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.