SOURCE: “The Most Sublime Event,” in Nation, March 12, 1990, pp. 351–58, 360.

In the following negative review of Citizens, Barber objects to Schama's biased preoccupation with mob violence during the French Revolution, his apparent sympathy for the dethroned aristocracy, and his disdain for the democratic ideals of the revolutionaries.

Napoleon liked to say history is fable agreed upon. Anyone who reads more than one history of the French Revolution knows that Napoleon had it exactly backward: History is truth not agreed upon. That is to say, while historical events may possess some essential core meaning, a truth visible to wholly impartial spectators (the Estates-General were convened in Versailles in 1789; Louis XVI was subsequently tried and executed), there are and can be no impartial spectators and thus there is no such thing as historical truth. For however wedded to impartiality historians may be, they always live in two worlds: a world of...