OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 12/11/18, SPi oxford world’s classics 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 oxford world’s classics For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics have brought readers closer to the world’s great literature. Now with over 700 titles — from the 4,000-year-old myths of Mesopotamia to the twentieth century’s greatest novels — the series makes available lesser-known as well as celebrated writing. The pocket-sized hardbacks of the early years contained introductions by Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, and other literary figures that enriched the experience of reading. Today the series is recognized for its fine scholarship and reliability in texts that span world literature, drama and poetry, religion, philosophy, and politics. Each edition includes perceptive commentary and essential background information to meet the changing needs of readers. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 12/11/18, SPi 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 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 12/11/18, SPi 1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Editorial material © David R. Sorensen and Brent E. Kinser 2019 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First published as an Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2019 Impression:1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2018944465 ISBN 978–0–19–881559–4 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 12/11/18, SPi 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 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 12/11/18, SPi 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. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 12/11/18, SPi 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.