![]() Violence is what made the revolution revolutionary.” Violence of the streets and of the state, then, is Schama’s central subject, which he confronts with both high moral seriousness and appalling superficiality. ![]() ![]() Worst of all, it was a vast spectacle of horror held together from beginning to end by popular savagery and official atrocities-”bloodshed was not the unfortunate by-product of revolution, it was the source of its energy. The revolution was a bizarre process of demanding human rights only to suppress them. Rather, it interrupted the bourgeoisifying of France, impeded modernization, and established human rights only to suppress them. ![]() The revolution was not, (as many other historians point out) bourgeois, a mere fantasy of Marxists. For the bicentennial of the French Revolution, Simon Schama sings no birthday songs, only litanies on the “normalization of evil.” Following some recent French historians, and ideas that go back to Alexis de Tocqueville’s “The Ancien Regime and the Revolution” (1856), he argues that much of what was progressive in the Revolution was already developing in the 18th Century. ![]()
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