The Return to History: Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution

“It is a common phrase,” Hilaire Belloc observes, “that the history of the French Revolution cannot yet be written impartially. It would be truer to say that it will never be written impartially” (150). Today, these words seem more prophetic than ever. During my thirty-five year involvement with Carlyle’s history, extending from the publication of the first Oxford World’s Classics edition in 1989 to the second version in 2019, and finally to the three-volume Oxford English Text edition in 2020, the flow of books, monographs, and articles about the subject has continued with unabated intensity. As interpretations have changed, so too have editorial assumptions. Belloc’s prediction that the history of the upheaval “will never be written impartially” needs further refinement in this context. For as the history of the Oxford editions demonstrates, Carlyle’s challenge to the notion of impartiality in The French Revolution has fundamentally changed the ways in which his modern editors have comprehended and transmitted the work. Stylistically and methodologically, Carlyle’s “Conversation” with the French Revolution marked a meeting of Scottish and French rhetorical methods. He relished sources such as Buchez and Roux’s Histoire parlementaire because they were bursting with “scenes of tragedy, of comedy, of farce, of farce-tragedy, . . . eloquence, gravity, . . . bluster, bombast, and absurdity; scenes tender, scenes barbarous, spirit stirring, and then flatly wearisome” (“Parliamentary History”). For Carlyle, the authors of his primary materials, and these included visual materials hitherto barely accounted for let alone analyzed, were as integral to his text as the people and events that they described. Throughout The French Revolution, he carried on a running debate with his source authors, marshalling an array of epithets to personalize his disagreements. Carlyle’s historiographical style is examined to give a complete account of Carlyle’s practice as a historian.