The French Revolution

944 Pages·2019·4.807 MB·English

by  Thomas Carlyle, David R Sorensen, Brent E Kinser, Mark Engel

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 12/11/18, SPi
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THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
Thomas Carlyle was born in 1795 in Ecclefechan, a small market
village in Dumfriesshire. He studied for the ministry, enrolled in law
classes, and taught briefly before deciding on a career as a writer.
During the 1820s, his essays and translations helped to introduce
German literature and thought to a British audience. Sartor Resartus,
his one full-scale work of imaginative fiction, was first published peri-
odically in 1833–4. In 1826 Carlyle had married Jane Welsh. In 1834
they moved from Scotland to London and settled at Cheyne Row,
Chelsea. It was here that Carlyle wrote the works that confirmed his
position as the most influential of the Victorian cultural leaders: The
French Revolution (1837), On Heroes and Hero-Worship (1841), Past
and Present (1843), Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), and the six-volume
history of Frederick the Great (1858–65). His Reminiscences were pub-
lished shortly after his death, in 1881.
David R. Sorensen is Professor of English at Saint Joseph’s
University, Philadelphia. He has published extensively on Thomas
Carlyle and is a senior editor of the Duke–Edinburgh Collected Letters
of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle (1970–ongoing). His most recent
work is the edited edition of Carlyle’s On Heroes and Hero-Worship
(2013), with Brent E. Kinser. He is co-editor of Carlyle Studies Annual
and a founding director of the Victorian Lives and Letters Consortium
(2011–).
Brent E. Kinser is Professor of English at Western Carolina
University, North Carolina. He has published extensively on Thomas
Carlyle and is the author of The American Civil War and the Shaping of
British Democracy (2011). His most recent work is the edited edition of
Carlyle’s On Heroes and Hero-Worship (2013), with David R. Sorensen.
He is co-editor of Carlyle Studies Annual and a founding director of
the Victorian Lives and Letters Consortium (2011–).
Mark Engel was a professional editor and independent scholar.
He edited with Michael K. Goldberg and Joel J. Brattin, Carlyle’s
On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1993) and with
Rodger L. Tarr, Sartor Resartus (2000). He died in December 2017.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 12/11/18, SPi
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OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
THOMAS CARLYLE
The French Revolution
A History
Edited with an Introduction and Notes by
DAVID R. SORENSEN
and
BRENT E. KINSER
Text Established by
MARK ENGEL
Μέγα ὁ ἀγὼν ἔστι, θεῖον γὰρ ἔργον· ὑπὲρ βασιλείας, ὑπὲρ ἐλευθερίας,
ὑπὲρ εὐροίας, ὑπὲρ ἀταραξίας*. — Arrianus.
∆όγμα γὰρ αὐτῶν τίς μεταβάλλει; χωρὶς δὲ δογμάτων μεταβολῆς,
τί ἄλλο ἢ δουλεία στενόντων καὶ πείθεσθαι προσποιουμένων;*
— Antoninus
1
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CONTENTS
Introduction vii
Note on the Text xxxv
Select Bibliography xxxviii
A Chronology of Thomas Carlyle lii
A Chronology of the French Revolution liv
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 1
Explanatory Notes 721
Illustrations and Maps 805
Annotated Index 817
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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 12/11/18, SPi
INTRODUCTION
i. The French Revolution: Background and Preparation
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 pro-
fession 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 manu-
script 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 metrop-
olis 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 cen-
tury. The rioting was caused by deep popular resentment against the
House of Lords for blocking passage of the Reform Bill. Carlyle recog-
nized the figurative significance of the event when he wrote to his
brother Alexander eight days later: ‘The crowd was quiet, rather [grati-
fied] 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
1 Ian Campbell, Aileen Christianson, David R. Sorensen, et al. (eds), The Collected
Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle (Durham: Duke University Press, 1970–2017,
ongoing), vi. 396. Hereafter cited as CL.
2 Thomas Carlyle, Reminiscences, ed. K. J. Fielding and Ian Campbell (Oxford: Oxford
World’s Classics, 1997), 83. Hereafter abbreviated as Rem.
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viii Introduction
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 d iscovered 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 conflagra-
tion 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 edi-
tion to be ‘A History in Three Volumes’. Both for Mill and for himself,
Carlyle later regretted that ‘that poor story of the burnt Manuscript
3 Brent E. Kinser, ‘A Burning Question Answered: The Manuscript of TC to William
Graham, 22 April 1835’, Carlyle Studies Annual, 31 (2015–16), 257–8.
4 Wordsworth and Coleridge, ‘Preface’, in Lyrical Ballads 1798 and 1802, ed. Fiona
Stafford (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2013), 98, 111.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 12/11/18, SPi
Introduction ix
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’, admir-
ing Gibbon’s ‘winged sarcasms’ and his ‘grand power of investigating,
ascertaining, of grouping and narrating’ (Rem. 219). From a vast store-
house of minutia, Gibbon built an epic. Carlyle was intrigued by the
author’s alertness to the discrepancy in history between its signal trans-
actions 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 ‘e xuberant,
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
5 See David Sorensen, ‘Carlyle, Gibbon, and the ‘Miraculous Thing of History’, Carlyle
Annual, 12 (1991), 33–43.