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THE FRENCH REVOLUTION: A HISTORY |
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INTRODUCTION The archetypal Victorian, Thomas Carlyle was born in the same year (1795) as the Romantic Keats. Yet in the course of his long life, England changed radically under the twin pressures of two revolutions, the French and the Industrial. The first inspired Carlyle's The French Revolution (1837), the second, his great outcry against the barbarism of laissez-faire capitalism, Past and Present (1843). By the end of his long life, England had undergone a political and cultural sea change. In the year before his death in 1882, Oscar Wilde published his Poems and Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience opened on the London stage. Yeats and Kipling were in print before the end of the 1880s. Long estranged from his earlier radicalism, Carlyle lived out his last solitary decade in a kind of posthumous silence, "a spectre moving in a world of spectres." The world had changed; Carlyle had not. Yet in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, Carlyle was the most widely influential voice in the English-speaking world. Those he profoundly touched constitute a roster of eminent Victorians, English and American: the young John Stuart Mill, Ruskin, Dickens, Emerson, Whitman, Melville, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Meredith. All in one way or another discovered themselves in discovering Carlyle. Dickens dedicated Hard Times to Carlyle, and across the channel Engels paid him fervent tribute in a review of Past and Present. George Eliot wrote that for the leading minds of her generation the reading of Carlyle "was an epoch in the history of their minds." And after the news of Carlyle's death reached Whitman, he remarked that trying to imagine the larger culture of the past half-century without Carlyle would be like trying to imagine an army with the artillery left out. Yet today, Carlyle is rarely read by nonspecialists and only occasionally appears on reading lists within the academy. The causes are many, not least of which is that Carlyle is one of the most allusive and innovative of English prose writers, a kind of proto-Joyce in his incessant verbal coinages, [1] conflation of ancient myth and modern actuality, his labyrinthine narrative strategies and gift for impersonation. It is impossible to "speed-read" Carlyle, any more than Milton, whose Paradise Lost figures on virtually every page of The French Revolution, as do Homer and the Bible. If he is now half- forgotten, his is not the case of a once-inflated popular reputation expiring into decent oblivion, but of meteoric genius now in partial eclipse. Nowhere is that genius on more dazzling display than in The French Revolution, at last available to American readers, complete and moderately priced, in the present Modern Library edition. No creation of Carlyle's is more striking than his self-creation as a poet-prophet in the years immediately preceding the composition of The French Revolution. In 1826, he married the brilliant Jane Baillie Welsh, who, in choosing Carlyle, made a kind of Faustian bargain, selling not her soul but her happiness by wedding genius in the person of her difficult, dyspeptic, possibly impotent, and self-absorbed husband. In 1828, they moved to virtual seclusion on a farm amidst the desolate Scottish moors at Craigenputtock. For the following six years, Carlyle searched to find his true vocation. He published anonymously a remarkable series of essays surveying the whole of contemporary English culture. Emerson read them in America, recognized a new mind of the first magnitude, and journeyed all the way to Craigenputtock to greet their author. During these years he created one of the strangest, most innovative books in English, the quasi-autobiographical Sartor Resartus (1833-34). In Sartor he became adept at impersonating "many voices," and, most memorably, he anatomizes the revolution in individual consciousness that results in conversion, as he was soon to explore conversion writ large as revolution across the nation of France. But he had yet to find a subject large enough to contain his ambition as a writer or a style appropriate to his subject. He began to groom himself for the role of latter-day prophet, a kind of ironic John the Baptist in an age that worshipped the machine. "I have some thoughts of beginning to prophecy [sic] ... that seems the best style, could one strike into it rightly," he wrote in 1829 to the editor of Blackwood's Magazine. His new friend John Stuart Mill sent him a library of books on the French Revolution, and in a letter of 1833 acknowledging the gift, Carlyle announces that the "right History" of the Revolution would be the "grand Poem of our Time.... [The] man who could write the truth of that, were worth all other writers and singers." The French Revolution is just that, one of the grand poems of his century, yet its poetry consists in being everywhere scrupulously rooted in historical fact. But the letter most revealing of Carlyle's self-consecration as poet-prophet-historian is his first to Emerson: "I am busy constantly studying with my whole might for a Book on the French Revolution. It is part of my creed that the only Poetry is History, could we tell it right." To tell it right means, first, transcending the linear, time-bound limits of narrative so that, for example, when Carlyle depicts the storming of the Bastille in a roar of voices, his reader also hears the crashing of the towers of Troy and the fall of the walls of Jericho. "Narrative is linear, Action is solid," Carlyle had written in "On History" (1830). How then can a writer render in lines on a page a world in upheaval in which all events are contiguous with all other events, "prior or contemporaneous," and events themselves are highly problematic, a world in which everything, as Carlyle delights in pointing out, is "optique," depends upon the angle of vision of countless beholders? The solution is to create through a montage of words on a page a world of historical actuality in which no event occurs in isolation from any other and all are rendered in their rounded fullness. I pause a moment longer over the oddity of Carlyle's use of the word tell. Storytellers tell tales but we expect historiographers to write history. To tell it in Carlyle's sense implies a concept of history we have virtually lost but that lies at the heart of his vocation -- history as utterance, as song or revelation, as in telling a secret, or in the joyous proclamation, "Go, Tell it on the Mountain." History in this ancient sense is not narration but prophecy. It is not data but speech -- the sung speech of a poet. On at last beginning the book, Carlyle wrote to his brother John that he was composing "quite an epic Poem on the Revolution: an Apotheosis of Sansculottism." [2] Robert Lowell, it seems, agreed with Carlyle's description. In a gnomic essay on Homer and Virgil, Dante and Milton, drafted shortly before his death, Lowell wondered if there are any epics in prose: "I know one, Carlyle's French Revolution." Carlyle had prepared to write his revolutionary epic with all the awesome deliberateness and self-consecration that Milton brought to the writing of Paradise Lost, Wordsworth to The Prelude, or Joyce to Ulysses. Magnitude of scale combined with minuteness of realization mark the defining quality that energizes all epic. For epic is not confined to any particular form or literary period. Rather, it embodies the dominant impulse of the literary imagination in any age -- from Gilgamesh to Derek Walcott's Omeros -- by which the panoramic and the particular, the cosmic and the local, the mythic and the historic, are held in most fruitful tension. Epic is the great colonizer of all other genres. A prime sign of the burst of literary creativity in the nineteenth century is that the epic impulse manifested itself in so many different genres -- primarily in the novel (the "home epic" of Middlemarch, for example) -- but also in autobiography (The Prelude), in history (The French Revolution; The Stones of Venice), in Henry Mayhew's teeming sociological panorama (London Labour and the London Poor), to say nothing of the great American and Continental epics, historical and fictional, of Prescott and Michelet, of Melville, Tolstoy, and Balzac. With all the skill of a modern documentary journalist, Carlyle writes The French Revolution as if he were a witness-survivor of the Apocalypse. But in the modern world the gods have gone underground, God Himself is in apparent hiding, and the Apocalypse has relocated itself in historical time. Much of the power of The French Revolution lies in the shock of its transpositions, the explosive interpenetration of modern fact and ancient myth, of journalism and Scripture. And so Carlyle invents a mixed style, a unique "ludicro-terric" idiom that is by turns prophetic and ironic, epic and mock-epic, and that interweaves the language of Homer and the Bible with the abrupt argot of the Parisian barricades. The hero of Carlyle's latter-day epic is the demonic Sansculottes: "The 'destructive wrath' of Sansculottism: this is what we speak, having unhappily no voice for singing." Tucked within the modest disclaimer is the traditional boast of the epic poet -- Carlyle's tacit comparison of himself to Homer -- and the further suggestion that in a post-heroic age speech (prose) is a more persuasive medium than song (poetry). Hence in The French Revolution Carlyle writes, or rather speaks -- for history is at bottom a "telling" -- a kind of inspired vernacular poetry that is closer to Homer and Milton than to the prose of Gibbon or Macaulay. John Stuart Mill said as much at the start of his review of The French Revolution, a review perhaps written in partial recompense for his having been inadvertently responsible for the burning of the sole manuscript of Carlyle's first volume: [3]
Carlyle's analysis of the causes of the Revolution is starkly simple: "For ourselves ... [the] French Revolution means ... the open violent Rebellion, and Victory, of disimprisoned Anarchy against corrupt worn-out Authority." Anarchy bursts its prison, rises from the "infinite Deep," rages, and finally consumes itself in the Reign of Terror. The huge, stalking capitalizations that loom at the reader from Carlyle's pages -- Rebellion, Anarchy, infinite Deep -- are the metaphoric equivalent of the Greek Furies or of the Old Testament God who shakes Israel's oppressors from their thrones. The disimprisoned Anarchy that destroys ancient Authority is both psychological and political; within the psyche, it represents the unleashing of all unconscious drives. [4] In the nation, it is the overturning of ancient Authority by the Sansculottes. Anarchy is enthroned throughout Part III of The French Revolution, "The Guillotine," a descent into a Dantesque underworld, a "Black precipitous Abyss" presided over by Carlyle's mock-heroic Satan, the infernal cellar-dweller Marat. Classical Underworld, Christian Hell, and the naked psyche regressed back to Cannibalism -- these are the three types under which Carlyle comprehends the Reign of Terror. This incarnate anarchy is always present in man, therefore always immanent in history. In certain epochs (the Ancien Regime) it is pent up; in others, it bursts forth, is disimprisoned, until it devours itself in its own flames. On the single most appalling page of The French Revolution, Carlyle asks an appalling question. He is at the human tannery at Meudon, where the flayed skins of the newly guillotined were reportedly dressed into leather and sold. "At Meudon," Carlyle writes, citing Montgaillard,
Much earlier in The French Revolution Carlyle had written that society rests on the primitive political fact "that I can devour Thee." Imagery of gorging and disgorging is so prevalent as to suggest that, for Carlyle, revolution is the politics of aggression by ingestion. This darkly tragic view of the human condition inevitably makes Carlyle a mocker of the Enlightenment. True to its Enlightenment origins, the Revolution enthroned Reason; but it also unleashed the Furies; it worshipped Liberty, yet institutionalized Terror as an instrument of state policy; it proclaimed Brotherhood, but, in the words of a Gironist orator about to be beheaded, the Revolution, like Saturn, devoured its children. Carlyle found much irony -- but no contradiction -- in the fact that the Festival of Reason was celebrated on the eve of the worst atrocities of the Revolution, the mass shootings at Lyon and the mass drownings at Nantes. How could the sons of the Enlightenment have fathered such a state? Because they were sons of the Enlightenment, Carlyle grimly replies. Atrocity is the bloody underbelly of the Social Contract, darkness the underside of the Enlightenment, the wages of believing we are creatures of pure reason and benevolence. No, says Carlyle, we have reason and still inhabit the cave; we love our brother, and also flay and eat him. The heraldic emblem of The French Revolution is the Great Beast of the Apocalypse in Sansculottish dress. Primitive, vital, cathartic, he is a beast who destroys and cleanses, who fathers both violence and renewal -- a "ludicro-terrific" beast, as all demons must be in the Age of Reason. Hence the narrative of The French Revolution is simultaneously epic and mock-epic, tragic, ironic, comic. The Great Beast of the Revolution can be as comically incongruous as Robespierre, dressed in a kind of Revolutionary drag, presiding over the absurd Feast of Reason; and he can be as tragic as the same Robespierre, mutilated [5] and shrieking, at the foot of the guillotine:
The whole gathered power of The French Revolution compresses to a single point in that shriek of Robespierre. The Revolution had begun in words: first, the words of the philosophes, then a buzzing in the streets of Paris that rose to a roar and shattered the Bastille. Robespierre had become the articulate intelligence of revolutionary France, its "Chief Priest and Speaker." Speech had been fine-tuned into slogan and decree and epigram -- "The Revolution, like Saturn, is devouring its own children"; even the phlegmatic Louis XVI arrived at the scaffold prepared to speak his final piece, until Samson cut him short. But in this last act of Carlyle's drama, death lapses into pure savagery, the Revolution cannibalizes itself, and speech degenerates into an aboriginal scream. The thin skin of civilization -- a mere "wrappage" Carlyle had called it at Meudon -- is ripped from Robespierre's jaw, a gesture of gratuitous malice, for the blood-soaked bandage could not have resisted the falling blade. The cries of the self-blinded Oedipus, the howls of Lear, are not more chilling than the shriek of Robespierre. Carlyle had called the beheading of Robespierre the last act of a "natural Greek drama." The ancient Greeks followed the performance of their tragedies with a brief, comic satyr play. The short closing book of The French Revolution is Carlyle's updating of a satyr play. The Sansculottes, formerly depicted as avenging Furies, are transmuted into Dandies, Jeunesse Doree, gilded youth dancing in the streets with women in Greek costume in celebration of the end of the Reign of Terror. With the French armies everywhere victorious across Europe and Napoleon moving to center stage, having hijacked the Revolution to serve his own imperial ends, Carlyle brings his epic to a close. The old metaphors return, but now stood on their heads. Young women dressed as Minervas and Junos appear at costume balls in sheer tunics that barely conceal their "flesh-coloured drawers." The new decadence of feigned nudity supplants the old Sansculottism of naked power. But through the flesh-colored drawers peep the human skins at Meudon and the obscenely mutilated body of the Princesse de Lamballe, hacked to pieces some two hundred pages earlier "with indignities, and obscene horrors of moustachio grands-levres." One incident in Carlyle's satyr play signals the movement from high drama to farce. A band of carousing Jeunesse Doree in plaited hair tresses drags the remains of the martyred Marat from the Pantheon and dumps them in the cesspool of Montmartre, "grand Cloaca" of Paris and the World: "Shorter godhead had no living man." This apotheosis-in-reverse nicely illustrates, in advance, Marx's aphorism on history repeating itself -- first as tragedy, then as farce. Carlyle's great flaming meteor of a book ends not with an apocalyptic bang but with titters of decadent laughter echoing through the freshly gilded salons of Paris. _______________ Notes: 1. Carlyle is one of the most frequently cited authors in the Oxford English Dictionary. He is credited as the coiner of numerous words that have long passed into common usage, including genetic, industrialism, and the modern sense of the word environment. 2. Carlyle's term for the doctrines and actions of the Sansculottes (literally, without knee-breeches), the revolutionary proletariat of Paris. 3. Carlyle had entrusted Mill with the manuscript, but while in his custody it had been destroyed, perhaps used for kindling by a servant. Mill made handsome amends, which Carlyle accepted and then heroically sat down to recompose from memory what had gone up in flames. 4. Carlyle uses the unconscious in its modern sense a half-century before the Oxford English Dictionary's earliest citation of the term (1884; see the 1986 Supplement). In "Characteristics" (1831) he writes of the small fraction of our lives that we rule with "Consciousness" and observes that "the curious relations of the Voluntary and Conscious to the Involuntary and Unconscious ... might lead us into deep questions of Psychology and Physiology." 5. Robespierre had shot himself in the jaw in a failed attempt at suicide. *** JOHN D. ROSENBERG is the William Peterfield Trent Professor of English at Columbia University, where he teaches Victorian literature and has chaired the undergraduate program in literature humanities. He is the author of The Darkening Glass: A Portrait of Ruskin's Genius, The Fall of Camelot: A Study of Tennyson's "Idylls of the King," and Carlyle and the Burden of History. |