1989, the bicentennial of the fall of the Bastille and the ‘official’ start of the French Revolution, saw an enormous body of literature flood the market. Intending a celebration of the Rights of Man, President Mitterrand perhaps expected most works to be favourable, congratulating the revolutionaries for contributing to the progress of humanity. Instead, many publications emphasised the bloodthirsty nature of the Revolution, criticising the Terror, attacks on the Vendée rebels and federalists, the ‘armed missionaries’marching across the continent, and the man held responsible for it all, Robespierre.

Simon Schama’s Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (London: Penguin, 1989) is undoubtedly the best of these. Taking the narrative approach, he appeals both to the mass market and the specialist. Schama’s beautifully descriptive prose follows the causes and course of the French Revolution from the 1770s to the fall of Robespierre. Through his detailed 740-page work he draws from disciplines across the historical spectrum, including art history and women’s studies, cultural history and the history of science, as well as the expected political and economic strands. The thrust of his argument is simple: the Revolution did not constitute a step forward; it delayed progress and consumed everything – including liberty – in its path. Harsh criticism of the Revolution is balanced by a forgiving line on the French monarchy. Thus, his discussion on Louis XVI’s expensive and exclusive coronation is more slapdash than Colin Jones’ carefully reasoned approach, scapegoating the clergy for bad decisions rather than assessing the deep divide in Louis’ character.

Schama’s style is deliberately provocative, his introduction defensive. Narrative, Schama claims, is necessary to understand this ‘haphazard and chaotic event’, despite the risks of being ‘mischievously old-fashioned.’ The text is littered with such polemical statements as ‘historians have been accustomed to tracing the sources of France’s financial predicament to the structure of its institutions…nothing of the sort was true’, while references to ‘historians never tire of…’ and ‘historians at this point…’, distance him from the profession, adding further to his idea of personal rebellion. Yet there is something tongue-in-cheek about these statements: his is a challenge to the established historiography of the Revolution, intended more to provoke debate than to silence it. And although there is undoubtedly something mischievous about his writing, his reasoning is sound. A thematic approach gives unintentional weight to one aspect over another, and an understanding of the key players, written almost biographically, is necessary to see that events were shaped by those men – and women – who acted in them.

Objectivity, Schama claims, is unobtainable, and so Citizens is subjective; ‘an exercise in animated description’. This infinitely adds to its readability, although the emotional tug is taken beyond the requirements of non-fiction. Tears prick the eyes over the final separation of Louis from his family and the fate of young Louis-Charles. The sense of loss is palpable during the description of Malesherbes’ final moments awaiting his meeting with the National Razor, watching the decapitation of his daughter and his granddaughter. But did Schama really need to write of the ‘old man’s’ ‘likely reflection that by not heeding his younger daughter’s advice to emigrate he had somehow attracted the attention of the Tribunal and destroyed his family’,to add further pathos: is it not clumsy to salute the death of this bastion of reason with the Romantic pull of emotion?

In keeping with the narrative form, the book has no endnotes (although sources and bibliography are provided by chapter at the end). For a work of popular history, this is understandable although now uncommon. However, fact-checking is not easy, and a cynic might wonder if this is a secondary reason. Despite this, he is well-read and familiar with the subject, proven by his analysis of both the written sources and the artefacts, and it is somewhat unfair to criticise Citizens for lacking in historical debate. There is a firm grounding in secondary works, with the narrative style not fully ruling out academic discussion. Analysis is not overstated, but Schama knows the historiography, has his own, very decided, opinions on it, and feels he is making a valuable contribution.

In Schama’s desire to show happenstance he focuses on the individual decisions, which ‘More than any inequity in a society based on privilege, or the violent cycles of famine that visited France in the 1780s’, were the cause of the Revolution. However, it should be noted that the restrictions those privileges placed on the ‘actors’ affected their decisions, and limited options. The fiscal crisis, for example, was difficult to resolve exactly because France’s institutions were archaic. That is not to say the Revolution was predetermined since the reign of Louis XIV, but that something had to change. The ‘cast’ merely provided the way in which change occurred.

Despite this, Schama attempts to develop a number of themes, with varying success. The least well-developed is his consideration of the role of the family in cultural ideology. The clashing roles of women, from the ideal domesticated mother to the reality of thinking, independent women, are explored particularly in the relationship between Louis and Marie-Antionette. The queen’s Romantic inclinations, competing with the country’s expectations of her, led both to a decrease in her popularity and to questions over Louis’s ability to govern his family, let alone the state. However, this analysis, which starts so well, is quickly subsumed by the thrill of violence.

The clash between liberty and the power of the state is better developed, particularly when ‘power’ includes not just military, but economic, survival: liberty is impossible when the state is threatened. This draws in Schama’s third theme, that of the Revolution in context, as part of eighteenth-century France rather than as separate from it. According to his view, the Revolution did not represent a sudden break from the past and the start of a new era. Instead, it was part of the continuing narrative of change within France. ‘French culture and society in the reign of Louis XVI,’ argues Schama, was ‘troubled more by its addiction to change than by resistance to it’. Drawing on cultural as well as political evidence, Schama shows that sections of the nobility embraced revolutionary ideas with glee. It was the representatives of the ancien régime – parlementaires, noblesse d'épée (including a prince of the blood) and the salon regulars – who provided the Revolution with its leaders. The ‘popular’ revolution of the sans-culottes and the provinces was, then, a reaction against ‘modernization, rather than…impatience with its speed of progress’. To Schama, the Maximum and other protectionist laws show the traditional nature of the Revolution. That he was writing primarily for a capitalist, laissez-faire audience would, of course, have no impact on definitions of ‘traditional’ and ‘revolutionary’.

Schama’s main preoccupation is with violence. Unlike previous generations of historians, particularly those supporting the ‘classic’ French view, he considers the Terror not as an aberration but as integral to the success of the Revolution. To Schama, the Revolution depended ‘on organized killing to accomplish political ends’ and a consideration of violence is therefore essential. The gory accounts of suffering, such as the ‘vertical deportations’ at Nantes, where stripped and bound rebels were placed by their hundreds in sinking boats, will appeal to fans of Crichton and Clancy. This sort of sensationalism undoubtedly helps sell books – Citizens was a New York Times best-seller and is still in the top 10,000 on Amazon – but Schama resolutely insists that ‘it does historians no credit to look aside in the name of scholarly objectivity’. To what extent Schama believes this is questionable: that he paraphrases the same justification at least five times smacks of a need to convince himself as well as the reader. His choice of dating the start of the Revolution to July 1789, and finishing with the fall of Robespierre five years before its end, according to his own dates, is suspicious. That Citizens doesn’t include the White Terror – a glaring omission considering the number of pages dedicated to the Jacobin Terror – may be for expediency’s sake, but is likely determined by his obvious sympathy for the victims of 1789 to 1794. At the other end, if a start date of 1788 had been chosen, perhaps with the inability of the Notables or the parlements to find a solution to the economic crisis, then political instability rather than violence would be key: as Schama says, ‘the Notables were the first revolutionaries’.

There is a reason Citizens is popular. It redefined debate on the French Revolution, the role of violence within it, and the need to consider it holistically. It challenged prevailing notions of its causes, its effects – both short- and long-term – and how it was studied. What’s more, it did so during a time of celebration, with an obvious snub to traditional historians. In utilising the narrative format, Schama rose above the traditional history and the historians who presented it, while at the same time provoking response, thus keeping his argument in both the public and the academic eye. But it is the quality of his language, the fullness of description, and the well-argued plea to emotion that, whatever the professional failings of the book, make Citizens worth reading.