When I started writing [Citizens], I thought the revolution of 1789 then goes on the skids and turns into the Terror of 1793. But I became more and m… - Simon Schama

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When I started writing [Citizens], I thought the revolution of 1789 then goes on the skids and turns into the Terror of 1793. But I became more and more alarmed by what happened in 1789, and more and more bleak about what it is we are supposed to be celebrating. It dawned on me that no sooner had the Declaration of the Rights of Man been signed than a law was passed which allowed opening of mail, stopped freedom of movement and had a brutal attitude to who was a patriot and who was not.
Then there was the violence. It was not the fact of decapitation so much as the way these people self-consciously understood what you could do with violence, the way violence could construct allegiances. I'm not saying no good came of the revolution. There was the definition of a citizen with equal rights before the law, the emancipation of the Jews and black slaves – these were intrinsically noble. But the way the revolution enacts these doesn't accidentally produce violence. It necessarily produces violence. And if you look at the landscape of France in 1799 with Bonapartist military dictatorship, the balance is unhappy rather than happy.