Postmodernism

Says Evans, “nothing has outdated the views not only of Elton, but even of Carr, more obviously than the arrival in the 1980s of postmodernist theory, which has called into question most of the arguments put forward by both of them”, rightly adding “postmodernism is a convenient label; it is not an organized movement, nor does it amount to a coherent ideology”. Schama's Citizens, says Evans, exemplifies “the best aspects of postmodernism's influence on mainstream history”, but for Evans postmodernism is there to be resisted, not praised. For Schama himself, it is Hayden White's approach that is seen as posing the danger: “Narratives have been described, by Hayden White among others, as a kind of fictional device used by the historian to impose a reassuring order on randomly arriving bits of information about the dead”. However, Schama distances himself from this “alarming insight” of the postmodern approach, ascribing his own point of departure in the writing of Citizens to reading David Carr's “Narrative and the real world: an argument for continuity”: “As artificial as written narratives might be, they often correspond to ways in which historical actors construct events”.

It is, for Schama, a kind of fact that the French Revolution was “a thing of contingencies and unforeseen consequences”, “a much more haphazard and chaotic event and much more the product of human agency than structural conditioning”.6 To handle this chaos, Schama seeks to justify his narrative approach (in “the form of nineteenth-century chronicles”) and carefully outlines his arguments.