This Bastille Day, we revisited a review essay by Edwin Frank from our Summer 1995 issue—on ways of writing about revolution, what Simon Schama got wrong in his bicentennial bestseller Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (1989), and why “the recent book that best captures the character and import of the Revolution for our time is instead a novel, plain and simple: Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety”:
Revolutions are acts of hope. That’s why they are the terrain of novelists as much as historians.
Edwin Frank
After twenty years in which revolution has been dismissed as the enthusiasm of under-stimulated professors, over-excitable students, and the odd follower of Bob Avakian, the Republicans have succeeded in making it popular again.
The extraordinary coincidence in 1989 of the fall of the Berlin Wall with the 200th anniversary of the fall of the Bastille seemed to provide irrefutable symbolic evidence that the age of revolution was, at last, over. Radical revolutions had come to nothing, and even the reformist project of social democracy, which had presented itself as the constructive alternative to revolutionary destruction, suddenly appeared historically irrelevant.
At the time, such political reflections found support in scholarly debate on the French Revolution. A new generation of historians—most prominently François Furet—undercut the claim to universality that was the basis for the mythic appeal not only of the French Revolution but of revolution itself. Their work exposed the fundamentally local character of the Revolution’s animosities and did not mince words about its atrocities. The Revolution was not, as Marxist historians had claimed, the transformation of the feudal state by a newly ascendant bourgeoisie, but a bloody distortion of modernizing and liberalizing tendencies that were already at work in the ancien regime forces that, failing the Revolution, might very well have run their course far more effectively. The only world-historical significance the Revolution retained was to anticipate the later barbarisms committed in its name. Otherwise, it was just another detail in the “register of crimes, follies and misfortunes” that Gibbon famously declared history to be. In short, a mistake.
The book that most successfully caught the spirit of that moment in the late eighties, when revolutionary aspiration had come to seem a distraction from the business of everyday life, was Simon Schama’s Citizens. Published to take advantage of the anniversary, Schama’s book was not an original piece of historical research, but a grand and engaging synthesis of revisionist scholarship, distinguished by what can only be called aesthetic distaste before the whole phenomenon of revolution. For Schama, the French Revolution was worse than wrongheaded; it was de trop: its Rousseauian sentimentality and paranoia, the self-consciously histrionic history-making of its major and minor actors, and its rhetorical—leave aside real—overkill made it too deplorably melodramatic for words.
And yet, only six years later, we have a revolution breaking out in the unlikely cause of freeing us from the tyranny of welfare queens. Grotesque as it undoubtedly is, this reactionary appropriation of revolutionary rhetoric helps to reopen the question of the historical significance of revolution. Superficially, it bears out Schama’s sense of the perversity, illiberalism, and vulgarity of the revolutionary spirit. But the bad faith of the Republicans should not disguise either the rootedness of the resentments they have exploited or the failure of the liberal state, so painfully apparent under the avowedly reformist Clinton administration, to establish itself as anything more than an apologist for high finance. And in this light, Schama’s inquest on the French Revolution looks like an exercise in wishful thinking: far from taking the measure of revolutionary reasons and passions, he could be said to have simply averted his face from them. Is there a way to reconceive the history of revolution that will neither exempt it from its failures nor reduce it to them, but will do justice to the power it continues to exercise over our political and moral understandings? The question has come to seem urgent again.
→ Read the full essay here.
|
