Department of History

Introduction by Brenna Bahr

This project was introduced to us on the first day of class by our professor, Dr. Caroline Sherman, who related to us the tale of Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution as a book confronted with the threat of extinction prior even to its publication. Carlyle, upon finishing a draft of the first book, gave it to his friend, John Stuart Mill, to review. Tragedy struck, and the sole draft was mistaken by a servant of Mill’s for trash, and thrown into the fire. Carlyle was forced to write the first book again, and The French Revolution finally saw publication in 1837, three years after Carlyle began to write it.[i] In the intervening years, Carlyle’s work received widespread acclaim and was highly influential on Victorian writing. More recently, however, it has faded from the historical purview, replaced by the ever-increasing modern monographs which offer topical and specific accounts of the events of the French Revolution, without the burden of Carlyle’s romantic prose. In a response to this Dr. Sherman challenged us to save Carlyle from the fire once more, this time to be rescued from the flames of anonymity.

Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution is an interesting example of a work of historiography becoming a work of history. Although it was a study of the events and figures in France concerning the Revolution, the influence of Carlyle’s work had historical implications of its own.  Among them were the effects on the work of Charles Dickens and British suffragette, Emmeline Pankhurst.

 Charles Dickens used The French Revolution as the historical basis for A Tale of Two Cities. Dickens claimed to carry a copy of The French Revolution with him wherever he went, rereading it many times.[ii]  In Dickens’ preface to A Tale of Two Cities, he paid homage to The French Revolution: “It has been one of my hopes to add something to the popular and picturesque means of understanding that terrible time, though no one can hope to add anything to the philosophy of Mr. Carlyle’s wonderful book.”[iii] Dickens and Carlyle knew each other  personally, so that when Dickens began writing A Tale of Two Cities, Carlyle “had an enormous box of books sent to him from the London Library” to aid in his research.[iv]

Emmeline Pankhurst, a principle actor in the movement for women's suffrage in Britain, listed Carlyle’s French Revolution among her favorite books, and influential in her life. In her My Own Story, Pankhurst discusses the impact Carlyle’s work had on her: “At nine, I discovered the Odyssey and very soon after that another classic which has remained all my life a source of inspiration. This was Carlyle’s ‘French Revolution,’ and I received it with much the same emotion that Keats experienced when he read Chapman’s translation of Homer – ‘… like some watcher of skies, When a new planet swims into his ken.’ I never lost that first impression, and it strongly affected my attitude toward events which were occurring around my own childhood.”[v] Carlyle’s tale of revolution helped inspire Pankhurst in her own political revolt, a development with enormous consequences far after The French Revolution’s publication.

Given the effects of Carlyle’s work in his own time on literary and political forces, it is not difficult to see why The French Revolution would retain interest to modern scholars.  But is the interest in Carlyle’s account of this momentous political event simply historical? Or does his telling of the French Revolution remain a worthwhile representation of an event that occurred in neither his country nor his time?

By the standards of modern scholarship, Carlyle is lacking; the sparse footnotes, the unnamed sources, and the absence of a comprehensive bibliography detract from an unaided reader’s assurance of authenticity.  As our historical detective work has shown, given a few months and all the advantages of modern research, we are able to replicate his findings and divine his sources, rendering his work outdated and superfluous. So, with that in mind, we began the seemingly untenable task of discerning historical merit from Carlyle’s The French Revolution on its own terms, beyond the applications of its influence: not as an example of nineteenth century scholarship or elucidatory for the study of literature written on the French Revolution, but as a standalone work worth preserving. 

It is necessary here to say a few words about the framing of our study of history in its relationship to Carlyle’s The French Revolution, and the French Revolution itself. The course was structured so that we were assigned one classical and one contemporary monograph a week. This duality of modern and classical scholarship provided a context for the larger issue Carlyle brought to light. Carlyle, unlike many of the modern works we studied, relates no framework in his introduction to which he expects his agents to conform, nor does he offer a pat conclusion, reiterating the themes he contended throughout.

As our study of the French Revolution progressed, while immersed in competing frameworks that sought to reveal underlying comprehensive causes for the revolution, it became increasingly difficult to discern agency at work. Confronted with the many religious, economic, political, and social factors at play, many of our class discussions were dominated by the question of over-determination, concept while suited to mathematics, gave us great pause in its application to history.  Actions that occurred with distinct causes, taken as a whole, comprise the event known as The French Revolution. But this view divorces action from agency and cause from event. The fact that something happened shows only that its causes were sufficient for it to have happened, not that its occurrence was inevitable. The French Revolution emerges as a phenomenon in the philosophic sense of perceived event. This stands in contrast to Kant’s thing-in-itself, the noumenon, which is an entity superseding observation. An over-determined phenomenon then, means over-determined perception, which stands as a shortcoming in the observer, not in the thing-in-itself. Students of the French Revolution can only hope to seek the phenomenon that which is perceivable, rather than that which is.

A generous definition of “event” is required to claim something so diffused by time and location as the French Revolution fits within this paradigm. Referring to the events of 1789 as equivalent with the events of 1793 holds 1793 as necessary in the definition of 1789. What this means is that it is impossible to understand 1789 without 1793; but the impossibility of this perspective is that 1789 did occur, and it happened four years before 1793. While it is very easy to see the necessity of understanding the events of 1793 with knowledge of 1789, the inverse cannot be true, because while the present may be informed by the past, the past cannot be informed by the future. An understanding is possible, but it is an understanding, necessarily, of something larger, and thus Other, than 1789. Causes alone cannot equal an event, or else each time those causes were present, so, necessarily, would be the event. However, the economic, philosophic, political, and religious causes for The French Revolution can be discerned elsewhere in history, yet there was a single French Revolution.

 Or was there? The precise beginning and end of the Revolution are widely debated. There was no ideal, practice, belief, or even individual that remained constant for its duration. This question of over-determination can be resolved then, in distinguishing that the French Revolution was not a single event, but a multitude of events each with their own causes; or better yet, a shift, fundamentally differentiating between that which came before and that which came after.

This leads back to the discussion of frameworks. By applying a certain framework to the whole of the French Revolution is to extrapolate modern concepts onto past events whereby denying the historical context in which they occurred. Created concepts that exist now that did not exist during the time which they are applied to, do nothing more than disprove the timelessness of the concept. Simply put, if the concept had existed then, it would have existed then. Seeking the past with a modern perspective indicates our lack of knowledge of now more than the clarity of our knowledge of then. To play upon the Infinite Monkey Theorem, setting monkeys in rooms with typewriters and waiting for them to type the complete works of Shakespeare ignores the possibility that they might first type Thoreau. To establish first a framework in order to study history is to preclude the true findings that inevitably do not fit into that framework.

The significance of Carlyle’s work is found in his lack of an over-arching conclusion. Rather than presuppose an answer and direct his research to proving a particular end, Carlyle achieves a level of impartiality in his holistic approach. To truly portray the French Revolution, Carlyle seeks to immerse himself in the mundanities of it as well as in its benchmark events. Models and frameworks can only replicate a knowable, finished product – they cannot create. If they were to result in something previously unseen, the product would be learnable, quantified action, but action divorced from agency.

That sense is not found in Carlyle. His The French Revolution exists as a work of representation, not a hypothesis that demands a conclusion. It does not seek to know the historical actor by the results of his or her actions, but rather the intentions that gave rise to the actions themselves. For Carlyle, there is no villain; those whom he censures at one point can be found with godlike attributes at their next portrayal. He explores motivations, acknowledges failings and strengths, and grants clemency and agency to their actions. Carlyle’s account is imbued with myth, legend, and depictions of characters both larger than life yet strangely real. Carlyle’s representation of these historical actors resembles part biography, part Arthurian tale, with events and dialogue woven together by threads of legend. This is something very different than a modern monograph, yet to try to understand The French Revolution by our terms does it a great disservice, a disservice Carlyle did not do to those he portrayed. Our removal from Carlyle is not unlike Carlyle’s removal from the French Revolution.

There is a futility in accepting as we must with this perspective, that history is unknowable, but it is a noble futility; one that serves as the basis for real understanding.  To instead be in search of a comprehensive model or framework requires the endless casting aside of faulty models, a fruitless search for the final variables that will enable complete understanding. In finding historical merit in Carlyle’s work, we have, with this understanding, sought to affirm there is a greater value in what we do, than an informative recounting of past events, and an importance in narrative beyond chronicle. It is our hope to make Carlyle understood on his own terms, just as he seeks to make those he portrays understood on theirs.