Carlyle wrote The French Revolution at a stage of his career when he was haunted by the prospect of failure and penury. Proud of his Scottish Calvinist origins, he frequently questioned whether his choice of profession dishonoured his pious and austere upbringing. Carlyle’s self-doubt was aggravated by his inability in the 1830s to find a publisher for Sartor Resartus, the ‘Satirical Extravaganza’ into which he had poured ‘more of my opinions on Art, Politics, Religion, Heaven Earth and Air, than all the things I have yet written’.1 Obliged to consent to the manuscript being ‘slit in pieces’ (CL vi. 142) and serialized in Fraser’s Magazine in 1833–4, he lashed out at the ‘Blockheadisms’ of London publishers and critics. Nonetheless, in June 1834 he and his wife, Jane Welsh Carlyle, were drawn by the allure of the ‘big Babel’2 to a modest terraced house in Chelsea, where the backdrop of the sprawling metropolis with its crowds, noise, and hurly-burly intensified his growing desire to write about the French Revolution. On 16 October of that year, now writing in earnest, Carlyle witnessed the burning of the Palace of Westminster, home to the British Parliament since the thirteenth century. The rioting was caused by deep popular resentment against the House of Lords for blocking passage of the Reform Bill. Carlyle recognized the figurative significance of the event when he wrote to his brother Alexander eight days later: ‘The crowd was quiet, rather [gratified] than otherwise; whew’d and whistled when the breeze came as if to encourage it: “there’s a flare-up” (what we call shine) “for the House O’ Lords!”—“A judgement for the Poor-Law Bill!”—“There go their hacts” (acts)!—such exclamations seemed to be the prevailing ones. A man sorry I did not anywhere see’ (CL vii. 319).
Four days later, Carlyle wrote to his brother John and reported that ‘the new Book is fairly underway, and doing not so badly’ and insisted it would be ‘out in the course of spring’ (CL vii. 325). He completed the first volume of his projected trilogy in late December, and by February he was working on the ‘Feast of Pikes’ and planning ahead to the end of the second volume. Then disaster struck. On the evening of 6 March 1835, his friend John Stuart Mill, the young Utilitarian philosopher and liberal radical with whom Carlyle had formed an uneasy intellectual rapport, appeared at the door of No. 5 Cheyne Row ‘pale as Hector’s ghost’ (Rem. 92). Mill announced to the stunned occupants that the manuscript of the first volume, which Carlyle had loaned him, had been inadvertently employed as kindling to start a fire. Carlyle described the moment as ‘a half sentence of death to us both’: ‘We sat talking till late; “shall be written again”, my fixed word and resolution to her’ (Rem. 92). A recently discovered letter that Carlyle sent to his friend William Graham on 22 April 1835 indicates how arduous this labour proved to be:
I lent [the manuscript] to a worthy friend here . . . who . . . left it lying in his rooms unlocked, where it went as waste paper. . . . The fruit of five months hard toil, evaporated as a false dream of the night! . . . So I had to begin again; and for these weary six weeks have I been sitting and toiling, at the unthankfullest task, which nevertheless must and shall be done.3
Conceived in adversity, Carlyle’s The French Revolution never lost its reputation as a haphazard creation. The book was a striking display of ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’, though its emotions were ‘recollected’ in turmoil rather than ‘tranquillity’.4 The episode of the manuscript’s destruction only enhanced the Romantic mystique of this ‘Flame-Picture’ (p. 658). Carlyle himself was prone to refer to the work as an improvisation. Prior to writing the third volume, he told Jane Welsh Carlyle of his plan 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’ (CL ix. 22). Five days after he had submitted the final manuscript to his publishers on 12 January 1837, Carlyle described the result to his friend John Sterling as ‘a wild savage Book, itself a kind of French Revolution . . . come hot out of my own soul, born in blackness whirlwind and sorrow’ (CL ix. 82). The image of his epic as the volcanic eruption of an eccentric literary genius has endured, to the detriment of its claim on the title page of the first edition to be ‘A History in Three Volumes’. Both for Mill and for himself, Carlyle later regretted that ‘that poor story of the burnt Manuscript had ever oozed out . . . into the ear or the imagination of the idle Public’ (to Harriet Isabella Mill, 17 May 1873; CL, forthcoming). The incident obscured the fact that The French Revolution was the culmination of sustained effort on Carlyle’s behalf to define a coherent theory and practice of history. It also diminished the significance and originality of his research, and of the extensive and varied French sources that he employed to obtain his unique grasp of the event.
From an early stage in his intellectual development, Carlyle was strongly attracted to the study of the past. In a letter of 11 November 1823, he counselled his brother John that ‘History . . . is the basis of all true general knowledge’, and urged him to read Gibbon, ‘the most strong-minded of all historians’ (CL ii. 467). Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88) helped extinguish Carlyle’s belief in orthodox Christianity, but it also awakened in him an abiding appreciation of history as a spiritual exercise. He recalled in 1866 reading the twelve volumes ‘at the rate of a volume a day’, admiring Gibbon’s ‘winged sarcasms’ and his ‘grand power of investigating, ascertaining, of grouping and narrating’ (Rem. 219). From a vast storehouse of minutia, Gibbon built an epic. Carlyle was intrigued by the author’s alertness to the discrepancy in history between its signal transactions and the routines of ordinary people. In shedding light on daily existence in the classical world, Gibbon enabled his readers to unite the ‘events of ancient with those of modern history’ (CL i. 120).5
The limitations of the Decline and Fall were as instructive to Carlyle as its merits. He was irritated by the manner in which Gibbon’s ‘exuberant, sonorous and epigrammatic’ (CL i. 120) style functioned to preserve his aloofness from his sources, and to identify him with the progressive and rational eighteenth century. It was a trait that Gibbon shared with the other pre-eminent Enlightenment historians whom Carlyle had read and admired, including David Hume and William Robertson. Like Gibbon, they used their irony to screen themselves from religious ‘enthusiasm’ and surveyed the past from a secure gentlemanly vantage point without becoming emotionally enmeshed in the mass of detail they accumulated. They were capable of arousing a feeling of chaos in their accounts but rarely gave any indication that they themselves were touched by confusion or uncertainty. Carlyle’s attitude was ambivalent. He recognized that by holding the past to the test of reason, Gibbon, Hume, and Robertson had freed history from the grip of theological prejudice. But, in perfecting their philosophical brand of exposition, they had also robbed history of its poetry. Their allegiance to the ‘dignity of history’6—a cardinal principle of eighteenth-century historians—reflected their unassailable belief in the superiority of the analytical present to the credulous past.
Gibbon and his contemporaries may have led Carlyle to discount miracles, but they also encouraged him to consider reality from a different angle. Carlyle’s intensive study of German literature in the 1820s, notably the writings of Goethe and Schiller, inclined him to think of history as both an external and an internal sphere, and ‘Facts’ as the emblems of actual and invisible phenomena. Emphasizing both these descendental and transcendental realms, Carlyle adopted an idiosyncratic attitude towards the prevailing ‘Signs of the Times’, coincidentally the title of an essay he published in the Edinburgh Review in June 1829. In this clairvoyant piece, he outlined the predicament of the historian writing in the ‘Age of Machinery’. Though Carlyle eulogized the permanent benefits of science, technology, and laissez-faire, he foresaw the perils of deferring to ‘Mechanism’ as ‘Our true Deity’. This ubiquitous trend had exerted an enervating effect on the study of the past. Historians had ‘grown mechanical in head and heart, as well as in hand’, and the baneful effects of this change were apparent in their curiously blinkered outlook: ‘If we read History with any degree of thoughtfulness,’ Carlyle asserted, ‘we shall find that the checks and balances of Profit and Loss have never been the grand agents with men; that they have never been roused into deep, thorough, all-pervading efforts by any computable prospect of Profit and Loss, for any visible, finite object; but always for some invisible and infinite one’.7
Nowhere was this myopia more evident than in British attitudes to the French Revolution, which were divided between Radicalism and Conservatism, ‘the grand categories under which all English spiritual activity . . . must range itself’ (CL viii. 41). For Carlyle the French uprising was the ‘offspring’ of a ‘mighty movement’ that had universal implications. The ‘boundless grinding collision of the New with the Old’ had provoked a popular outcry for change. Though the stated object of this movement was ‘political freedom’, Carlyle cautioned against assessing it too reductively: ‘It is towards a higher freedom than mere freedom from oppression by his fellow-man, that man dimly aims.’ To fathom the phenomenon, he maintained, the historian must learn to resist the political, economic, and philosophical orthodoxies of the day. The French Revolution was the product of ‘a deep-lying struggle in the whole fabric of society’ that eluded ‘cause and effect’ reasoning. In ‘Signs of the Times’, Carlyle offered a vague explanation of the ‘explosion’ (Works, xxvii. 82), but he was not yet ready to go further. Fresh pressures, both private and public, would soon compel him to return to this seismic moment in ‘World-History’.
Between 1830 and 1833 Carlyle was shaken by the deaths of his sister and his father, James Carlyle, who had ‘seen the American War, the French Revolution, [and] the rise and fall of Napoleon’, and warned that ‘the lot of a poor man was growing worse and worse’ (Rem. 35). The outbreak of the July Revolution in France, together with disturbances in Coventry, Worcester, and Bristol in protest against the attempts to thwart the Reform Bill, persuaded Carlyle that ‘a second edition of the French Revolution [was] distinctly within the range of chances’, because there was ‘nowhere any tie remaining among men’ (CL vi. 52). These factors induced him to engage in political debate while eschewing partisan ‘Ists’ and ‘Isms’.8 In letters, notebooks, essays, and in his fictional autobiography Sartor Resartus, written between September 1830 and August 1831, he persisted in his attacks against conventional history and in his campaign to revitalize the discipline as the highest form of poetry. He opposed the materialistic slant of nineteenth-century science and objected to its programme of reducing the physical universe to a series of systems, codes, and laws. Yet his education as a mathematician and scientist at Edinburgh University had imbued him with a strong psychological urge to find common territory between his imaginative and his empirical propensities. This tension lay at the core of the plot of Sartor Resartus, which was shaped around the shifting viewpoints of the cool and detached British editor, and the mystic and visionary Professor Diogenes Teufelsdröckh. It was also central to a series of essays that Carlyle wrote in the period before The French Revolution: ‘On History’ (1830), ‘Biography’ (1832), ‘Boswell’s Life of Johnson’ (1832), and ‘On History Again’ (1833).
What united these diverse endeavours was Carlyle’s overriding goal to enunciate a new way of thinking and writing about the past. Indirectly, he was gradually devising an approach that he himself could employ. Long before Nietzsche condemned ‘the stifling of life by the malady of history’ in his essay ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’ (1874), Carlyle warned of the dangers of wedding history to science. Both men deplored the tendency of historians to transform the inhabitants of the past into ‘mere abstractis and shadows’, and to divest them of individuality and free will.9 Where Nietzsche differed from Carlyle—and the German philosopher would never forgive the ‘Sage of Chelsea’ for his dissent—was in his rejection of the idea of God in history. For Carlyle, history was a record of ‘the mysterious vestiges of Him, whose path is in the great deep of Time, whom History indeed reveals, but only all History, and in Eternity, will clearly reveal’.10 Nietzsche’s pointed accusation that Carlyle was ‘an English atheist who makes it a point of honour not to be one’11 concisely, if unintentionally, condenses the appeal of the past to the author of The French Revolution. History offered Carlyle solace and inspiration, comforting him for his loss of faith by uniting him with a lost realm overflowing with ‘Natural Supernaturalism’.12 Through contact with historical individuals and communities, Carlyle vicariously recovered an emotional kinship with God.13
The moribund state of history in the early nineteenth century fortified his opinion that it was impossible to study the past without attending to its sacred element. The more exactingly historians strove to subordinate history to ‘mechanical’ modes of philosophy, the less able they were to address the crisis of modernity. Carlyle proposed a radical path out of this intellectual cul-de-sac. In ‘On History’ he sought to define the organic connection between intellect and imagination in the recovery of the past as part of a broader attempt to fuse history with poetry and prophecy. ‘History, as it lies at the root of all science’, he declared, ‘is also the first distinct product of man’s spiritual nature; his earliest expression of what can be called Thought. It is a looking both before and after.’ His objectives were bold. On the one hand, Carlyle sought to save history from poets and novelists, who in popularizing the subject had diminished its importance as a record of the truth. On the other, he disputed the conventional view of the discipline as ‘Philosophy teaching by Experience’ (HE 3, 4). This Enlightenment doctrine had been given new impetus in the early Victorian period by liberals and Utilitarians seeking to formulate a ‘science of history’14 that codified the immutable laws of human progress.
The popularity and renown of Walter Scott’s novels compelled Carlyle to distinguish his notion of historical truth from that of his fellow Scotsman. Though he venerated the author of Waverley for having boldly expanded the boundaries of social history, Carlyle was reluctant to join the chorus of Scott’s admirers who championed the supremacy of fictional over factual truth. In the wake of Scott’s literary success, these arguments had become increasingly influential. Writing in Blackwood’s in 1826, Thomas Doubleday declared that the
value of Fact lies not in its being what it is, but in the effect it produces. An historical series is valuable, not because it is true, but because, being true, it, in consequence, produces certain effects upon the human mind. Could the same effect be produced by a fictitious narrative, it would be just as good. . . . Fact . . . is the primitive granite . . . upon which all Fiction is formed. And this being so, Fiction has always more or less the advantage of truth.15
A year later in Guesses at Truth (1827), the theologians Julius and Augustus Hare affirmed that ‘no fact can be a truth . . . a fact is only an outward sign of a truth’. In a passage that Carlyle seemed to echo in ‘On History’, the Hares stressed the indeterminacy of all historical knowledge: ‘The scene of operation is boundless . . . the events are so intertwisted and conglomerated . . . that the history of the world is one of God’s own great poems: how can any man aim at doing more than reciting a few brief passages from it?’16
In ‘On History’ Carlyle concedes that these ‘passages’ constitute ‘only some more or less plausible scheme and theory of the Transaction, or the harmonised result of many such schemes, each varying from the other, and all varying from Truth’. History therefore is barely comprehensible, a ‘Chaos, boundless as the habitation and duration of man, unfathomable as the soul and destiny of man’. Yet Carlyle resolutely denies that historical and fictional truth are synonymous. Throughout the essay, he stresses that historical knowledge is distinct because of its proximity to real life. Historical narrative is a mode of thought that is imbedded in the very texture of experience. Storytelling is not an embellishment or a distortion of reality, but an ‘inheritance’ prompted by the natural human desire to give shape to random existence. History and narrative are mysteriously interwoven: ‘As we do nothing but enact History, we say little but recite it nay, rather, in that widest sense, our whole spiritual life is built thereon.’ Historical narratives differ from fictional ones in that they grow out of an actual set of particulars, and in tenuous yet legitimate ways, mirror the essential qualities of that experience. From the ‘Prophetic Manuscript’ of history, ‘some letters, some words may be deciphered; and if no complete Philosophy, here and there an intelligible precept’. The imperfect nature of this knowledge does not disqualify it from being ‘practically valuable’ (HE 7, 4, 8).
In defending the autonomy of historical facts, Carlyle reserves space for imagination as well as reason. He is similarly flexible in his response to those who demand that history should be allied to science. Accuracy is a worthy and noble aim, he affirms, but no historical verdict can ever withstand revision or correction, regardless of the number or quality of the documents that buttress it. The Enlightenment definition of history was founded on the fanciful supposition that ‘experience’ can be ‘gathered and intelligibly recorded’. But this ‘experience’ is the fruit of a highly fallible mode of perception, riven by the ‘fatal discrepancy between our manner of observing [passing things], and their manner of occurring’. While observations are ‘successive . . . the things done were often simultaneous’ (HE 5, 7). The tenets of the ‘philosophical historians’ are no more empirically sound than those of the divines who claim that they can find proof of God’s will in the unfolding procession of history.17 Like those whom they claimed to supersede, the Enlightenment historians had rooted their prognostications in ‘enthusiasm’ rather than reason.
Two years later Carlyle reiterated this point in ‘On History Again’: ‘The Perfect in History . . . were perfect in all learning extant or possible. Perfection . . . is . . . well known not to be the lot of man’ (HE 16). No definitive platform exists from which the past can be surveyed impartially. But the ineffability of history paradoxically bolsters Carlyle’s assurance that ‘in that complex Manuscript some letters, some words, may be deciphered’. ‘All-knowledge’ (HE 8) is impossible, but this impossibility gives indubitable proof of God’s presence in history. If the study of the past is humbling, it can also be revelatory. By disowning their scientific pretensions, historians are active correspondents in the reconstruction of the past. As Carlyle points out in ‘Biography’: ‘The Thing which I here hold imaged in my mind did actually occur; was, in very truth, an element in the system of the All, whereof I too form part; had therefore, and has, through all time, an authentic being; is not a dream, but a reality!’ (Works, xxviii. 54).
In ‘Boswell’s Life of Johnson’, Carlyle celebrates another Scottish author who transformed the historical consciousness of the age. In his estimation Boswell’s biography of Dr Johnson ranks as ‘an English Odyssey’ that yields ‘more real insight into the History of England during those days than twenty other Books, falsely entitled “Histories”, which take to themselves that special aim’. Carlyle classifies the ‘Johnsoniad’ as a Grub-Street epic that radiates Boswell’s ‘open sense’ and his ‘force, diligence and vivacity’. In his biography the ‘Singer’ and ‘Scholiast’ breach the literary etiquette of his day by carrying on a frank and unfettered dialogue with the past. In doing so he uses evidence that is beneath the ‘dignity of history’, such as ‘Gossip, Egoism, Personal Narrative . . . Scandal, Raillery, and suchlike; the ‘sum-total of which constitutes that . . . grand phenomenon still called “Conversation” ’.18 Boswell imaginatively projects himself into his subject’s world, creating a detailed chronicle of Johnson’s mental life by holding a ‘Naphtha-light’ to ‘all that [he] touched’ (Works, xxviii. 85, 80, 45, 80).
For Carlyle, Boswell’s unrivalled accomplishment is to unite the man with his times. The book is exemplary history, blending Johnson’s sentiments with those of the crowd to evoke the atmosphere of his London ‘environment’. Boswell’s narrative teems with a vibrant feeling of how commoners in the eighteenth century ‘lived and had their being; were it but economically, as, what wages they got, and what they bought with these’. His ‘jottings-down’ of his friend’s ‘careless conversation’ are so authentically recited that Johnson’s ‘thinkings and doings were not significant of himself only, but of large masses of mankind’ (Works, xxviii. 77, 81, 84, 86). It was no coincidence that Carlyle’s most important source in The French Revolution—Buchez and Roux’s Histoire parlementaire de la Révolution française—overflowed with the same ‘undignified’ Boswellian exuberance, containing ‘scenes of tragedy, of comedy, of farce, of farce-tragedy oftenest of all; there is eloquence, gravity; there is bluster, bombast, and absurdity: scenes tender, scenes barbarous, spirit-stirring and then flatly wearisome: a thing waste, incoherent, wild to look upon; but great with the greatness of reality; for the thing exhibited is no vision, but a fact’ (‘Parliamentary History of the French Revolution’ [1837], in HE 226–7). In the Life of Johnson, Carlyle had discovered a flexible blueprint for writing his projected history of the French ‘whirlwind’.
Carlyle’s admiration of Boswell attests to the distance that lay between him and Mill, who played a pivotal role in persuading him to write The French Revolution. Mill always gave priority to the discussion of ideas over ‘careless conversation’. He sought out Carlyle for the same reason that he pursued friendship with other intellectual adversaries. As he explains in his Autobiography (1872), ‘the greatest part of my mental growth consisted . . . in building the bridges and clearing the paths which connected [my opponents] with my general system of thought’ (CW i. 253). Mill not only generously shared his ‘great knowledge’ (CL vii. 289) of the French Revolution with Carlyle, but also provided him with a vast range of histories and memoirs that he had collected in preparing a review of Scott’s Life of Napoleon (1827) in April 1828. Mill recalled that the ‘number of books which I read for this purpose, making notes and extracts––even the number I had to buy (for in those days there was no public or subscription library from which books of reference could be taken home), far exceeded the worth of the immediate object; but I had at that time a half formed intention of writing a History of the French Revolution’ (Autobiography, CW i. 135). After abandoning this plan, he sent a ‘cartload’ (CL vii. 289) of books to Carlyle that included the sixty-eight-volume Collection des mémoires rélatifs à la Révolution française, edited by Berville and Barrière; individual histories by Bachaumont, Bailleul, Clavelin and Kerverseau, Dulaure, Georgel, Hénault, Lacretelle, Lameth, Levasseur, Mignet, Montgaillard, Madame de Staël, Thiers, and Toulongeon; memoirs and biographies by Dampmartin, Dumont, Lucas de Montigny, Morellet, Madame Roland, and Arthur Young; the Moniteur newspaper; and miscellaneous collections including Lallement’s Choix de rapports, Michaud’s Biographie Universelle, and instalments from Buchez and Roux’s ongoing Histoire parlementaire.19
Carlyle’s reading of these volumes was momentous. Historians and critics have rightly observed that he assessed the French Revolution in a British context and treated it as a prophetic warning to those who ignored the ‘Condition of England’ question.20 But to an extent seldom credited either by his admirers or by his critics, Carlyle’s French sources, and to a lesser degree his British and German ones, profoundly influenced his conception and re-creation of the Revolution. He later told his biographer James Anthony Froude: ‘I should not have known what to make of this world at all . . . if it had not been for the French Revolution’.21 The French writings confirmed Carlyle’s earlier intimation in ‘Signs of the Times’ that the Revolution amounted to more than a political conflict. It also signified an ‘instantaneous change of the whole body-politic, the soul-politic being all changed; such a change as few bodies, politic or other, can experience in this world’ (p. 523). Taking his cue from his French readings, Carlyle deduced that the generating force of this convulsion was ‘religiosity’ (SR 21). As a consequence, he knew that, if he wanted to reconstruct the Revolution, he would need to divulge its interior ‘soul-politic’. This entailed organizing the narrative around his sources and allowing them to ‘speak’ through his text directly to the audience.
The French volumes he used were remarkably heterogeneous, and Carlyle consulted them with scarcely any orientation. C. F. Harrold has observed that his ‘great handicap was not in consulting Mémoires and contemporary histoires, but in being among the very first to do so, in being without critical guidance, without a perspective which would have thrown much of his material into its true proportion’.22 Moreover, the proximity of many of these sources to the Revolution lent them stylistic qualities that jibed with Carlyle’s own epic and prophetic predilections. Their narratives were loaded with classical and biblical allusions that early annotators of The French Revolution often mistook as originating with Carlyle himself. This convergence in both tone and texture only increased the difficulties he faced in establishing his multitudinous ‘point of vision’. In The French Revolution he admits that his strategy is inexact: ‘Which problem the best insight, seeking light from all possible sources, shifting its point of view whithersoever vision or glimpse of vision can be had, may employ itself in solving: and be well content to solve in some tolerably approximate way’ (p. 175). Carlyle knew that questions that he posed about the French Revolution inevitably bore traces of present values and concerns, but he had devised a means of circumventing this impediment. His resolution was what Ralph Waldo Emerson later called ‘stereoscopic’.23 In his rehearsal he effected a balance between past and present by simultaneously rehearsing the biases of his source authors and juxtaposing them with the debates raging in the 1830s about the July Revolution. The task of deciphering the ‘Prophetic Manuscript’ remained daunting, but he had thoroughly prepared himself to meet the challenge.
Carlyle intentionally designed The French Revolution to repudiate Mill, who unwittingly served as a vital antagonist throughout. In his essay on Scott, Mill stipulates that the ‘historian . . . must be well disciplined in the art of connecting facts into principles, and applying principles to the explanation of facts: . . . in short, a philosopher’ (CW xx. 35–6). Judged philosophically, history is a calculus that discloses the operation of permanent laws of human advancement. Reviewing the first two volumes of Archibald Alison’s History of Europe during the French Revolution (1833–42) in 1833, Mill elaborates his thesis specifically in relation to the French Revolution. Those who regard the cataclysm as ‘arising from causes peculiarly French’ ignore its wider repercussions:
It must be the shallowest view of the French Revolution, which can now consider it as any thing but a mere incident in a great change in man himself, in his belief, in his principles of conduct and therefore in the outward arrangements of society; a change which is but half completed, and which is now in a state of more rapid progress here in England. (CW xx. 118)
From Mill’s vantage point, the violence and mayhem of the French Revolution are an unfortunate by-product of this ‘change’, but their relevance is eclipsed by the manifold benefits of progress.
His view of the ‘incident’ sharply contradicts Carlyle’s core beliefs. In Mill’s ‘science of history’, the past is wholly subservient to philosophy, and facts derive their importance in relation to a universal pattern of moral, material, and political improvement.24 This process culminates with the achievement of what Carlyle’s rival Macaulay elsewhere called ‘good government . . . temperate liberty, and liberal order’.25 In this equation, the superiority of the present is assumed. Though Carlyle believes that historians should be thoroughly engaged in the controversies of the present, he also feels deeply that the past should be respected and understood in its own setting. Mill’s ‘scientific’ theory of the French Revolution divested the upheaval of its human worth. He neutralized its unprecedented passion, violence, and novelty in order to allay his own anxieties about the continuity of history. His ‘philosophy’ had transformed the ‘grand Miraculous Tissue, and living tapestry named French Revolution’ (p. 376) into a lifeless abstraction. As Carlyle confided to his brother John in 1835, ‘[Mill] is a pure-minded clear man every way but with the strangest Utilitarian husk round him, which he will never cast off: it strikes me very much how all these people look forever at some theory of a thing, never at any thing’ (CL viii.103).
For Carlyle, Mill’s thinking was unhistorical because it ignored the ‘jarring that went on under every French roof, in every French heart’ during the Revolution. ‘Philosophy’ said nothing about the ‘Galvanic Mass, wherein all sorts of far stranger than chemical or galvanic forces and substances are at work’ (p. 321). He was eager to probe the mentalité of all sides of the Revolutionary debate, and to supplement his reading with first-hand impressions of Paris. When he learnt that Mill was going to visit the city in September 1833, he pleaded with him to search for cheap lodgings, locate libraries, and ‘tell me what resources, from Books, from Men, from personal inspection I should find there more than elsewhere’. His ambition was to ‘understand . . . French Existence, French History, especially the recent portion of it’ (CL vii. 447). But financial constraints forced Carlyle to fall back on the historical material that was available to him, and on the memories that he retained of an earlier trip that he had taken to the French capital in 1825. This was not his preferred option, but with tenacity and purpose, he took the advice of Teufelsdröckh to ‘Do the Duty which lies nearest thee’ (SR 145). On 18 July 1833 he professed to Mill: ‘A man’s theory is valuable simply as it facilitates his practice . . . for indeed till we have tried and done, we can never know what power there lies in us to do’ (CL vi. 412). Driven by a furious impatience with any further speculation, he resolved to proceed.
In referring to The French Revolution as ‘The History of Sansculottism’ (CL viii. 41), Carlyle reveals the dramatic effect of his major sources on his evolving interpretation of the event. He follows his Republican authors—Chamfort, Clavelin and Kerverseau, Buchez and Roux, Linguet and Dusaulx, and Mercier—in casting the Sansculottes as both the progenitors and the victims of the Revolution. The epithet (‘Destitute-of-Breeches’) appeals to him because, as Mercier remarks in Le Nouveau Paris, it originated as an aristocratic term of abuse against authors ‘who were not elegantly dressed’. Elsewhere, Mercier traces the term to the faubourgs, suburbs located mainly on the eastern side of Paris: ‘The inhabitants of the faubourgs composed a formidable corporation under the name of sans-culottes, which had been applied to them derisively by Lacail, and which they preserved as a badge of glory.’26 In his earlier Tableau de Paris, Mercier offers a harsh description of these nameless ‘Lackalls’, who share nothing in common with those who reside in the more affluent sections of the city. ‘There are no shoes to be seen in these dwellings’, Mercier observes, and ‘the children there are naked and sleep in jumbled heaps’. Marooned and forgotten, these denizens are a dangerous and formidable threat to the other Paris, being ‘nastier, more excitable, more contentious and more inclined to mutiny than in other neighbourhoods’.27
Anticipating Disraeli’s novel Sybil (1845) and his thesis of ‘the two Nations’, Carlyle regards the Sansculottes as the occupants of an alien territory, shunned by the affluent classes. Their condition is defined by their humiliation and anger: ‘Hunger and nakedness, and nightmare oppression lying heavy on Twenty-five million hearts; this, not the wounded vanities or contradicted philosophies of philosophical Advocates, rich Shopkeepers, rural Noblesse, was the prime mover in the French Revolution’. Yet these ‘Twenty-five Millions, who sat in darkness, heavy-laden, till they rose with pikes in their hands’ were an unknown entity, hitherto lumped together in ‘a dim compendious unity . . . as the canaille; or more humanely, as “the masses” ’ (pp. 567, 36). To Carlyle they comprise ‘the notablest phenomenon I meet with since the time of the Crusades or earlier’ (CL viii. 41).
Their anonymity presents an enigma that he tries to address both historically and stylistically. He focuses relentlessly on evidence that yields personal glimpses of this ‘black, bottomless’ (p. 421) verity. In an early chapter entitled ‘Petition in Hieroglyphs’, he speculates that ‘if with an effort of imagination, thou follow [the masses], over broad France, into their clay hovels, into their garrets and hutches, the masses consist all of units. Every unit of whom has his own heart and sorrows; stands covered there with his own skin’ (p. 36). Carlyle finds testimony of their destitution in a letter that Victor Riqueti, marquis de Mirabeau, sends to the comtesse de Rochefort on 18 August 1777. Riqueti describes a group of ‘savages descending in torrents from the mountains’ at the Baths of Mont d’Or, dancing in groups, their ‘faces haggard . . . covered with their long greasy hair; the upper part of the visage waxing pale, the lower distorting itself into the attempt at a cruel laugh and a sort of ferocious impatience’. The marquis denounces those who demand that these impoverished beings pay more tax, and presume that ‘by the cold spurt of your pen . . . you will fancy you can always starve them with impunity’. Such ‘Government by Blindman’s-buff ’, the marquis predicts, ‘will end in the General Overturn (culbute générale)’ (p. 37).
If Carlyle is eager to resist the Liberal–Utilitarian designation of the ‘twenty-five millions’ as ‘the masses’ (p. 36), he is also keen to refute Edmund Burke’s Tory caricature of them as a ‘swinish multitude’ whose revolutionary ideology is a ‘drunken delirium’.28 Seeking to turn Burke’s preoccupation with ‘circumstances’ against the prejudices of the Tory statesman,29 Carlyle examines the behaviour of the Sansculottes in the early days of the Revolution. His sources suggest that they possess a distinct awareness of their duties as a revolutionary vanguard. In their report of the Réveillon riot in April 1789, Buchez and Roux comment on the mysterious actions of the so-called brigands who ransack the paper-warehouse in the Rue St Antoine on the rumour that its owner had said that ‘a journeyman might live handsomely on fifteen sous a-day’. Contrary to their ruthless image, these ruffians exhibit unusual composure. Though they vandalize the premises, they steal nothing, and in the aftermath of a brutal suppression, they ‘bury their dead with the title Defenseurs de la Patrie, Martyrs of the good Cause’. Echoing Buchez and Roux, Carlyle wonders ‘in what strange figure, the new Political Evangel may have shaped itself; what miraculous “Communion of Drudges” may be getting formed!’ (pp. 112, 110). Whatever the answer, he concludes, their actions cannot be summarized by ‘profit and loss’ calculations.
As the insurrection gathers momentum, Carlyle strives to give a human face to this ‘dim compendious unity’. He is moved by his discovery in the sources of the names and professions of several of those who besieged the Bastille on 14 July 1789. Previously unknown to him and British readers, figures such as ‘Louis Tournay, cartwright of the Marais, old-soldier of the Regiment Dauphiné’, ‘Aubin Bonnemère (also an old soldier) seconding him’, ‘half-pay Hulin’, ‘Cholat the wine-merchant’, ‘Georget, of the Marine Service’, ‘Santerre, the sonorous Brewer of the Suburb of Saint Antoine’, and ‘Huissier Maillard’ (pp. 157–8, 116, 160) lend corporeal substance to the occasion. By identifying them, Carlyle explodes the anonymity of the ‘mob’ and invests its members with individuality and purpose. At the same time, his electric, present-perfect re-enactment of the siege conjures up their fervent loyalty to the Sansculottic revolutionary ‘Mythus’. Imaginatively participating in the scenes that Linguet and Dusaulx recount, and Prieur and Berthault sketch and engrave in Chamfort’s Tableaux, Carlyle evokes the ‘nowness’ of the conflagration. His narrative bristles with populist intensity and indignation: ‘Blood flows; the aliment of new madness. The wounded are carried into houses of the Rue Cerisiae; the dying leave their last mandate not to yield till the accursed Stronghold fall. And yet, alas, how fall? The walls are so thick!’ (p. 158).
For Carlyle, the Sansculottes’ solidarity, as well as their anger and violence, stem from their harsh poverty and exclusion. They instinctively recognize that the ancien régime is a ‘lie’, and that the polite schemes for reform being touted by constitutionalist politicians will only perpetuate this deceit in more devious and mendacious ways. If the ‘Feudal Fleur-de-lys had become an insupportably bad marching banner’, Carlyle proclaims, ‘Moneybag of Mammon’, the creed of the ‘respectable Republic for the Middle Classes’, is ‘still worse’. The Sansculottes’ belief in Freedom, Equality, and Brotherhood, however impractical, is an authentic expression of their ‘transcendental despair’, which ‘was not false’ (pp. 560–1, 523, 629). The defining attributes of this Rousseauistic ‘Gospel according to Jean-Jacques’—contempt for the corrupt and privileged, and reverence for the victimized and the ‘virtuous’—inflame the Sansculottes with a desire for justice and redemption. Their disillusionment, exacerbated by centuries of ‘starvation, falsehood, corruption and the clamm of death’, becomes the driving animus of the Revolution. By the conclusion of The French Revolution, Carlyle pronounces the destruction of the ‘body’ of Sansculottism, but insists that, in 1837, the movement ‘still lives, and is not dead, but is changed. The soul of it still lives; still works far and wide through one bodily shape into another less amorphous’. Adapting itself to different ‘circumstances’, he predicts, Sansculottism will rise again in a Phoenix-like ‘New-birth’ (pp. 387–8, 152, 710).
Occupying the centre of the stage throughout Carlyle’s drama, the Sansculottes inspire his descriptions of the ‘transcendent’ and ‘demonic’ phases of the Revolution, as well as his treatment of the various opposing factions. In each case, Carlyle contrasts the bedrock integrity of the Sansculottes’ radical ‘point of vision’ with the moral and spiritual blindness of those seeking to thwart or advance the Revolution. Sansculottism determines the fate of each faction that orbits around it:
Patriotism . . . were it never so white-frilled, logical, respectable, must either lean itself heartily on Sansculottism, the black, bottomless; or else vanish, in the frightfulest way, to Limbo! Thus some, with upturned nose, will altogether sniff and disdain Sansculottism: others will lean heartily on it; nay others again will lean what we call heartlessly on it: three sorts; each sort with a destiny corresponding. (p. 421)
Throughout each of these confrontations, the Sansculottes are isolated by barriers of class, wealth, education, and culture, but they proudly and stubbornly persevere with the Revolution, propelled by the hope that they will soon escape their shackles.
To the royalists and émigrés, the Sansculottes threaten their idyll of the King and Queen tending their loyal and submissive ‘flock’. But the ‘decent drapery’30 of the ancien régime that Burke venerates in the Reflections for making power seem gentle and obedience easy cannot disguise the truth, for Carlyle, that the people ‘are not tended, they are only regularly shorn’. For him, until they begin to realize their identity as Sansculottes, the ‘flock’ is ‘sent for, to do statute-labour, to pay statute-taxes; to fatten battlefields (named Bed of Honour) with their bodies, in quarrels which are not theirs; their hand and toil is every possession of man; but for themselves they have little or no possession’ (p. 20). In a Boswellian manner, Carlyle hectors his royalist sources, particularly Madame Campan and Joseph Weber, for extolling the pageantry of royalty at Versailles in effusive prose. Remembering a visit of the King and Queen to Marly, Campan enthuses that the ‘diamonds, feathers, rouge, gold lamé and embroidered fabrics dispelled even the faintest semblance of a rural stay; but the people liked to see the pomp of their sovereign and of a brilliant court paraded under the leafy shade’.31 In this rodomontade, the ‘people’ function as a backdrop to a spectacle that supposedly ennobles them by freeing their minds from the grind of daily survival. Parodying her frothy rococo idiom, Carlyle retorts: ‘Wholly the lightest-hearted frivolous foam of Existence; yet an artfully refined foam; pleasant were it not so costly, like that which mantles on the wine of Champagne!’ (p. 35).
The lawyers, intellectuals, and politicians who ‘lean heartily’ on the Sansculottes are no more successful in fathoming their motives than the royalists who ‘sniff and disdain’ them. Exceptional individuals such as Mirabeau and Danton can inspire and move the ‘canaille’ because in temperament and character, they incarnate the people’s inveterate distrust of elites. Seizing on a phrase used in a letter by Victor Riqueti in reference to his son, the comte de Mirabeau—‘il a humé toutes les formules’32 (he swallowed all formulas)—Carlyle applies it as well to the Sansculottes, who are fiercely suspicious of ‘logic-chopping’ (p. 240) ideologues. In his summary of the September massacres, he recalls an earlier anecdote from Bailly’s memoirs, in which Dusaulx, a deputy in the Legislative Assembly, who now delivers an order to halt the killings in the prisons, encountered a group of Sansculottes: ‘He was wont to announce himself . . . on all occasions as . . . “as a man who loves his country, who is the Translator of Juvenal”. . . . “Juvenal?” interrupts Sansculottism: “Who the devil is Juvenal? One of your sacré Aristocrates? To the Lanterne!” ’ Carlyle drolly concedes that, from ‘an orator of this kind, conviction was not to be expected’ (p. 502). The episode neatly unveils the gap separating the cosmopolitan radicals of the Third Estate from the gritty protagonists of the French Revolution.
Of the two political groups striving to represent the Sansculottes, Carlyle sides with the Jacobins rather than the Girondins. In doing so, he deliberately offends fashionable British liberal opinion, which had singled out the Girondins as the progressive party of the French Revolution. In his review of Alison, Mill had praised them as martyrs, ‘the purest and most disinterested body of men, considered as a party, who ever figured in history’, who gave their lives to advance ‘the progressive revolution embracing the whole human race’ (‘Alison’, CW xx. 99, 118). Carlyle’s dissent is unequivocal and his sarcasm, unsparing. In The French Revolution he mocks the swollen panegyrics that dominate the memoirs of Barbaroux, Buzot, Louvet, and Meillan, which he characterizes as ‘long-drawn Interjections, of Woe is me and Cursed ye be’ (p. 504). The ‘Egoism’ of the Girondins is suggestive of their absence of vision. Juggling his sources against one another, Carlyle endorses the view of Buchez, the Saint-Simonian editor of the Histoire parlementaire, who attacks the Girondins for upholding the notion of society as ‘a mechanism; that is the principal fault of their philosophy’.33 Though he laments the Girondins’ ‘cruel fate’, Carlyle sides with Buchez in linking their defeat to their predicament as ‘strangers to the People they would govern; to the thing they would come to work’. Wedded to the ‘Decencies’, these ‘Pedants of the Revolution’ (pp. 626, 578) lose touch with those who bring them to political power.
Carlyle scorns their ‘patronising’ presumption that they can somehow guide the Revolution ‘by respectable methods’. The Girondins’ adherence to ‘Political Economy . . . free-trade, and all law of supply and demand’ means little to those who have been denuded of their dignity and self-respect (pp. 392, 581). Combing his sources, he locates evidence that undercuts the uniformly flattering and heroic depiction in the Girondin memoirs of their final days in the National Convention between 31 May and 2 June 1793. In a footnote to Buzot’s recollection of the purge of the Girondins, the editor Saladin reveals that during the standoff in the Convention hall, where the dissenting deputies are trapped by the Jacobins and their supporters, the Abbé Grégoire ‘and several other members, wanting to relieve themselves, are escorted outside the hall by fusiliers’.34 Carlyle welcomes the detail as an instance of Boswellian ‘farce-tragedy’, and uses it to puncture the hyperbole of the Girondin writers. In his narrative, their vaunted idealism is compromised by more basic needs: ‘We are prisoners in our own hall: Bishop Grégoire could not get out for a besoin actuel without four gendarmes to wait on him! What is the character of the National Representative become?’ (p. 596).
Metaphorically, the Girondins are also ‘prisoners’ of their own obsolete theories. Assuming the voice of the ‘Lackalls’, Carlyle asks:
Was the Revolution made, and fought for, against the world, these four weary years, that a Formula might be substantiated; that Society might become methodic, demonstrable by logic? . . . Or ought it not withal to bring some glimmering of light and alleviation to the Twenty-five Millions . . . ?
The ferocity of the reaction against the Sansculottes makes violence their sole recourse, but their ‘Audacity’ and ‘Impetuosity’ produce enduring gains. The Girondins, a party of ‘fervid Constitutional principles’, fail to see that the Revolution would never have happened ‘had not that same great Nether Deep, of Bedlam, Fanaticism and Popular wrath and madness, risen on the Tenth of August’. Without the Sansculottes, Carlyle reminds the ‘respectable’ radicals among his reading audience, ‘French Patriotism were an eloquent Reminiscence; swinging on Prussian gibbets’ (pp. 392, 540).
He abhors the ‘monstrous, stupendous [and] unspeakable’ brutality of the Jacobins, but Carlyle refuses to resort to ‘hysterics’ in his treatment of them. Their ardent devotion to the ‘Evangelist Jean-Jacques’ is genuine, and ‘a better faith than the one it replaced; than faith in the Everlasting Nothing and man’s Digestive Power’ (pp. 474, 628, 264). The Sansculottes rally to the Jacobins because of the party’s visceral solidarity with their plight, which is apparent in the earthy and abrasive rhetoric of its leaders, particularly Danton and Marat. To the Jacobins, the Sansculottes are more than ‘mounds of combustible explosive material, for blowing down Bastilles with!’ (p. 567). But when they try to impose their austere model of Rousseau’s social contract on the Sansculottes, the Jacobins betray their heartlessness. Echoing and consolidating the views of the Deux Amis, Toulongeon, and Mercier, Carlyle discerns that the Jacobins, like their émigré opponents, are ‘ignorant of much that they should know: of themselves, of what is around them’. Their ‘Gospel of Brotherhood’ contains brutal contradictions that can be resolved only through terror. It calls on its members to ‘amend each the whole world’s wicked existence’, but marginalizes the issues of individual guilt and repentance (pp. 412, 628). For the Jacobins, personal transformation becomes the responsibility of the body politic. Morality is reduced to a test of political righteousness, and terror is used as a means of annihilating the enemies of doctrinal rectitude.35 As the urge to disinfect the body politic becomes more extreme, the violence required to sustain the ‘purges’ becomes more systematic and comprehensive.
In The French Revolution, Carlyle detects elements of ‘farce-tragedy’ in the defeat of the Jacobins, as well as the Girondins. Illustrating Vergniaud’s observation that the Revolution, ‘like Saturn, is devouring its own children’, he retrieves and revises an anecdote ‘or rumour of Anecdote’ from Lamothe-Langon’s history of the Convention. At a ‘bachelor’s dinner’ hosted by Barrère at his house in Clichy and attended by members of the Committee of Public Safety, the war minister Carnot excuses himself from the dinner table ‘driven by a necessity, needing of all things paper’. Groping in the pocket of Robespierre’s jacket, he finds ‘a list of Forty, his own name among them’, of those to be guillotined (pp. 681–2). The revelation allegedly precipitates the Thermidorean reaction, and the downfall of ‘the Sea-Green Incorruptible’. For Carlyle, the story also vividly demonstrates how personal sympathies can be sacrificed for the sake of dogmatic ‘Formulas’. The Jacobin ‘Gospel’ begins by worshipping ‘the Sanculottes’ in the abstract and ends by destroying them in the flesh. Infatuated with their visions of perfectibility, Robespierre and his accomplices lose contact with humanity as they furiously strive to navigate the Revolution ‘through seas of blood, to Equality, frugality, worksome Blessedness, Fraternity, and the Republic of the Virtues’ (pp. 682–3, 681). For the sake of a purified future, imperfect citizens must be sacrificed to the ineluctable logic of history.
From the outset, Carlyle gauged that his plan to rescue the French Revolution from the incubus of ‘philosophical history’ would meet stiff resistance, and the early critical response to the book largely fulfilled these expectations. Mill set the terms of the debate in his review of the book in July 1837. In ‘hailing [The French Revolution] as one of those productions of genius which are above all the rules, and are a law to themselves’, he was at least temporarily successful in assuring ‘the early success and reputation’ of the book’ (Autobiography, CW i. 225). Though his aims were honourable, Mill’s review damaged Carlyle’s standing by highlighting his painterly talents at the expense of his historical method. Mill had to exaggerate Carlyle’s historical accomplishment—‘A more pains-taking or accurate investigator of facts, and sifter of testimonies, never wielded the historical pen’—in order to compensate him for his philosophical deficiencies. The benefit of Carlyle’s method is that it ‘brings us acquainted with persons, things, and events, before he suggests to us what to think of them: nay, we see that this is the very process by which he arrives at his own thoughts; he paints the thing to himself––he constructs a picture of it in his own mind’. The disadvantage of this arrangement, however, is that Carlyle refuses to endow history with any other purpose than pictorial verisimilitude. He forgets that, ‘without a hypothesis to commence with, we do not even know what end to begin at, what points to enquire in’ (‘Carlyle’s French Revolution’, CW xx. 138, 158, 162).
In his review Mill hinted at Carlyle’s remoteness from the intellectual currents of his times. Sceptical of all systematic thinking, Carlyle the historian pursued an eccentric course. Other radicals and progressives echoed Mill’s criticism. In an 1843 essay, Giuseppe Mazzini grants that, in The French Revolution, Carlyle’s ‘points of view are always elevated; his horizon always extends beyond the limits of country; his criticism is never stamped with that spirit of nationalism’. Nevertheless, Mazzini complains, Carlyle’s identification with the Sansculottes is ideologically inconsistent: ‘[He] comprehends only the individual; the true sense of the unity of the human race escapes him. He sympathises with all men, but it is with the separate life of each, and not with their collective life.’36 A year later in a review of Carlyle’s Past and Present (1843), Friedrich Engels traced Carlyle’s shortcomings to his religious confusion. Though he appears unfamiliar with The French Revolution, Engels’s comments are equally pertinent to it. He lauds Carlyle for striking ‘a human chord’ in his discussion of the working classes, but faults him for his ‘pantheistic’ sentimentality, which is the result of his ‘disbelief in reason, despair of the intellect and truth’. Unable to renounce his theocentric leanings, Carlyle underestimates the primacy of economic forces in history. Viewed from the summit of dialectical science, Engels contends, democracy is only ‘a transitional stage . . . towards real human freedom; just as the irreligiousness of the age will eventually lead to complete emancipation from everything that is religious, superhuman and supernatural, not to its restoration’.37 Again, for Engels, Carlyle’s philosophical naivety undermines his stature as a historian.
These attacks by advocates of a more scientific version of ‘Philosophy teaching Experience’ coincided later in the century with the rejection of Carlyle by a newly emerging class of British academic historians. The two groups found a common cause of complaint in Carlyle’s overemphasis on the ‘biographic phasis’ (CL vi. 302) in the life of the past. The Scottish Hegelian philosopher James Hutchison Stirling, who met Carlyle in 1857, complained that the ‘universal is to him a pallid ghost, and impalpable: he must see instead, show us instead, the red blood of the individual. . . . And yet our business is to think, while it is only by universals and never by singulars that we can think.’38 Historians broke with Carlyle for other reasons. In thrall to Leopold von Ranke’s notion of history as ‘how, essentially, things happened’ (wie es eigenlich gewesen),39 they began to subject Carlyle’s ‘poetic fact’ in The French Revolution to more rigorous standards of precision. It was no longer sufficient to applaud Carlyle for his ‘painstaking industry’ and ‘strenuous toil’40 in an era in which serious history was meant to be ‘critical, to be colourless, and to be new’.41 By the 1880s, a consensus was forming among students of the French Revolution that Carlyle’s account was ‘more and more felt to be a literary picture, and less and less a historical explanation. . . . it is now seen to be a poem, with the . . . exaggeration of poetry, but without . . . solid historical science and true historical philosophy’.42
Whereas Victorian novelists were inspired by his ‘History of Sansculottism’ to humanize the ‘masses’—Carlyle’s influence permeates the crowd scenes in Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge (1841) and A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Disraeli’s Coningsby (1844) and Sybil (1845), Kingsley’s Alton Locke (1849), and Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1854–5)—historians were suspicious of his procedures, particularly in the light of the authoritarian direction that his political thinking took in the mid-1840s. Not unexpectedly, the most damaging critique against him was delivered by Oscar Browning in a lecture that he delivered to the Royal Historical Society in March 1886. A Fellow of the Society and a former master of Eton College, he taught history at Cambridge and was heavily involved in reforming the teaching of the subject in schools.43 In his talk on Carlyle’s handling of the ‘Flight to Varennes’, Browning sought to expose the author of The French Revolution as a falsifier of the facts and a leading member of what he derisively referred to as ‘the picturesque school of historians’. His aim was not simply to criticize Carlyle, but also to insist that, as a consequence of his inaccuracies, he had ‘forfeited his claim to be a historian of the first rank’.44 By expelling Carlyle from this elite, Browning also reaffirms the status of the profession as a branch of science.
Browning hinges his commentary on Carlyle’s egregious miscalculation of the distance and duration of the royal journey from Paris to Varennes. The slip sheds light on the risks Carlyle takes in submerging himself in his sources: too often, in his struggle to convey the ‘Protea[n] manysidedness’ (‘Goethe’s Works’, in Works, xxvii. 405) of the French Revolution, he loses sight of basic details, a problem that he compounds by refusing to correct or revise mistakes in later editions. Browning regards the error as symptomatic of Carlyle’s method and practice of history, which seeks the ‘picturesque at any price’. But he compromises his own objectivity by attacking Carlyle on political, rather than historical, grounds. A staunch royalist, Browning confidently proclaims at the conclusion of the lecture: ‘We now know almost every detail of the flight and capture of the King, and I can recall no event more tragic to one who has studied it in all its details.’ Carlyle proceeds from a wider social circumference. For him the flight illustrates how profoundly Sansculottic attitudes have penetrated the ordinary French psyche. In his narrative, the obliviousness of the King and Queen to the dangers they incur in fleeing Paris contrasts sharply with the revolutionary awareness of the rural populations. In retrospect, it is Browning rather than Carlyle who ‘fail[s] to grasp the direction in which truth would reveal itself in the future’.45 Recent studies of the Flight by Munro Price, Timothy Tackett, and Mona Ozouf have validated Carlyle’s approach by stressing the ‘new sense of self-confidence, of self-reliance, of identity with the nation as a whole’46 that the villagers at Sainte-Menehould and Varennes exhibited.
Unfortunately for Carlyle, Browning succeeded in debunking his reputation for accuracy among a substantial number of British historians, despite the fact that his own probity was later called into question.47 In the introduction to the first Oxford World’s Classics edition of The French Revolution in 1907, C. R. L. Fletcher refers tactfully to the ‘Legendary’ quality of the book, which ‘has been stereotyped by Carlyle’s splendid genius on the minds of two generations of Englishmen’.48 Periodically in the twentieth century, thoughtful efforts have been exerted to restore a balance of opinion with respect to this ‘Legend’. In 1956 A. J. P. Taylor observed that ‘Carlyle sensed the masses as no other writer has done. He expressed their outlook, against his own conscious convictions.’49 Roger Sharrock elaborated this point further ten years later, arguing that, in The French Revolution, ‘the People is never just a mob; sometimes it is a manifestation of the divinely appointed energy of history, but Carlyle is capable of transcending his own theoretical assumptions and seeing the Faubourg St Antoine as a collection of individuals with their own lives to live’.50 But even historians whose practice seemed directly indebted to Carlyle were reluctant to acknowledge him as a legitimate disciple of Clio. Reflecting upon his achievement in 1989, Richard Cobb pronounced: ‘Carlyle is not concerned to present us with an accurate narrative history of the French Revolution. . . . The book is a work of art, a literary masterpiece.’51
While historians have remained ambivalent in their appraisal of The French Revolution, philosophers and literary theorists influenced by idealist, deconstructionist, and postmodern schools of thought have accorded him a warmer reception. The hydra-headed aspect of Carlyle’s method of history has won him an eclectic audience. In certain respects, his techniques seem to align him with the historical philosophy of R. G. Collingwood, who stressed the priority of re-enacting the past intellectually and imaginatively. In other respects, Carlyle’s scepticism of the dominant linguistic tropes of history and his notion of the past as a ‘chaos of being’ links him to developments in postmodernism thought.52 Still further, his contention in ‘On History’ that the narrative structures are embedded in the description of events anticipate debates about the fictional properties of history.53 The drawback of these initiatives to categorize Carlyle theoretically is that they deflect attention away from his statement that his book was ‘a kind of French Revolution’ (CL ix. 116). He had always sought disruption more than acceptance. As K. J. Fielding presciently remarked in the introduction to the 1989 World’s Classics edition of the work, Carlyle’s ‘grotesque anglicising of French words’ such as ‘Sansculottism’ was cited by his contemporary critics as a manifestation of his ‘verbal terrorism’ and ‘linguistic barbarity’.54 To a startling degree, the form and style of The French Revolution correlated with the tenor of the event itself.
Yet it was not merely the ‘Savagery’ of the Sansculottic ‘volcano’ that Carlyle sought to transmit in his epic. The spiritual dimension of The French Revolution—one celebrated by radicals as diverse and fiercely individualistic as Richard Wagner, Alexander Herzen, and Ivan Turgenev55—contains within itself the promise of peace and reconciliation through empathy and forgiveness: ‘That there be no second Sansculottism in our Earth for a thousand years, let us understand well what the first was; and let Rich and Poor of us go out and do otherwise.’ Invoking this spirit of solidarity, Carlyle pleas with his readers to see beyond factionalism and ideology: ‘To the eye of equal brotherly pity, innumerable perversions dissipate themselves; exaggerations and execrations fall off, of their own accord’ (pp. 712, 565). George Eliot indirectly shed light on his perspective when she noted in Middlemarch (1871–2) that there ‘is no doctrine which is not capable of eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men’.56 Writing from a darker vantage point, the Dutch historian Pieter Geyl (1887–1996)—a survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp and a trenchant critic of Carlyle—commented poignantly: ‘He opened up unsuspected possibilities, if not for historic understanding, yet for the organs of historic feeling.’57 Fittingly, in the final paragraph of his ‘Epos’, Carlyle thanks his readers for the Boswellian ‘Conversation’ that they have conducted with them: ‘To thee I was but as a Voice. Yet was our relation a kind of sacred one’ (p. 719). These words serve as a powerful reminder that it was ‘fellow feeling’ rather than a philosophical ‘Formula’ that fired Carlyle’s passion to resurrect the French Revolution in the pages of his history.