Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm has described the book in 1990 as being "exceptionally stylish and eloquent" and "extremely well-read." Nevertheless, he considered Citizens to be, above all, a political denunciation of the revolution and a continuation of a tradition in British literature and popular consciousness (established by the writings of Edmund Burke and Thomas Carlyle, reinforced by Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities and promulgated in subsequent pop literature), which has defined the Revolution foremost by the Terror. It was what made the Revolution revolutionary." In short, “From the very beginning violence was the motor of revolution.” Schama considers that the French Revolutionary Wars were the logical corollary of the universalistic language of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, and of the universalistic principles of the Revolution which led to inevitable conflict with old-regime Europe. it was the Revolution's source of collective energy. "The terror," declared Schama in the book, "was merely 1789 with a higher body count violence. Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution is a book by the historian Simon Schama, published in 1989, the bicentenary of the French Revolution.
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