The French Revolution: A History

Overview
Thomas Carlyle’s 1837 history turns the French Revolution into a vast, thunderous drama rather than a cool chronicle. Across three volumes, “The Bastille,” “The Constitution,” “The Guillotine”, he follows the collapse of the Old Regime, the upsurge of popular sovereignty, and the descent into Terror, written in a vivid present tense that makes events feel immediate. Carlyle treats the Revolution as a moral convulsion: retribution against centuries of misrule and falsehood, yet also a warning about chaos unleashed when authority rots and talk supplants action.

Structure and Plot
The story begins in economic misery and administrative paralysis. Court frivolity and ministerial incompetence collide with bad harvests, bread scarcity, and a fiscal crisis. The Estates-General meets in 1789; the Third Estate proclaims itself a National Assembly and swears the Tennis Court Oath. Paris erupts in July; the Bastille falls; throughout the countryside the Great Fear topples seigneurial power. The August Decrees and the Declaration of the Rights of Man announce a new order. In October, market women and militants march to Versailles, hauling the royal family to the Tuileries, where monarchy is domesticated under the gaze of the people.

Reform multiplies and fractures. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy splits France’s conscience; émigré nobles and alarmed monarchies gather beyond the borders. The King flees and is stopped at Varennes, a symbolic unmasking that poisons constitutional hopes. War beckons. On 10 August 1792, the Tuileries is stormed; monarchy falls. September brings prison massacres as panic merges with vengeance.

The Convention tries the King; Louis XVI dies on the scaffold early in 1793. Surrounded by invading armies and internal revolts, the Republic centralizes power in the Committee of Public Safety. A revolutionary government, grounded in emergency laws, wages total war at home and abroad. Assignats inflate, surveillance spreads, festivals of Reason vie with a cult of civic virtue. Danton, once the storm’s trumpet, falters and is guillotined; Robespierre, the “sea-green incorruptible,” ascends. The “Law of Suspects” and the Law of 22 Prairial accelerate executions. On 9 Thermidor (27 July 1794), the Convention turns; Robespierre and his allies are seized and executed. The Terror breaks.

Portraits and the Crowd
Carlyle paints characters as moral forces. Mirabeau is genius and appetite, the one man who might have guided France through ordered change. Danton is energy, earth, and boldness, a statesman of action. Robespierre is pale resolve and abstract virtue hardened into fatal logic. Marat embodies the corrosive edge of suspicion. Louis XVI appears weak yet human, a decent man crushed by history; Marie Antoinette is pride and pathos. Beneath and around these figures surges the People, sans-culottes, artisans, market women, an elemental presence that storms palaces, fills clubs, and haunts assemblies, at once creative and destructive.

Themes and Style
The book is a meditation on the wages of “sham”, hollow institutions, false speech, and privilege, when confronted by suffering and truth. Carlyle admires strong, sincere leadership and distrusts airy rhetoric and financial alchemy; the paper-money assignat becomes a symbol of unreality. Providence and necessity loom: events gather like weather, then break with irresistible force. The style is oracular, metaphor-rich, cinematic; apostrophes to places and persons, abrupt scene cuts, and biting irony give political narrative the pulse of epic and tragedy.

Aftermath and Legacy
Thermidor loosens the vise, but venality and weariness mark the new order. Jacobin clubs close; a White Terror takes revenge. The Directory manages drift and corruption until a young artillery officer disperses a royalist uprising with a “whiff of grapeshot.” The Revolution’s heroic and horrific energies, Carlyle suggests, have burned through France, leaving a landscape ready for a different kind of order. His history endures as a moral vision of political breakdown and renewal, a portrait of crowds and leaders under pressure, and a masterwork of historical prose whose heat still smolders.