Citizens is the ultimate tragedy. You'd be hard-pressed to find a story riddled with so many good intentions that saw everything go so horribly wrong. Schama's mission is to paint what he considers the most accurate assessment of the French revolution, from the years just prior to the storming of the Bastille through the Reign of Terror. (I'd recommend following the reading of this book with Andrew Roberts' Napoleon: A Life, to continue the story). In a too-lengthy introduction, Schama notes that authors have either celebrated the revolution, and thus whitewashed history, or have taken a Francophobe perspective to the story and thus overlooked the good many were trying to accomplish. By the time you finish this massive tome--it's quite long--you'll realize that those whitewashing the horrors of this period should really be ashamed of themselves, especially the cover-up attempts of the suppression of a rebellion in western France that approaches that of genocide.
In fact, a key takeaway for me from reading this book is just how much evil was committed by individuals in the name of the public good. (A great example, of course, is how the ruling Jacobins during the Reign of Terror operated out of a body called the "Committee of Public Safety," in which individual safety could be forfeit with a single accusation by someone with a beef against you.) On only a couple of occasions does Schama make reference to how many atrocities were committed about 150 years later by everyday soldiers and citizens of Germany and its holdings during World War II, but there's no question that the ability to disengage one's moral compass to participate in some sort of larger "movement" is hardly unique to Germany (or Africa or Asia).
I also found myself reflecting on how fortunate early Americans were that their constitution stuck and that they had leaders who were willing to compromise. The fact is that France didn't really settle in to a stable constitutional government until about 80 years after the storming of the Bastille (and that fell in about two minutes when Hitler invaded). We expect countries in the developing world to take to democracy as quickly and bloodlessly as British colonists did in the colonies that became America, but the French were a highly educated and civilized people with far greater understanding of public policy, and yet they just ended up dividing into bloodier and bloodier factions. Had I lived in France at the time, I would have welcomed Napoleon's dictatorial rule, because at least he established with the Napoleonic Code a consistent rule of law for all classes and religions.
Ugh. So much bloodshed. So many dashed dreams and hopes. So many innocents suffering. If I were French, I would not want anyone to read this book, ever. But I think everyone who participates in any way in discussions about public policy--which should be any voting citizen--should set aside the significant amount of time necessary to read this book and should then do so, cover to cover.
There
are all kinds of reasons. In the first place, the history of France and
the United States are very closely twinned together at this time.
Lafayette discovers freedom in his momentous journey to America in the
war and brings back some of that spirit of freedom, some of that
determination to found a new kind of political world, to France. He
wasn't the only one either. There are a whole group of young, rich,
well-educated nobles who go out and fight in the American war -- a man
called Alexandre de Lameth, for example -- who come back and become
really very determined revolutionaries.
I think, though, there is actually not just a historical reason. There is a present-day reason. It takes no very profound insight to see that the rest of what remains of this century, the world is going to be very exercised by the fate of freedom, not only in the West either. I think a lot hinges on the road to democracy that's attempted in countries around the world, most notably in, one might say, post-revolutionary empires like China and Russia. There's a lot to be learned from what the French suffered, in my view, in the Revolution about things to avoid as well as things to embrace.
I think, though, there is actually not just a historical reason. There is a present-day reason. It takes no very profound insight to see that the rest of what remains of this century, the world is going to be very exercised by the fate of freedom, not only in the West either. I think a lot hinges on the road to democracy that's attempted in countries around the world, most notably in, one might say, post-revolutionary empires like China and Russia. There's a lot to be learned from what the French suffered, in my view, in the Revolution about things to avoid as well as things to embrace.
LAMB: Here is a shot of the cover of your book. You see it in almost every bookstore. What are we looking at on the cover?
SCHAMA: You're looking at a
miniature model of the Bastille carried by four men who were called the
Apostles of Liberty." There were in fact 80 plus of these people
attired with the bonnet of liberty and they had the hat of liberty on
their head and the striped trousers of the sans-culottes. Sans-culottes
simply means not trouserless, as some people think it does, but it
means without stockings. If you were sans-culottes it meant you wore
these kinds of tight trousers, and you could be deemed to be one of the
people. What counts about the image and what I try making something of
in the book is that it wasn't enough for great events like the storming
of the Bastille to happen in Paris. The Revolution was very conscious
that these had to be communicated.
We're at the beginning of a new kind of political world, a world that's really wrapped up in symbol and emotive things like a cockade in flags. There was a brilliant man called Palloy, who had the contract to demolish the Bastille, who managed to be both an entrepreneur and a great communicator at the same time. What he did was to send these Apostles of Liberty around France to each of the 83 departments, the regions of France, with a kind of Bastille kit. They had the model that you see on the jacket, they had an account of the story of what had happened on the 14th of July, and they even sometimes had actors to explain the events and the great people of the day.
So I wanted the title of the book to be both a kind of revolutionary greeting as well as a description. "Citizens" is an account of the fundamental change from a subject, someone who is in theory at the mercy of an absolute, omnipotent king, into a citizen, someone who governs themselves, as the theory. But, secondly, I wanted it to be "Citizens" with a kind of implicit exclamation mark, the great greeting of the Revolution. The book is about public utterances, the way in which the public world of politics invades the private world, so there are both those senses.
We're at the beginning of a new kind of political world, a world that's really wrapped up in symbol and emotive things like a cockade in flags. There was a brilliant man called Palloy, who had the contract to demolish the Bastille, who managed to be both an entrepreneur and a great communicator at the same time. What he did was to send these Apostles of Liberty around France to each of the 83 departments, the regions of France, with a kind of Bastille kit. They had the model that you see on the jacket, they had an account of the story of what had happened on the 14th of July, and they even sometimes had actors to explain the events and the great people of the day.
So I wanted the title of the book to be both a kind of revolutionary greeting as well as a description. "Citizens" is an account of the fundamental change from a subject, someone who is in theory at the mercy of an absolute, omnipotent king, into a citizen, someone who governs themselves, as the theory. But, secondly, I wanted it to be "Citizens" with a kind of implicit exclamation mark, the great greeting of the Revolution. The book is about public utterances, the way in which the public world of politics invades the private world, so there are both those senses.
LAMB: When did you first get the idea that you wanted to write a book about the French Revolution?
SCHAMA: A long, long time ago,
in fact. This is sort of a silly word, training. I think of auto
mechanics being trained. Historians simply learned it on the job. In so
far as I was trained at graduate school, I was really trained to be a
French historian. My first book, which came out in 1977, an age ago it
seems to be, was meant to be about what happens to revolutions when they
go imperialist, when they decide to become missionary, proclaim their
ideals to the rest of the world but also to act on them in the shape of
armies.
I was interested in the way the French behaved when they started to be in other people's countries -- Holland, Italy, Switzerland and so on. In doing that, I spent a year in Paris in the national archives and thought that that was the topic I was going to do. The year I was sort of making up my mind was 1968, and I had been to Prague, in '65, had a lot of friends in Czechoslovakia. Just reading in the archives and thinking about Czechoslovakia, I must say I felt, God, what happens to revolutions when they become bullies is terribly depressing and terribly predictable. It's fraternity on the terms of the biggest brother. They turn into dictatorships, they annex countries. The Warsaw Pact's code word at the time was fraternal help to Czechoslovakia.
So I thought why not switch the topic and work on the little country that's on the receiving end of all this very heavy good will, in my case, the Dutch. So, not to be long-winded about it, I became a Dutch historian for a long time after that. But the French part of it always intrigued me. I gave lectures at Cambridge in England on France. I never let go of the French side. I had a publisher in England who said to me as I was finishing my last book on Holland -- "How about writing a book on the French Revolution for the bicentennial year?" I said, "There are thousands of books on the French Revolution. The world does not need another book on the French Revolution."
"Listen," he said to me, clever man, "Supposing you had an aunt who knew nothing about the French Revolution, knew nothing about the 18th century, and wanted a history as a great story, what would you give her?" I said, "You have a point." I had been going around preaching that historians ought to tell more stories and stop talking to other historians. So he said, "Why don't you stop talking about it and try to."
Once I started to do it, it all came tumbling out. I did a lot more research. It was a book that really kind of just came pouring out of me, for better or worse, and has the virtues and vices of a literary impulse.
I was interested in the way the French behaved when they started to be in other people's countries -- Holland, Italy, Switzerland and so on. In doing that, I spent a year in Paris in the national archives and thought that that was the topic I was going to do. The year I was sort of making up my mind was 1968, and I had been to Prague, in '65, had a lot of friends in Czechoslovakia. Just reading in the archives and thinking about Czechoslovakia, I must say I felt, God, what happens to revolutions when they become bullies is terribly depressing and terribly predictable. It's fraternity on the terms of the biggest brother. They turn into dictatorships, they annex countries. The Warsaw Pact's code word at the time was fraternal help to Czechoslovakia.
So I thought why not switch the topic and work on the little country that's on the receiving end of all this very heavy good will, in my case, the Dutch. So, not to be long-winded about it, I became a Dutch historian for a long time after that. But the French part of it always intrigued me. I gave lectures at Cambridge in England on France. I never let go of the French side. I had a publisher in England who said to me as I was finishing my last book on Holland -- "How about writing a book on the French Revolution for the bicentennial year?" I said, "There are thousands of books on the French Revolution. The world does not need another book on the French Revolution."
"Listen," he said to me, clever man, "Supposing you had an aunt who knew nothing about the French Revolution, knew nothing about the 18th century, and wanted a history as a great story, what would you give her?" I said, "You have a point." I had been going around preaching that historians ought to tell more stories and stop talking to other historians. So he said, "Why don't you stop talking about it and try to."
Once I started to do it, it all came tumbling out. I did a lot more research. It was a book that really kind of just came pouring out of me, for better or worse, and has the virtues and vices of a literary impulse.
LAMB: From when to when did you actually physically write it?
SCHAMA: It took nearly two years. It was finished in '88, so I suppose between the end of '86 and the fall of '88.
LAMB: Where did you write it?
SCHAMA: I wrote some of it in
France, I wrote some of it overlooking Lake Tahoe, an improbable place,
but I wrote quite a bit of it in France. I wrote a lot of it at home in
Lexington, Massachusetts., a place important for another revolution
where the British Empire started to come unglued. Harvard has a
magnificent French revolutionary collection, in fact, in the library.
There was this wonderful person called Archibald Cary Coolidge, who was
the university librarian at Harvard in the 1920s, and he was a kind of
intellectual robber baron. Harvard had lots of money then, not that it's
completely broke now. He said, 1921 will be Portugal year. He went off
to Portugal and to the University of Coimbra and bought everything he
could lay his hands on. 1925 or thereabouts was France year, and he
bought a collection of 50,000 books, newspapers, documents, posters,
letters, and that helped me a good deal to do some of the work, at least
in research at Harvard.
- See more at: http://www.booknotes.org/Watch/8380-1/Simon+Schama.aspx#sthash.n5myIw1A.dpuf
There
are all kinds of reasons. In the first place, the history of France and
the United States are very closely twinned together at this time.
Lafayette discovers freedom in his momentous journey to America in the
war and brings back some of that spirit of freedom, some of that
determination to found a new kind of political world, to France. He
wasn't the only one either. There are a whole group of young, rich,
well-educated nobles who go out and fight in the American war -- a man
called Alexandre de Lameth, for example -- who come back and become
really very determined revolutionaries.
I think, though, there is actually not just a historical reason. There is a present-day reason. It takes no very profound insight to see that the rest of what remains of this century, the world is going to be very exercised by the fate of freedom, not only in the West either. I think a lot hinges on the road to democracy that's attempted in countries around the world, most notably in, one might say, post-revolutionary empires like China and Russia. There's a lot to be learned from what the French suffered, in my view, in the Revolution about things to avoid as well as things to embrace.
I think, though, there is actually not just a historical reason. There is a present-day reason. It takes no very profound insight to see that the rest of what remains of this century, the world is going to be very exercised by the fate of freedom, not only in the West either. I think a lot hinges on the road to democracy that's attempted in countries around the world, most notably in, one might say, post-revolutionary empires like China and Russia. There's a lot to be learned from what the French suffered, in my view, in the Revolution about things to avoid as well as things to embrace.
LAMB: Here is a shot of the cover of your book. You see it in almost every bookstore. What are we looking at on the cover?
SCHAMA: You're looking at a
miniature model of the Bastille carried by four men who were called the
Apostles of Liberty." There were in fact 80 plus of these people
attired with the bonnet of liberty and they had the hat of liberty on
their head and the striped trousers of the sans-culottes. Sans-culottes
simply means not trouserless, as some people think it does, but it
means without stockings. If you were sans-culottes it meant you wore
these kinds of tight trousers, and you could be deemed to be one of the
people. What counts about the image and what I try making something of
in the book is that it wasn't enough for great events like the storming
of the Bastille to happen in Paris. The Revolution was very conscious
that these had to be communicated.
We're at the beginning of a new kind of political world, a world that's really wrapped up in symbol and emotive things like a cockade in flags. There was a brilliant man called Palloy, who had the contract to demolish the Bastille, who managed to be both an entrepreneur and a great communicator at the same time. What he did was to send these Apostles of Liberty around France to each of the 83 departments, the regions of France, with a kind of Bastille kit. They had the model that you see on the jacket, they had an account of the story of what had happened on the 14th of July, and they even sometimes had actors to explain the events and the great people of the day.
So I wanted the title of the book to be both a kind of revolutionary greeting as well as a description. "Citizens" is an account of the fundamental change from a subject, someone who is in theory at the mercy of an absolute, omnipotent king, into a citizen, someone who governs themselves, as the theory. But, secondly, I wanted it to be "Citizens" with a kind of implicit exclamation mark, the great greeting of the Revolution. The book is about public utterances, the way in which the public world of politics invades the private world, so there are both those senses.
We're at the beginning of a new kind of political world, a world that's really wrapped up in symbol and emotive things like a cockade in flags. There was a brilliant man called Palloy, who had the contract to demolish the Bastille, who managed to be both an entrepreneur and a great communicator at the same time. What he did was to send these Apostles of Liberty around France to each of the 83 departments, the regions of France, with a kind of Bastille kit. They had the model that you see on the jacket, they had an account of the story of what had happened on the 14th of July, and they even sometimes had actors to explain the events and the great people of the day.
So I wanted the title of the book to be both a kind of revolutionary greeting as well as a description. "Citizens" is an account of the fundamental change from a subject, someone who is in theory at the mercy of an absolute, omnipotent king, into a citizen, someone who governs themselves, as the theory. But, secondly, I wanted it to be "Citizens" with a kind of implicit exclamation mark, the great greeting of the Revolution. The book is about public utterances, the way in which the public world of politics invades the private world, so there are both those senses.
LAMB: When did you first get the idea that you wanted to write a book about the French Revolution?
SCHAMA: A long, long time ago,
in fact. This is sort of a silly word, training. I think of auto
mechanics being trained. Historians simply learned it on the job. In so
far as I was trained at graduate school, I was really trained to be a
French historian. My first book, which came out in 1977, an age ago it
seems to be, was meant to be about what happens to revolutions when they
go imperialist, when they decide to become missionary, proclaim their
ideals to the rest of the world but also to act on them in the shape of
armies.
I was interested in the way the French behaved when they started to be in other people's countries -- Holland, Italy, Switzerland and so on. In doing that, I spent a year in Paris in the national archives and thought that that was the topic I was going to do. The year I was sort of making up my mind was 1968, and I had been to Prague, in '65, had a lot of friends in Czechoslovakia. Just reading in the archives and thinking about Czechoslovakia, I must say I felt, God, what happens to revolutions when they become bullies is terribly depressing and terribly predictable. It's fraternity on the terms of the biggest brother. They turn into dictatorships, they annex countries. The Warsaw Pact's code word at the time was fraternal help to Czechoslovakia.
So I thought why not switch the topic and work on the little country that's on the receiving end of all this very heavy good will, in my case, the Dutch. So, not to be long-winded about it, I became a Dutch historian for a long time after that. But the French part of it always intrigued me. I gave lectures at Cambridge in England on France. I never let go of the French side. I had a publisher in England who said to me as I was finishing my last book on Holland -- "How about writing a book on the French Revolution for the bicentennial year?" I said, "There are thousands of books on the French Revolution. The world does not need another book on the French Revolution."
"Listen," he said to me, clever man, "Supposing you had an aunt who knew nothing about the French Revolution, knew nothing about the 18th century, and wanted a history as a great story, what would you give her?" I said, "You have a point." I had been going around preaching that historians ought to tell more stories and stop talking to other historians. So he said, "Why don't you stop talking about it and try to."
Once I started to do it, it all came tumbling out. I did a lot more research. It was a book that really kind of just came pouring out of me, for better or worse, and has the virtues and vices of a literary impulse.
I was interested in the way the French behaved when they started to be in other people's countries -- Holland, Italy, Switzerland and so on. In doing that, I spent a year in Paris in the national archives and thought that that was the topic I was going to do. The year I was sort of making up my mind was 1968, and I had been to Prague, in '65, had a lot of friends in Czechoslovakia. Just reading in the archives and thinking about Czechoslovakia, I must say I felt, God, what happens to revolutions when they become bullies is terribly depressing and terribly predictable. It's fraternity on the terms of the biggest brother. They turn into dictatorships, they annex countries. The Warsaw Pact's code word at the time was fraternal help to Czechoslovakia.
So I thought why not switch the topic and work on the little country that's on the receiving end of all this very heavy good will, in my case, the Dutch. So, not to be long-winded about it, I became a Dutch historian for a long time after that. But the French part of it always intrigued me. I gave lectures at Cambridge in England on France. I never let go of the French side. I had a publisher in England who said to me as I was finishing my last book on Holland -- "How about writing a book on the French Revolution for the bicentennial year?" I said, "There are thousands of books on the French Revolution. The world does not need another book on the French Revolution."
"Listen," he said to me, clever man, "Supposing you had an aunt who knew nothing about the French Revolution, knew nothing about the 18th century, and wanted a history as a great story, what would you give her?" I said, "You have a point." I had been going around preaching that historians ought to tell more stories and stop talking to other historians. So he said, "Why don't you stop talking about it and try to."
Once I started to do it, it all came tumbling out. I did a lot more research. It was a book that really kind of just came pouring out of me, for better or worse, and has the virtues and vices of a literary impulse.
LAMB: From when to when did you actually physically write it?
SCHAMA: It took nearly two years. It was finished in '88, so I suppose between the end of '86 and the fall of '88.
LAMB: Where did you write it?
SCHAMA: I wrote some of it in
France, I wrote some of it overlooking Lake Tahoe, an improbable place,
but I wrote quite a bit of it in France. I wrote a lot of it at home in
Lexington, Massachusetts., a place important for another revolution
where the British Empire started to come unglued. Harvard has a
magnificent French revolutionary collection, in fact, in the library.
There was this wonderful person called Archibald Cary Coolidge, who was
the university librarian at Harvard in the 1920s, and he was a kind of
intellectual robber baron. Harvard had lots of money then, not that it's
completely broke now. He said, 1921 will be Portugal year. He went off
to Portugal and to the University of Coimbra and bought everything he
could lay his hands on. 1925 or thereabouts was France year, and he
bought a collection of 50,000 books, newspapers, documents, posters,
letters, and that helped me a good deal to do some of the work, at least
in research at Harvard.
- See more at: http://www.booknotes.org/Watch/8380-1/Simon+Schama.aspx#sthash.n5myIw1A.dpuf
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