Thank you for the shout out! I think the best write up I've seen that catalogs a sample of the inaccuracies is in this post by u/molstern and continued in the comments section: https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/2dw9en/petition_to_denaturalize_simon_schamas_citizens/

You'll notice that most of Schama's inaccuracies center around quotations: he either misattributes, or misrepresents, quotes quite frequently. The ones listed in that post are just a sampling.

Outside of the factual inaccuracies that list covers, there are a few more general criticisms of the book.

First, for asserting it's a chronicle of the Revolution, Schama covers a lot of material that is quite ancillary to the Revolution. Now that isn't inherently bad, but the book is over 800 pages long and stops at the Terror, which is certainly not the end of the Revolution. Part of the reason it's so long without covering more of the actual Revolution is that Schama inserts his opinion into the text frequently, and so much of the verbiage is just Schama's particular point of view. Analysis isn't a bad thing-- in fact providing context and analysis is crucial to the job of a historian, but Schama's opinions read far more like an op-ed piece in a newspaper than a historian carefully sifting through evidence.

The other great issue that I don't see mentioned in that post is the galling lack of citations. Indeed if one does the "pinch test" of the 800+ page tome, they'd find that only 27 of the 907 (!) pages are in his Sources & Bibliography section. That is a scant 3% of the book. Let's compare with what I hold up to be the gold standard of Revolutionary summaries, Peter McPhee's Liberty or Death. It actually covers through the coup of Napoleon, and spans 454 pages. It actually cites specific sources for its facts and quotes (something Schama fails to do, which might explain their inaccuracies), and devotes 73 pages of its 454 to direct citations and a bibliography, accounting for 16% of the book. Any time an author is asking you to 'trust him' with a more narrative bibliography explaining "this section was mainly taken from these memoires" you know you have a problem.

That brings up another fault with Schama's book: he indeed relies heavily on memoires and accounts from contemporaries (and these he often misquotes and misinterprets, as seen in the other Reddit post.) Contemporary memoires are a fantastic historical source, but MUST be contextualized and critically analyzed to mean anything. To use an extreme example, imagine going 200 years in the future and reading a book about Hitler that relies on contemporary memoires of his high-ranking Nazi officials. Of course they have a very strong bias, and so any usage of their material would need to be couched in this context. Now that doesn't mean they are invalid, and a good historian would not dismiss them as such. Instead, a good historian would analyse them and compare them with other accounts to find similarities and differences, and then critically think about and postulate on what the truth could be. Schama does none of this, taking accounts that fit his personal opinion and presenting them as fact. This is often what gives Citizens its popular appeal, as such intensely charged rhetoric is exciting, but this is what makes it horrific for historians of the period.

I will end by saying anyone who specializes in a certain area always has a bit of an aversion to popular histories, because they know that some of the nuance and factual accuracy will get lost in the mix (looking at you Oversimplified's French Rev YouTube videos....) but what makes Schama particularly egregious is first, that he is actually a historian, and yet eschews good practices that history is founded upon, second, that he can't be bothered to cite his sources or check for facts, and third that he is particularly inflammatory and intentionally provocative so that he sells better. Not to mention that Citizens is hardly a 'popular' history, running at an unbelievable 900 pages!

I don't think historians should all be cookie-cutter and follow the same set patterns and never think outside the box, but abiding by basic tenets of honesty and methodology are what separates, to use the cliche, fact from fiction.

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Edit: Adding with regards to bibliographies:

A citation is only useful if you tell me exactly where you're deriving a certain fact, figure, or idea. If you claim, say, that 2,400 people were executed in Paris during the Terror, you need to cite this so that anyone can check your source. This is crucial for scholarship, especially for ideas and thoughts more interpretive than cut and dry numbers. A common idea is that historians should be entirely unbiased and objective. While that's understandable in theory, it's not practicable, as historians are always going to be influenced by their own beliefs, culture, and time period. The best a historian can do is make sure that their own beliefs don't alter the facts presented, though they surely will flavor the analysis. In this way I can check the sources of say, Albert Mathiez and understand that he saw the same facts as I do, but through a different lens (in his case his worldview was colored by a communist ideology). This means that the study of history is a vast, infinite conversation through the ages between historians, observing the same set of facts but adding their own 'conversation' to the dialogue, imagining and re-imagining why an event occurred, or what an individual's motives were. Where this conversation breaks down is when a 'historian' asserts unsubstantiated opinion into the mix, as Schama does frequently in Citizens. There is no conversation to be had when your source for an entire chapter is a mention you pulled mostly from someone's memoires. It should not be incumbent upon your reader to parse through an entire source to 'find' your viewpoint.

With a good historian such as McPhee, I can use his books as jumping off points for deeper dives into a subject. If I'm interested in learning more about the acquittal rates during the September Massacres I can turn to where he discusses them, follow their citations, and be lead to several scholarly articles that elucidate even further, and follow their sources and so on, so that a good secondary source book acts like a map of knowledge, showing you the way to many different rivers and tributaries. When a history book does not provide this, like Schama's, what you're left with is a map that shows you in the middle of a lake with a dot where you're at. There are no facts to follow, you're marooned in Schama's opinion, which is for obvious reasons not valuable for a history. No further discussion can happen- you're having a one-on-one conversation hearing what Schama thinks happened and why.