SOURCE: “A Revolutionary Romance with Violence,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, May 21, 1989, p. 4.

In the following review, Maniquis offers an unfavorable assessment of Citizens.

For the bicentennial of the French Revolution, Simon Schama sings no birthday songs, only litanies on the “normalization of evil.” Following some recent French historians, and ideas that go back to Alexis de Tocqueville's “The Ancien Regime and the Revolution” (1856), he argues [in Citizens] that much of what was progressive in the Revolution was already developing in the 18th Century. The revolution was not, (as many other historians point out) bourgeois, a mere fantasy of Marxists. Rather, it interrupted the bourgeoisifying of France, impeded modernization, and established human rights only to suppress them. The revolution was a bizarre process of demanding human rights only to suppress them. Worst of all, it was a vast spectacle of horror held together from beginning to end...