What on earth has happened to Simon Schama: The Romantics and Us reviewed

‘You may think our modern world was born yesterday,’ said Simon Schama at the beginning of The Romantics and Us. If you do, though, I can only imagine that you’ve never seen any history documentaries on television — where, as a rule, the modern world is born in whatever period the documentary happens to be about, from Ancient Rome to the 1980s. After all, how can the past possibly be interesting if we can’t see ourselves reflected in it?

As the title indicates, Schama’s choice, this time, of an era important enough to lead to us was the romantic movement. But as it soon turned out, the ‘us’ he had in mind was rather narrowly defined: the folks who go on marches in the name of ‘the brotherhood and sisterhood of the people’ (or some of the people at any rate — mainly the ones who go on marches).

As an example of what he meant, Schama showed us some recent American protestors in less violent action than usual. He also grew touchingly dewy-eyed as he recalled being a young man in Paris during the 1968 uprising when it felt as if ‘the world could be reshaped by youth’. Among the now elderly soixante-huitards he met was the artist Michèle Katz, who proudly showed us some of the posters created back then. ‘If being united means you have to crush things, so be it,’ she said of one image of triumphant marchers, although the ‘things’ being crushed under the marchers’ feet appeared to be undesirable people.

Of course, the fountainhead of all this ‘democracy’ — as Schama approvingly if questionably called it — was the French Revolution. Or at least it was for a year or two, before its ‘ideals’ were ‘betrayed’ by those pesky Jacobins.