TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/041789/04178900.062

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 6.5 KB | 129 lines

                                                                                BOOKS, Page 74

The Rhythm of Retribution


By Otto Friedrich


    CITIZENS: A CHRONICLE OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
    by Simon Schama
    Knopf; 948 pages; $29.95

    This extraordinary history of the French Revolution begins
with a three-story-high plaster elephant standing guard in the
Place de la Bastille. Commissioned by the triumphant Emperor
Napoleon, eventually to be recast in the bronze of captured
cannons, the elephant was designed to make Parisians forget
their revolutionary past and dream of an imperial future. Its
real destiny -- like the question of what to remember -- proved
quite different. "By 1830, when revolution revisited Paris, the
elephant was in an advanced state of decomposition," writes
Harvard historian Simon Schama. "One tusk had dropped off, and
the other was reduced to a powdery stump. Its body was black
from rain and soot and its eyes had sunk, beyond all natural
resemblance, into the furrows and pockmarks of its large,
eroded head."

    Such a grand beginning inspires confidence that we are in
the hands of a master storyteller, and Schama's epic history
richly fulfills that promise. This saga of revolt and revenge
may at first seem somewhat familiar, for it has long been one of
the great narrative legends of modern time, told and retold by
Burke, Tocqueville, Carlyle and others. We already know -- don't
we? -- about the dim-witted King Louis XVI, about Queen Marie
Antoinette's supposedly saying "Let them eat cake," and the
ragged mobs cheering as the bloodied guillotine rises and falls
in its awful rhythm of retribution.

    Schama's splendid recounting soon convinces us, however,
that much of what we thought we knew is wrong, a collection of
Hollywood versions of 19th century romances: Leslie Howard as
"that demmed elusive Pimpernel," or Ronald Colman doing a "far,
far better thing" by accepting the fate prescribed by Dickens in
A Tale of Two Cities. Schama's reality is very different from
the legends.

    For example, the famous storming of the Bastille prison --
of which the French are noisily celebrating the 200th
anniversary this summer -- was hardly a storming at all. The
outnumbered and ill-supplied defenders (whose oppressed
prisoners consisted of just two lunatics, four forgers and one
aristocratic ne'er-do-well put away by his family) finally
surrendered when they saw themselves confronting the rioters'
artillery, which included a silver-inlaid cannon originally
given to France by the King of Siam. And the commandant of the
Bastille, who had tried to avoid further bloodshed, was
subsequently hacked to death, his head stuck on a pike and
paraded through the streets.

    This reassembling and rearranging of historical detail is
brilliantly successful: Schama's tale is vivid, dramatic,
thought-provoking. Yet such is the current academic vogue for
bloodless and pseudoscientific historiography that the author
repeatedly feels a need to apologize for what he somewhat
disingenuously calls a "mischievously old-fashioned piece of
storytelling." If Schama's portrait of the revolution is often
surprising in its closeup details, however, it is no less so in
coloring the background imagery of the French society being
overturned.

    In Schama's version, the ancien regime (a pejorative term
coined after the revolution) was hardly just the moribund feudal
anachronism of literary legend. Though France's economic growth
was less spectacular than that of Britain, its foreign trade,
mining and textile industries were all booming. Moreover, many
new enterprises were run by aristocrats, many of whom were
self-made men who had bought or earned their titles. The French
upper classes, writes Schama, were eager to push France into
technological modernity, and there was an almost Jeffersonian
optimism in the way they welcomed the convening of the
Estates-General and the creation of a constitutional monarchy.
It was the poor, by contrast, who resisted such novelties as
free trade and religious toleration.

    What went so horribly wrong between the hopeful beginnings
in 1789 and the terror of 1793? Many things, as usual. Some of
the worst weather in decades ruined several harvests and
inspired a dangerous connection between the need for political
reforms (i.e., a representative legislature) and the need to
feed the hungry. Austrian military intervention inspired an
equally dangerous tie between political radicalism and
paranoiac xenophobia. Particularly important, though, according
to Schama's most interestingly unfashionable thesis, the
revolutionaries believed in their own Rousseauean rhetoric,
their demagogic speeches and pamphlets (Marat and others were
successful journalists), their repeated appeals to patriotic
bloodshed. Schama writes, "From the first year . . . violence
was not just an unfortunate side effect from which enlightened
Patriots could selectively avert their eyes; it was the
Revolution's source of collective energy. It was what made the
Revolution revolutionary."

    Schama's interpretation is deeply conservative (a viewpoint
with a current vogue all its own), and he is quite aware that
violence has brought other Jacobins to power in other
child-eating revolutions. King Louis did not deserve the
guillotine, Schama argues, and the supposed achievements of the
revolution hardly justified all the other killing. When it
ended, new taxes had replaced old taxes, and the poor remained
as poor as ever. If there is one serious weakness in Schama's
portrait, it is his intense antipathy toward the Jacobin
leaders, the Robespierres and Marats, whom he presents less as
misguided zealots than as monsters. Indeed, the guillotining of
Robespierre in 1794, where Schama abruptly ends his chronicles
of a ruined France, seems almost to give him a sense of grim
satisfaction.

    Still, there is no need for ideology to teach us such
lessons when history does it so much more subtly -- by means of
Napoleon's elephant and all the rest of what Schama calls
history's "chaotic authenticity." Thus the Marquis de
Condorcet, eminent mathematician, philosopher and advocate of
the republic, ended fleeing for his life through the outskirts
of Paris. Stopping at an inn, he ordered a restorative omelet.
When asked how many eggs he wanted in it, he thoughtlessly asked
for a dozen. He was promptly arrested as a suspicious character
and locked up in a prison cell, where he was later found
mysteriously dead.