Books like Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution

From this place & this time forth commences a new era in world history & you can all say that you were present at its birthGoethe, after the battle of ValmyPreludeThis is my impression of this book: Schama and Edward Burke take a stroll through an apple orchard in the late spring, -look at the beautiful trees- how marvellous, and the busy little bees flying amongst the blossom- the blossom on the trees, so charming and delicate and full of future promise! In the autumn they return and walk through the same orchard and exclaim-oh how vile and disgusting! Apples, apples everywhere and in an apple orchard too, how shameless and disgusting! Or to put it anyway, imagine Schama saying: stupid French-people, life was getting better and better, things were good, there was nice culture in the wealthier cities, and lots to eat if you were rich, educated people got to read lots of sophisticated stuff, and life was so good that the King had decided to demolish the Bastille and have the site turned into a park.At which one replies - well why then did Royal authority collapse so rapidly, why was there such a melt down of government? A problem with arguing that the ancien regime was basically fine and well intentioned and nice while the revolution wasn't is that the people involved in both are the same, one has to believe in dramatic head injuries occurring to most of the population of France, otherwise what one has is that the Revolution was a natural development from the ancien regime its actors and responses were shaped by it. Schama in the final pages comes close to discussing the role of the press and of journalists as responsible parties in stirring up hatred and blood lust but as I felt throughout this book, just as one of the basic problems of monarchy are monarchs, so too the basic problem with a Simon Schama book is Simon Schama (view spoiler)[ somebody else has to write that book, and maybe they have, it would be very relevant to contemporary politics in many countries (hide spoiler)]