Frederick Davidson gives his usual sterling performance. There's a summing up of what happened to who, but less attention to what - if anything - it all meant. It's a long, fascinating account, whose only fault is that it ends rather abruptly after the death of Robespierre. The Revolution was self-consciously symbolic and declamatory, and it made for magnificent "scenes" of political debate. He gives full play to the political history of the various factions: the Montagnards, the Girondins, the Jacobins and to the successive waves of political and sometimes physical extermination carried out by one faction against another.
Schama doesn't focus exclusively on this aspect of the revolution.
Later still, this place of refuge was stormed again, with even worse butchery, and he was tried and condemned to the guillotine.
Later that palace was stormed by a mob, who killed and beheaded his defenders, and forced him to take refuge elsewhere. The king was at Versailles a mob stormed the palace, killed and beheaded his defenders, and forced him to move to his palace in the city, the Tuilleries, where they could keep an eye on him. Heads were being removed as trophies by ordinary people for years before the guillotine made the process systematic. Once killed by a Paris mob, the victim's body was likely to be torn apart - literally - with parts paraded around the city on the ends of pikes. I'm writing this in the wake of recent terrorist attacks in Paris and I hesitate to say this because of the timing, but Paris is no stranger to the savage violence of the mob on people perceived as enemies. It's also the place to go for stomach-churning descriptions of mob violence. Schama emphasizes the great personalities involved in the French Revolution: this is the place to go for full portraits of the vacillating but sometimes courageous Louis XVI for the puritanical Robespierre the devilish Marat, with his repulsive skin disease and calculating opportunists like Talleyrand.
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