Peter Taaffe: Citizens By Simon Schama

(Militant International Review, No. 43, Spring 1990)

Published by Viking,

1989, £20

Reviewed by Peter Taaffe

In last year’s avalanche of literature on the 200th anniversary of the French revolution, Simon Schama’s book Citizens was singled out by bourgeois reviewers. Little wonder for, as he admits, he adopts „the unfashionable top-down“ rather than „bottom-up“ approach.

While Citizens has been praised and its author lionised, it is not a serious work. Not quite fiction, it is at best ‚faction‘, and a not very good example of this genre. True the author admits that „what follows … is not science“. On this at least we concur!

Schama’s excuse is that modern history is „depersonalised, cut loose from the speech and conduct of great men“. True, the output of most modern bourgeois historians is as interesting as a railway timetable. But real history, seeking to describe the objective unfolding of events, neither ignores ‚great men‘ nor isolates them from the objective conditions in which they operate.

No bourgeois historian has explained fully the causes of the revolution, its rhythm and the role of the great figures shaped by and in turn shaping its course. Schama is no exception. However, many are at least readable in comparison to Schama. Some present accurate factual data, adding to our knowledge. Schama is not even capable of this.

Among pages of useless detail about ‚ballooning‘ in pre-revolutionary France or of prisoners who kept rats as pets, Schama’s real theme is the alleged bloodlust of the French masses. Thus there is no coherent explanation why the Parisian masses stormed the Bastille. It was not to release the seven prisoners incarcerated there. Instead they believed this Royalist stronghold was stockpiled with guns trained on Rue St Antoine, the main bastion of the revolution.

Schama particularly laments the treatment of the Governor of the Bastille, Launey. He complains, „a sword was handed to Desnaux but he cast it aside and used a pocket knife to saw through de Launey’s neck“. This act was barbaric, but Schama ignores the 98 killed and 73 wounded because de Launey ordered the guards to fire. Is it little wonder that the besiegers of the Bastille were driven into a frenzy which resulted in the bloody execution of the Governor?

In passing, Schama mentions the privations of the masses without recognising this as the spur driving the revolution forward. A similarly selective approach is adopted to the Terror. While most bourgeois historians praise 1789 – the ‚good revolution‘ – and excoriate 1793 – ‚the bad revolution‘, Schama declares „the Terror was merely 1789 with a higher body count“. This typifies the shallow and vulgar treatment of the ebbs and flows of the revolution.

History must proceed under the pacifist baton of conductor Schama. Violence, it seems, was „the revolution’s source of collective energy. It was what made the revolution revolutionary“. In fact the Terror arose from the attempts of counter-revolution, internally and externally, to mobilise the forces of feudal reaction with the bourgeois of Britain in a coalition to smash the revolution.

Schama also goes to ludicrous lengths in his apologia of Louis XVI. Thus he writes „on 14 July 1789 Louis’s journal consisted of the one word entry ‚rien‘ (nothing). Historians invariably find this a comic symptom of the King’s hapless remoteness from political reality. But it was nothing of the sort. The journal was less diary than one of his remorselessly innumerated lists of kills at the hunt. Since his favourite pastime had been more or less permanently interrupted, there could hardly have been a more negatively eloquent utterance on his predicament than ‚rien‘.“

We are asked to believe that while a social earthquake developed under his feet it was entirely normal for the French King to concentrate his mental forces on the ‚hunt‘. This comment says as much about Schama’s method as it does about the vacuous Louis.

For Schama the revolution’s social achievements are a dead letter. Yet the destruction of the last remnants of feudalism, the unification of France, the acceptance of bourgeois law etc., cleared the way for the future development of capitalism. This would not have been accomplished without the great French revolution. It is a measure of the fear of bourgeois historians that they have to denigrate the revolutions of the past in order to defeat its threat today. This song is sung in many different keys. Thatcher deploys crude invective in her ignorant broad sides. Schama merely adopts a more ‚erudite‘ approach.