As long as history books are written by humans, not robots, a degree of political polarisation is bound to creep in, but I feel if a historian wants to write a book that is a political 'argument', he should call it something else rather than a plain history - in the case of Schama's Citizens, the average reader doesn't realise it came about as part of a left-right historian pendulum: they think it's "the definitive' history of the revolution! But any argument has to be backed up with solid facts, like a barrister making a court case producing 'exhibit A'. Schama just seems to make 'facts' up to suit his case, even down to saying Robespierre is long-nosed (like the child-catcher or any number of pantomime villains, but the opposite of the historical truth) and Saint-Just black-haired (the sinister, raven-haired temptress leading France into sin, perhaps?)!
Even if he'd forgotten, everything about the quote suggests Danton or someone like that - it was said at the frontier (not somewhere Robespierre ever went), to the Duc de Chartres, and the quote its entirity just doesn't sound like Robespierre's language. My french is only so-so, but if I can tell the stylistic differences in the linguistic styles of Robespierre, Saint-Just, Danton etc, someone who is presumably fluent and is highly paid to be a 24/7 historian should, one hopes, have a feel for the characters of his subjects.
The parts of the book I have read are full of errors of a basic factual nature, and in this particular instance it feels so convenient to the thrust of his argument - at the point in the book it occurs, it takes on a great deal of significance in the way it is used - he implies this is Robespierre's gameplan in a nutshell - that it must be deliberate. All facts and quotations in a history book should be checked and have footnotes, too: every quote in a university degree-level thesis has to have a reference, so a man who was by then a tutor, with Britain's most famous and comprehensive library on his doorstep, and presumably also had an editor, has no excuse for mistakes of this schoolboyish nature.
What I often find - and it's the reason I had to improve my French so I could read primary sources, because I found the various books I had at that point contradicted each other - is that modern historians don't generally misattribute quotes, because the general practise is to provide references for each one: instead, they carefully select a few words from a much longer phrase so that, in some instances, you get the opposite impression from that which you get when you read the full quote, or discover the full circumstances around an event (like the omission of Hébert and co. from that BBC docudrama, or films like 'Danton' ). This sort of decontextualising is the most common practise: Mark Steel says it's like saying in the early 1940's British people taped up their windows and blacked them out for no apparent reason!
It's the standard practise in British newspapers, too!
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2009-08-26 09:23 am (UTC)Even if he'd forgotten, everything about the quote suggests Danton or someone like that - it was said at the frontier (not somewhere Robespierre ever went), to the Duc de Chartres, and the quote its entirity just doesn't sound like Robespierre's language. My french is only so-so, but if I can tell the stylistic differences in the linguistic styles of Robespierre, Saint-Just, Danton etc, someone who is presumably fluent and is highly paid to be a 24/7 historian should, one hopes, have a feel for the characters of his subjects.
The parts of the book I have read are full of errors of a basic factual nature, and in this particular instance it feels so convenient to the thrust of his argument - at the point in the book it occurs, it takes on a great deal of significance in the way it is used - he implies this is Robespierre's gameplan in a nutshell - that it must be deliberate. All facts and quotations in a history book should be checked and have footnotes, too: every quote in a university degree-level thesis has to have a reference, so a man who was by then a tutor, with Britain's most famous and comprehensive library on his doorstep, and presumably also had an editor, has no excuse for mistakes of this schoolboyish nature.
What I often find - and it's the reason I had to improve my French so I could read primary sources, because I found the various books I had at that point contradicted each other - is that modern historians don't generally misattribute quotes, because the general practise is to provide references for each one: instead, they carefully select a few words from a much longer phrase so that, in some instances, you get the opposite impression from that which you get when you read the full quote, or discover the full circumstances around an event (like the omission of Hébert and co. from that BBC docudrama, or films like 'Danton' ). This sort of decontextualising is the most common practise: Mark Steel says it's like saying in the early 1940's British people taped up their windows and blacked them out for no apparent reason!
It's the standard practise in British newspapers, too!