SOURCE: “Reinventing the Revolution,” in Partisan Review, Vol. LVII, No. 3, Summer, 1990, pp. 354–62.

In the following review of Citizens, Marcus commends Schama's narrative skill, but finds shortcomings in his “polemical and ideological contentions,” particularly his overemphasis on irrational violence.

Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution by Simon Schama has made a great popular success, and it is largely a merited one. It sums up and brings to bear in one volume a generation of revisionist historical research on the French Revolution and puts it forward in spirited and sustained form. Whatever critical observations I have to make in what follows, and they are considerable, should not be regarded as ingratitudes but as the questionings and perplexities of an improved and sympathetic reader.

Schama's intention, he lets us know from the outset, is to present his work “in the form of a narrative.” Instead of arguments embodied as “structural...