Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
1789 revisited, 21 Jul 1999
By A Customer
This is essential reading for anyone interested in France, history and the Enlightenment, - exactly how much light was brought to mankind by the cast behind the French Revolution of 1789? And,conversely, how dark was the ancien régime really? All the answers in this immensely readable book. If you can only read one book about the crucial moment of European history, this is the one.
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24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
superb guide to a hard topic, 3 Jan 2003
This was the first history book that I read for pleasure, and all the way through, and as such occupies a special place in my heart. I read it during my A-levels studying the rise of the liberal nation state in Europe down to 1870. It wasn't until I read this book though that I had any context in which to place these events, an understanding of the French Revolution is essential to understanding Europe in the nineteenth century and, to a lesser degree, the whole modern world. Schama's history is an excellent place to start.
I was warned at my university course that Schama was controversial, post-modern even, this was before he made his name retelling televisually friendly grand narratives, but I could never really work out why. This is perhaps because, opposed to dryer academic accounts, he chooses to focus on the individuals involved and on minor characters, Malashearbes, Lucy de la Tour du Pin, as much as on the obvious biggies, Lafayette, Danton and of course Robespierre. He also displays an awareness that history and the past are not the same thing and that the former is in a constant state of flux whilst the former remains ultimately unknowable. All admirable traits to my mind.
That said Schama's thesis, whilst convincing seems unremarkable. He argues that the violence that finally consumed the revolution along with all its leading players, and a good few thousand others besides, was inherent from the start. For anybody who ever wondered why Britain's teeming cities and stygian factories never burst into this kind of revolt Schama makes very clear that oppression alone does not make for a revolution. The French revolution, to a greater extent even then the Russian, was the direct result of an internal crisis of the Ancien Regime which due to a massive loss of financial credibility coupled with, perhaps undeserved, scandal found itself without legitimacy.
Schama's main skill is though that he can outline these big themes, and others, introduce us and involve us with a whole plethora of characters and gu | |
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