Meanwhile, it became clear that true fiscal reforms could be achieved only with the support of representative bodies. Policies especially were inconsistent and ineffective. With no two ministers following the same strategy, fiscal In Louis XVI, royal irresolution produced political incoherence.
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But he is right to shift blame for failure from structural dysfunctions to ''circumstances and policies'' - that is, to menĪnd, above all, to a well-meaning but indecisive King, who was addicted to changing ministers in midstream. Schama underestimates structural problems that no 18th-century regime effectively coped with. Nevertheless, aggressive, reforming managers in high office did not manage to reform Īnd the money crisis turned into the political crisis that led the monarchy to its end. And those who sought to manage it on the King's behalf were more than empty heads presiding over empty purses. But in 18th-century perspective, even this huge debt was neitherĮxceptional nor unmanageable. By 1788, debt service accounted for almost half of current revenues. There were serious problems, similar to those faced by other contemporary regimes: venality of office (51,000 public offices held as private property) facilitated cash flow but blocked reform tax exemptions at the top encouraged tax evasion at the bottom.īut the root of the fiscal problems was the cost of armaments, coupled with resistance to new taxes. Queen Marie Antoinette was lampooned as Madame Deficit, but expenditure on all Court items, 6 or 7 percent of the total budget, was about half what the British spent on their monarchy. The bureaucratic personnel of the 1780's would be recalled to office by Napoleon in the late 1790's, to mend the mess the Revolution left behind. Like the elite, government was less interested in tradition than in novelty and greater efficiency. Was fired more by hostility to modernization, attempted or proposed, than by the will to speed it forward. Indeed, he argues, revolutionary violence Schama insists, was troubled more by addiction to change than by resistance to it. Ideas, the Marquis de Lafayette and his equally noble friends were no exception and the reign of Louis XVI, Mr. Schama says was known in America as Marcus D. Far from rejecting the social and intellectual lessons of the Enlightenment, nobles echoed them: not least the gentleman Mr. Far from offering an obstacle to progress, the greatest modernizers in metallurgy, mines, shipbuilding or street Two-thirds of noble families had become ennobled during the 17th and 18th centuries: a nobleman was no more thanĪ successful bourgeois and capitalist enterprise among nobles was as vigorous as among their bourgeois counterparts.
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Neither stagnant nor reactionary, the French nobility,Īt least its most audible and visible members, were more open to new blood, ideas and ventures than they had ever been. The old regime was not old, nor did it act anachronistic, fusty or decrepit. Schama, was no bourgeois thrust against stodgy despotism or anachronistic aristocracy.
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His arguments, though, are embedded in narrative.
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But nowhere more than here does he challenge enduring prejudices with prejudices of his own. Schama, who teaches historyĪt Harvard University, has committed other large and readable tomes. Provocative and stylish, Simon Schama's account of the first few years of the great Revolution in France, and of the decades that led up to it, is thoughtful, informed and profoundly revisionist. Once hefted, however, and well balanced on lap, knee or chest, ''Citizens'' will prove hard to put down. Those who like to do their poring lying down will scarcely rush to take up this book. Section 7, Column 3 Book Review Deskīy EUGEN WEBER Eugen Weber, a professor of history at the University of California at Los Angeles, is the author of ''Peasants Into Frenchmen.''ĬITIZENS A Chronicle of the French Revolution. March 19, 1989, Sunday, Late City Final Edition