolshevik in 20th century Russia. Schama's passion for justice and right drive a spike through the hypocritic hearts of both critics and apologists for the revolution, leaving us to sit amongst our own prejudices. The accumulation of detail provided here paints a devastating portrait of this complex time, and Schama's narrative brilliance drives the story forward with total conviction and fire. I love what this book reveals, and I love what it did to me, is still doing to me.

Rating:
Summary: Don't Let The Size Scare You!
Review: I received a copy of Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution as a gift several years ago. I've been interested in the French Revolution since high school, and I used to enjoy leafing through this book, looking at the pictures and reading a paragraph here and there. However, I was intimidated by the sheer size of this book --- over 800 pages of text! I never thought I'd have the time to sit and read it from cover to cover.

I finally decided one day to just start at Page 1 and see how far I got. It took me 4 months, and it involved missing hours of sleep, and ignoring many other books, magazines, and newspapers. But it was worth every minute!

I won't get into the details about why this book is worth reading --- my fellow reviewers have done that rather well. Suffice it to say that this is an excellent volume and a must-read for anyone interested in this period of history. Don't be intimidated by the number of pages! Read and enjoy!

Rating:
Summary: Tedious pace outweighs artful prose
Review: I'm going to admit up front I didn't read the whole book which that and my giving it a low rating, I realize will only earn me a deluge of negative votes. So be it. I know Mr. Schama has an excellent reputation and and has a great writing style. But he is repetitous to the point of being chronologically confusing. He delves into the meanings of things, the motives of people, but he also goes around and around. I got to page 254 and realized while I had previously enjoyed the book, it was getting bogged down. He uses VERY long sentences and his explanations are often so roundabout, that they require multiple readings to absorb their meaning and context.

I take real issue with a book marketed as a popular non-fiction read and then come to find it so exhaustive in detail, it is geared to those already well read in this era. Don't make this your first read on the French Revolution. Don't bother with this book at all, unless you are already especially intrigued by the French Revolution.

Rating:
Summary: the two revolutions , Liberty and Bondage.
Review: In 1830, Tocqueville after his american journey wrote:In the future,two countries are doomed to share the world domination,United states and Russia.American people who has to make its ways through an hostile Nature, use freedom as mean for its domination.Russia which has to fight against its own people use bondage. Atfter reading this marvellous book,it appears to me that Schama draw the line between two revolutions. The first one is the freedom revolution the second one is the bondage revolution. The first revolution was dedicated to freedom, like its little american sister.Its goal was to achieve the world domination.To do that Revolution needs Unity.And the only one in France at this moment who symbolized unity and could achieve it was the King.Actually in the economic fied, Louis XVI pretty much agree with the Adam Smith's theories . But in social and religious matters he had more reservations. Mirabeau, La Fayette and others tried to change the king's feelings.The Prise de la Bastille cleared the way for reforms.The representants of the old feudal order, nobility and church,lost their obstructive power. Left the insider opposition. France since the beginning of the feudal order was a very divided country.From the time were monney was scarce and bartering the usual way to do business, french people don't like the ones who make money.The influx of new money and liberty threatened the " situations acquises" actually the old social order. The second revolution capitalized on this fears. The Rousseau zealots were against the Voltaire's followers.They prefer equality versus Liberty.But they thought in a very animals farm Orwell twist that some are more equal than others.To assure their domination, (in the future their russian bolchevic heirs will mimic them,) they used bondage with its collateral violence. But they have the same goal than their predecessors and they need unity. So they use an abstract concept the General Will easier for its prophets to manipulate than a live person, the king. Napoleon with the same goal, the world domination will unify the two revolutions. He will bring freedom to the other europeans nations through bondage. To my knowledge this exellent book is not translated in France. I guess I understand why? French people in their opinion brought the torch of freedom to the world and they don't like that a foreigner, told them that the truth is a little bit more complicated. Today french people are still divided between Unity an division. The same frenchman who had kissed, hugged and loved his fellow country men after the world cup victory in the soccer game,as soon as he is behind the wheel step on it and hate all the others drivers.

Rating:
Summary: An excellent, if flawed narrative.
Review: In Citizens, Simon Schama sets out to write a modern history of the French Revolution in the style of the narrative histories of the nineteenth century. In this goal he succeeds admirably. The narration is well written, entertaining, and always pertinent to the historical analysis. However, the problem lies in Mr. Schama's historical analysis itself. He portrays the aristocracy in ancien regime France as a vibrant, progressive, commercial backbone of France. Supposedly, the revolution destroyed itself when it turned to popular violence against the enlightened nobles. Schama demonizes the peasantry by portraying their actions without motives. The real sufferings and grievances of the peasantry under the nobles are ignored, while the problems of the aristocracy under the revolutionary government are given a vivid description. Furthermore, the book abruptly ends after the fall of the Jacobins. While this may be understandable so that the book does not become too long, it smacks of self-interest for the author. Perhaps the book was cut sort because the Directory period showed that a revolutionary government by the upper class also did not work, although Schama would have you believe that it was France's only hope. Still, most of the rest of the book is both spot-on and entertaining, so I find it hard not to recommend it. Read this book for a well-written overview of the Revolution, but take the book's claims with a grain of salt.

Rating:
Summary: An Entertaining and Informative Read on this Dark Period
Review: It is fashionable in America to presume that the American Revolution marks the fault line between the dynastic regimes of old and modern governments. The backwoods colonists of the New World handily defeated the trained soldiers of the Old and so liberated the world, paving the way for modernity.

Thankfully, this is not so.

Thankfully, because the responsibility for the curse of absolutism and the rise of oppressive, autocratic states so endemic in the 19th and 20th centuries falls squarely on the revered sans-culottes of France.

Reactionary, you say? Perhaps. But as Simon Schama demonstrates ably in this account of the French Revolution, the cry "Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite" so beloved of the Birkenstock Left first erupted from bloodthirsty mobs calling for their fellow citizens' heads.

The schoolboy believes the French Revolution was an inevitable reaction to its American counterpart, and to the coldheartedness of the French nobility. The Terror which followed, while regrettable, was wholly necessary to purge France of its old oppression. Like so much of history being taught today, this is simplistic tripe.

Schama explains the origins of the Revolution as no other, weaving the strands of the narrative together into a mighty torrent. Far from being unavoidable, the French Revolution was eminently preventable--if only the King took swift, decisive, and brutal action to deal with the revolutionaries before the famous Tennis Court Oath, or if he had reined in his imperial ambitions, or his incompetent ministers who bankrupted the Empire.

Schama punctures other schoolboy myths. The Bastille, long a symbol of monarchial tyranny, actually housed only a couple of bewildered old men, quite surprised at the row made over them. Queen Marie-Antoinette, far from being the viper who told starving peasants to "eat cake" if they could not find bread, went to the guillotine with a nobility the tyrant Robespierre could not match when his turn came. And there are countless other surprises in store within these pages.

Schama has an eye for detail. Were you ever morbid enough to wonder whether the victims of the guillotine were conscious as their heads were raised to the cheering throngs? It's in the book. Interested in the role figures of the American Revolution played in the French? Then you'll follow Thomas Paine, the Marquis de Lafayette, and others through the tumult.

Most importantly, you'll understand exactly how the Pandora's Box opened during the French Revolution drove the rise of fascism and communism, and why contemporaries the world over viewed it as the signal event of their time.

If there's one book you read on this fascinating era, read this one.

Rating:
Summary: Stands as one of the few truly great historical narratives.
Review: Like Shelby Foote with his three volume "Civil War - A Narrative," Schama has leapt beyond the realm of history into that of literature. His characterizations of the major figures are fascinating, his judgments insightful, and his prose is a sheer delight. Schama never loses sight of the true contradiction of this and all revolutions, freedom derived from the very real threat of violence. The tragedy of the French revolution, he reminds us, is that each successive regime to take the reins of the state confronted the revolutionary violence which lifted it to power with incrementally harsher measures of "control," culminating in Robespierre's Terror and the military dictatorship of Napolean. Shama also draws with the greatest clarity the straw men which fueled the public's patriotism, whether the fear of foreign influence over the Crown, the succession of famine plots, each more wildly implausible than those preceding, or the paranoid hunts for those who "betrayed" the revolution, never mind if they were the inspirations for it the day before. Shama never flinches from the brutality; neither does he shrink from portraying the humanity of the Revolution's participants. Highly recommended to all readers; do not assume that a lack of interest in revolutionary France will prevent your complete enjoyment.

Rating:
Summary: Schama Shames the Revolutionaries
Review: Loyal readers of "Tale of Two Cities," "Scarlet Pimpernel" and the memoirs of Grace Elliot already know that the Revolution was a sordid, shabby affair, wherein People of Quality were mercilessly served up to the mob. Simon Schama's "Citizens" simply fleshes out the story. Incontrovertibly, the national standard of living under Louis XVI was far, far higher than under any of the various Republican directorates, much less the Consulate or the Empire; freedom of expression was greater, social mobility existed, crops were harvested and foreign policy, though far from perfect, at least had some rationality. As Schama painstakingly demonstrates, the Revolution was triggered not by a seething popular undercurrent but from a relatively isolated financial crisis, in which the King found it impossible to repay the national debt without the assistance of various disaffected factions within the aristocracy and upper middle classes. His only solution - a reconvening of the Three Estates - gave those factions the opportunity to grab power; the later rioting of the sans-couluttes and the red-capped Paris mob was merely an expansion of that earlier power struggle. Even the great mythologized event of 1789 - the storming of the Bastille - was a fraud: only seven prisoners were actually inside: four forgers, two lunatics, and the Marquis de Sade. Humane, literate, magisterial; also contains numerous biographic passages on Necker, Lafayette, Talleyrand, Mirabeau, Malesherbes and Marat.

Rating:
Summary: Schama d'alors citoyen...
Review: Now, Simon can write; and believe me Simon has read (see his Landscape and Memories if in doubt)...and Simon has taste, and Simon has an idea, a very good idea; the world of the ancient regime was in fact becoming the world of the nouveau burgois ..no less luminary that Lavoissier and personage of the stature of Condorcet attest to that. This is a book for novices and specialists; for a novice it gives a rather balanced treatment of France on the immediate eve(perhaps a bit too naive about the Austriche Cocotte)of the Revolution and the heady days of the Jeau de Paume that will preclude having to read Carlyle or Burke as reactionary antidotes. For specialists, it is a well argued quasi social history of a period now carved in monumental letters in Legends of European Letters. Schama is certain, and this book proves the subject is far from dead. Recommended