Why so many dramatic pauses?

The language is a lot more convoluted than History of Britain, which meant that the story was harder to stay engaged with.

Team that with the pauses for dramatic effect or sometimes even just an upcoming noun of the narrator and this was a lot less than I'd hoped it would be.

Re-listening might help the story so I'll try that, but it won't help the narration which I already had on x 1.2 just so the pauses were a bit more manageable.

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2 people found this helpful

Remarkable

This is a remarkable book. It is beautifully written and engagingly read.

The other reviews are right, you need to know the French Revolution already. Unless you already know your Estates General from your Assembly from your Convention you had better get your overview somewhere else; this work is to beautifully paint in the details. This is for people who want to know what was on Charlotte Corday's bookshelf.

Schama puts people and place in the centre stage, and demotes grand historical forces to play second fiddle. This was retro-subversive in 1989, and to my ears in 2022 it still feels like a fresh approach. I would listen to the first half of the preface at least twice if I were you, it is the framework that hangs the whole thing together.

I liked the narrator. She has a really nice style that emphasises certain parts with great personality, and probably makes the prose better than it would read on a page. She switches between English and French accents seamlessly. She has a slight lisp as others have mentioned, but when I meet people with lisps in real life I never feel particularly like I want to punch them. Anyway, you'll be spending 38 hours with her so you had better just go with it.

All in all, I absolutely loved this book. It brought the French Revolution totally alive for me.

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Impressive even 30+ years on

As a thematic-narrative synthesis of scholarship of the French Revolution as it stood in the late 80s, in the run-up to the 200th anniversary, this is almost certainly dated today. Yet thanks largely to it's emphasis on the way the Revolution was experienced by individuals, and its determination to explore a wide variety of perspectives from across the social spectrum (including various women, from prostitutes to royalty), it still feels fresh.

The only trouble with this approach is that despite being chronological, the different lenses and vast array of characters can make it quite hard to keep track of what happened when, who's who, and what the causes (almost always multiple, often unexpected) actually were.

But in many ways this is an unfair complaint - the Revolution was complex as all hell in both causes (around half the book) and evolution. A simple narrative really wouldn't do it justice. One that ignored the impact on individuals would be impersonal. One that simplified causes to "let them eat cake" myths would be next to useless. The complexity *was* the Revolution, and the Revolution was complexity.

What this does mean, of course, is that this is going to be worth a re-read. Probably several. So I'm glad I have a physical copy as well as the audiobook - and am especially glad the audiobook has properly titled chapters, to make finding the right bits easier for a dip in re-"read".

Very solid narration, with just the right levels of empathy and emotion, and very good French pronunciation.

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3 people found this helpful

History at its finest

If you want to go beyond Dickens’s “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” this is the book for you. The romanticism Lafayette, the cynicism of Talleyrand, the opportunism of Mirabeau and the idealism of Robespierre - history doesn’t get any more interesting than this.

Brilliantly read by Sara Powell.

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Brilliant scholarship, great narrative moments, somewhat shaky analysis

This is a beautiful read performance of a very good book. Schama is a proper scholar, and his treatment of the French Revolution is rich in detail and factually authoritative. Sara Powell’s performance is excellent. It’s hard to believe she didn’t write the book, her voice so perfectly meshes with the text.

We all have such strong opinions on the Revolution that it’s hard to judge an analysis of it. Schama doesn’t present himself as an analyst, but rather as a chronicler. Both his chronicle and analysis, however, are somewhat marred by inconsistency. He makes two main arguments which don’t mesh very well. One is that the Revolution was “contingent.” The other is that its “motor” was violence. The fact that he so frequently describes this violence as “inexorable” rather undoes his claim that the Revolution was “contingent.” His argument basically amounts to this: it didn’t have to happen, but once it happened, it has to happen like this. That’s fine, but he never quite makes this argument, and anyway he lacks the materials to make it because he is so much more interested in all the little details of his story.

It’s a pity that he waded into a debate about the big forces of history, when this really wasn’t his interest. His opening chapter, describing Talleyrand and Lafayette’s memory of the Revolution decades later, is absolutely masterful. I wish he had ditched the sociological analysis, which is not his strength, and had instead threaded the memory of the Revolution through his tale. If his final assessment had rested on the symbolism and memorialisation of the Revolution, I think his argument may have been much stronger.

All in all a great book. Lefebvre’s “Quatre-Vingt-Neuf” is still my pick for a first book on the Revolution. But if someone asked me for a second, I’d say this one.

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An history of the French Revolution

A fascinating window on the events surrounding the French Revolution. This is a highly detailed account and a must for the history buff.

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Immersive dive into late 18th Century France

Having studied the French Revolution years ago at school & found it very confusing, this listen brought colour & clarity to it's story. It was somewhat confusing to follow the great trail of characters with difficult French names (took me a while for example to find the spelling of "Talleyrand" to be able to look him up on google! ) Perhaps the only one I even remembered from school was Robespierre. In some ways then might be better to read this as a book rather than listen to an audiobook. Apparently the author got a lot of stick in 1989 as a party pooper on the bicentennial "celebrations", so don't prepare in this listen to be enamored by the Revolution. He does however appear to try get the listener immersed in the period & the characters with fairness and generosity. I really only have 2 disappointments with this - firstly that this long listen came to an end & secondly he has not written a follow up volume in Napoleon !

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A fantastic chronicle

A great chronicle of a truly interesting event. Although it could be overly detailed, it gave a good summary of all of the key events of the revolution. The narrotor is fantastic and really captures some of the author's wit.

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Incisive

Excellent dispelling of myths revealing true violence nature of the French Revolution. Excellent narration.

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2 people found this helpful

Combines the sweep of history with cohesive narrative

A throughly enjoyable and enlightening book, very well performed and very amenable to performance. Achieving both depth of insight and the grand sweep of events is a tough balance but Schama makes it seem effortless. The book was written nearly 40 years ago but is as fresh as ever.

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