Reviews for The French Revolution

The average rating for The French Revolution based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-01-25 00:00:00 Mag. Patricia Chmelarova This the most unusual history you are ever likely to read, dear Reader. Not, it must be emphasized, historical "fiction". One may perhaps best call it historical/philosophical Drama. The work not unbiased recitation of fact; rather, a poetic play, the author shifting perspective and tense, at times most blatantly writing in the first person - plural/present - observing the events of which he writes as they happen. (He, Thomas Carlisle - Scottish philosopher, historian, satirist, essayist, mathematician - born December 1795 - this respected History, still in print, beginning with the death of Louis XV in 1774, ending within that micro-epoch in which the author himself began his path through life and the world.) Yes, historical Drama - and thus shall I rephrase the Contents as if written for a play, a play in which notable men and women of France act out their part in the history of their Nation. Thus - Act I. The Bastille. I.i. Death of Louis XV I.ii. The Paper Age I.iii. The Parlement of Paris I.iv. States-General I.v. The Third Estate I.vi. Consolidation I. vii. The Insurrection of Women Act II. The Constitution II.i. The Feast of Pikes II.ii. Nanci II.iii. The Tuleries II.iv. Varennes II.v. Parliament First II.vi. The Marseillese Act III. The Guilotine III.i. September III.ii. Regicide III.iii. The Girondins III.iv. Terror III.v. Terror the Order of the Day III.vi. Thermidor III.vii. Vendemiaire We read, with quickening pulse, drawn into the author's fantastic/extravagant/lavish description/remembrance/imagining/testimony/adumbration of the Procession of the 4th of May 1789 - the Procession to the Church of St. Louis, those pages, early in this drama, say Act I Scene IV, which, for unknown reasons, unknown synapses of the memory organ, live most vividly for the reviewer. But now finally the Sun, on Monday the 4th of May, has risen; - unconcerned, as if it were no special day. And yet, as his first rays could strike music from the Memnon's Statue on the Nile, what tones were these, so thrilling, of preparation and foreboding, which he awoke in every bosom at Versailles … o o o Rejoice nevertheless, ye Versailles multitudes; to you, from whom all this is hid, the glorious end of it is visible. This day, sentence of death is pronounced on Shams; judgment of resuscitation, were it but afar off, is pronounced on Realities. This day, it is declared aloud, as with a Doom-trumpet, that a Lie is unbelievable. … Behold, however! The doors of St. Louis Church flung wide; and the Procession of Processions advancing towards Notre-Dame! Shouts rend the air … The Elected of France, and then the Court of France, they are marshalled and march here … Some Fourteen Hundred Men blown together from all winds, on the deepest errand. Yes, in that silent marching mass … is a Covenant; they too preside at a new Era in the History of Man. The whole Future is there, and Destiny -ill-brooding over it … Meanwhile, suppose we too, good Reader, should, as now without miracle Muse Clio enables us - take our station … to glance momentarily over this Procession ... … As we gaze fixedly, do not nameless Figures not a few, which shall not always be nameless, disclose themselves… Young Baroness de Stael - she evidently looks from a window ... But where is the brown-locked, light-behaved, fire-hearted Demoiselle Theroigne? … who, with thy winged words and glances, shall thrill rough bosoms, whole steel battalions, and persuade an Austrian Kaiser … Of the rougher sex how … enumerate the notabilities! Has not Marquis Valadi hastily quitted his Quaker broadbrim .. De Morande from his Courrier de l'Europe; Linguet from his Annales, they looked eager through the London fog, and became ex-Editors - that they might feed the guillotine… o o o Surely also, in some place not of honour, stands or sprawls up querulous, that he too, though short, may see - one squalidest bleared mortal, redolent of soot and horse-drugs: Jean Paul Marat of Neuchatel! O Marat, Renovator of Human Science, lecturer on Optics; O thou remarkablest Horseleech, once in D'Artois' Stables - as thy bleared soul looks forth, through thy bleared, dull-acrid, woe-stricken face, what sees it in all this? Any faintest light of hope, like dayspring after Nova-Zembla night? Or is it but blue sulphur-light, and specters; woe, suspicion, revenge without end? … Two other Figures, and only two, we signalize there. The huge, brawny Figure; through whose black brows, and rude flattened face (figure ecrasee), there looks a waste energy as of Hercules not yet furibund - he is an esurient, unprovided Advocate; Danton by name him mark. Then that other, his slight-built comrade, and craft-brother; he with the long curling locks; with the face of dingy blackguardism, wondrously irradiated with genius, as if a naphtha-lamp burnt within it: that Figure is Camille Desmoulins … Thou poor Camille, say of thee what they may, it were but falsehood to pretend one did not almost love thee, thou headlong lightly sparkling man! But the brawny, not yet furibund Figure, we say, is Jacques Danton; a name that shall be "tolerably known in the Revolution." He is President of the electoral Cordeliers District at Paris, or about to be it; and shall open his lungs of brass. We dwell no more on the mixed shouting Multitude: for now, behold, the Common Deputies are at hand! Carlyle's farewell to his reader - as could be, eerily, my own:And so here, Reader, has the time come for us two to part. Toilsome was our journeying together, not without offence; but it is done. To me thou wert as a beloved shade, the disembodied or not yet embodied spirit of a Brother [or Sister]. To thee I was but as a Voice. Yet was our relation a kind of scared [sic - ?] one; doubt not that! For whatsoever once sacred things become hollow jargons, yet while the Voice of Man speaks with Man, hast thou not there the living fountain out of which all sacredness sprang, and will yet spring? Man, by the nature of him, is definable as "an incarnated Word". Ill stands it with me if I have spoken falsely; thine also it was to hear truly. Farewell. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Previous review: Robert Frost - Critical Essays Random review: Cloud Atlas Next review: Basil Street Blues Previous library review: The French Revolution VSI Next library review: Paris to the Moon

Review # 2 was written on 2012-07-27 00:00:00 Melanie Sharpe There's so much to hate about this "classic" that I almost feel a little queasy saying that, at the end of the day, I do think its a great work... of a sort. Carlyle was a nineteenth century "liberal," which then as now means basically a conservative. He was thus horrified by the French Revolution's "excesses"- both the, I would say, excess of random carnage it eventually gave way to, and its attempts at legitimately egalitarian reform. To his credit, Carlyle makes absolutely no attempt at objectivity. Indeed, this is that rare work of "history" that seems to proclaim objectivity a farce. In that sense,the book, published in the mid-nineteenth century, was quite ahead of its time. The writer presents himself as a man out of time, positioned on the streets of Paris as they were before he was born. A lone man trying his best to understand momentous events as they happen, and taking time out to sermonize about them. His language is that of a person on the street, employing slang, epithets, low humor, and yet it is prose of the highest caliber. I've heard Carlyle's style described as "proto-Joycean", and at the very least this is a for-runner of stream-of-consciousness writing. Indeed, few books I've ever read struck me as such a personal encounter with their author. That being said, the author is a brilliant boar. His sympathies lie only with royalty, even though he acknowledges that the monarchy had failed and the time of absolutist feudalism had come to an end. He never acknowledges the atrocities committed by the reactionaries, as if the mass murders committed by the revolutionary government happened in a void. (There were horrific excesses committed by the Jacobins, but they were only fighting fire with fire.) And he's blatantly racist- his half page devoted to the Haitian uprisings is so offensive its comical. So, beyond its literary value, is there any reason to read this tome? I think so. It became, despite its eccentricity, the "official" history of the Revolution in the United States and western Europe. More than that, I think it the proto-type of all depictions of attempts at egalitarian social reorganizations since the French Revolution meant to assert the hegemony of the reaction. "Psychologize the sovereign!" "Atomize the oppressed!" "Pick an individual bad guy (in this case Robespierre) to root against!" But I have to say again, Carlye was a talented asshole. His, utterly manipulative, depictions of the royal family's last moments are devastating to read in exactly the ways he wants them to be. And his description of the execution of Robespierre shocked me. After simplistically vilifying the Sea-Green for hundreds of pages he acknowledges, after his agonizing death, that Robespierre was merely an overly-determined man in the wrong place at the wrong time- which is to say, a place and time of momentous change. Carlye was truly a conservative with a tragic sense of life- hateful of change, but also acknowledging its inevitability. I thought the last paragraph an astonishing little meditation on the relationship between writer and reader. I wish to respond to it personally. Yes, Carlyle, it has been a long, not entirely pleasant journey we have taken together. I tried to listen to what you had to say, but I disagreed with most of it. I can't honestly say I like you, then again I may never forget you. Farewell.