Will I love Citizens?

No artist exists in a vacuum. Certainly, Vigée Le Brun had little interest in politics, but political events shaped her life and the world she inhabited. It is, therefore, essential to understand the times in which Vigée Le Brun lived.  

History and art history professor, documentarian, and cultural essayist, award-winning author Simon Schama’s Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution presents Louis XVI’s France as vibrant, dynamic, and innovative, its people fascinated by novelty and technology. Schama’s gripping style combines entertainment and scholarship to make this book a convincing social, cultural, and narrative account of the French Revolution.

'Citizens' reexamines the events of the French revolution. So many cliches have surrounded this most unexpected and almost inexplicable series of events, and many of them are wrong. Schama examines the evidence and takes us through the events with an eye for the important detail. The removal of the monarchy and the reign of terror needed the confluence of a great many events, and among them were pamphlets full of scandal and completely false – but which made an impact. Surely that could never happen today?

This book is an erudite deep-dive into a topic familiar to many, though superficially (as reading the book makes abundantly clear.) No one who reads it will ever see a Bastille Day celebration in quite the same way.

Schama emphasizes how the hideous violence often and justifiably associated with the later Reign of Terror under Maximilien Robespierre was there right from the beginning in 1788-89. He also convincingly demonstrates how much of the aristocracy and even members of the extended royal family enabled the revolutionaries by criticizing their own class, simply because it was fashionable to do so.

It’s chilling… show more.

Mr. Schama’s chronicle is considered the essential historical tome of the French Revolution. He presents the background and events leading to the revolution through its end when Robespierre was executed. The author leaves no stone unturned and many of the people, events, and outcomes have chilling similarities to our contemporary world more than 230-years later.

I like how Mr. Schama sticks to the facts. The reader is allowed to digest the events and reach their own conclusions. I think the lessons from the French Revolution are very fluid and every generation can learn from them.

At one point during the… show more.

There are so many good books on the Enlightenment era, but my favorite ones have tended to deal with events in France. Among my preferred reads is Simon Schama’s Citizens, which I first breezed through in graduate school when it appeared in 1998. Citizens not only provides stunning, jaw-dropping insight into the events of the revolution, it confers an unforgettable texture to the main characters. (The images I have of Danton and Robespierre still come from the pages of this book, despite having read many other works on the same subject.) In recent years some critics have taken the… show more.