Five-minute digest
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.
Top 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Verified Quotes
Frequently cited
“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”
“Every unit of whom has his own heart and sorrows; stands covered there with his own skin, and if you prick him he will bleed”
“O God, guide us, protect us; we are too young to reign!’—Too young indeed”
“Singular Guillotin, respectable practitioner: doomed by a satiric destiny to the strangest immortal glory that ever kept obscure mortal from his resting-place, the bosom of oblivion”
“complexion of a multiplex atrabiliar colour, the final shade of which may be the pale sea-green”
“So dies a gigantic Heathen and Titan; stumbling blindly, undismayed, down to his rest”
Frequently cited
“The Revolution, like Saturn, is devouring its own children”
“Alas, whatever quarrel we had with them, has not their cruel fate abolished it? Pity only survives”
“Shams are burnt up; nay, what as yet is the peculiarity of France, the very Cant of them is burnt up”
“Man, by the nature of him, is definable as “an incarnated Word”
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.