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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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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1 person 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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Incisive

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

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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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Excellent

The definitive book on the Revolution. Would recommend to anyone wanting to get an understanding of what happens and why.

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A great overall of French Revolution

Really enjoyable weaving of stories and how they intersect in the bigger picture, rather than focusing on Robespierre etc.

This might sound silly but the amount of French with no English translation is ridiculous, sometimes I didn't even know what was being said, I'm not sure if the actors voice made it worse feel like she was really over doing it, so I could barely pick up names I hadn't heard before.

Other than that though it's worth it.

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Fabulous but horrific

The author and narrator might , perhaps, be surprised to be reminded of their work so long after the event.
Wonderful research, painfully evocative descriptions, I found The Terror sickening and upsetting, analogies with the 20th century were justifiably drawn. Man's inhumanity to man keeps on repeating itself, The Holocaust too will probably be repeated and justified by the same Diabolical influences. Thank you, Simon Schama.
A word for Sara Powell, thank you, a long read and as an 'ancien prof de francais' I admired your French.

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4 people found this helpful

The best way to encounter the Revolution is through its people

THE history of the Revolution even 35 years on. A pleasure to revisit it via audible.

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