SOURCE: “The French Revolution and the Language of Terror,” in Partisan Review, Vol. LVII, No. 3, Summer, 1990, pp. 345–53.

In the following review of Citizens, Dunn praises Schama's examination of the Terror and his synthesis of narrative detail and conservative judgment in the tradition of Alexis de Tocqueville.

In 1858, eight years after the publication of his book, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, Alexis de Tocqueville recognized the centrality and the mystery of a question he had not even raised in that luminous and seminal work, the question of the virus of the Terror:

There is in this disease of the French Revolution something very strange that I can sense, though I cannot describe it properly or analyze its causes. It is a virus of a new and unknown kind. There have been violent Revolutions in the world before; but the immoderate, violent, radical, desperate, bold, almost crazed and...