I think this book is required reading for anyone interested in the French Revolution, but it should not be the only book they read about it. For one thing, it assumes the reader already knows the timeline of events.
Schama basically dismisses all the classic explanations of why the Revolution broke out, like class tensions or economic conditions. In the end he has only Violence, which seems to inevitably spring from Enlightenment universalism. But I don’t think he adequately explains the staying power of the French Republic, and the immense power of the idea of national (as opposed to royal) sovereignty.
Update 2025-05-06: I’ve since read E. J. Hobsbawn’s Echoes of the Marseillaise, which deals with the historiography of the French Revolution, and he has this to say to Schama and other revisionists:
In fact, the paradox of revisionism is that it seeks to diminish the historic significance and transforming capacity of a revolution whose extraordinary and lasting impact are utterly obvious, or that can be overlooked only by a combination of intellectual provincialism and tunnel vision; or by the monographic myopia which is the occupational disease of specialist research in historical archives.