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II. Carlyle and the French Revolution
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 February 2009
Extract
Carlyle entered the field of Revolutionary studies when the Revolution was transforming itself from politics to history, and he himself played an important part in this transition. His older contemporaries belonged to the Revolutionary generation and his younger friends, like John Mill, were products of it. William Smyth was at that time lecturing on the French Revolution in Cambridge and looking out upon it ‘as from a College window’. Smyth was extricating himself from the spirit of the pamphleteers through wide reading and a conscious training in academic impartiality. John Wilson Croker, from the midst of the political scene, was fighting the phantom of the Revolution, and at the same time delving deep into the Revolutionary sources. For him the Revolution had become a subject of historical inquiry only in the sense that he was able to investigate it from records. Alison's book came out after Carlyle had begun his studies. It stole Croker's thunder but left Carlyle unmoved. Alison knew the sources but not how to use them. His bibliographical prefaces are now the best part of his book, which Carlyle had not read when Mill asked whether it was worth reviewing.1 Carlyle glanced at it, saw that the ‘margin bears marks of great enquiry’, knew that Alison had been to France, and advised Mill to review it but to tell his own story, without fear or favour.2 ‘It is a thing utterly unknown to the English and ought to be known.’ When Mill read the book himself, he found that Alison was ‘inconceivably stupid and twaddling...has no research’,3 and that the references were to compilations. Alison's book, pervaded by political principle, tried to throw ‘ true light’ on the Revolution, was tremendously successful and is now forgotten. His sort of history is soon superseded. As he modestly realized, his success was due to his being first in the field.
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References
1 Mill to Carlyle, 11–12 Apr. 1833 [The] Letters of [John S.] Mill, ed. Elliott, H.S. (1910), 1,46.Google Scholar
2 Carlyle wrote that Alison was an ‘ Ultra Tory, and therefore cannot understand the French Revolution’ (to Mill, 18 Apr. 1833, Letters to Mill [Sterling and Browning], ed. A. Carlyle, 1923, 51). Mill wanted to review Alison but had little hope of being allowed to do so in the Ed[inburgh] Rev[iew], because he wanted to show up Macaulay's ignorance of the Revolution ‘as shown in that review’. He sent his review to Carlyle who said, ‘there is not a word in it that I do not subscribe to’ (Carlyle to Mill, 24 Sept. 1833. Letters to Mill, 69). The review alluded to is no doubt that in the Monthly Repository (July, Aug. 1833), VII, 507, 513. It is a severe criticism especially of Alison's view of the causes of the Revolution. Macaulay's article which Mill wanted to show up is probably that on Dumont in Ed. Rev. (1832).
3 To Carlyle, 18 May 1833 (Letters of Mill, 1, 49).Google Scholar
4 The essays on Mirabeau and on the Histories, and the Diamond Necklace also appeared in 1837. In this article the references to [the] Fr[ench] Rev[olution] are to the 1869 edition.
5 Carlyle expected to be done with the French Revolution for ever, as soon as he finished writing about it. His few corrections related to (1) the sinking of the Vengeur (see below, p. 130); (2) his assertion that Frederick the Great was the only king ever to attempt suicide (in 1868 he added a note calling this a calumnious rumour which he had got from the Ed. Rev. review of the Memoires de Bastille. C. R. L. Fletcher's edition (1902) does not contain the correction); (3) Admiral ‘Nesham’, not ‘Needham’, and to the sword he had been given in Paris in 1789 which was not ‘long since rusted into nothingness’.
6 E.g. Young, L.M., [Thomas] Carlyle [and the Art of History] (Philadelphia, 1939)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Harrold, C.F., ‘Carlyle's General Method in The French Revolution‘, in Publications of the Modern Language Association of America (1928), XLIII, 1150–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Much valuable analysis of Carlyle's mind and work loses by being presented as an argument in such a controversy. These are mainly American scholars. Carlyle has always had a special attraction for Americans. His first earnings came from the U.S., and he left his library to Harvard University. J. A. Froude, My Relations with Carlyle (1903), 72.
7 Young, Carlyle, 3–4.
8 G. P. Gooch, History and Historians [in the Nineteenth Century] (2nd edn. 1952), 304.
9 They argue, roughly, that Carlyle regarded history writing as an art. He must therefore be judged, like a creative artist, by the standards that he set himself.
10 On the division of historical work see, e.g., the article ‘On History’, Fraser's [Magazine] (1830); on the significance of small but true facts see ‘Biography’, ibid. (Apr. 1832).
11 To Goethe, 22 Dec. 1829 ([Correspondence between] Goethe and Carlyle, ed. Norton, C.E. (1887), 162Google Scholar). Niebuhr's History of Rome had been translated in 1828 by Hare and Thirlwall.
12 The influence of Scott and Byron was great on Carlyle. From romanticism he learnt early an idea which was to be fruitful for his history writing, that ‘the kind of genius named dramatic may be employed in a thousand ways unconnected with the theatre; it gives life and splendour to the picturesque novels of Sir Walter Scott, and forms in a different shape, the basis of much sublime philosophy in the treatises of Madame de Staël’ (to Jane Welsh, 30 Apr. 1822, [The] Love Letters [of Thomas Carlyle and Jane Welsh], ed. A. Carlyle (1909), I, 39).
13 Love Letters, 1, 43, 69, 80.
14 To Jane Welsh, Aug. 1822, ibid. 1, 68.
15 In his earliest letters Carlyle showed a preference for history which he always recommended to Jane. E.g. ‘ I still look upon it as the most instructive and interesting of all studies’ (13 July 1822. Love Letters, 1, 66). In time and bulk most of Carlyle's work (15 out of 23 volumes) was devoted to historical writing.
16 See, e.g., History of Frederick the Great (Chapman and Hall, 1897), 1, 168.
17 Basil Willey, in his essay on Carlyle in Nineteenth Century Studies (1950), calls Carlyle's history evidence for the reality of a moral order. Carlyle wrote in ‘Count Cagliostro’: ‘ With anation,.... where the multitude of the chances covers, in greatmeasure, the uncertainty of Chance, it may be said to hold always that general Suffering is the fruit of general Misbehaviour, general Dishonesty.’
18 E.g. E. Jenks, Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill (1888).
19 ‘Alison has enabled us to understand one of the mysteries of the Revolution, the occasional enthusiasms and generosity of men who were no trained [?] assassins’ (Cambridge University Library, Add. MS. 5649).
20 See, e.g., ‘Mirabeau’ in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, III (1899), 409–10.Google Scholar
21 ‘Each individual takes up the Phenomenon according to his point of vision...gives, consciously, some poor crotchety picture of several things; unconsciously some picture of himself at least. And the Phenomenon, for its part, subsists there, all the while, unaltered; waiting to be pictured as often as you like, its entire meaning not to be compressed into any picture drawn by man’ (‘Parliamentary History’ in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, IV (1899), 2).
22 E.g.’ Cavaignac is angry with me for my treatment of the Sea–green man and Impartialité generally. I take no sides in the matter. How very singular!’ (Froude, J.A., Thomas Carlyle, 1834–1881 (1884), 1, 113).Google Scholar
23 Carlyle: an Anthology (1953) 5–68; ‘Bias in History’ (An Autobiography and other Essays, 1949). 73–4.
24 ‘Impartial...mais non calme ni insensible’ (A. Aulard, ‘Carlyle Historien de la Révolution Française’, La Révolution Française (1912), LXII, 202).
25 Carlyle praised Mill's sharpness in reviewing Alison:’ I set little store by this so celebrated virtue of Tolerance1 (to Mill, 24 Sept. 1833, Letters to Mill, 70).
26 Mill, who expounded Carlyle's views of history-writing in Carlyle's own spirit, dissented from him on this point. He thought Carlyle's mistrust of analysis excessive and believed that past politics offer useful hypotheses to prove from history.
27 See, e.g., A. Ralli, Guide to Carlyle (1920). Carlyle himself called them ‘miserable compilations’ (Love Letters, 1, 19).
28 Carlyle taught himself German in 1819–20.
29 Dr John Moore's Journal during a Residence in France... (1793) and View of the causes and progress of the French Revolution (1795) are sources of some importance, which Carlyle used for the 10 Aug. (Fr. Rev. 11, 260), for the massacres of Sept. (ibid. 11, 305), and for the scene in the Convention on 24 Oct. (Carlyle says 25 Sept.), when Marat put a pistol to his head (ibid. 11, 357). Carlyle thinks Moore may have copied the Moniteur, but this is unlikely.
30 An even more bitter memory must have been his proposal to Fraser, when driven by need in the course of the preparations for the French Revolution, of a series of articles ‘ chiefly to be translated from memoirs’. Fraser made such a low offer that Carlyle abandoned the idea (Carlyle to his brother John, 17 June 1834, Letters [of Thomas Carlyle], 1826–36 (1888) 11,184).
31 The best general account of Mill's help to Carlyle is in M. St John Packe's The Life of John Stuart Mill (1954). E. Neff (Carlyle and Mill (2nd edn. 1926)) does not study in detail this side of their relations. E. Jenks (Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill, 1888) treats the two men separately. He knew that there was a correspondence, but had no access to it. Froude was wrong when he said that Carlyle's letters to Mill had been destroyed, for they were published later (Letters to Mill, ed. A. Carlyle, 1923). Those of Mill to Carlyle are in Letters of Mill, see n. 1 above.
32 Goethe and Carlyle. Apart from a few references to the Saint Simonians and to Scott's Napoleon it has little bearing on politics or history.
33 [The Correspondence of Thomas] Carlyle and [Ralph Waldo] Emerson, 1834–72 (ed. C. E. Norton, 2 vols. 1883).
34 Carlyle first heard from the Saint–Simonians as a result of his article ‘The Signs of the Times’, Ed. Rev. (1829). Goethe asked him to keep aloof from them (17 Oct. 1830, Goethe and Carlyle, 226), but Carlyle continued to received material, e.g. on the Three Days (ibid. 258), and thought them ‘earnest zealous and nowise ignorant’. To Mill he wrote favourably of them as being good and necessary (16 June 1832, Letters to Mill, 8), but later he said of them that ‘the enthusiast nowise excludes the quack’ (16 Oct. 1832, ibid. 16).
35 Young, Carlyle, 96. Miss Young suggested that when the decision to write the French Revolution took place, between the writing of the article ‘ On History’ and that on ‘ Biography’, Carlyle by way of preparation ‘whipped into shape’ his ideas on history–writing with the result that the latter article contains more practicable views. But ‘Biography’ (Apr. 1832) in fact preceded the decision to write the French Revolution, which was made in June 1833. Moreover, Carlyle's most extravagant idea about history–writing, that which requires the extraction of poetry from history, had already emerged fully when he wrote ‘The Diamond Necklace’.
36 To Mill, 28 Aug. 1832 (Letters to Mill, 11). Carlyle asks Mill not to mind what he could not find.
37 16 Oct. 1832 (Letters to Mill, 16).
38 19 Nov. 1832 (ibid. 23).
39 To Mill, I2 Jan. 1833 (ibid. 33–4).
40 Three years later Carlyle was still asking for such a book on bons mots (A. Carlyle, New Letters of Thomas Carlyle (1904), 3).
41 Book VI, ch. IV (I, 285).
42 22 Feb. 1833 (Letters to Mill, 40).
43 The same list of the three great men reappears in the article ‘Mirabeau’.
44 To Mill, 13 June 1833 (Letters to Mill, 57).
45 E.g. to Mill, early Sept. 1834: ‘The French business grows darker and darker upon me; dark as was Chaos. Ach Gott!' (Letters to Mill, 101).
46 To different correspondents Carlyle now wrote that he had come to honour ‘ facts more and more, theory less and less’. See, e.g., his letter to Emerson of 29 Apr. 1836. A fact is great as a ‘ Sentence printed if not by God, then, at least by the Devil’ (Carlyle and Emerson, 1, 93).
47 Mill's review Westminster Review (July, 1837), XXVII is important as laying down the lines for much ensuing criticism and exposing Carlyle's view of history in the spirit and in the words of Carlyle's own discussions of it. (‘This is not so much a history as an epic poem; and notwithstanding this, or even in consequence of this, the truest of histories.’) I have not found any comment on Carlyle's French Revolution by Croker. J. G. Alger (Paris [in 1789–1794], 1902, 533) speaks of the review of Carlyle's work in Q[uarterly] R[eview] (Sept. 1840), LXVI, 446–503, as being by Croker. Nothing could be less likely, and he gives no evidence. The style, the preoccupation with abstract thought, the moderateness of the criticism and, above all, the absence of attack on historical points (except one or two minor ones) rule out Croker as the author.
48 Art. cit., n. 6 above.
49 E.g. R. A. E. Brooks who, editing Carlyle's Journey to Germany (New Haven, 1940) and showing its connexion with the battle scenes in Frederick, says his aim is to ‘ push forward the field opened with Professor C. F. Harrold's fine study’. Brooks had the advantage of the fact that Carlyle had done field-work for Frederick.
50 20 Jan. 1834 (Letters to Mill, 90). It was a question whether she fell from a roof flying from a bailiff, or was thrown from a window.
51 To Emerson, Feb. 1835: ‘All is so inaccurate, superficial, vague in the numberless books I consult; and without accuracy at least, what other good is possible?’
52 Harrold, art. cit. 1166. In his list of fabrications occurs the statement: ‘Robespierre's sarcastic question “A Republic, what is that?” does not occur in Madame Roland's account which Carlyle cites.’ The following are the relevant passages: 1. Madame Roland, Mémoires (1800), 11, 69–70. ‘Pétion et Brissot disoit qu'il...fallait préarer les esprits à la République. Robespierre, ricanant à son ordinaire et se mangeant les ongles, demandoit ce que c'étoit qu'une République.’
2. Carlyle, Fr. Rev. n, 107. ‘They...would fain have comforted the seagreen man; spake of...a journal to be called The Republican...“A Republic?” said the seagreen, with one of his dry husky unsportful laughs “What is that?”‘
3. Madame Roland, Appel à I'impartiale posterité (1795). In the English translation (1795), I, 58. ‘That afternoon I met him at Pétion's... Pétion and Brissot...said that this flight would be the king's ruin and that advantage must be taken of it...prepare men's minds for a republic. Robespierre, with his usual sneer, and biting his nails, asked what was a republic. The plan of a paper entitled the Republican of which two numbers only were published, was now founded.’
Carlyle might have used the Appeal in the French or in the English translation. The Annual Register for 1792 (published in 1798) used the English translation for the same passage but Carlyle did not here use the Annual Register, which does not mention the proposed plan of a periodical.
53 Professor Harrold's article is nevertheless of great value. The massive work done in comparing Carlyle with some of his sources brings out the literary activity in Carlyle's writing, but even there it is not exhaustive. When, for instance, a source says 'sans bas comme sans souliers’, and Carlyle says ‘wooden shoes’, we cannot assume this to be a misquotation or a literary alteration unless there are no wooden shoes in any other source which Carlyle could have read.
54 Carlyle to his mother, 5 Aug. 1834 (Letters, 1826–1836, 11, 200)Google Scholar.
55 Acton, [Lectures on the] French Revolution (1925), 358Google Scholar.
56 It is possible that the quarrel with Panizzi started earlier and prejudiced Carlyle's case. Panizzi convinced the trustees that there was no case for special privileges. Carlyle made further efforts through Lady Ashburton and Lord Clarendon. See L. A. Fagan, The Life of Sir Anthony Panizzi (2 vols. 1880), I, 332; Carlyle, in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, IV (1899), 7–8 note; H. M. Stephens, The French Revolution (1886), v-vi; Acton, French Revolution, 358; J. W. Croker, ‘Robespierre’ (Q.R. Sept. 1835, LIV); L. J. Jennings, Croker Papers (1884), 11, 285.
57 A.H.R., Ball, Carlyle's French Revolution. Abridged and edited (Cambridge, 1930).Google Scholar
58 Mill replied that there was easy access to men and libraries and that living conditions were easier than in London. He had the economic details from Comte and DuchStel (Letters of Mill, 25 Nov. 1833, 1, 71).
59 For years Carlyle considered going to the U.S.A. where he had numerous invitations to lecture. Emerson made financial arrangements and promised great success.
60 Who wrote the memoirs of Lamotte (which seemed to him unauthentic) ? Was Orleans involved in the affair? In which house in London did Lamotte die? What happened to her Count? Was Oliva heard of again? Is Vilate by ‘an oversight of the Devil’ alive? Where did the jewellers live and where are they now? (28 Oct. 1833, Letters to Mill, 76).
61 17 Dec. 1833 (ibid., 82).
62 Carlyle to his mother, 25 Oct. 1834 (Letters, 1826–1836, II, 232).
63 Between Oct. and Dec. 1834 he frequently reported that the Bastille was holding out. See, e.g., ibid. 11, 244, 247.
64 Carlyle told Emerson that the review was undertaken at Mill's request, as well as ‘for needful lucre’. Carlyle had to revise it (letter to Jane, 24 July 1836) and it finally appeared in 1837.
65 Letters 1826–1836, II, 330–4. The Tree of Liberty is mentioned in the History, Book I, ch. XII. The lantern was that of the Place de Grève.Google Scholar
66 French Revolution, 358.
67 History and Historians, 303.
68 Moniteur, Journal des Débats, Révolutions de Paris, Bulletin du Tribunal Révolutionnaire (Aulard, art. cit. 196).
69 Alger's statement (Paris, 531) that Carlyle ‘virtually wrote his book from the Moniteur and from Buchez and Roux’ is not true. Had Carlyle done this he would have been spared his greatest difficulty of dealing with contradictory evidence. Moreover, the Moniteur did not include much about human behaviour. He used it rather for reference, to verify dates. Buchez and Roux he used for its extracts from contemporary documents.
70 Fr. Rev. I, 93.
71 Ibid, III, 332. Aulard, art. cit., 197.
72 Ibid. 1, 29; III, 277. ‘Prudhomme...a Jacobin Editor, will become a renegade one, and publish...Crimes of the Revolution; adding innumerable lies withal.’ But Carlyle used in Prudhomme both true stories and lies. The only lie he exposes is the slander of Cavaignac (III, 294).
73 Lallement, G.N., Choix de Rapports, Opinions et Discours prononcés à la Tribune Nationale depuis I789 jusqu'à ce jour (1815), 20 vols. (Paris, 1815)Google Scholar. See Aulard, art. cit., 196.
74 History and Historians, 303.
75 Carlyle, ‘On the sinking of the Vengeur’ (Fraser's, 1839).
76 Fr. Rev.III, 298–9.
77 E.g. in Nineteenth Century (1899), XLVI, 493.
78 History and Historians, 303.
79 Fr. Rev. 11, 337–8.
80 O. Browning, The Flight to Varennes and other Essays (1892).
81 History and Historians, 304.
82 To his wife, 24 July 1836 (A. Carlyle, New Letters, 21); cf. to his mother, 27 July 1836 (ibid. 24).
83 E.g. Alger, Parts, 531.
84 To his mother, 12 June 1834 (Letters, 1832–1836, 11, 172–3, 325).
85 It is interesting that before Carlyle wrote any serious history, in the review of ‘Boswell's Life of Johnson’ (Fraser's (1832), 370–413), he criticized Croker, who edited Boswell, for constantly noting ‘The editor does not know, the editor does not understand’.
86 Westminster Review (July, 1837), XXVII, 179. Mill interpreted Carlyle in the light of his own view that some good came out of the Revolution. He ends his review by a quotation which implies Carlyle's sympathy with the Revolution and adds that the inference is that rulers must not sit indolent on top of chaos: ‘That there be no second sansculotism in our earth for a thousand years, let us understand well what the first was; and let Rich and Poor of us go and do otherwise.’
87 The Times, 3 Aug. 1837. Thackeray praised Carlyle's impartiality compared with Scott's Tory prejudices and with the ‘immoral impartiality’ of Thiers who ascribed only base and selfish motives and saw the Revolution as a struggle for places.
88 Aulard (art. cit. 198–9) lists the passages in which Carlyle implies sympathy with the Revolution, e.g. where Carlyle asks whether France could be regenerated without revolution, or states that the émigrés made the Revolution violent, that the massacres of September were caused by fear of foreigners and that not a personal enemy of Danton died in them. All the quotations that he gives are out of context.
89 ‘Conservatism I cannot attempt to conserve, believing it to be a portentous embodied sham, accursed of God, and doomed to destruction, as all lies are’ (Froude, op. cit., I, 24).
90 Art. cit. 202.
91 To his mother, 1 Dec. 1834 (Letters, 1832–1836, 249); to Emerson, 3 Feb. 1835, 29 Apr. 1836. Most students of Carlyle describe him as a Radical in those years. In the same letter Carlyle describes his amusement at a Radical meeting he attended. D. A. Wilson (Carlyle to The French Revolution) quotes the letter and omits from it the remarks which are unfavourable to the Radicals. On 12 May 1835 he wrote home, Radicalism was advancing ‘which means revolt against innumerable things... Dissolution and confusion...and a darkness’.
92 Gooch, in the ‘Study of Modern History’, writes that Carlyle, like everyone else before Bir6, misconceived the Girondins.
93 E.g. F. Harrison, Historians of the Revolution (1886); Gooch, History and Historians, 304.
94 Much of Gooch's criticism concurs with that expressed earlier by Harrison in an article on the revolutionary historians and in another on ‘Carlyle's Place in Literature’.
95 See, e.g., Fr.Rev. 1, 265. Carlyle discusses the question where the French Revolution is taking place. It is easy, he says, to publish volume after volume recorded from the ‘Reporter's Chair’ in the Assembly, ‘easy but unprofitable. The National Assembly...goes its course; making the constitution; but the French Revolution also goes its course’.
96 Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (The Centenary Edition, 1897), Lecture VI, 199–201.
97 E.g. ‘Remark, meanwhile, how from amid the wrecks and dust of this universal Decay new Powers are fashioning themselves, adapted to the new time, and its destinies.’ Fr. Rev. 1, Bk. 1, Ch. 2.
98 It has also been said that though these men of 1789 laboured hard to make a stable constitution, ‘in Carlyle's eyes they stand condemned for the most terrible of all crimes, want of success’. Fletcher's edn. of Fr. Rev. I, 266 n.
99 E.g. ‘The Diamond Necklace’ (Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1899), II, 326).Google Scholar