SOURCE: A review of Citizens, in Historian, Vol. LII, No. 4, August, 1990, pp. 642–43.

In the following review of Citizens, Slavin objects to Schama's prejudiced view of the French Revolution as a needlessly bloody and futile historical episode.

Robespierre chided his moderate opponents for “wanting a revolution without a revolution.” Simon Schama [Citizens] wants no revolution at all. In “shaking off the mythology of the revolution” (see the interview by Mervyn Rothstein in The New York Times, 27 April 1989), Schama has created his own mythology. He admits that he does not believe in “pure objectivity”—what historian does? But the reader has the right to expect of him a fair treatment of the revolutionaries as they undergo a profound social and political crisis. Unfortunately, as Thomas Paine said of Edmund Burke, “He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird.”

Schama sees the Revolution as a series of scandalous events. In...