(2 of 2)
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.