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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The French Revolution," Thomas Carlyle presents a vivid and impassioned chronicle of one of history's most tumultuous periods. Employing a unique narrative style that blends historical fact with poetic prose, Carlyle breathes life into the pivotal events and figures of the Revolution. The work serves not only as a historical account but as a profound reflection on the struggle for liberty, the nature of power, and the upheaval of societal norms, encapsulated in Carlyle's striking use of language and metaphor. His deep engagement with the zeitgeist of the late 18th century sheds light on the revolutionary fervor that shook France and reverberated throughout Europe. Carlyle, a prominent Scottish historian and philosopher, was deeply influenced by the moral and philosophical dilemmas of his era. His experiences in a rapidly industrializing society and his interest in struggles for human dignity informed his portrayal of the French Revolution. Carlyle's own life was marked by a fascination with strong ideals, which translated into his passionate investigations of historical movements, making him a compelling guide through the chaos of revolutionary France. This seminal work is highly recommended for readers interested in the intricate relationship between history and philosophy. Carlyle's "The French Revolution" not only enhances our understanding of historical events but also encourages reflection on the complexities of human behavior in times of crisis. Its eloquent prose and insightful analysis make it a timeless addition to the study of social transformation. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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The French Revolution
Table of Contents
Introduction
A nation’s oldest certainties can fracture in a moment, and the forces released by that rupture may remake every law, loyalty, and life.
Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution stands as a classic because it does more than recount events: it transforms political history into a work of urgent literary imagination. First published in 1837, the book helped shape the way English readers envisioned the Revolution, not as an abstract sequence of measures and ministries, but as a lived upheaval with moral, social, and emotional weight. Its reputation has endured through generations of readers who return to it for its intensity of vision and its conviction that history is driven by human energies as much as by institutions.
Carlyle (1795–1881), a Scottish essayist and historian, wrote at a time when the aftershocks of the late eighteenth century still shaped European thought. The French Revolution had already produced a vast archive of documents and narratives, yet Carlyle approached the subject with a distinctive purpose: to render the Revolution intelligible as a crisis of legitimacy and belief, as well as a struggle over power. Without reducing its complexity, he treats the upheaval as a decisive turning point in modern political and social consciousness.
The book’s central premise is that the Revolution cannot be understood merely through official decrees or the actions of prominent figures, but must be seen in the pressures accumulating across society—economic strain, institutional weakness, and widespread demand for change. Carlyle aims to depict the movement from old regime to revolutionary transformation as a process in which ideas, crowds, and contingency collide. He does not offer a detached chronicle so much as a dramatic rendering of historical forces at work, with attention to how swiftly collective mood can shift.
Its classic status also rests on style: Carlyle’s prose is famously vigorous, compressed, and scene-driven, pressing the reader toward events with a momentum uncommon in conventional histories of his day. The narrative has the force of a literary performance, marked by sharp contrasts, rapid transitions, and a sense of immediacy. This approach helped broaden the possibilities of historical writing in English, demonstrating that a history could seek truth while still employing the tools of rhetoric, pacing, and vivid characterization.
The French Revolution is typically encountered as a history, yet it continually engages questions usually associated with political philosophy and moral inquiry. What gives authority to a government when tradition fails? What happens when reform is delayed until it becomes impossible to manage? Carlyle frames the era as a test of social order itself, and he insists on the difficulty of judging a time in which fear, hope, idealism, and resentment coexisted. The result is a narrative attentive to the peril of simplified explanations.
Carlyle composed the work in the 1830s, decades after the events it depicts, when Britain and Europe were wrestling with industrial change and debates over representation. That distance gave him access to earlier accounts while also sharpening his sense of the Revolution as a warning and a lesson for modernity. He addresses not only French politics but the broader problem of how societies justify hierarchy, distribute burdens, and respond when lived realities no longer match inherited forms. The historical subject becomes a mirror for nineteenth-century anxieties.
The book’s influence on later writers has often been noted because it models a kind of historical narrative that behaves like epic literature without abandoning its documentary impulse. Its intensity and imaginative reconstruction helped open paths for subsequent historical and political prose, encouraging authors to treat public events as moral drama and collective experience. Even for readers who disagree with Carlyle’s judgments, the work demonstrates how narrative voice can shape historical perception. That lesson has continued to matter to historians, novelists, and essayists alike.
Equally enduring are its themes: the volatility of popular sovereignty, the fragility of institutions under strain, and the unpredictable consequences of political idealism when confronted with scarcity and anger. Carlyle is drawn to the moment when language and legality cease to command universal assent and when symbolic gestures acquire life-and-death importance. He presents the Revolution as an arena where private lives are swept into public currents, and where the desire for justice can coexist with impulses toward coercion.
For new readers, it helps to approach the book as both a work of history and a deliberate act of interpretation. Carlyle selects, arranges, and animates events to convey meaning, often emphasizing the clash between abstract principles and concrete suffering. His narrative asks the reader to consider how revolutions are remembered, how responsibility is assigned, and how quickly moral certainty can be claimed by opposing sides. The book’s power lies partly in its refusal to make upheaval comfortable or easily resolved.
Although written in the early Victorian period, The French Revolution remains relevant because its subject is not confined to one nation or century. Questions about legitimacy, representation, economic pressure, and the credibility of public institutions recur wherever political systems confront demands they cannot absorb. Carlyle’s work endures as a reminder that societies are sustained by shared beliefs, and that when those beliefs collapse, events can accelerate beyond anyone’s control. That continuing resonance explains why the book still compels readers seeking to understand both history and the present.
In the end, Carlyle’s achievement is to make the Revolution feel like a human emergency rather than a distant chapter, while keeping its scale and complexity in view. Its classic status rests on the fusion of documentary ambition with literary force, and on its persistent engagement with the problems of authority, conscience, and collective action. The same dynamics that animate its pages—inequality, mistrust, political polarization, and sudden shifts in public mood—remain familiar today. That familiarity, unsettling and instructive, is part of its lasting appeal.
Synopsis
Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution: A History (published in 1837) presents the upheaval in France as a vast, dynamic human drama rather than a detached chronicle. Carlyle begins by framing the Revolution as the breakdown of an old order that has lost moral and practical credibility, and he emphasizes the social pressures that accumulate beneath outward stability. Instead of treating events as merely institutional changes, he foregrounds the lived experiences of crowds, leaders, and ordinary people, and he signals that the narrative will move through sudden turns driven by fear, hunger, conviction, and the search for legitimacy in public life.
The opening movement surveys the conditions of late eighteenth-century France, including the privileges and burdens that divide society and the sense that traditional authority can no longer command consent. Carlyle sketches how public confidence erodes amid fiscal strain, uneven justice, and widening resentment. He introduces the tensions between court, clergy, nobility, and commoners, and he shows how competing expectations gather around the prospect of reform. Throughout, his emphasis falls on the fragility of established forms when they no longer correspond to realities on the ground, and on the power of collective emotion to accelerate political change.
As the crisis sharpens, the convening of representative institutions becomes a focal point for hopes and anxieties. Carlyle traces how debates over representation and sovereignty quickly turn into a struggle over who can speak for the nation. He follows the emergence of a new political vocabulary and the rapid creation of public arenas—assemblies, pamphlets, and popular gatherings—that magnify conflict. The narrative stresses momentum: decisions made under pressure generate consequences that outpace intentions. Reformist aims and radical demands begin to intermingle, and the question of authority—legal, moral, and practical—moves from courtly procedure into the street.
Carlyle then depicts the escalation from political dispute to revolutionary rupture, when popular action and symbolic events give a new, irreversible character to the movement. He conveys the atmosphere in Paris as rumor, scarcity, and anger converge, and he portrays the crowd as a decisive historical actor that both expresses grievance and compels leaders to respond. In his account, moments of collective action do not simply illustrate disorder; they reveal a profound shift in where power is felt to reside. The old regime’s responses appear increasingly improvised, and the search for a workable settlement becomes more urgent and more elusive.
With the initial break accomplished, the story turns to the difficult work of remaking institutions and securing the Revolution against internal and external threats. Carlyle describes how legislative efforts, local authorities, and popular societies interact in unstable ways, and how competing factions interpret liberty and order differently. He presents the Revolution as simultaneously constructive and corrosive, capable of generating new civic ideals while also intensifying suspicion. The expanding public sphere, he suggests, increases accountability but also multiplies accusations. The central tension becomes how to translate abstract principles into governance while preventing violence from becoming the default instrument of politics.
As France faces war and deepening polarization, Carlyle shows how emergencies accelerate centralization and sharpen ideological boundaries. Political leaders struggle to define patriotism, treason, and public virtue, and the state’s need for security collides with commitments to rights and legality. Carlyle tracks the hardening of rhetoric and the narrowing of permissible disagreement, depicting how fear—of invasion, conspiracy, and collapse—reshapes decision-making. He keeps attention on the interplay between leaders and the masses, suggesting that popular expectations and elite strategies continually pressure one another. The Revolution’s promise remains visible, but so does its capacity for coercion.
In the middle portion, Carlyle concentrates on the intensifying measures adopted in the name of safeguarding the Republic and enforcing revolutionary justice. He depicts the expansion of surveillance, the prominence of tribunals, and the moral language used to justify severe policies. While he narrates actions taken by prominent figures and bodies, he remains concerned with the wider social psychology that sustains them: exhaustion, zeal, and the demand for certainty amid chaos. The Revolution appears as a furnace testing ideals in extreme conditions. Carlyle’s account maintains ambiguity about whether such severity is a tragic necessity or a catastrophic departure from the Revolution’s aims.
As the revolutionary government evolves, Carlyle follows shifting alignments and the recurring cycles of accusation and purge that destabilize political life. He depicts how attempts to impose unity can generate further fragmentation, and how individuals who rise to prominence may become vulnerable to the very mechanisms they helped strengthen. The narrative continues to stress volatility: authority is repeatedly redefined, and public opinion, factional rivalry, and state power form an uneasy triangle. Carlyle’s treatment underscores that revolutionary legitimacy is fragile when built on emergency and suspicion, and that the movement’s internal conflicts can be as consequential as its struggle against opponents.
In closing the arc of his history, Carlyle emphasizes the Revolution’s enduring significance as a confrontation between hollow forms of authority and the demand for real social and moral renewal. Without reducing the events to a simple moral lesson, he presents the period as a warning about what can happen when longstanding injustices are ignored until only rupture seems possible, and about how violence can proliferate when politics becomes absolute. His broader message is that societies require institutions grounded in sincerity, responsibility, and humane purpose, and that the search for freedom must contend with the dangers of fanaticism and despair.
Historical Context
The narrative that Thomas Carlyle cast as The French Revolution is anchored in late‑eighteenth‑century France, a Bourbon monarchy formally absolute yet practically constrained by custom, privilege, and fiscal weakness. The dominant institutions were the Crown, the Catholic Church, and a legal-social order structured around estates and corporate privileges. Royal authority depended on a central bureaucracy, provincial administrations, and a patchwork of courts, while ecclesiastical institutions held land, collected tithes, and shaped education and morals. Carlyle’s work, though written decades later, continually returns to this institutional landscape to explain why political legitimacy frayed when material hardship and administrative failure converged.
The social order of the Ancien Régime divided society in law and taxation more than in simple wealth: clergy and nobility held exemptions and seigneurial rights, while the “Third Estate” encompassed peasants, urban workers, and a growing professional and commercial middle. Peasants faced dues, rents, and obligations that varied by region, and many communities lived close to subsistence. Urban artisans and laborers were highly sensitive to bread prices, which could dominate household budgets. Carlyle reflects these structures by emphasizing the moral and psychological distance between privileged elites and the broader population, portraying inequity as both a practical grievance and a symbolic affront.
France’s fiscal crisis provides a direct bridge between the historical record and Carlyle’s opening pressures. Costly warfare—especially the mid‑eighteenth‑century conflicts and French intervention in the American War of Independence (late 1770s to early 1780s)—expanded debt. The monarchy’s revenue system, riddled with exemptions and reliant on unequal taxes and tax farming, proved incapable of meeting obligations without reform. Repeated attempts to restructure taxation and borrowing ran into institutional resistance from privileged bodies and political elites. Carlyle treats the fiscal breakdown not as a technical accounting matter but as an existential failure of governance, in which the state’s inability to pay becomes the state’s inability to command obedience.
Administrative and constitutional conflict intensified in the 1780s as the Crown sought new revenues and broader consent. Political opposition often rallied around claims of “fundamental laws,” customary rights, and the authority of courts and representative bodies. The monarchy’s use of lit de justice and other procedures to register edicts provoked controversy, while the idea that taxation required some form of national assent gained traction. Carlyle echoes this by describing a regime caught between old forms and new expectations, where disputes over legal procedure become a proxy for a deeper question: who speaks for the nation. His narrative style highlights the mounting tension between legality and legitimacy.
Intellectual movements also shaped the atmosphere Carlyle reconstructs. Enlightenment debates about sovereignty, law, and rights circulated through salons, pamphlets, and academies, and critiques of privilege and arbitrary power became part of public conversation. Writers such as Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau did not cause the Revolution single‑handedly, but their arguments supplied a vocabulary for reformers and opponents alike. Carlyle, writing from a nineteenth‑century British context, engages this world ambivalently: he recognizes the power of ideas yet remains skeptical of abstract systems when unmoored from moral character and practical governance.
Everyday life in the 1780s was shaped by agriculture, limited transportation networks, and the centrality of grain markets. Poor harvests and disruptions in the bread supply contributed to price spikes, hunger, and unrest in multiple years, especially in the late 1780s. Market liberalization experiments and local enforcement practices could heighten insecurity for consumers and producers alike. Carlyle repeatedly foregrounds bread and scarcity as immediate drivers of crowd action, using them to show how political crisis turns social when basic subsistence is threatened. His depiction mirrors the documented sensitivity of urban and rural communities to food availability.
The calling of the Estates‑General in 1789, the first since the early seventeenth century, formed the constitutional pivot Carlyle dramatizes. Elections, cahiers de doléances (lists of grievances), and debates over representation gave political voice to a wide range of concerns: taxation, feudal burdens, administrative abuses, and legal inequality. A central dispute concerned voting by order versus voting by head, because the balance of power hinged on how “the nation” would be counted. Carlyle’s narrative captures the momentum and uncertainty of this moment, presenting it as a collision between inherited forms and an emergent claim to national sovereignty.
As the Third Estate declared itself the National Assembly and pressed for constitutional authority in mid‑1789, the crisis shifted from fiscal reform to foundational politics. The attempt to reorganize sovereignty around a representative body challenged the monarchy’s traditional prerogatives. The period saw rapid political improvisation, with deputies and ministers responding to rumor, troop movements, and popular expectation. Carlyle’s account emphasizes the drama and contingency of these days, illustrating how symbolic acts and procedural decisions acquired revolutionary weight. The book uses this transition to explore how legitimacy can migrate from crown to nation in a compressed time frame.
Parisian popular intervention, most famously the storming of the Bastille in July 1789, became a defining emblem of the Revolution’s early phase. The Bastille’s practical significance as a fortress was less important than its symbolic association with arbitrary imprisonment and royal authority. The event also reflected fears of repression and the search for arms amid political uncertainty. Carlyle recounts such episodes as moments when the crowd enters history as an actor, not merely a backdrop, while also warning of violence’s unpredictability. His representation resonates with contemporary and later understandings of the Bastille as revolutionary symbolism.
In the countryside during the summer of 1789, widespread unrest and fear—often termed the Great Fear—contributed to attacks on seigneurial records and assertions against feudal obligations. The National Assembly’s August decrees sought to dismantle aspects of feudal privilege and restructure rights, though the implementation and compensation questions proved complex. Carlyle treats the rural dimension as essential, showing that revolution was not solely an urban or parliamentary phenomenon. By linking peasant anxieties to legislative change, he underscores how social conflict and political reform fed one another across regions.
The reconfiguration of church-state relations, especially from 1790 onward, also provides crucial context for Carlyle’s narrative. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy reorganized the Church in France, redefining dioceses, requiring clerical oaths, and bringing ecclesiastical structures into alignment with revolutionary governance. These measures generated profound divisions among clergy and laity and contributed to later conflict. Carlyle echoes the wrenching nature of this transformation, often presenting it as a spiritual as well as political upheaval. He uses the Church question to illustrate how revolution extended into conscience, community, and local identity.
The monarchy’s position deteriorated as constitutional debates and popular distrust grew, culminating in the attempted flight of the royal family in 1791 and the erosion of confidence in constitutional monarchy. While reformers had initially pursued various forms of limited monarchy, events and perceptions narrowed possibilities. Carlyle portrays this period as a tightening spiral in which symbols of unity fail to restore trust. He emphasizes how rumor, press politics, and public demonstrations magnified crises of credibility. The historical record supports the idea that by 1791–1792, monarchical legitimacy had been severely weakened across many political factions.
International war shaped the Revolution’s trajectory from 1792 as France faced conflict with European powers, intensifying internal polarization. War pressures influenced decision‑making, heightened suspicion of treason, and contributed to emergency politics. Carlyle frames wartime as an accelerant that exposes fissures in the new order, as leaders and crowds alike interpret military danger through domestic grievances. The link between external threat and internal radicalization is a recurring theme in accounts of the period, and Carlyle’s narrative uses it to show how revolution can become totalizing when survival appears at stake.
The Revolution’s radical phase, including the establishment of the Republic and the rise of emergency governance, forms a central subject for Carlyle’s dramatic technique. Political factions and institutions competed over the meaning of popular sovereignty, representation, and security. Measures associated with revolutionary government, including tribunals and surveillance, reflected both ideological commitments and the pressures of war and internal rebellion. Carlyle’s depiction is not a neutral chronicle; it stresses moral intensity, fear, and the corrosive effects of violence. His narrative thus echoes documented shifts toward exceptional measures while offering a critique of their human costs.
Technological and cultural developments in print culture are vital to understanding both the Revolution and Carlyle’s representation of it. Expanding literacy in urban centers, the proliferation of pamphlets, newspapers, and political clubs, and the rapid circulation of rumor helped create a volatile public sphere. Political language became performative, with speeches, festivals, and symbolic acts shaping perceptions of authority. Carlyle, writing in the 1830s, draws on this communicative atmosphere, often dramatizing how words and images can mobilize crowds. His approach reflects how contemporaries experienced politics as immediate, public, and emotionally charged.
Carlyle’s own era in Britain shaped his method and concerns. He wrote The French Revolution in the early 1830s, a period marked by contentious reform debates, social unrest, and the passage of the Reform Act of 1832. Industrialization, urbanization, and widening political participation raised questions about order and representation that made the French example feel urgent rather than remote. Carlyle’s book engages these anxieties indirectly, presenting the Revolution as a warning and a lesson about governance, social obligation, and the dangers of neglecting popular misery. His history is thus a nineteenth‑century meditation on eighteenth‑century events.
The book’s composition history also bears on its distinctive form. Carlyle undertook the work after early success as an essayist and historian, and he relied on published documents, memoirs, and histories then available, while crafting a highly rhetorical, scene‑driven narrative. His approach departed from detached academic style, aiming instead for moral insight through vivid reconstruction. This stylistic choice aligns with Romantic-era historiography, which valued character, fate, and the inner meaning of events. Without inventing facts, Carlyle dramatizes them, and the dramatization itself becomes part of the historical context of how the Revolution was remembered and debated in the nineteenth century.
Author Biography
Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) was a Scottish essayist, historian, and social critic whose prose helped shape Victorian intellectual life. Writing in an urgent, highly figurative style, he challenged complacent views of progress and offered searching accounts of leadership, labor, and belief in an industrial age. Carlyle became widely known through essays and large-scale historical works that blended narrative, moral judgment, and philosophical reflection. He influenced debates about history and politics in Britain and beyond, and his distinctive voice—admired by some for its power and condemned by others for its severity—remains a key reference point in nineteenth-century letters.
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Born in Ecclefechan, Dumfriesshire, Carlyle was educated locally before studying at the University of Edinburgh in the early nineteenth century. He initially trained with an eye toward a conventional profession but gravitated toward scholarship and writing, supporting himself through tutoring and journalism. Early on he immersed himself in German literature and philosophy, working as a translator and interpreter of continental thought for English readers. This engagement informed both his stylistic experiments and his critical outlook, including an interest in Romantic-era ideas, the spiritual dimensions of culture, and the limits of purely utilitarian accounts of society.
After establishing himself as a critic and essayist, Carlyle began publishing major work in the 1830s. Sartor Resartus (first appearing serially and later in book form) announced his mature method: a hybrid of fiction, philosophical satire, and cultural criticism, presented through layered narration and invented apparatus. In parallel he wrote influential essays, notably “Signs of the Times,” which scrutinized mechanization and modern “machinery” in social life, and “Characteristics,” which contrasted spiritual aspiration with what he saw as moral drift. These works gained attention for their originality and for a rhetoric that sought to shock readers into reflection.
Carlyle’s reputation expanded decisively with The French Revolution: A History (1837), a dramatic account that fused archival engagement with a vivid, almost epic narrative manner. Rather than presenting history as dispassionate chronicle, he emphasized experience, crowd psychology, and the moral stakes of political upheaval. The book was praised for its imaginative force and for bringing historical writing closer to literature, though some readers questioned its departures from conventional scholarly tone. It nevertheless established Carlyle as a major historian and set the pattern for later works that treated the past as a field of exemplary action and cautionary collapse.
In the 1840s and early 1850s Carlyle turned increasingly to social criticism and to a theory of leadership. Past and Present (1843) juxtaposed medieval monastic life with modern industrial conditions to argue that social order required duty, meaningful work, and moral authority. The same period produced On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841), a set of lectures contending that decisive individuals—prophets, poets, and statesmen—play a central role in shaping events. His advocacy of “heroic” authority and his attacks on what he called “laissez-faire” became widely debated, inspiring adherents and provoking sustained criticism.
Carlyle continued to publish large historical studies, most notably Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches (1845), which assembled and interpreted primary materials to revise Cromwell’s reputation, and The History of Friedrich II of Prussia, Called Frederick the Great (issued over the 1850s and 1860s), an extensive narrative of statecraft and war. These books reinforced his standing as a formidable, if idiosyncratic, historian: meticulous in labor yet openly interpretive in judgment. Throughout, his prose remained a signature element—compressed, metaphor-rich, and prophetic—capable of both galvanizing readers and exhausting those who preferred calmer exposition. His polemical writings also included “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question,” a text now widely condemned for its racist arguments and an important part of his contested legacy. Later in life he published Reminiscences, reflecting on people and experiences in a reflective, elegiac register, and he remained a prominent public voice in literary culture. His influence extended through friendships and correspondence with leading writers and thinkers of the period, even as controversy increasingly accompanied his pronouncements. By the later nineteenth century, admiration for his moral intensity coexisted with growing unease about the political implications of his thought and about elements of his social commentary that modern audiences reject. Carlyle spent his later years continuing to write and to revise, while his public reputation settled into a complex mixture of reverence and dispute. He died in 1881, leaving a body of work that remains significant for historians of ideas, Victorian studies, and debates about the responsibilities of authorship. His writings helped expand what historical narrative and criticism could attempt, influencing later essayists and historians in style and ambition. At the same time, his advocacy of strong authority and his racist statements ensure that engagement with his work is inseparable from ethical evaluation. Contemporary readers return to Carlyle for his powerful diagnoses of modernity and for a cautionary case study in how literary brilliance can coexist with deeply troubling convictions.
The French Revolution
BOOK 1.I. DEATH OF LOUIS XV.
Chapter 1.1.I. Louis the Well-Beloved.
President Hénault, remarking on royal Surnames of Honour how difficult it often is to ascertain not only why, but even when, they were conferred, takes occasion in his sleek official way, to make a philosophical reflection. “The Surname of Bien-aimé (Well-beloved),” says he, 'which Louis XV. bears, will not leave posterity in the same doubt. This Prince, in the year 1744, while hastening from one end of his kingdom to the other, and suspending his conquests in Flanders that he might fly to the assistance of Alsace, was arrested at Metz by a malady which threatened to cut short his days. At the news of this, Paris, all in terror, seemed a city taken by storm: the churches resounded with supplications and groans; the prayers of priests and people were every moment interrupted by their sobs: and it was from an interest so dear and tender that this Surname of Bien-aimé fashioned itself—a title higher still than all the rest which this great Prince has earned.'[1]
So stands it written; in lasting memorial of that year 1744. Thirty other years have come and gone; and 'this great Prince' again lies sick; but in how altered circumstances now! Churches resound not with excessive groanings; Paris is stoically calm: sobs interrupt no prayers, for indeed none are offered; except Priests' Litanies, read or chanted at fixed money-rate per hour, which are not liable to interruption. The shepherd of the people has been carried home from Little Trianon, heavy of heart, and been put to bed in his own Château of Versailles: the flock knows it, and heeds it not. At most, in the immeasurable tide of French Speech (which ceases not day after day, and only ebbs towards the short hours of night), may this of the royal sickness emerge from time to time as an article of news. Bets are doubtless depending; nay, some people 'express themselves loudly in the streets.'[2] But for the rest, on green field and steepled city, the May sun shines out, the May evening fades; and men ply their useful or useless business as if no Louis lay in danger.
Dame Dubarry, indeed, might pray, if she had a talent for it; Duke d'Aiguillon too, Maupeou and the Parlement Maupeou: these, as they sit in their high places, with France harnessed under their feet, know well on what basis they continue there. Look to it, D'Aiguillon; sharply as thou didst, from the Mill of St. Cast, on Quiberon and the invading English; thou, 'covered if not with glory yet with meal!' Fortune was ever accounted inconstant: and each dog has but his day.
Forlorn enough languished Duke d'Aiguillon, some years ago; covered, as we said, with meal; nay with worse. For La Chalotais, the Breton Parlementeer, accused him not only of poltroonery and tyranny, but even of concussion (official plunder of money); which accusations it was easier to get 'quashed' by backstairs Influences than to get answered: neither could the thoughts, or even the tongues, of men be tied. Thus, under disastrous eclipse, had this grand-nephew of the great Richelieu to glide about; unworshipped by the world; resolute Choiseul, the abrupt proud man, disdaining him, or even forgetting him. Little prospect but to glide into Gascony, to rebuild Châteaus there,[3] and die inglorious killing game! However, in the year 1770, a certain young soldier, Dumouriez by name, returning from Corsica, could see 'with sorrow, at Compiègne, the old King of France, on foot, with doffed hat, in sight of his army, at the side of a magnificent phaeton, doing homage to the—Dubarry.'[4]
Much lay therein! Thereby, for one thing, could D'Aiguillon postpone the rebuilding of his Château, and rebuild his fortunes first. For stout Choiseul would discern in the Dubarry nothing but a wonderfully dizened Scarlet-woman; and go on his way as if she were not. Intolerable: the source of sighs, tears, of pettings and pouting; which would not end till 'France' (La France, as she named her royal valet) finally mustered heart to see Choiseul; and with that 'quivering in the chin (tremblement du menton)' natural in such case,[5] faltered out a dismissal: dismissal of his last substantial man, but pacification of his scarlet-woman. Thus D'Aiguillon rose again, and culminated. And with him there rose Maupeou, the banisher of Parlements; who plants you a refractory President 'at Croe in Combrailles on the top of steep rocks, inaccessible except by litters,' there to consider himself. Likewise there rose Abbé Terray, dissolute Financier, paying eightpence in the shilling,—so that wits exclaim in some press at the playhouse, "Where is Abbé Terray, that he might reduce us to two-thirds!" And so have these individuals (verily by black-art) built them a Domdaniel, or enchanted Dubarrydom; call it an Armida-Palace, where they dwell pleasantly; Chancellor Maupeou 'playing blind-man's-buff' with the scarlet Enchantress; or gallantly presenting her with dwarf Negroes;—and a Most Christian King has unspeakable peace within doors, whatever he may have without. "My Chancellor is a scoundrel; but I cannot do without him."[6]
Beautiful Armida-Palace, where the inmates live enchanted lives; lapped in soft music of adulation; waited on by the splendours of the world;—which nevertheless hangs wondrously as by a single hair. Should the Most Christian King die; or even get seriously afraid of dying! For, alas, had not the fair haughty Châteauroux to fly, with wet cheeks and flaming heart, from that Fever-scene at Metz; driven forth by sour shavelings? She hardly returned, when fever and shavelings were both swept into the background. Pompadour too, when Damiens wounded Royalty 'slightly, under the fifth rib,' and our drive to Trianon went off futile, in shrieks and madly shaken torches,—had to pack, and be in readiness: yet did not go, the wound not proving poisoned. For his Majesty has religious faith; believes, at least in a Devil. And now a third peril; and who knows what may be in it! For the Doctors look grave; ask privily, If his Majesty had not the small-pox long ago?—and doubt it may have been a false kind. Yes, Maupeou, pucker those sinister brows of thine, and peer out on it with thy malign rat-eyes: it is a questionable case. Sure only that man is mortal; that with the life of one mortal snaps irrevocably the wonderfulest talisman, and all Dubarrydom rushes off, with tumult, into infinite Space; and ye, as subterranean Apparitions are wont, vanish utterly,—leaving only a smell of sulphur!
These, and what holds of these may pray,—to Beelzebub, or whoever will hear them. But from the rest of France there comes, as was said, no prayer; or one of an opposite character, 'expressed openly in the streets.' Château or Hôtel, were an enlightened Philosophism scrutinises many things, is not given to prayer: neither are Rossbach victories, Terray Finances, nor, say only 'sixty thousand Lettres de Cachet[1]' (which is Maupeou's share), persuasives towards that. O Hénault! Prayers? From a France smitten (by black-art) with plague after plague, and lying now in shame and pain, with a Harlot's foot on its neck, what prayer can come? Those lank scarecrows, that prowl hunger-stricken through all highways and byways of French Existence, will they pray? The dull millions that, in the workshop or furrowfield, grind fore-done at the wheel of Labour, like haltered gin-horses, if blind so much the quieter? Or they that in the Bicêtre Hospital, 'eight to a bed,' lie waiting their manumission? Dim are those heads of theirs, dull stagnant those hearts: to them the great Sovereign is known mainly as the great Regrater of Bread. If they hear of his sickness, they will answer with a dull Tant pis pour lui; or with the question, Will he die?
Yes, will he die? that is now, for all France, the grand question, and hope; whereby alone the King's sickness has still some interest.
Chapter 1.1.II. Realised Ideals.
Such a changed France have we; and a changed Louis[1q]. Changed, truly; and further than thou yet seest!—To the eye of History many things, in that sick-room of Louis, are now visible, which to the Courtiers there present were invisible. For indeed it is well said, 'in every object there is inexhaustible meaning; the eye sees in it what the eye brings means of seeing.' To Newton and to Newton's Dog Diamond[2], what a different pair of Universes; while the painting on the optical retina of both was, most likely, the same! Let the Reader here, in this sick-room of Louis, endeavour to look with the mind too.
Time was when men could (so to speak) of a given man, by nourishing and decorating him with fit appliances, to the due pitch, make themselves a King, almost as the Bees do; and what was still more to the purpose, loyally obey him when made. The man so nourished and decorated, thenceforth named royal, does verily bear rule; and is said, and even thought, to be, for example, 'prosecuting conquests in Flanders,' when he lets himself like luggage be carried thither: and no light luggage; covering miles of road. For he has his unblushing Châteauroux, with her band-boxes and rouge-pots, at his side; so that, at every new station, a wooden gallery must be run up between their lodgings. He has not only his Maison-Bouche, and Valetaille without end, but his very Troop of Players, with their pasteboard coulisses, thunder-barrels, their kettles, fiddles, stage-wardrobes, portable larders (and chaffering and quarrelling enough); all mounted in wagons, tumbrils, second-hand chaises,—sufficient not to conquer Flanders, but the patience of the world. With such a flood of loud jingling appurtenances does he lumber along, prosecuting his conquests in Flanders; wonderful to behold. So nevertheless it was and had been: to some solitary thinker it might seem strange; but even to him inevitable, not unnatural.
For ours is a most fictile world; and man is the most fingent plastic of creatures. A world not fixable; not fathomable! An unfathomable Somewhat, which is Not we; which we can work with, and live amidst,—and model, miraculously in our miraculous Being, and name World.—But if the very Rocks and Rivers (as Metaphysic teaches) are, in strict language, made by those outward Senses of ours, how much more, by the Inward Sense, are all Phenomena of the spiritual kind: Dignities, Authorities, Holies, Unholies! Which inward sense, moreover is not permanent like the outward ones, but forever growing and changing. Does not the Black African take of Sticks and Old Clothes (say, exported Monmouth-Street cast-clothes) what will suffice, and of these, cunningly combining them, fabricate for himself an Eidolon (Idol, or Thing Seen), and name it Mumbo-Jumbo[3]; which he can thenceforth pray to, with upturned awestruck eye, not without hope? The white European mocks; but ought rather to consider; and see whether he, at home, could not do the like a little more wisely.
So it was, we say, in those conquests of Flanders, thirty years ago: but so it no longer is. Alas, much more lies sick than poor Louis: not the French King only, but the French Kingship; this too, after long rough tear and wear, is breaking down. The world is all so changed; so much that seemed vigorous has sunk decrepit, so much that was not is beginning to be!—Borne over the Atlantic, to the closing ear of Louis, King by the Grace of God, what sounds are these; muffled ominous, new in our centuries? Boston Harbour is black with unexpected Tea: behold a Pennsylvanian Congress gather; and ere long, on Bunker Hill, DEMOCRACY announcing, in rifle-volleys death-winged, under her Star Banner, to the tune of Yankee-doodle-doo, that she is born, and, whirlwind-like, will envelope the whole world!
Sovereigns die and Sovereignties: how all dies, and is for a Time only; is a 'Time-phantasm, yet reckons itself real!' The Merovingian Kings, slowly wending on their bullock-carts through the streets of Paris, with their long hair flowing, have all wended slowly on,—into Eternity. Charlemagne sleeps at Salzburg, with truncheon grounded; only Fable expecting that he will awaken. Charles the Hammer, Pepin Bow-legged, where now is their eye of menace, their voice of command? Rollo and his shaggy Northmen cover not the Seine with ships; but have sailed off on a longer voyage. The hair of Towhead (Tête d'étoupes) now needs no combing; Iron-cutter (Taillefer) cannot cut a cobweb; shrill Fredegonda, shrill Brunhilda have had out their hot life-scold, and lie silent, their hot life-frenzy cooled. Neither from that black Tower de Nesle descends now darkling the doomed gallant, in his sack, to the Seine waters; plunging into Night: for Dame de Nesle how cares not for this world's gallantry, heeds not this world's scandal; Dame de Nesle is herself gone into Night. They are all gone; sunk,—down, down, with the tumult they made; and the rolling and the trampling of ever new generations passes over them, and they hear it not any more forever.
And yet withal has there not been realised somewhat? Consider (to go no further) these strong Stone-edifices, and what they hold! Mud-Town of the Borderers (Lutetia Parisiorum or Barisiorum) has paved itself, has spread over all the Seine Islands, and far and wide on each bank, and become City of Paris, sometimes boasting to be 'Athens of Europe,' and even 'Capital of the Universe.' Stone towers frown aloft; long-lasting, grim with a thousand years. Cathedrals are there, and a Creed (or memory of a Creed) in them; Palaces, and a State and Law. Thou seest the Smoke-vapour; unextinguished Breath as of a thing living. Labour's thousand hammers ring on her anvils: also a more miraculous Labour works noiselessly, not with the Hand but with the Thought. How have cunning workmen in all crafts, with their cunning head and right-hand, tamed the Four Elements to be their ministers; yoking the winds to their Sea-chariot, making the very Stars their Nautical Timepiece;—and written and collected a Bibliothèque du Roi; among whose Books is the Hebrew Book! A wondrous race of creatures: these have been realised, and what of Skill is in these: call not the Past Time, with all its confused wretchednesses, a lost one.
Observe, however, that of man's whole terrestrial possessions and attainments, unspeakably the noblest are his Symbols, divine or divine-seeming; under which he marches and fights, with victorious assurance, in this life-battle: what we can call his Realised Ideals. Of which realised ideals, omitting the rest, consider only these two: his Church, or spiritual Guidance; his Kingship, or temporal one. The Church: what a word was there; richer than Golconda and the treasures of the world! In the heart of the remotest mountains rises the little Kirk; the Dead all slumbering round it, under their white memorial-stones, 'in hope of a happy resurrection:'—dull wert thou, O Reader, if never in any hour (say of moaning midnight, when such Kirk hung spectral in the sky, and Being was as if swallowed up of Darkness) it spoke to thee—things unspeakable, that went into thy soul's soul. Strong was he that had a Church, what we can call a Church: he stood thereby, though 'in the centre of Immensities, in the conflux of Eternities,' yet manlike towards God and man; the vague shoreless Universe had become for him a firm city, and dwelling which he knew. Such virtue was in Belief; in these words, well spoken: I believe. Well might men prize their Credo, and raise stateliest Temples for it, and reverend Hierarchies, and give it the tithe of their substance; it was worth living for and dying for.
Neither was that an inconsiderable moment when wild armed men first raised their Strongest aloft on the buckler-throne, and with clanging armour and hearts, said solemnly: Be thou our Acknowledged Strongest! In such Acknowledged Strongest (well named King, Kön-ning, Can-ning, or Man that was Able) what a Symbol shone now for them,—significant with the destinies of the world! A Symbol of true Guidance in return for loving Obedience; properly, if he knew it, the prime want of man. A Symbol which might be called sacred; for is there not, in reverence for what is better than we, an indestructible sacredness? On which ground, too, it was well said there lay in the Acknowledged Strongest a divine right; as surely there might in the Strongest, whether Acknowledged or not,—considering who it was that made him strong. And so, in the midst of confusions and unutterable incongruities (as all growth is confused), did this of Royalty, with Loyalty environing it, spring up; and grow mysteriously, subduing and assimilating (for a principle of Life was in it); till it also had grown world-great, and was among the main Facts of our modern existence. Such a Fact, that Louis XIV., for example, could answer the expostulatory Magistrate with his "L'Etat c'est moi (The State? I am the State);" and be replied to by silence and abashed looks. So far had accident and forethought; had your Louis Elevenths, with the leaden Virgin in their hatband, and torture-wheels and conical oubliettes (man-eating!) under their feet; your Henri Fourths, with their prophesied social millennium, 'when every peasant should have his fowl in the pot;' and on the whole, the fertility of this most fertile Existence (named of Good and Evil),—brought it, in the matter of the Kingship. Wondrous! Concerning which may we not again say, that in the huge mass of Evil, as it rolls and swells, there is ever some Good working imprisoned; working towards deliverance and triumph?
How such Ideals do realise themselves; and grow, wondrously, from amid the incongruous ever-fluctuating chaos of the Actual: this is what World-History, if it teach any thing, has to teach us, How they grow; and, after long stormy growth, bloom out mature, supreme; then quickly (for the blossom is brief) fall into decay; sorrowfully dwindle; and crumble down, or rush down, noisily or noiselessly disappearing. The blossom is so brief; as of some centennial Cactus-flower, which after a century of waiting shines out for hours! Thus from the day when rough Clovis, in the Champ de Mars, in sight of his whole army, had to cleave retributively the head of that rough Frank, with sudden battleaxe, and the fierce words, "It was thus thou clavest the vase" (St. Remi's and mine) "at Soissons," forward to Louis the Grand and his L'Etat c'est moi, we count some twelve hundred years: and now this the very next Louis is dying, and so much dying with him!—Nay, thus too, if Catholicism, with and against Feudalism (but not against Nature and her bounty), gave us English a Shakspeare and Era of Shakspeare, and so produced a blossom of Catholicism—it was not till Catholicism itself, so far as Law could abolish it, had been abolished here.
But of those decadent ages in which no Ideal either grows or blossoms? When Belief and Loyalty have passed away, and only the cant and false echo of them remains; and all Solemnity has become Pageantry; and the Creed of persons in authority has become one of two things: an Imbecility or a Macchiavelism? Alas, of these ages World-History can take no notice; they have to become compressed more and more, and finally suppressed in the Annals of Mankind; blotted out as spurious,—which indeed they are. Hapless ages: wherein, if ever in any, it is an unhappiness to be born. To be born, and to learn only, by every tradition and example, that God's Universe is Belial's and a Lie; and 'the Supreme Quack' the hierarch of men! In which mournfulest faith, nevertheless, do we not see whole generations (two, and sometimes even three successively) live, what they call living; and vanish,—without chance of reappearance?
In such a decadent age, or one fast verging that way, had our poor Louis been born. Grant also that if the French Kingship had not, by course of Nature, long to live, he of all men was the man to accelerate Nature. The Blossom of French Royalty, cactus-like, has accordingly made an astonishing progress. In those Metz days, it was still standing with all its petals, though bedimmed by Orleans Regents and Roué Ministers and Cardinals; but now, in 1774, we behold it bald, and the virtue nigh gone out of it.
Disastrous indeed does it look with those same 'realised ideals,' one and all! The Church, which in its palmy season, seven hundred years ago, could make an Emperor wait barefoot, in penance-shift; three days, in the snow, has for centuries seen itself decaying; reduced even to forget old purposes and enmities, and join interest with the Kingship: on this younger strength it would fain stay its decrepitude; and these two will henceforth stand and fall together. Alas, the Sorbonne still sits there, in its old mansion; but mumbles only jargon of dotage, and no longer leads the consciences of men: not the Sorbonne; it is Encyclopédies, Philosophie, and who knows what nameless innumerable multitude of ready Writers, profane Singers, Romancers, Players, Disputators, and Pamphleteers, that now form the Spiritual Guidance of the world. The world's Practical Guidance too is lost, or has glided into the same miscellaneous hands. Who is it that the King (Able-man, named also Roi, Rex, or Director) now guides? His own huntsmen and prickers: when there is to be no hunt, it is well said, 'Le Roi ne fera rien (Today his Majesty will do nothing).'[7] He lives and lingers there, because he is living there, and none has yet laid hands on him.
The nobles, in like manner, have nearly ceased either to guide or misguide; and are now, as their master is, little more than ornamental figures. It is long since they have done with butchering one another or their king: the Workers, protected, encouraged by Majesty, have ages ago built walled towns, and there ply their crafts; will permit no Robber Baron to 'live by the saddle,' but maintain a gallows to prevent it. Ever since that period of the Fronde, the Noble has changed his fighting sword into a court rapier, and now loyally attends his king as ministering satellite; divides the spoil, not now by violence and murder, but by soliciting and finesse. These men call themselves supports of the throne, singular gilt-pasteboard caryatides in that singular edifice! For the rest, their privileges every way are now much curtailed. That law authorizing a Seigneur, as he returned from hunting, to kill not more than two Serfs, and refresh his feet in their warm blood and bowels, has fallen into perfect desuetude,—and even into incredibility; for if Deputy Lapoule can believe in it, and call for the abrogation of it, so cannot we.[8] No Charolois, for these last fifty years, though never so fond of shooting, has been in use to bring down slaters and plumbers, and see them roll from their roofs;[9] but contents himself with partridges and grouse. Close-viewed, their industry and function is that of dressing gracefully and eating sumptuously. As for their debauchery and depravity, it is perhaps unexampled since the era of Tiberius and Commodus. Nevertheless, one has still partly a feeling with the lady Maréchale: "Depend upon it, Sir, God thinks twice before damning a man of that quality."[10] These people, of old, surely had virtues, uses; or they could not have been there. Nay, one virtue they are still required to have (for mortal man cannot live without a conscience): the virtue of perfect readiness to fight duels.
Such are the shepherds of the people: and now how fares it with the flock? With the flock, as is inevitable, it fares ill, and ever worse. They are not tended, they are only regularly shorn. They are sent for, to do statute-labour, to pay statute-taxes; to fatten battle-fields (named 'Bed of honour') with their bodies, in quarrels which are not theirs; their hand and toil is in every possession of man; but for themselves they have little or no possession. Untaught, uncomforted, unfed; to pine dully in thick obscuration, in squalid destitution and obstruction: this is the lot of the millions; peuple taillable et corvéable à merci et miséricorde. In Brittany they once rose in revolt at the first introduction of Pendulum Clocks; thinking it had something to do with the Gabelle. Paris requires to be cleared out periodically by the Police; and the horde of hunger-stricken vagabonds to be sent wandering again over space—for a time. 'During one such periodical clearance,' says Lacretelle, 'in May, 1750, the Police had presumed withal to carry off some reputable people's children, in the hope of extorting ransoms for them. The mothers fill the public places with cries of despair; crowds gather, get excited: so many women in destraction run about exaggerating the alarm: an absurd and horrid fable arises among the people; it is said that the doctors have ordered a Great Person to take baths of young human blood for the restoration of his own, all spoiled by debaucheries. Some of the rioters,' adds Lacretelle, quite coolly, 'were hanged on the following days:' the Police went on.[11] O ye poor naked wretches! and this, then, is your inarticulate cry to Heaven, as of a dumb tortured animal, crying from uttermost depths of pain and debasement? Do these azure skies, like a dead crystalline vault, only reverberate the echo of it on you? Respond to it only by 'hanging on the following days?'—Not so: not forever! Ye are heard in Heaven. And the answer too will come,—in a horror of great darkness, and shakings of the world, and a cup of trembling which all the nations shall drink.
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. Besides the old Noblesse, originally of Fighters, there is a new recognised Noblesse of Lawyers; whose gala-day and proud battle-day even now is. An unrecognised Noblesse of Commerce; powerful enough, with money in its pocket. Lastly, powerfulest of all, least recognised of all, a Noblesse of Literature; without steel on their thigh, without gold in their purse, but with the 'grand thaumaturgic faculty of Thought' in their head. French Philosophism has arisen; in which little word how much do we include! Here, indeed, lies properly the cardinal symptom of the whole wide-spread malady. Faith is gone out; Scepticism is come in. Evil abounds and accumulates: no man has Faith to withstand it, to amend it, to begin by amending himself; it must even go on accumulating. While hollow langour and vacuity is the lot of the Upper, and want and stagnation of the Lower, and universal misery is very certain, what other thing is certain? That a Lie cannot be believed! Philosophism knows only this: her other belief is mainly that, in spiritual supersensual matters no Belief is possible. Unhappy! Nay, as yet the Contradiction of a Lie is some kind of Belief; but the Lie with its Contradiction once swept away, what will remain? The five unsatiated Senses will remain, the sixth insatiable Sense (of vanity); the whole dæmonic nature of man will remain,—hurled forth to rage blindly without rule or rein; savage itself, yet with all the tools and weapons of civilisation; a spectacle new in History.
In such a France, as in a Powder-tower, where fire unquenched and now unquenchable is smoking and smouldering all round, has Louis XV. lain down to die. With Pompadourism and Dubarryism, his Fleur-de-lis has been shamefully struck down in all lands and on all seas; Poverty invades even the Royal Exchequer, and Tax-farming can squeeze out no more; there is a quarrel of twenty-five years' standing with the Parlement; everywhere Want, Dishonesty, Unbelief, and hotbrained Sciolists for state-physicians: it is a portentous hour.
Such things can the eye of History see in this sick-room of King Louis, which were invisible to the Courtiers there. It is twenty years, gone Christmas-day, since Lord Chesterfield, summing up what he had noted of this same France, wrote, and sent off by post, the following words, that have become memorable: 'In short, all the symptoms which I have ever met with in History, previous to great Changes and Revolutions in government, now exist and daily increase in France.'[12]
Chapter 1.1.III. Viaticum.
For the present, however, the grand question with the Governors of France is: Shall extreme unction, or other ghostly viaticum (to Louis, not to France), be administered?
