‘The French Revolution’ Review: Thomas Carlyle’s Masterpiece, Complete
By: By Barton Swaim
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
‘It all stands pretty fair in my head, nor do I mean to investigate much more about it, but to splash down what I know, in large masses of colours; that it may look like a smoke-and-flame conflagration in the distance,—which it is.” So wrote Thomas Carlyle to his wife, Jane, before beginning the last volume of his history of the French Revolution. The work took Carlyle three years to write, and its publication in 1837 made the Scotsman one of the foremost writers in Britain. Over the next decade he would achieve fame across Europe and America as a historian, literary critic and political essayist—as, to use an anachronistic term, an intellectual.
Carlyle has been forgotten by the general public, except perhaps as a coiner of terms (“cash nexus,” “the dismal science”), but he has been blessed with a confederation of academics dedicated to publishing his writings in handsome scholarly editions. The collected letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, a collaborative work by scholars at Duke and Edinburgh universities, has reached its 49th volume and, after more than half a century, nears completion. The Carlyles corresponded with a great number of important writers and political figures in Europe and America in the mid-19th century; the letters are an immense resource for historians.
Recent years have seen the publication of scholarly editions of Carlyle’s most influential works, chiefly “On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History” (1841) and “Past and Present” (1843). Other works, meanwhile, are available in Oxford World’s Classics paperback editions, including the bizarre satire “Sartor Resartus,” published serially in 1833-34, and the beautiful “Reminiscences,” published after Carlyle’s death in 1881.
Now we have, in three hefty hardback volumes, a definitive edition of “The French Revolution,” edited by Mark Cumming and David R. Sorensen. It is a fuller and more detailed version of the World’s Classics paperback, edited by Mr. Sorensen and Brent E. Kinser, published in 2019. Like its predecessor, the new edition features a fine introduction to Carlyle’s life and work. Carlyle’s prose is thick with allusions to Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, Milton, “The Pilgrim’s Progress” and especially the Bible; all are deftly referenced here. Moreover, Carlyle was writing only four decades after the revolution and assumed far more familiarity with its names and events than today’s readers are likely to possess. This edition makes the work decipherable in ways it otherwise isn’t.
Thomas Carlyle was born in 1795 in the village of Ecclefechan, in the Lowlands of Scotland, the son of a stonemason. His mother and father were Seceders—staunchly Calvinist Presbyterians who dissented from the established Church of Scotland. Thomas drifted away from Christianity but retained Calvinism’s dim view of human nature and his parents’ scorn for polite establishmentarianism of all kinds.
Carlyle studied at Edinburgh University and later taught school. In his 20s he learned French and German, read insatiably, and published essays on German literature. In the early 1830s—in 1826 he had married the witty and tough-minded Jane Welsh—he began to weary of teaching. Having made a modest name for himself as a literary critic, he began contemplating a move to London and a literary career.
In 1834, the Carlyles moved into 5 Cheyne Row in Chelsea. That year Carlyle began writing a history of the French Revolution. John Stuart Mill, who lived nearby, supplied him with a large number of books for the project. Having finished the first volume, Carlyle lent the manuscript to Mill. A few days later Mill showed up at the Carlyles’ address, “pale as Hector’s ghost.” The future Utilitarian philosopher had left the manuscript lying around, and a housekeeper had used it as kindling to start a fire. Carlyle took the news equably and began again.
The book, when it finally appeared, outraged some reviewers, delighted others and was talked about by everybody. Carlyle was only 42 at the time, but he quickly acquired the reputation of a sage. “Chartism,” published in 1839, broadly suggested that the poor of industrialized England were ready to revolt against an idle and stupid ruling class. The lectures of “On Heroes” (1841), in which he enunciated the idea that “the history of the world is but the Biography of great men,” established Carlyle’s reputation as a critic of democracy. In “Past and Present” he used the recently published chronicle of a 12th-century monastery to attack the “Mammonism” and moral superficiality of England’s political class.
Carlyle’s philosophy is often described as an expression of “might makes right” and authoritarianism. That is wrong—he always insisted that the right to rule was valid only if exercised with charity and justice—but he lent credence to early-20th-century arguments for autocratic rule. His later works, particularly the frenetic “Latter-Day Pamphlets” (1850), indulged in bigoted language about the enslaved and did much to harm his reputation.
Carlyle is still worth reading, if for no other reason than that he shaped European political thought for two generations. Mill, whose friendship with Carlyle cooled in the 1840s, consciously defined his own radical liberal outlook against the Carlylean ethic. The American Transcendentalists revered Carlyle. Marx and Engels both praised and misunderstood him. Friedrich Nietzsche hated him, sharply describing Carlyle as “an English Atheist who makes it a point of honour not to be so,” but the German philosopher clearly mimicked Carlyle’s fiery style and borrowed from his worldview.
And what about that style? It strikes many modern readers as turgid and unreadable, but much of the Victorian public—hardly a dull reading audience by comparison with ours—found it bracing. There is something in it of the biblical prophet: weird but somehow important. I find Carlyle difficult at lengths longer than an essay, but I can imagine the thrill occasioned by “The French Revolution” when it first appeared. Carlyle hated the 18th-century Enlightenment’s approach to history, which he felt prized lifeless analysis and demoted human will. In his historical writing there is an immediacy, an emotional intensity and a visual quality; hence the intermittent present-tense narration, the frequent use of exclamation, and the heavy use of metaphor and color. It was Carlyle who popularized the sobriquet “sea-green Robespierre” for the Jacobin leader—so termed because one of Carlyle’s sources recalled Robespierre’s complexion as pale and his veins as green.
Here, to take a passage almost at random, is a paragraph from the first volume of “The French Revolution,” titled “Bastille,” relating the royal court’s attempt to interfere with the proceedings of the Third Estate—the citizen-commoners agitating against the nobility—by sending a band of carpenters to remove the platform on which revolutionaries were speaking. Carlyle terms the royal court Œil-de-Bœuf, the name of a small elliptical window, symbolizing an eye, in the chamber in Versailles where the court met. “Instead of soldiers, the Œil-de-Bœuf sends—carpenters, to take down the platform. Ineffectual shift! In few instants, the very carpenters cease wrenching and knocking at their platform; stand on it, hammer in hand, and listen open-mouthed. The Third Estate is decreeing that it is, was, and will be, nothing but a National Assembly. . . . Which done, one can wind up with this comfortable reflexion from Abbé Sieyes: ‘Messieurs, you are today what you were yesterday.’ ” Engaging, in its way—for the first 50 or 100 pages.
Carlyle had no interest in the Tory interpretation; he saw the sans-culottes —lower-class republicans demanding better conditions—as basically right but also ignorant and dangerous. But although Robespierre is the villain of his chronicle, Carlyle had only contempt for the revolution’s quasi-radicals. “On the whole I am sick of the Girondins,” he wrote to Mill while working on his final volume. “To confess a truth, I find them extremely like our present set of respectable Radical members. There is the same cold clean-washed patronising talk about ‘the masses,’ . . . the same Formalism, hidebound Pedantry, superficiality, narrowness, barrenness. I find that the Mountain was perfectly under the necessity of flinging such a set of men to the Devil.” The Girondins, he writes in one particularly censorious passage,
are strangers to the People they would govern. . . . Formulas, Philosophies, Respectabilities, what has been written in Books, and admitted by the Cultivated Classes: this inadequate Scheme of Nature’s working is all that Nature, let her work as she will, can reveal to these men. . . . Carping and complaining forever of Plots and Anarchy, they will do one thing: prove, to demonstration, that the Reality will not translate into their Formula; that they and their Formula are incompatible with the Reality: and, in its dark wrath, the Reality will extinguish it and them!
At one level, it’s true, Carlyle rejects the Burkean view that the Revolution was a colossal outrage against God and man. The heroes of “The French Revolution” are assemblyman Georges Danton and the journalist Camille Desmoulins, both Montagnards who turned against Robespierre, resisted the Terror and were executed for it. But Carlyle’s criticism of the Girondins is, at another level, fully Burkean.
In “Reflections on the Revolution in France,” Burke had contended that “circumstance” rather than “abstract principle” properly determines the wisdom of political decisions. “Am I to congratulate a highwayman and murderer who has broke prison,” Burke asked, “upon the recovery of his natural rights?” The Girondins, Carlyle held, were so fixated on empty abstractions—“Formulas, Philosophies, Respectabilities”—that they failed to grasp the Revolution’s potential for savagery. In our own day, the spectacle of popular media personalities applauding mayhem and destruction even as they mouth hollow abstractions—“systemic injustice,” “white supremacy”—suggests the enduring presence of Carlyle’s Girondins.
As impressive as this edition and the World’s Classics paperback are, I remain pessimistic that the world wants to hear more from Carlyle. Occasionally one meets someone who has read him with profit. (My colleague Walter Russell Mead has read all 21 volumes of “Frederick the Great”—twice.) But Carlyle’s difficult style and his association with autocracy don’t suggest an imminent Carlyle revival. As for France in the decade after 1789, readers searching for a clear and gripping account are probably best advised to read Simon Schama’s or Christopher Hibbert’s histories.
Even so, Carlyle’s interpretation of the French Revolution is, like its author, sui generis—a smoke-and-flame conflagration, seen in the distance by a strange prophet.
—Mr. Swaim is an editorial-page writer for the Journal.
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