The French Revolution: A History

Summary

Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution: A History (1837) follows France from the deathbed of Louis XV in May 1774 to the cannon with which Napoleon Bonaparte cleared the Paris streets on 13 Vendémiaire (5 October 1795). It is arranged in three volumes, The Bastille, The Constitution and The Guillotine, each divided into books of short, titled chapters. Carlyle does not write as a detached chronicler. He narrates mostly in the present tense, speaks to his characters and to the reader, borrows the cadences of epic and of Hebrew prophecy, and fixes people with epithets that stuck: the 'sea-green' Robespierre, Marat the 'Dogleech', Mirabeau the Titan. The reader feels placed inside the crowd while also hearing a judge speak from above it. Beneath the narrative lies a moral argument. Carlyle holds that the Old Regime collapsed because it had become a sham: a monarchy, nobility and established Church that kept their forms after ceasing to do the work those forms existed for. He titles the second book of the first volume 'The Paper Age', an era of edicts, fashionable philosophy and paper credit with nothing solid behind them, while some twenty-five million poor subjects, whom the court lumped together as 'the masses', present their grievances in the 'hieroglyphic' of bread riots. When bankruptcy forces the summoning of the Estates-General in 1789, the long-deferred bill falls due. The first volume carries the story through the defiance of the Third Estate, the storming of the Bastille and the October march of the market-women to Versailles. The second volume follows the attempt to govern by written constitution: the Feast of Pikes in 1790, the mutiny at Nancy, the death of Mirabeau in April 1791, the royal family's failed flight to Varennes, and the rising of 10 August 1792 that ends the monarchy. The third volume is a descent through the September prison massacres, the trial and execution of the King, the fall of the Girondins, Charlotte Corday's killing of Marat, the Terror, Thermidor and Robespierre's death, and finally the 'whiff of grapeshot' that closes the insurrectionary era. Carlyle is neither royalist nor Jacobin. He mocks the court's frivolity and the King's indecision, yet he counts the September dead against inflated rumours and grants every faction its share of guilt. His sympathy goes to whatever he judges sincere, even when it destroys, and his scorn to whatever is hollow; readers should notice that this standard can lead him to admire force too readily. The book is long, allusive and in places violent, so teachers will choose episodes, but few histories show so vividly that political order depends on truthfulness.

Plot or Argument

• Vol. I, Book I: The death of Louis XV

  Carlyle opens at Versailles in May 1774 as Louis XV dies of confluent smallpox while courtiers calculate whether the last sacraments will drive away his mistress, Madame du Barry. The young Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette fall on their knees on hearing the news and pray that they are too young to reign.

• Vol. I, Book II: The Paper Age

  The hopeful early reign of Louis XVI: Turgot's reforms and the bread riots of 1775, Necker's finances, the vogue of Rousseau's Social Contract, French aid to the American rebels, and a flood of pamphlets. Carlyle presents it as an age of hope written on paper, with the poor outside the palace gates unrepresented.

• Vol. I, Books III-IV: Bankruptcy and the Estates-General

  Calonne's deficit, the Assembly of Notables of 1787, Loménie de Brienne's failed edicts and the struggle with the Parlement of Paris lead to the summoning of the Estates-General. The book ends with the procession of deputies at Versailles in May 1789, where Carlyle sketches Mirabeau, Robespierre, Dr Guillotin and others as they pass.

• Vol. I, Book V: The Third Estate takes the Bastille

  The Commons refuse to sit by orders, swear their oath in the tennis court, and defy the King's master of ceremonies. Necker's dismissal sets Paris in motion; on 14 July 1789 the crowd besieges and takes the Bastille, and the hanging of officials from the street lamp introduces the Lanterne as a political instrument.

• Vol. I, Books VI-VII: Consolidation and the march on Versailles

  The Constituent Assembly sets out to make a constitution while chateaux burn in the provinces and a new 'Fourth Estate' of journalists rises. In October 1789 the market-women of Paris, led by the usher Maillard, march to Versailles and bring the royal family back to the Tuileries.

• Vol. II, Books I-II: Federation and mutiny

  The Feast of Pikes on the Champ-de-Mars on 14 July 1790 stages national brotherhood through oaths and symbols, while clubs and newspapers multiply. In August the garrison at Nancy mutinies over arrears of pay and is crushed by the Marquis de Bouillé, a first sign that the army will decide what speeches cannot.

• Vol. II, Books III-IV: Mirabeau's death and Varennes

  Mirabeau, the one statesman Carlyle thinks might have steered the Revolution, dies in April 1791. In June the royal family flees in a heavy new coach, is recognised by the postmaster Drouet, and is stopped at Varennes. The return to Paris is followed by the shooting of petitioners on the Champ-de-Mars.

• Vol. II, Books V-VI: The throne falls

  The Constitution of 1791 is accepted but cannot work. The Legislative Assembly faces émigrés, war with Austria, the Roland ministry and the invasion of the Tuileries in June 1792. Volunteers arrive from Marseilles singing their new song, and on 10 August the palace is stormed and the Swiss Guards killed.

• Vol. III, Books I-II: September and regicide

  The insurrectionary Commune and Danton rule Paris while Prussian armies advance. Prisoners are slaughtered in the September massacres; Dumouriez holds the Argonne and the invasion stalls at Valmy. The National Convention tries Louis XVI, votes his death, and he is guillotined on 21 January 1793.

• Vol. III, Books III-IV: The Girondins fall and Terror begins

  Dumouriez defects, the Mountain and the Paris sections purge the Girondin deputies in June 1793, and Charlotte Corday kills Marat in his bath. Civil war spreads; Marie-Antoinette and the Girondin leaders go to the guillotine, and Carlyle closes the book with Vergniaud's saying that the Revolution, like Saturn, devours its children.

• Vol. III, Books V-VI: Terror and Thermidor

  Terror becomes official policy: drownings at Nantes, the dechristianising festivals, the destruction of the Hébertists and then of Danton, and Robespierre's Feast of the Supreme Being. On 9 Thermidor (27 July 1794) the Convention turns on Robespierre, who is guillotined the next day with his jaw shattered by a pistol shot.

• Vol. III, Book VII: Vendémiaire and Finis

  The reaction brings gilded youth, hunger and a failed royalist landing at Quiberon. When the Paris sections rise against the Convention in October 1795, Bonaparte's artillery disperses them, and Carlyle declares the Revolution proper ended. A closing chapter judges the whole as the burning up of imposture and takes leave of the reader.

Characters

• Louis XVI, King of France

  Well-meaning, devout and irresolute in Carlyle's portrait; unable to act either as reformer or as master, he is carried from Versailles to Varennes to the scaffold.

• Marie-Antoinette, Queen of France

  Mocked early for frivolity, she is treated with growing pity in captivity; her trial and execution in October 1793 are among the book's gravest scenes.

• Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, Comte de Mirabeau, orator of the Constituent Assembly

  Dissolute, scarred and enormously able, the 'Titan' whom Carlyle regards as the only man who could have governed the Revolution; his death in 1791 removes that possibility.

• Maximilien Robespierre, Jacobin leader

  The 'sea-green Incorruptible', an Arras lawyer whose rigid sincerity Carlyle finds narrow and joyless; he rises through the Jacobin Club to dominate the Terror and falls on 9 Thermidor.

• Georges Danton, revolutionary leader

  Massive, energetic and coarse, the man of August and September 1792 whom Carlyle treats with more warmth than Robespierre; he is guillotined in April 1794 after urging that the Terror be slowed.

• Jean-Paul Marat, journalist, 'Friend of the People'

  A former physician to the Comte d'Artois's household, whom Carlyle calls 'horseleech' and 'Dogleech'; his newspaper demands heads, and Charlotte Corday kills him in July 1793.

• Charlotte Corday, assassin of Marat

  A young woman from Caen, sympathetic to the Girondins, who travels to Paris to kill Marat; Carlyle narrates her act and execution with a mixture of admiration and dread.

• Marquis de Lafayette, commander of the National Guard

  Hero of the American war, constitutional monarchist and 'Scipio Americanus' in Carlyle's irony; he tries to hold the middle ground and finally flees in 1792.

• Dr Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, physician and deputy

  A respectable Paris doctor who proposes a humane beheading machine; Carlyle pities him for having his name attached forever to the instrument of the Terror.

• Pierre Vergniaud, Girondin orator

  Eloquent leader of the Girondins, whose remark that the Revolution devours its own children Carlyle uses as the epitaph for his party.

• Stanislas Maillard, usher and crowd leader

  A Bastille veteran who leads the women's march to Versailles and later presides over an improvised prison court in September 1792.

• Jean-Baptiste Drouet, postmaster of Sainte-Menehould

  The 'old dragoon' who recognises the King during the flight of June 1791 and rides ahead to have the royal coach stopped at Varennes.

• Napoleon Bonaparte, artillery officer

  Glimpsed watching the storming of the Tuileries in 1792, then commanding artillery at the siege of Toulon, he returns on 13 Vendémiaire, when his guns disperse the Paris sections and end the age of insurrection.

Lessons

• Forms that have ceased to work

  Carlyle's diagnosis of 1789 is that King, nobility and Church still wore their robes but no longer did their duties, so that authority had become a 'sham' that hunger and debt eventually exposed. The argument is moral rather than economic: rulers who live by appearances lose the right and the power to rule. Students should test this claim against the episodes Carlyle chooses and against what he leaves out.

  • Which details of Louis XV's deathbed in Book I does Carlyle use to show a court living by appearances?
  • Why does he call Louis XVI's early reign 'The Paper Age', and what is paper standing in for?
  • Is 'sham' a sufficient explanation of a revolution, or does Carlyle need debt, harvests and ideas as well?

• Every unit of the masses

  In 'Petition in Hieroglyphs' Carlyle rebukes the habit of speaking of the poor as 'the masses' and insists that each of them is a man with a soul, made by God. The bread riot of 1775, answered with two hangings, becomes his emblem of government that will not read the petition in front of it. The passage asks what rulers owe to the people they cannot see.

  • What does Carlyle mean by calling the rioters' wretchedness a petition written in hieroglyphs?
  • How does his appeal to the Cardinal Grand-Almoner turn a political point into a religious one?
  • Where else in the book does the crowd become a set of named individuals, and where does it remain a faceless force?

• The historian who counts the dead

  When he reaches the September massacres, Carlyle sets the rumoured figures of six or twelve thousand beside Maton's list of 1,089 victims, and he will not let either indignation or partisanship inflate them. Yet he also refuses to treat the killings as anything but murder done by men who chose it. Honest history requires both accuracy and judgment.

  • Why does Carlyle bother to correct the exaggerated numbers of the September killings?
  • How does he keep Maillard's prison court from looking like justice even while describing its procedures?
  • Can a historian be exact about numbers and still pass moral judgment, or do the two tasks pull against each other?

• A history told in the present tense

  Carlyle narrates the Bastille, Varennes and Thermidor as if they were happening now, addresses characters by name, and interrupts with prophecy and lament. The style makes readers feel the uncertainty participants felt, but it also lets the narrator's verdicts arrive with the force of events. Close reading of form is part of judging the argument.

  • Rewrite four sentences from 'Storm and Victory' in the past tense; what changes?
  • Choose one epithet ('sea-green', 'Dogleech', 'Titan') and explain what judgment it carries.
  • Does the closing farewell to the reader in 'Finis' make the history more honest or more manipulative?

• When grapeshot ends the argument

  The book closes with Bonaparte's guns on 13 Vendémiaire, which Carlyle presents as the moment when insurrection gives way to command. His respect for sincere strength can slide into admiration of force itself, a tendency he later develops in On Heroes. Readers should weigh his verdict against the cost the book itself has recorded.

  • Why does Carlyle say the 'whiff of grapeshot' promised in 1789 could not have worked then but works in 1795?
  • Is order imposed by artillery a solution to the Revolution or only an end to it?
  • What would Scripture's account of rulers as servants of justice add to Carlyle's judgment of Bonaparte's act?

Context

Carlyle wrote a generation after the events, in a Britain that had fought France almost continuously from 1793 to 1815 and was itself debating reform, Chartism and the condition of the poor. The Revolution was still the central political memory of Europe: conservatives read it through Burke as a warning against abstract theory, radicals through Paine as the dawn of liberty. Carlyle claimed neither inheritance. He treated the Revolution as a judgment on a society that had ceased to be truthful, and he meant the lesson for England as much as for France.

Composition

Carlyle, who had moved from Scotland to Chelsea in 1834, worked from printed memoirs, parliamentary histories, newspapers such as the Moniteur and collections of documents rather than from archives. In March 1835 the manuscript of the first volume, lent to John Stuart Mill, was accidentally burned while in Mill's keeping. Carlyle rewrote it from memory and notes, finished the whole work in January 1837, and published it in three volumes with James Fraser in London that year.

Reception

Mill reviewed it warmly in the London and Westminster Review in 1837, and the book made Carlyle famous, leading to the lecture series published as On Heroes (1841). Dickens acknowledged in his preface to A Tale of Two Cities (1859) that he had drawn on Carlyle's 'wonderful book'. Later academic historians, working from archives, corrected many details and distrusted the method, yet the history stayed in print and has continued to shape the popular picture of the Revolution in English.

Comparisons

• A Tale of Two Cities

  Dickens took the Bastille assault, the dancing Carmagnole and the tumbrils from Carlyle's pages and said so in his preface, but he moves the moral centre from public judgment to private sacrifice: Sydney Carton redeems one life where Carlyle weighs a nation.

• Reflections on the Revolution in France

  Burke wrote in 1790, before regicide and Terror, and predicted them from the Revolution's principles; Carlyle wrote after the fact and blamed the Old Regime's hollowness as much as revolutionary theory. Both distrust paper constitutions, but Burke defends the inherited order that Carlyle thinks had already died.

• The Old Regime and the Revolution

  Tocqueville's 1856 study, built from provincial archives, argues that centralised administration and peasant resentment grew under the monarchy and survived the Revolution. Read beside Carlyle, it shows how an analytic historian finds continuity where a dramatic one finds rupture and judgment.

• On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History

  The 1840 lectures turn the history's instinct into doctrine: the sincere great man as the true ruler, with Napoleon and Cromwell as modern examples. Students can ask whether the history's portraits of Mirabeau, Danton and Bonaparte already contain the theory.

• Sartor Resartus

  Carlyle's 'clothes philosophy' treats institutions as garments that wear out and must be replaced; The French Revolution narrates a whole society's clothing falling apart, and many of its images of sham, rags and nakedness come from that earlier book.

• Past and Present

  Six years later Carlyle applied the diagnosis to England, contrasting a medieval abbot who governed with the idle aristocracy and Mammon-worship of the 1840s; the warning implicit in the French history becomes explicit counsel to British rulers.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The sickroom of Louis XV in Book I of the first volume. Carlyle builds his whole argument about sham authority out of who enters, who flees and who stays at the bedside.
• The present-tense narration of 14 July 1789 in 'Storm and Victory'. Notice where Carlyle stops describing the crowd and starts shouting with it, and decide whether he ever steps back out.
• The nicknames Carlyle gives his figures: the sea-green Robespierre, Marat the Dogleech, Mirabeau the Titan, Bouillé and Drouet in the Varennes chapters. Track how each epithet carries a verdict.
• The September massacres in the third volume. Watch how Carlyle corrects the rumoured numbers and how he describes the improvised prison courts.
• The final chapter, 'Finis'. Carlyle quotes a mock prophecy about the burning of imposture and then speaks directly to the reader about truthful speech.

Key terms and names

Sham

Carlyle's word for an institution or person that keeps the outward form of an office while no longer doing its work; the root cause of the Old Regime's fall in his account.

The Paper Age

His title for the early reign of Louis XVI, when edicts, philosophy, pamphlets and paper money multiplied while real reform and real bread did not.

Estates-General

France's assembly of clergy, nobility and commons, not summoned since 1614, called in 1789 to solve the royal bankruptcy.

Sansculotte

Literally 'without knee-breeches'; the working Parisian militant who wore trousers rather than aristocratic breeches. Carlyle uses 'Sansculottism' for the whole popular force of the Revolution.

Girondins

The eloquent, largely provincial republican party in the Legislative Assembly and Convention, purged by the Mountain and the Paris sections in June 1793.

Thermidor

The summer month of the Revolutionary calendar; 9 Thermidor Year II (27 July 1794) is the day the Convention overthrew Robespierre.

Vendémiaire

The autumn month in which the Paris sections rose against the Convention in 1795 and were dispersed by Bonaparte's artillery.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension What events does Carlyle place at the beginning and the end of his history, and why might he have chosen 1774 and 1795 rather than 1789 and 1799?
2. Comprehension What happened to the first manuscript of Volume I, and how did Carlyle respond?
3. Comprehension Who was Dr Guillotin, and why does Carlyle feel sorry for him?
4. Interpretation Carlyle says the poor present their grievances 'in hieroglyphs'. What does the image suggest about the relation between rulers and ruled in 1775?
5. Interpretation Compare Carlyle's portraits of Mirabeau and Robespierre. Why does he admire the dissolute man more than the incorruptible one?
6. Interpretation After condemning the Girondins' ineffectiveness, Carlyle writes that only pity survives. What changes his tone, and is the change justified?
7. Big Question Carlyle believes a society that lives by lies will be destroyed. Is truthfulness the foundation of political order, and what would that require of rulers and citizens today?

Faith Connections

• Romans 13:3-4 (Scripture)

  Paul describes rulers as servants of God for good, bearing the sword against wrongdoing. Carlyle's charge against the Old Regime is that its rulers kept the sword and the honours while abandoning the service, and students can ask whether the Revolution's new rulers did any better.

• Proverbs 14:31 (Scripture)

  Whoever oppresses the poor shows contempt for their Maker. Carlyle's insistence in 'Petition in Hieroglyphs' that every one of the masses is a man made by God comes close to this proverb, and the 1775 hangings show its opposite.

• John 1:14 (Scripture)

  Carlyle's farewell defines man as 'an incarnated Word', borrowing the Gospel's language for Christ. Students should notice both the reverence for speech and the way Carlyle applies to human nature a phrase Scripture reserves for the Son.

• Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) (Great Conversation)

  Burke defended inherited institutions against revolutionary abstraction; Carlyle shares his distrust of paper constitutions but thinks the institutions Burke defended were already dead.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: Carlyle argues that the French monarchy, nobility and Church fell because they had become shams, keeping the forms of authority without its duties, and that the Revolution was the violent destruction of that falsehood; but the revolutionaries, too, were judged by the same standard, and only the sincere, whether good or terrible, could hold power for long.

Rhetorical device: historic present and apostrophe. In 'Storm and Victory' the narrator announces that the Bastille is besieged and then addresses the crowd directly, urging all Frenchmen with hearts in their bodies forward, so that reader and narrator seem to stand inside the attack.

Debate: Resolved: that Carlyle's vivid, judging style tells the truth about the French Revolution better than a neutral chronicle could.

Memory Work

How the Twenty-five Millions of such, in their perplexed combination, acting and counter-acting may give birth to events

The Bastille is besieged! On, then, all Frenchmen that have hearts in their bodies

Writing Prompts

Essay: Choose one episode, the women's march to Versailles, the flight to Varennes or the death of Robespierre, and show how Carlyle's choice of detail, tense and epithet guides the reader's moral judgment of it.

Comparison with A Tale of Two Cities: Compare Carlyle's account of the storming of the Bastille with Dickens's in Book II of A Tale of Two Cities. What does each writer want the reader to feel, and which account better helps a reader judge the event?

Medical Lens

Carlyle is not a medical writer, but the history is full of bodies, physicians and death, and it records how eighteenth-century people spoke about them. Louis XV's smallpox, the hunger behind the riots, Dr Guillotin's promise of a painless death, Cabanis at Mirabeau's bedside, Marat's chronic skin disease and Robespierre's shattered jaw all appear in specific chapters. Carlyle's descriptions of temperament (Robespierre's 'atrabiliar' complexion) use humoral vocabulary as character portraiture, not diagnosis. Modern writers have proposed diagnoses for Marat's illness and for Mirabeau's final illness; these are retrospective readings and should be presented as such. Teachers should preview the Terror chapters, which describe executions and massacres directly.

• Vol. I, Book I, Ch. III-IV ('Viaticum', 'Louis the Unforgotten')

  Louis XV dies of confluent smallpox; courtiers fall ill from the infection and flee, while his daughters nurse him at the sickbed.

  Fever Infection Nursing Caregiving Death Dying
• Vol. I, Book II, Ch. II ('Petition in Hieroglyphs')

  Scarcity of bread in 1775 drives the poor to Versailles; Carlyle describes their sallow faces and thin diet as a petition the government refuses to read.

  Starvation Nutrition
• Vol. I, Book IV, Ch. IV ('The Procession')

  Dr Guillotin is introduced as the Assembly's adviser on ventilation and hygiene and as author of a beheading machine promised to cause no pain; the same chapter describes Robespierre's bilious complexion.

  Physicians Doctors Medical Ethics Humoral Medicine
• Vol. II, Book III, Ch. VII ('Death of Mirabeau')

  Mirabeau's overwork in his last months (leeches applied after the morning's labour, presiding over the Assembly bandaged), the attendance of his friend and physician Cabanis, and the dying man's written request for opium to end his agony.

  Physicians Doctors Opium Laudanum Pain Death Dying
• Vol. III, Book I, Ch. IV and VI ('September in Paris', 'The Circular')

  The September massacres reach the Bicêtre and the Salpêtrière; Carlyle sets rumours of patients killed with grapeshot against the documented count of victims.

  Asylum Institution Death Dying
• Vol. III, Book IV, Ch. I ('Charlotte Corday')

  Marat, a former physician, receives Corday while sitting in a slipper-bath because of a chronic illness that Carlyle declines to name.

  Physicians Doctors Pain
• Vol. III, Book VI, Ch. VII ('Go Down to')

  Robespierre, his lower jaw broken by a pistol shot, lies bound in bloody linen before his execution; Carlyle treats the wound as a failed suicide, a point historians still dispute.

  WAR Wounds Pain Death Dying

Creative Prompts

• Classroom

  Divide the class among the three volumes. Each group chooses one chapter, reads it aloud, and presents the single detail Carlyle uses to make the whole episode memorable.

• Essay

  Carlyle blames the Revolution on 'sham'. Write an essay testing this claim against two episodes, one from before 1789 and one from the Terror, and decide whether the Revolution's leaders escaped the charge they brought against the Old Regime.

• Dialogue

  Write a conversation in 1837 between Carlyle and an elderly survivor of the Girondin party who has just read Book III of the third volume and objects to how Carlyle has portrayed his friends.

• Adaptation

  Retell the flight to Varennes as a newspaper report written in June 1791 in the plain past tense, then compare your version with Carlyle's 'The Night of Spurs' and list what the present-tense narration adds.

Further Reading

• Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke

  The 1790 argument against the Revolution that Carlyle's readers knew well.

• The Old Regime and the Revolution, Alexis de Tocqueville

  An archival analysis of continuity between monarchy and Revolution.

• Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of the Terror in the French Revolution, R. R. Palmer

  A classic study of the Committee of Public Safety.

• Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, Simon Schama

  A modern narrative history that, like Carlyle, emphasises violence and personality.

• A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens

  The novel Dickens built partly on Carlyle's history.

• On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, Thomas Carlyle

  Carlyle's 1840 lectures on the great man in history.

• Thomas Carlyle: A History of His Life in London, James Anthony Froude

  Includes the burning of the first volume's manuscript and its rewriting.