Like most bien-pensant liberals, Schama seems to assume that divisions are a bad thing, which is surely untrue. Some forms of discord are certainly to be regretted, but others aren’t. Low-paid workers who strike against companies which could easily pay them more stir up trouble, and so they should. The alternative to such conflict is consensus, which means that working people meekly accept what they are given, which may mean in turn that they find it hard to eat and keep warm at the same time.

Conflict worries people like Schama because it undermines social unity. But no society has ever been fully unified, and not all societies need to be. All civilizations have been marked by the clash of opposing values and feuding life-forms. It wasn’t, for example, as though there was a coherent entity known as the British nation which began to fall apart not long after the first immigrants arrived on its shores. Immigrants have been arriving on our shores for centuries, including the British. It’s true that the idea of unity begins to gain ground with the rise of nationalism, but nationalism as a full-blooded ideology isn’t much more than a couple of centuries old. Even when you think you’ve achieved a state of concord throughout the realm, bits of the nation can suddenly revolt or drop off, as Ireland did early last century.

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The myth of cultural unity

By Terry Eagleton

When there has been cohesion between rulers and ruled, it’s often enough because the latter have been too weak or intimidated to fight the former. Two hundred years ago, when poets and politicians were praising the spirit of unity which sprang from pride in the Empire, Britain was effectively a police state, equipped with draconian laws against those who stole a hen and dedicated to muzzling dissent and free speech. A little later, the Victorians lived in constant fear of revolution. In the early 20th century, the government sent gunboats into the river Mersey with their guns trained on a potentially seditious Liverpool.

In none of this did culture matter very much. Like many liberal intellectuals, Schama overestimates its political clout. In fact, a lot of the finest literary culture of the early 19th century — from the prophecies of William Blake to the ferocious polemic of Shelley, the satire of Byron and the essays of the magnificent William Hazlitt — was dedicated to attacking the autocratic state in Westminster, not to healing the wounds of the nation. The dream of culture as a unifying force emerges only later, in the work of authors like Matthew Arnold and T.S. Eliot. In the early decades of industrialism, social and political antagonisms were too raw for the intellectual fantasy that something known as culture could spirit them away. Poetry was not the answer to Peterloo.

Why should anyone have imagined that it was? There was, in fact, a reasoned case behind this apparently fatuous claim. The idea was that social strife was real, but largely superficial. It concerned our material, everyday, less-than-glamorous selves, while beneath this surface lay spiritual resources which everyone shared at some incomparably deeper level, and which could be given the name of culture. Culture was now beginning to usurp the role of religion, which had run into a whole range of problems from the age of the Earth to the corrupt behavior of the churches. If the arts were important, it was because they encapsulated these elusive spiritual resources in palpable form. In the case of literature, you could even hold them in your hand. The arts were the refuge to which the creative imagination had migrated, driven out of everyday social life by the rise of a philistine industrial capitalism. By the time we reached the 20th century, there would be plenty of commentators for whom this was pretty much the only place where human value was to be found.

The problem, however, was that this idea of culture went rather too deep. It seemed to suggest that actual social differences — being a woman rather than a man, or a landowner rather than a window cleaner — didn’t really matter. And this was rather more convenient for men and landowners than it was for women and window cleaners. As long as culture brought us together in spirit, we could remain the mutually hostile, vastly unequal people we actually were. Culture seemed to make all the difference, and yet to make no difference at all.

In this sense, too, it bore a resemblance to religion. It represented a common ground on which we could meet purely as human beings, suspending for a magical moment whatever divided us. But this made our common humanity seem unworkably abstract and impalpable. It by-passed our concrete differences rather than working through them. In any case, culture was hardly a common ground in reality. On the contrary, its distribution throughout the population has always been strikingly unequal. In this sense, it was less a spiritual consensus than a field of contention. The culture of the court and the culture of the folk had never exactly constituted a unity.

There were other problems as well. For one thing, it was hard to believe that poetry and painting represented the acme of civilized existence, not least when you looked at the louche careers of more than a few poets and painters. For another, was there really no value to be found outside the arts, in sexual love, human community, the rearing of children, political transformation? Despite its elevated pitch, wasn’t this flight to art a desperately alienated view on the part of privileged men and women too dissociated from the everyday world to see it as anything but uniform and banal? The concept of “the masses” would soon emerge, which as Raymond Williams points out in Culture and Society is simply an external way of seeing most other people. I’m not part of the masses, and neither are my friends or family, but everyone else is.

This raises another issue. Along with the idea of the masses came the notion of mass culture, not least with the birth of the mass-circulation newspaper. From the last decades of the 19th century to around 1920, there was a major expansion of the popular press. Newspaper owners were reaping the benefit of educational change, which had brought to birth a literate but not highly educated mass readership. By 1900, the recently founded Daily Mail was reaching almost one million readers. That same period also witnessed the arrival of cinema, radio and recorded music. Something utterly momentous had happened to culture, which now included the Mirror as well as Michelangelo. It had been integrated into the very mechanistic, profit-driven civilization it was supposed to rebuke. Culture itself was split between high and popular. It could no longer provide a model of spiritual solidarity, if indeed it ever did.

Suggested reading

Is Britain heading for civil war?

By Brad Evans

There is also, however, culture in its more capacious sense, as a whole way of life. If there is high culture, there is also gay, Jamaican, Mancunian, police, beach, Geordie and pigeon-fancying culture. In our own time, the concept of culture has been pluralized. Far from representing a common humanity, it reflects a diversity of interests and identities. Culture has shifted from being an ideal of unity to a field of division. Some political quarrels are fought out nowadays as issues of cultural identity. Far from providing cohesion, culture has become part of the problem. It can be even more contentious than politics, since it involves the sensitive question of who one is.

So there are two major drawbacks with Simon Schama’s case. One is that culture in the narrow sense of the arts has never been much of a source of social cohesion. In any case, the function of art is quite as much to wound, confront and divide as it is to bring together. The other difficulty is that some social conflicts are simply essential, and can only be solved by one side winning and the other losing, which is not quite what liberals like to hear. Resolving the antagonism between slave and slave owner is known as getting rid of the slave owner. The same applies to democrats and tyrants or black bus drivers and white supremacists. It would be gratifying if there were some middle ground between them — semi-supremacism, perhaps? — but there isn’t. The truth doesn’t always lie in the center. Bringing people together isn’t always a positive move.

And while culture may help to alter people’s awareness, it will do nothing to change the material inequalities and social exclusions which underlie so much political violence. Those things are part of a system, and liberals find the idea of a system rather distasteful. It smacks too much of rigidity and totalitarian thought. This is a pity, because without grasping social divisions in this context they will remain stubbornly unresolved, however much culture you bring to bear on them.

Still, study of the French Revolution is endlessly instructive, for the radical temptation in politics exhibits consistent patterns, and the French Revolution displays them in crystalline form. Here are a few historical works on the period that are beautifully written, and may prove helpful for understanding the present.

François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution (1978) and The Passing of an Illusion (1995)

François Furet rescued the academic study of the French Revolution from an entanglement with Marxism that had grown debilitating in the decades after World War II. French historiographers of that period tended to project backwards onto Robespierre all the romance of 1917, and likewise to view the Soviet Union as the successor state chosen by History to advance the cause. What made this no longer tenable was the publication, in 1973, of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. The very parallels insisted upon by Marxist historians were now damning to their enthusiasms. Just as Solzhenitsyn showed that the gulag was no mere accessory to the revolutionary state, but rather its central manifestation and meaning, so it now became necessary to ask whether the Terror was not just a regrettable episode to be excused by extenuating circumstances, but the most revealing expression of revolution as a political culture.

This question had implications for how one was to understand the revolutionary passions of the youth movement of the 1960s, and Furet did not shy from drawing the relevant lessons. A member of the French Communist party in his youth, he came to see things in rather a different light. The opening essay in Furet’s Interpreting the French Revolution  offers many riches. For example, he explains the paranoid style of revolutionary politics, and its tendency to exercise power through contrived moral emergencies.

Furet’s final book, The Passing of an Illusion , traced the revolutionary passion in its career through 20^th-century intellectual life in the West. Writing in the early Nineties, when Communism had just collapsed, the choice of title must have seemed apt to book buyers. But Furet knew that “the revolution” is infinitely elastic, so boundless is its promise and so limitless is its “capacity to survive experience”. It has a birth date (1789) but no end; it provides “the matrix of universal history”. That history is understood as a struggle of human emancipation, its polestar a vision of equality. Whatever stands in its way appears not as mere obstacle, but as hateful enemy.

Further reading

Did the French Revolution cause Nazism?

By John-Lewis Stempel

Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (1989)

In the 1780s, the highest reaches of French society, as well as the broader reading public, was infatuated with the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Far more influential than his works of political philosophy were his works of sentimental education, Emile and the Nouvelle Héloïse. As Simon Schama wrote, “Rousseau’s works dealing with personal virtue and the morality of social relations sharpened distaste for the status quo and defined a new allegiance. He created, in fact, a community of young believers.” Rousseau gave no roadmap to revolution, but he did invent “the idiom in which its discontents would be voiced and its goals articulated.”

What distinguished the moral elect was possession of un coeur sensible, a feeling heart. Visible expression of inner sentiments became acceptable, and indeed to be overcome with passion was a sign of noble character. Weeping was a sign, not of weakness, but of sincerity. Schama writes that tears “were cherished precisely because (it was assumed) they were unstoppable: the soul directly irrigating the countenance. Tears were the enemy of cosmetics and the saboteur of polite disguise. Most important, a good fit of crying indicated that the child had been miraculously preserved within the man or woman.” Note the role of self-exposure in creating a moral typology of citizens. Soon, sincerity would become the virtue claimed by axe-wielding sans-culottes.

Reading Schama’s account of weeping French men and women before the Revolution, one cannot help but think of today’s emotivism, in which feeling replaces intellectual coherence as the index of truth. That is, of one’s own truth, which others must acknowledge and acquiesce to – or else wound one deeply. On Twitter, of course, tears are not visible. “I’m literally shaking” is a verbal embellishment that seems to serve the same purpose. It conveys intensity of feeling, hence the moral credibility of one’s response.

Further reading

Why the rich are revolting

By Ed West

Mona Ozouf, “Revolutionary Religion”, in A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution (1989)

In 2020, shrines to George Floyd sprang up in cities across America, with candles set before garlanded pictures of the man (as in a Hindu temple). An enormous holographic effigy of Floyd went on tour through the southern states. We have all seen the videos of white people washing the feet of black people, in emulation of Christ’s servanthood, and prostrating themselves in various postures of abasement while chanting self-denunciations.

In Robespierre’s Festival of the Supreme Being, explicitly religious props, recitations and images were used to imbue revolutionary ideology with sacred feeling in a deliberate caricature of Catholic ceremonies. “Here there were not spectators but celebrants, not an audience but a people,” as the historian Mona Ozouf wrote. The Festival was preceded by the destruction of France’s statues by “iconoclastic commandos from the revolutionary army”. The heart of Marat (one of the bloodier Jacobins, himself stabbed to death in his bathtub by a provincial woman) was placed in a vessel and hung from the roof of the Cordeliers as the crowd was encouraged to recite new psalms (“O cor Marat, O cor Jesus”). The Festival coincided with a busy period for the guillotine, as intended by Robespierre.

Was the revolutionary cult a strategic ruse, then, meant to reconcile the Revolution with Catholic habits through a superficial continuity? Perhaps it was an effort to bring the Revolution to a conclusion by establishing a state religion, in the hope that this would help to secure social cohesion? Historians disagree on these questions, and Ozouf guides us through the controversies.

By the same author

The danger of safetyism

By Matthew Crawford

Contemporary America is about as far from Catholic France as it is possible to get. Religious longings, apparently a permanent part of our human makeup, have long been frustrated in our secularised society. But for just that reason, revolutionary piety may hold special appeal. This bears on a question that has long hovered over the phenomenon of “political correctness”: how sincere is it? And is the quotient of sincerity changing?

Writing in The Atlantic in 2018, which now seems a long time ago, Reihan Salam parsed the utility of “white bashing” as part of the verbal repertoire of success in elite institutions. In this setting it was generally ironic, even while doing important work to signal that one is competent in the codes of the ruling class. “The people I’ve heard archly denounce whites have for the most part been upwardly-mobile people who’ve proven pretty adept at navigating elite, predominantly white spaces.” Salam, a child of Bangladeshi Muslims and Harvard student, came to view white-bashing as a form of “intra-white status jockeying,” a device by which the demarcation between “upper whites” and “lower whites” is made clear.

It would be hard to fix a date, but at some point this parlor game slipped the bounds of its intended audience. In the hands of the vulgar, it became literal-minded rather than playful, moralistic rather than urbane, a way of mobilising resentments and putting them to use. Again, one thinks of the trickle-down radicalism in France of the 1780s, as depicted by Simon Schama. The elite’s fashions of sentiment, its internecine dramas that seemed to be playing out in a safely “cultural” register, would become the seed of something more ominous. Something unintended and uncontrollable.

Trump, Schama claimed, was occupying the same territory as the French peasants did in 1789: in the summer of that year a Great Fear descended, including a terror of “brigands” working for the aristocracy. The brigands did not actually exist but the fear caused the peasants to organise themselves and become the armed guard of the revolution.

Trump’s brigands — the imaginary men in dark clothes — could be hugely useful, for as Schama put it: “In this case they could be the phalanxes of American counter-revolution — or fascism.” Might this be true?

There has been much chatter about what Donald Trump might do if he were to lose in November. Or, more to the point, what might he do if he wins — or seems to be winning — on the night of the election only to lose when postal votes are counted over the days (or weeks) afterwards? Who knows what his supporters might be capable of?

But there is another question, asked less often but certainly looming in the background this autumn. What would the Democrats and their supporters do if they lost?

Not Joe Biden — we know he’d go quietly. But what about the anti-Trump protesters on the streets of Portland, Oregon, of Seattle, of Chicago, of Washington DC itself. The bandana wearers. The stone throwers. The corner store looters.

Donald Trump’s disinclination to accept defeat is rather well known, but his opponents on the Left are assumed to be hewn from more democratic timber. For all the complaints about Russian interference and other criminality, they sucked it up in 2016.Would they, again?

It has to be an open question. It may become — if Trump hauls himself out of the electoral mess he is in — a central question, on which the future of America hinges, and polling does not lead to optimism: already 28% of Biden supporters say they will not accept a Trump victory as fair and accurate, compared to 19% of Trump voters.

The forces of the American Left are not controlled by shadowy figures in dark clothes, but they are organised and angry in a way that they have not been in recent history. So what do they believe is acceptable in the effort to resist Donald Trump, and how far will they go?

More from this author

Will America ever be great again?

By Justin Webb

If you are searching for a view of the intellectual and moral slack the American far-Left is cutting itself, look no further than gentle old National Public Radio. More than a decade ago, when I lived in the US, NPR was genially Left-of-centre, but not aggressively so. Last week it revealed itself to be — in the eyes of many Americans — quite unhinged, publishing an interview with Vicky Osterweil, the author of a book called In Defense of Looting.

Osterweil made two assertions, the first being that looting is justified because it attacks the idea of private property and the world of work: “So you get to the heart of that property relation, and demonstrate that without police and without state oppression, we can have things for free.”

The second is that stealing from shops is part of the wider movement for change in America: “Looting strikes at the heart of property, of whiteness and of the police,” she said: “It gets to the very root of the way those three things are interconnected. And also it provides people with an imaginative sense of freedom and pleasure and helps them imagine a world that could be. And I think that’s a part of it that doesn’t really get talked about — that riots and looting are experienced as sort of joyous and liberatory.”

None of this is robustly challenged, and this was not some sociology professor playing with edgy thoughts on campus — it was an interview conducted and disseminated by one of the most important mainstream broadcasters in the USA, a non-profit devoted to ideals of impartiality and truth.

It is fair to consider at least the possibility that the interview is evidence that something has snapped. In NPR, as in other places where Left-wing thought is explored (and used to be challenged), it has become acceptable to treat looting with respect. In fact it has become necessary, part of the struggle for racial justice. So, in the event of a Trump victory, what actions would be seen as proportionate and reasonable on the Left?

We do not really know any more; what we do know is that Joe Biden’s denunciation of violence — unequivocal and heartfelt and sympathetically reported by most of the media — is not regarded as wise or just by large segments of his supporters.

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Is Trump about to quit?

By Justin Webb

The writer Elie Mystal — the Harvard-educated Justice Correspondent for the The Nation, the oldest weekly magazine in America and home to the thoughtful centre-Left — had this to say about calls for restraint and non-violence: “Now comes the part where white people abandon us. Now comes the part where the white majority impatiently demands a return to normalcy. Now comes the part where white people say, ‘I believe that Black Lives Matter, but…’”

Mystal concludes: “I knew a majority of white people would revert to form and regress to their mean, because a majority of white people were always going to value their own comfort over justice for Black people.”

Again: never mind whether Biden is right or wrong. What does he do, what does he say, what is the deal on the streets, if Trump gets four more years? Will they accept Biden-style calls for restraint? Or is the wider movement too far gone, too hooked on the idea that oppression justifies radical change?

Suggested reading

How the Trumps silence their women

By Tanya Gold

The conservative author Rod Dreher last week tweeted a screen-shot of an online town hall meeting organised by the Northwestern University Law faculty. At the meeting each white faculty member at this hugely prestigious centre of American intellectual excellence begins with a self-denunciation. “I’m Jim Speta. And I am a racist,” the interim dean of the School says in the meeting chat thread leaked to Dreher. “My name is Emily Mullin. I am a racist and a gatekeeper of white supremacy. I will work to be better,” wrote another distinguished legal scholar. What might Emily Mullin’s work look like in the aftermath of a Trump victory?

When a political movement has gone so far as to instigate self-denouncing sessions, how could it accept victory by an opponent whose win can only be evidence of white supremacy? And will it be acceptable for white people who regard themselves as progressive to keep off the streets or to support the police as they try to protect the mainly poor people whose livelihoods go up in smoke when rioters come to town?

In 2016, plenty of people who hated his guts and feared greatly for the future of America, and believed that Hillary Clinton had been traduced and that the Russians had helped the Republicans, nonetheless said words to the effect of “Trump won the electoral college but not the popular vote but that is our system and I am sticking to it.”

That could be a “problematic” view in the event of a Trump victory this year. The word resistance, used loosely during the last four years, may take on a sharper and more dangerous meaning.