Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution

976 pp. "Instead of the dying Old Regime, Schama presents an ebullient country, vital and inventive, infatuated with novelty and technology--a strikingly fresh view of Louis XVI's France." "This well-written, thoroughly documented book should be on every high-school library shelf. It explains the self-destructive, bloody orgy that occurred in France but not in England or Prussia, countries in similar states of poverty and with similarly deprived, disenfranchised populaces. Schama theorizes that the cause of France's revolution lies in the self-deception of the ruling intelligentsia, who believed that they could make a Utopian France by allowing controlled violence, murder, and the destruction of property in the name of liberty, and all to exist simultaneously with good government. Schama presents Talleyrand, Lafayette, and others with more understanding than they are given in most histories, setting them amidst a web of violence of their own making. This book speaks to today's world, as nations strive to move from despotism to democracy." -- School Library Journal. CONTENTS: Preface; Powers of Recall -- Forty Years Later; Alterations: The France of Louis XVI; New Men: Fathers and Sons, Heroes for the Times; Blue Horizons, Red Ink: Les Beaux Jours, Oceans of Debt, Money Farms and Salt Wars, Last Best Hopes: The Coachman, Last Best Hopes: The Banker; Absolutism Attacked: The Adventures of M. Guillaume, Sovereignty Redefined: The Challenge of the Parlements, Noblesse Oblige?; The Cultural Construction of a Citizen: Collecting an Audience, Casting Roles: Children of Nature, Projecting the Voice: The Echo of Antiquity, Spreading the Word; The Costs of Modernity: How New Was the Old Regime?, Visions of the Future; Expectations; Body Politics: Uterine Furies and Dynastic Obstructions, Calonne's Portrait, Notable Exceptions; Suicides, 1787-1788: The Revolution Next Door, The Last Government of the Old Regime, The Swan Song of the Parlements, The Day of Tiles, End Games; Grievances, Autumn 1788 - Spring 1789: 1788, Not 1688, The Great Divide, August - December 1788, Hunger and Anger, Dead Rabbits, Torn Wallpaper; March - April 1789; Improvising a Nation: Two Kinds of Patriot, Novus Rerum Nascitur Ordo, May - June 1789, Tableaux Vivants, June 1789; Bastille, July 1789: Two Kinds of Palace, Spectacles: The Battle for Paris, July 12-13, 1789, Buried Alive? Myths and Realities in the Bastille, The Man Who Loved Rats, The Fourteenth of July 1789, The Afterlife of the Bastille: Patriote Palloy and the New Gospel, Paris, King of the French; Choices; Reason and Unreason, July - November 1789: Phantoms, July - August, Powers of Persuasion, July - September, The Quarrel of Women, October 5 - 6; Acts of Faith, October 1789 - July 1790: Living History, Apostasy, Acting Citizens, Sacred Spaces; Departures, August 1790 - July 1791: Magnitudes of Change, The Incontinence of Polemics, Mirabeau Pays His Debts, Rites of Passage; Marseillaise, September 1791 - August 1792: Finished Business?, Crusaders, Marseillaise; Impure Blood, August 1792 - January 1793: A Holocaust for Liberty, Goethe at Valmy, One Cannot Reign Innocently, Trial, Two Deaths; Virtue and Death: Enemies of the People? Winter - Spring 1793: Straitened Circumstances, Sacred Hearts: The Rising in the Vendee, Paltry Merchandise, March - June, Saturn and His Children; Terror is the Order of the Day: June 1793 - Frimaire An II (December 1793), Blood of the Martyr, Terror is the Order of the Day, Obliterations; The Politics of Terpitude: She-Wolves and Other Dangers, The End of Indulgence; Chiliasm, April - July 1794: Death of a Family, The School of Virtue, Thermidor; Epilogue; Reunions; Sources and Bibliography; Index; Photographic Credits.