SOURCE: “The Dreams of Reason,” in New Republic, April 17, 1989, pp. 35–39.

In the following review, Stone offers a positive assessment of Citizens, which he praises as “a stunningly virtuoso performance” despite its failure to provide the “serious historian” with adequate explanation, rather than description, of the French Revolution.

This is no ordinary book [Citizens]. It is over 900 pages long and it is illustrated by over 200 plates. It has no footnotes at all (which I strongly deplore). It calls itself a “Chronicle,” a word no self-respecting historian has used in his title for over a century. It is a main selection for the Book of the Month Club, which means that it already has a guaranteed sale of half a million copies, while the first printing of the trade edition is 40,000 copies. It is, therefore, already the best-selling American book of the year to commemorate the bicentennial of the French...