Re: [Marxism] Saint Simon Schama's Must See TV

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

J Rothermel wrote:
> http://www.bbcamerica.com/content/348/index.jsp
> 
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UW3fVMXg8ns
> 
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCQrnSQ4rTo
> 

I don't understand why you are recommending this. Schama is a 
reactionary. His scholarship on the French Revolution is part of the 
anti-revolutionary "revisionist" school. I doubt he'd have anything 
interesting to say about American politics or history.

http://www.enotes.com/contemporary-literary-criticism/schama-simon

Citizens, one of several books about the French Revolution published 
during the bicentennial year, is a revisionist attempt to debunk various 
myths of the French Revolution, particularly those that portray the 
revolutionaries as high-minded and justifiably violent. For example, 
Schama claims that the celebrated storming of the Bastille resulted in 
the liberation of a mere seven individuals from a relatively comfortable 
incarceration, which Schama contrasts with the frenzied murder of at 
least fourteen hundred prisoners in Paris by the revolutionaries in 
September 1792. Schama's description of the Revolution's paradox 
suggests a flawed ideal at the heart of the turmoil. He argues that the 
peasants who fought in the streets of Paris were reacting against the 
modern economic reforms being proposed by supporters of the previous 
regimes. In fact, Schama asserts, “Bloodshed was not the unfortunate 
by-product of revolution, it was the source of its energy.” History's 
villains—the monarchy and upper classes—become in Schama's chronicle the 
individuals who were transforming feudal France into a modern state. 
Schama extends an argument first advanced by Alexis de Tocqueville that 
the Bourbon dynasty was well on its way to modernizing France in the 
eighteenth century. Contrary to conventional historical interpretation, 
Schama suggests that the Revolution hindered modernization rather than 
precipitating or accelerating it. Schama places the Reign of Terror—a 
term describing a lengthy span of trials and executions in France—rather 
than the National Assembly's Declaration of the Rights of Man, squarely 
at the center of the Revolution. The essence of the Revolution, in 
Schama's view, was its reliance on mass orchestrated murder to achieve 
political goals. Furthermore, Schama contends that France under the 
control of revolutionary leader Maximilien Robespierre was the first 
modern totalitarian state. Schama chronicles with significant detail the 
conflict between the grand rhetoric of the French Revolution and its 
atrocities and links the ideals of the Revolution with the modernization 
of war machines, culminating in the disastrous armed conflicts of the 
twentieth century.

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