Citizens: A Chronicle of The French Revolution

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policies especially were inconsistent and ineffective. Meanwhile, it became clear that true fiscal reforms could be achieved only with the support of representative bodies. But the re-creation of an assembly representative enough to with equality. But, in Mr. Schama's words, asking for the impossible is one good definition of a revolution. warfare, with its fallout of militarism, nationalism and xenophobia; the disaster of the Vendee, where civil war wiped out one-third of the population; the ruin of port cities and textile towns that had been the growth areas of 18th-century

Simon Schama Quotes (Author of The Power of Art) - Goodreads Simon Schama Quotes (Author of The Power of Art) - Goodreads

In 2010, Schama was a financial donor to Oona King's unsuccessful campaign to become Mayor of London. [41]

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You can get a taste of his style in his recent New Yorker article (link below), but he basically introduces the reader to a subject with colorful characters and the social climate that they lived in. I certainly didn't know that Ben Franklin was a fashionable superstar in France for a time, or that one of the causes of the Revolution was financial mismanagement. Such was the symbolic power of the Bastille to gather to itself all the miseries for which ''despotism'' was now held accountable, that reality was enhanced by Gothic fantasies. . . . Ancient pieces of armor were declared to be fiendish

Citizens - Penguin Books UK

Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution. Illustrated, 948 pp. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1989. With the likes of Saint-Just and Robespierre (a state scholarship boy, typical of old regime meritocracy), doublespeak was in the saddle. Murderously weepy, sadistically moralistic, fanatically denouncing as fanatics those who did not share their fanaticism, At this time, Schama wrote his first book, Patriots and Liberators, which won the Wolfson History Prize. The book was originally intended as a study of the French Revolution, but as published in 1977, it focused on the effect of the Patriottentijd revolution of the 1780s in the Netherlands, and its aftermath. [9] [10]Somehow the revolutionary government found a way to pull itself together. The call for a levée en masse filled its ranks, and industry was militarized to provide weapons and supplies. France’s situation was helped by the reluctance of the British, Austrians, and Prussians to press the military campaigns too far, in part because they did not want to bear the costs of another war, and in part because it seemed possible that the revolution might collapse under its own weight at any moment. This book attempts to confront directly the painful problem of revolutionary violence. Anxious lest they give way to sensationalism, or be confused with counter-revolutionary prosecutors, historians have erred on the side of squeamishness in dealing with this issue. I have returned it to the centre of the story since it seems to me that it was not merely an unfortunate by-product of politics, or the disagreeable instrument by which other more virtuous ends were accomplished… In some depressingly unavoidable sense, violence was the Revolution itself.” That the two religions were engaged in a contested Passover–Easter dialogue at this formative moment is not in doubt. Even after the Council of Nicaea in 325, with Constantine himself present, separated out the two holidays and made sure that should they fall on the same day it would be the Jews who moved their Passover, that combative dialogue continued.”

Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution: Schama, Simon

Although the king remained popular, his Austrian wife Marie Antoinette was hated. She had been an immature teenage bride who had imbibed the Romanticism of Rousseau and affected a simple posture that was completely at odds with the behavior that France expected of a queen. She also chose her confidants poorly, allowing them to bring many friends and relatives into well paid government sinecures. She lost whatever respect she might otherwise have had, and became the object of scurrilous accusations, from attempting to betray France to every conceivable sexual perversion. Ironically, as the crisis deepened, she matured and became the King’s best advisor, “[Mirabeau] was also impressed by her fortitude and intelligence, especially when he compared it with the King’s hapless irresolution. ‘The King has only one man on whom he could depend, he remarked -- his wife’” (p. 533)

Sugarman, Daniel (6 November 2017). "Schama, Sebag-Montefiore and Jacobson unite to condemn Labour antisemitism". The Jewish Chronicle . Retrieved 2 May 2018. This is an excellent, enjoyable narrative about the period surrounding and including the French revolution, but it is not a great history. Schama does make his points, two of them being (1) that things weren't so bad and were getting better in 1789 and (2) the revolution was a bloody and unnecessary affair. He does not, however, prove much of everything by what amounts to a rather unsystematic collection of facts and anecdotes. Nor does he pay sufficient attention to what the events of the revolution, exemplified by, say, "The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen" meant to the world. Compared to Lefebvre's treatment, his is weak. Still, it is quite fun to read and the points he makes are worthy of pursuit. at Harvard University, has committed other large and readable tomes. But nowhere more than here does he challenge enduring prejudices with prejudices of his own. His arguments, though, are embedded in narrative. Above all, he tells

Citizens - Penguin Books UK Citizens - Penguin Books UK

Walvin, James (3 September 2005). "Review: Rough Crossings by Simon Schama". The Guardian . Retrieved 16 September 2018. Freedland, Jonathan (6 October 2017). "Simon Schama: finding the light in the darkness of the Jewish story – review". The Guardian . Retrieved 24 October 2017. In 2018, Simon Schama wrote and presented five of the nine episodes of Civilisations, a reboot of the 1969 series by Kenneth Clark. [37] Personal life [ edit ]He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. While I'm impressed by Schama's ornate prose style, I still admit some doubt over the story he tells, even if I am no expert on the country or the period. Were all of the peasantry as violent as he describes? Was the Ancien Régime really as dynamic and innovative as he makes them out to be in the early chapters? He talks about mistakes in decision-making and the collapse of state capacity, and so understates any discussion of economics and prices. men like Robespierre stood for the will of the people as long as the people's will matched their own visions. Ever offering to die for their beliefs, they got the sour satisfaction of undergoing the martyrdom they professed to Simon Schama Antidote". History News Network. Archived from the original on 18 June 2006 . Retrieved 28 March 2007. This is where circumstances altered cases. For two years before the Estates General assembled at Versailles in May 1789, harvests had been rotten, food supplies were short and opportunities to earn a living wage in an agriculture-driven economy had shrunk.