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.