The French Revolution by Thomas Carlyle A History
What's it about?
The French Revolution (1837) is a seminal work that presents the revolutionary period as a series of dramatic episodes told in vivid, often chaotic prose. Through its unconventional style and prophetic tone, it established a new approach to historical writing that emphasized the spiritual and symbolic dimensions of political upheaval, rather than merely documenting events.
The French Revolution
Paris, 1789. A hungry mob storms the Bastille. A king loses his head. A nation convulses in blood and fire.
It sounds like a script for prime-time TV, not the typical dry retelling of the French Revolution. That’s because Thomas Carlyle wasn’t your typical historian. When he tackled the subject in 1837, he turned the revolutionary tale into a vivid, almost hallucinatory journey through societal collapse. In his hands, it became a moral thunderstorm, divine justice crashing down on a corrupt society that had lost its spiritual compass.
So, if you’ve ever wondered what it might feel like to live through a revolution, this lesson is for you. You’ll be hurled into screaming crowds, overhear whispered conspiracies, and witness the terrifying mechanisms of the guillotine. Get ready to experience Carlyle’s vision of revolution as moral reckoning – one that continues to haunt and captivate readers nearly two centuries later.
In the year 1744, Louis XV of France nearly dies of illness. The nation weeps. Churches overflow with prayers. Sobs echo in chapels. When it becomes clear he will survive, the grateful French bestow upon him the title Bien-Aimé – Beloved.
Thirty years later, the same king lies sick again. But this time, the churches are quiet. People shrug. He is Bien-aimé no longer.
A court of parasites surrounds the dying monarch. Among them are a disgraced duke, a ruthless chancellor, and a financial minister who shamelessly defaults on debts. They’ve all won their power by cozying up to Madame du Barry: former courtesan, now the king’s mistress. Her influence is vast; she installs ministers, destroys rivals, and builds her own palace of luxury and control. Yet her power hangs by a thread. If the king dies, so does her empire.
The rot has spread far beyond Versailles. Once a warrior class, the nobility has become ornamental – draped in silk, obsessed with duels and feasts, stripped of all meaningful function. The Church mumbles dogma to empty pews. In the salons and coffee houses, a new nobility emerges – not of blood, but of ink. Philosophers and pamphleteers speak openly, asking dangerous questions. Skepticism, not faith, now rules.
Outside the palace, France festers. Taxes crush the poor. Hunger gnaws at the countryside. In Paris, police kidnap children off the street in an attempt to rein in beggars. This fuels rumors that the king is bathing in the blood of the young to heal himself. Though authorities quell the gossip, the fear behind it – of a parasitic elite draining the nation – isn’t so easily snuffed.
On May 10, 1774, the king finally dies. In the next room, the Dauphin – his grandson – and the young Dauphine, Marie Antoinette, fall to their knees, weeping, “We are too young to reign!” They are, yet they must. The courtiers rush to proclaim the new king. Louis XV’s body is shoved into two lead coffins and carted off to Saint-Denis under the cover of night. The procession is jeered by Parisians lining the route.
The world shifts. France is fermenting. With the dying breath of Louis XV, the Revolution begins to stir.
The sceptre falls from a trembling hand into one that’s decent but soft. The new king, young Louis XVI, inherits a France groaning beneath a mountain of debt. While nobles dance under gilded ceilings, the peasantry gnashes its teeth amid famine and crushing taxes.
Spring 1789 brings a desperate trumpet-blast. The ancient Estates-General is summoned for the first time in 175 years. Why? Because the treasury lies empty, the king’s coffers full of cobwebs. The Three Estates gather: Clergy, Nobility, and Commons. The Commons, which comprise 98 percent of the population, quickly see they are meant to be outvoted and dismissed as always. This time, they refuse.
On June 17th, the Commons declare themselves the National Assembly and claim the right to draft a constitution. When they find their meeting hall locked, they move to an indoor tennis court. Despite the oppressive heat, buzzing flies, and sweat stench, they swear not to separate until they’ve written a new constitution.
Their courage proves contagious. Conscience-driven priests and forward-thinking nobles join their cause. And Louis? He dithers, appears to yield – then surrounds Paris with troops.
This show of force, meant to terrify the people, instead galvanizes them. Paris becomes fire, hammer, and drum. Blacksmiths forge pikes with mad fervor. Women stitch cockades in red, white, and blue.
Then the thunderclap: the king’s own soldiers defect! The Gardes Françaises join the people with muskets, cannons, and discipline. On July 14th, the mob seizes 28,000 muskets hidden at Les Invalides hospital.
Next, they turn toward the Bastille – the massive fortress-prison which stands as a symbol of tyranny. After hours of musket fire and cannon blasts, Governor De Launay yields – then betrays his promise by firing on the crowd. The people retaliate by slaughtering him and parading his severed head on a pike. Similar vengeance soon befalls other hated officials, like Foulon, who once said “The people may eat grass.” Now grass is stuffed into his mouth as the people hang him from a lamppost.
Eventually, the chastened king journeys into the capital and performatively dons the tricolor cockade. On the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville, the city hall, he hears the crowd cry “Long live the Nation!” followed by a less enthusiastic “Long live the king!”
Freedom now walks the streets with blood on her hands. The Revolution has begun – and it does not ask permission.
It’s October 1789, and the women of Paris awake to empty cupboards and hungry children. King Louis XVI has retreated to Versailles, twelve miles away, while rumors swirl of aristocratic conspiracies. Black cockades appear on military uniforms, the tricolor reportedly trampled underfoot at royal feasts.
One morning, a young woman seizes a drum from a guardhouse and beats it, crying about grain shortages. Other women join her: marketplace vendors, seamstresses, housemaids. “The men will not act; we ourselves may act!” they declare.
Like melting snow in mountain rivers, they flow toward the Hôtel de Ville. By seven in the morning, almost 10,000 women have gathered, demanding weapons, bread, and justice.
The women storm the building, seizing guns and cannons from the armory. When officials offer no response, a quick-thinking bailiff named Maillard grabs a drum and begins beating a march toward Versailles. The women rally around him, forming a “living deluge” that swells with every mile.
The women reach Versailles soaked and mud-splattered. They enter the National Assembly demanding bread. As night falls, they shelter in churches and guardhouses. At dawn, they slaughter two royal bodyguards and parade their heads on pikes. Then, they storm the palace itself, breaking into the queen’s chambers and forcing the royal family to flee.
When the National Guard finally arrives, the palace has already been breached. The crowd demands that the king return to Paris. Louis, with no alternative, agrees. That afternoon, the royal family is escorted to the city by the triumphant crowd, surrounded by women carrying bread on pike points and singing that they’re bringing back “the Baker, the Bakeress, and the Little Baker’s Boy.”
The Revolution has learned a new language: crowds, hunger, the terrifying clarity of action. The age of petitions had ended. The age of marching and musket barrels had begun.
“Why,” says King Louis, “this is a revolt!” “Sire,” answers the Duke de Liancourt, “it is not a revolt – it is a revolution.” So unfolds France’s transformation – a spectacle wherein King, Queen, Constitution, and People whirl in the maelstrom of Fate.
By 1791, the monarchy is a hollow shell. Louis and Marie-Antoinette are imprisoned in the Tuileries Palace, guarded by bayonets in the same halls where courtiers once bowed to them. The sacred bond between king and subject lies broken beyond repair.
Still, the queen plots. She communicates secretly with a commander in the east, scheming an escape to Montmédi. Yet what comedy mars the enterprise! While the nation trembles, devoted Count Ferson orders that a stupendous new coach be built specifically for the royal family’s escape.
On the shortest night of the year, June 20, 1791, the flight commences. The royal family board the massive coach dressed as ordinary citizens and lumber toward freedom. Yet destiny has other designs. At Sainte-Menehould, postmaster Drouet recognizes the monarch’s profile despite his disguise. Mounting fresh horses, Drouet and his clerk quickly outpace the cumbersome royal carriage.
At Varennes-en-Argonne, the coach is halted. Drouet requests to inspect the king’s passport. Instead of urging his bodyguards forward, Louis surrenders. Thus is majesty undone by meekness.
Dragged back to Paris, the royal family is placed under heavy surveillance. Guards sleep outside their bedrooms. Doors remain open. This is what monarchy has become: watched, handled, contained.
The National Assembly tries to manage the fallout. Radical Jacobins want to depose the king immediately. But moderates fear chaos and civil collapse. They claim that Louis was kidnapped against his will, creating a legal fiction that declares Louis “inviolable.”
The public, however, is not convinced. Petitions flood Paris demanding the king’s removal. On July 17th, 1791, a massive crowd gathers at the Champ de Mars to sign a new petition for a republic. In response, the city’s leaders panic. The Marquis de Lafayette arrives at the scene with the National Guard. A warning shot is fired. Then another. Screams. Chaos. Blood. Dozens fall, dead or wounded.
This is the first time the Revolution has turned on itself with deadly force. It will not be the last.
After the king’s failed escape, the illusion of monarchy’s divinity shatters completely. In its place surges a Revolution that will tolerate no half-measures.
By 1792, Paris writhes in panic. Foreign armies approach from without, while fears of a counter-revolution spread within. Minister of Justice Danton thunders: “To defeat our enemies, we need audacity, more audacity, always audacity!” So, with pikes and clubs, the people storm prisons, killing nearly a thousand political prisoners.
Then, in January 1793, Louis XVI is sent to the guillotine. With his beheading, France crosses a Rubicon. It’s now at war with nearly all of monarchical Europe, while inside, the Revolution turns further on itself. Moderate Girondins call for order, law, and respect. But poor and radicalized sans-culottes rally to the Jacobins. Among them rises a chilling, focused figure: Maximilien Robespierre, “the Sea-Green Incorruptible.”
Robespierre, in sky-blue coat and powdered hair, lacks thunder – but understands the meaning of Revolution. While others theorize, he transforms the people’s desperate hunger into political will. Under his direction, the Convention establishes the Revolutionary Tribunal, then the Committee of Public Safety. The Convention begins arresting Girondin deputies.
Now begins what is later known as The Reign of Terror.
Revolutionary Committees multiply across France, empowered to arrest any deemed “Suspect.” Mass executions sweep Lyons. At Nantes, Representative Carrier initiates the noyades – drowning prisoners by the boatload in the Loire. Terror is insatiable.
Meanwhile, Robespierre works eighteen-hour days at a carpenter’s lodgings. His vision is moral, not political: France must be purified. Everyone – even former allies – mount the scaffold when obstructing his path toward virtue. Yet his virtue is built on foundations of blood. His famous maxim tells all: “Terror is nothing but justice, prompt, severe, inflexible.”
By mid-1794, 1,300 people have been guillotined in Paris within weeks. Robespierre’s colleagues begin to chafe beneath his moral domination.
One day, Robespierre rises to denounce the traitors he claims are hiding within the government – yet falters. Voices from the Convention interrupt. “Down with the tyrant!” is the cry. He stands pale and stunned, unable to answer.
That night, Robespierre is arrested. A failed suicide leaves his jaw shattered. The next day, he’s carried to the guillotine. The executioner tears the bandage from his face. He screams once – and is gone.
Thus stands the Reign of Terror. A people in transcendental despair create a government that, like Saturn in mythology, ultimately consumes its own children.
Robespierre’s fall in 1794 ends not only the man but the Terror itself. The guillotine halts. Prison doors swing open. Old Girondins emerge from hiding. And the crowds no longer scream for blood, but for an end.
As people find their voices again, Anti-Jacobin Thermidorians take over the Convention and dismantle the Terror’s machinery. They reform the Committee of Public Safety and strip the Revolutionary Tribunal of its terrible powers. By November, the Jacobin Club – once the Revolution’s fiery heart – is forcibly closed.
A remarkable social transformation now sweeps Paris. The strict republican virtue of the Robespierre era gives way to a fever of luxury. Women of means don Greek-inspired tunics and sandals. Wealthy speculators and former nobles mingle at lavish soirées. Even macabre “Victim Balls” appear, where guests who lost kin to the guillotine dance in mourning dress.
Yet for ordinary Parisians, this period brings desperate hardship. The abolition of price controls sends inflation soaring. Revolutionary paper money becomes worthless. Citizens stand in long queues for their daily two ounces of bread ration.
In spring 1795, hunger drives Parisians to revolt twice against the Thermidorian Convention. The first insurrection sees crowds invade the Convention demanding “Bread and the Constitution of 1793.” The uprising is suppressed. Then, a more serious revolt erupts. Armed sans-culottes storm the legislature and place a deputy’s head on a pike. But this insurrection too is crushed – and with it dies the popular revolutionary movement that has driven events since 1789.
Abroad, France’s armies flourish. Young, highly motivated generals from humble backgrounds triumph over Holland, Prussia, Spain. Military success invigorates the state, and generals rise as new heroes.
By October 1795, the Convention drafts a controversial new constitution cementing Thermidorian control. When Paris resists by organizing yet another insurrection, defense is entrusted to an obscure young artillery officer called Napoleon Bonaparte.
Bonaparte’s solution is to fire artillery directly into the advancing crowds. This “whiff of grapeshot” marks a fundamental change in revolutionary politics. The “sacred right of insurrection” that has propelled every major revolutionary change is now extinguished by military force.
France has entered a phase where the army, not the people, determines political outcomes. The nation becomes tidy – prosperous for some, hollow for many. Having slaughtered its own children, the Revolution is at last devoured by its own desire for rest.
The main takeaway of this lesson to The French Revolution by Thomas Carlyle is that revolution is not a clean march toward progress but a chaotic moral reckoning. Decadent monarchies under Louis XV and Louis XVI created conditions where desperate people, particularly women, upended the social order. The Revolution progressed through increasingly violent phases: from the hopeful Tennis Court Oath to the storming of the Bastille, the Women’s March on Versailles to the king’s execution, and finally to Robespierre’s Reign of Terror – where revolutionary purity devoured its own champions. Eventually, France found an exhausted equilibrium under Napoleon’s “whiff of grapeshot,” where military force replaced the people’s will.
The French Revolution (1837) is a seminal work that presents the revolutionary period as a series of dramatic episodes told in vivid, often chaotic prose. Through its unconventional style and prophetic tone, it established a new approach to historical writing that emphasized the spiritual and symbolic dimensions of political upheaval, rather than merely documenting events.
The French Revolution
Paris, 1789. A hungry mob storms the Bastille. A king loses his head. A nation convulses in blood and fire.
It sounds like a script for prime-time TV, not the typical dry retelling of the French Revolution. That’s because Thomas Carlyle wasn’t your typical historian. When he tackled the subject in 1837, he turned the revolutionary tale into a vivid, almost hallucinatory journey through societal collapse. In his hands, it became a moral thunderstorm, divine justice crashing down on a corrupt society that had lost its spiritual compass.
So, if you’ve ever wondered what it might feel like to live through a revolution, this lesson is for you. You’ll be hurled into screaming crowds, overhear whispered conspiracies, and witness the terrifying mechanisms of the guillotine. Get ready to experience Carlyle’s vision of revolution as moral reckoning – one that continues to haunt and captivate readers nearly two centuries later.
In the year 1744, Louis XV of France nearly dies of illness. The nation weeps. Churches overflow with prayers. Sobs echo in chapels. When it becomes clear he will survive, the grateful French bestow upon him the title Bien-Aimé – Beloved.
Thirty years later, the same king lies sick again. But this time, the churches are quiet. People shrug. He is Bien-aimé no longer.
A court of parasites surrounds the dying monarch. Among them are a disgraced duke, a ruthless chancellor, and a financial minister who shamelessly defaults on debts. They’ve all won their power by cozying up to Madame du Barry: former courtesan, now the king’s mistress. Her influence is vast; she installs ministers, destroys rivals, and builds her own palace of luxury and control. Yet her power hangs by a thread. If the king dies, so does her empire.
The rot has spread far beyond Versailles. Once a warrior class, the nobility has become ornamental – draped in silk, obsessed with duels and feasts, stripped of all meaningful function. The Church mumbles dogma to empty pews. In the salons and coffee houses, a new nobility emerges – not of blood, but of ink. Philosophers and pamphleteers speak openly, asking dangerous questions. Skepticism, not faith, now rules.
Outside the palace, France festers. Taxes crush the poor. Hunger gnaws at the countryside. In Paris, police kidnap children off the street in an attempt to rein in beggars. This fuels rumors that the king is bathing in the blood of the young to heal himself. Though authorities quell the gossip, the fear behind it – of a parasitic elite draining the nation – isn’t so easily snuffed.
On May 10, 1774, the king finally dies. In the next room, the Dauphin – his grandson – and the young Dauphine, Marie Antoinette, fall to their knees, weeping, “We are too young to reign!” They are, yet they must. The courtiers rush to proclaim the new king. Louis XV’s body is shoved into two lead coffins and carted off to Saint-Denis under the cover of night. The procession is jeered by Parisians lining the route.
The world shifts. France is fermenting. With the dying breath of Louis XV, the Revolution begins to stir.
The sceptre falls from a trembling hand into one that’s decent but soft. The new king, young Louis XVI, inherits a France groaning beneath a mountain of debt. While nobles dance under gilded ceilings, the peasantry gnashes its teeth amid famine and crushing taxes.
Spring 1789 brings a desperate trumpet-blast. The ancient Estates-General is summoned for the first time in 175 years. Why? Because the treasury lies empty, the king’s coffers full of cobwebs. The Three Estates gather: Clergy, Nobility, and Commons. The Commons, which comprise 98 percent of the population, quickly see they are meant to be outvoted and dismissed as always. This time, they refuse.
On June 17th, the Commons declare themselves the National Assembly and claim the right to draft a constitution. When they find their meeting hall locked, they move to an indoor tennis court. Despite the oppressive heat, buzzing flies, and sweat stench, they swear not to separate until they’ve written a new constitution.
Their courage proves contagious. Conscience-driven priests and forward-thinking nobles join their cause. And Louis? He dithers, appears to yield – then surrounds Paris with troops.
This show of force, meant to terrify the people, instead galvanizes them. Paris becomes fire, hammer, and drum. Blacksmiths forge pikes with mad fervor. Women stitch cockades in red, white, and blue.
Then the thunderclap: the king’s own soldiers defect! The Gardes Françaises join the people with muskets, cannons, and discipline. On July 14th, the mob seizes 28,000 muskets hidden at Les Invalides hospital.
Next, they turn toward the Bastille – the massive fortress-prison which stands as a symbol of tyranny. After hours of musket fire and cannon blasts, Governor De Launay yields – then betrays his promise by firing on the crowd. The people retaliate by slaughtering him and parading his severed head on a pike. Similar vengeance soon befalls other hated officials, like Foulon, who once said “The people may eat grass.” Now grass is stuffed into his mouth as the people hang him from a lamppost.
Eventually, the chastened king journeys into the capital and performatively dons the tricolor cockade. On the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville, the city hall, he hears the crowd cry “Long live the Nation!” followed by a less enthusiastic “Long live the king!”
Freedom now walks the streets with blood on her hands. The Revolution has begun – and it does not ask permission.
It’s October 1789, and the women of Paris awake to empty cupboards and hungry children. King Louis XVI has retreated to Versailles, twelve miles away, while rumors swirl of aristocratic conspiracies. Black cockades appear on military uniforms, the tricolor reportedly trampled underfoot at royal feasts.
One morning, a young woman seizes a drum from a guardhouse and beats it, crying about grain shortages. Other women join her: marketplace vendors, seamstresses, housemaids. “The men will not act; we ourselves may act!” they declare.
Like melting snow in mountain rivers, they flow toward the Hôtel de Ville. By seven in the morning, almost 10,000 women have gathered, demanding weapons, bread, and justice.
The women storm the building, seizing guns and cannons from the armory. When officials offer no response, a quick-thinking bailiff named Maillard grabs a drum and begins beating a march toward Versailles. The women rally around him, forming a “living deluge” that swells with every mile.
The women reach Versailles soaked and mud-splattered. They enter the National Assembly demanding bread. As night falls, they shelter in churches and guardhouses. At dawn, they slaughter two royal bodyguards and parade their heads on pikes. Then, they storm the palace itself, breaking into the queen’s chambers and forcing the royal family to flee.
When the National Guard finally arrives, the palace has already been breached. The crowd demands that the king return to Paris. Louis, with no alternative, agrees. That afternoon, the royal family is escorted to the city by the triumphant crowd, surrounded by women carrying bread on pike points and singing that they’re bringing back “the Baker, the Bakeress, and the Little Baker’s Boy.”
The Revolution has learned a new language: crowds, hunger, the terrifying clarity of action. The age of petitions had ended. The age of marching and musket barrels had begun.
“Why,” says King Louis, “this is a revolt!” “Sire,” answers the Duke de Liancourt, “it is not a revolt – it is a revolution.” So unfolds France’s transformation – a spectacle wherein King, Queen, Constitution, and People whirl in the maelstrom of Fate.
By 1791, the monarchy is a hollow shell. Louis and Marie-Antoinette are imprisoned in the Tuileries Palace, guarded by bayonets in the same halls where courtiers once bowed to them. The sacred bond between king and subject lies broken beyond repair.
Still, the queen plots. She communicates secretly with a commander in the east, scheming an escape to Montmédi. Yet what comedy mars the enterprise! While the nation trembles, devoted Count Ferson orders that a stupendous new coach be built specifically for the royal family’s escape.
On the shortest night of the year, June 20, 1791, the flight commences. The royal family board the massive coach dressed as ordinary citizens and lumber toward freedom. Yet destiny has other designs. At Sainte-Menehould, postmaster Drouet recognizes the monarch’s profile despite his disguise. Mounting fresh horses, Drouet and his clerk quickly outpace the cumbersome royal carriage.
At Varennes-en-Argonne, the coach is halted. Drouet requests to inspect the king’s passport. Instead of urging his bodyguards forward, Louis surrenders. Thus is majesty undone by meekness.
Dragged back to Paris, the royal family is placed under heavy surveillance. Guards sleep outside their bedrooms. Doors remain open. This is what monarchy has become: watched, handled, contained.
The National Assembly tries to manage the fallout. Radical Jacobins want to depose the king immediately. But moderates fear chaos and civil collapse. They claim that Louis was kidnapped against his will, creating a legal fiction that declares Louis “inviolable.”
The public, however, is not convinced. Petitions flood Paris demanding the king’s removal. On July 17th, 1791, a massive crowd gathers at the Champ de Mars to sign a new petition for a republic. In response, the city’s leaders panic. The Marquis de Lafayette arrives at the scene with the National Guard. A warning shot is fired. Then another. Screams. Chaos. Blood. Dozens fall, dead or wounded.
This is the first time the Revolution has turned on itself with deadly force. It will not be the last.
After the king’s failed escape, the illusion of monarchy’s divinity shatters completely. In its place surges a Revolution that will tolerate no half-measures.
By 1792, Paris writhes in panic. Foreign armies approach from without, while fears of a counter-revolution spread within. Minister of Justice Danton thunders: “To defeat our enemies, we need audacity, more audacity, always audacity!” So, with pikes and clubs, the people storm prisons, killing nearly a thousand political prisoners.
Then, in January 1793, Louis XVI is sent to the guillotine. With his beheading, France crosses a Rubicon. It’s now at war with nearly all of monarchical Europe, while inside, the Revolution turns further on itself. Moderate Girondins call for order, law, and respect. But poor and radicalized sans-culottes rally to the Jacobins. Among them rises a chilling, focused figure: Maximilien Robespierre, “the Sea-Green Incorruptible.”
Robespierre, in sky-blue coat and powdered hair, lacks thunder – but understands the meaning of Revolution. While others theorize, he transforms the people’s desperate hunger into political will. Under his direction, the Convention establishes the Revolutionary Tribunal, then the Committee of Public Safety. The Convention begins arresting Girondin deputies.
Now begins what is later known as The Reign of Terror.
Revolutionary Committees multiply across France, empowered to arrest any deemed “Suspect.” Mass executions sweep Lyons. At Nantes, Representative Carrier initiates the noyades – drowning prisoners by the boatload in the Loire. Terror is insatiable.
Meanwhile, Robespierre works eighteen-hour days at a carpenter’s lodgings. His vision is moral, not political: France must be purified. Everyone – even former allies – mount the scaffold when obstructing his path toward virtue. Yet his virtue is built on foundations of blood. His famous maxim tells all: “Terror is nothing but justice, prompt, severe, inflexible.”
By mid-1794, 1,300 people have been guillotined in Paris within weeks. Robespierre’s colleagues begin to chafe beneath his moral domination.
One day, Robespierre rises to denounce the traitors he claims are hiding within the government – yet falters. Voices from the Convention interrupt. “Down with the tyrant!” is the cry. He stands pale and stunned, unable to answer.
That night, Robespierre is arrested. A failed suicide leaves his jaw shattered. The next day, he’s carried to the guillotine. The executioner tears the bandage from his face. He screams once – and is gone.
Thus stands the Reign of Terror. A people in transcendental despair create a government that, like Saturn in mythology, ultimately consumes its own children.
Robespierre’s fall in 1794 ends not only the man but the Terror itself. The guillotine halts. Prison doors swing open. Old Girondins emerge from hiding. And the crowds no longer scream for blood, but for an end.
As people find their voices again, Anti-Jacobin Thermidorians take over the Convention and dismantle the Terror’s machinery. They reform the Committee of Public Safety and strip the Revolutionary Tribunal of its terrible powers. By November, the Jacobin Club – once the Revolution’s fiery heart – is forcibly closed.
A remarkable social transformation now sweeps Paris. The strict republican virtue of the Robespierre era gives way to a fever of luxury. Women of means don Greek-inspired tunics and sandals. Wealthy speculators and former nobles mingle at lavish soirées. Even macabre “Victim Balls” appear, where guests who lost kin to the guillotine dance in mourning dress.
Yet for ordinary Parisians, this period brings desperate hardship. The abolition of price controls sends inflation soaring. Revolutionary paper money becomes worthless. Citizens stand in long queues for their daily two ounces of bread ration.
In spring 1795, hunger drives Parisians to revolt twice against the Thermidorian Convention. The first insurrection sees crowds invade the Convention demanding “Bread and the Constitution of 1793.” The uprising is suppressed. Then, a more serious revolt erupts. Armed sans-culottes storm the legislature and place a deputy’s head on a pike. But this insurrection too is crushed – and with it dies the popular revolutionary movement that has driven events since 1789.
Abroad, France’s armies flourish. Young, highly motivated generals from humble backgrounds triumph over Holland, Prussia, Spain. Military success invigorates the state, and generals rise as new heroes.
By October 1795, the Convention drafts a controversial new constitution cementing Thermidorian control. When Paris resists by organizing yet another insurrection, defense is entrusted to an obscure young artillery officer called Napoleon Bonaparte.
Bonaparte’s solution is to fire artillery directly into the advancing crowds. This “whiff of grapeshot” marks a fundamental change in revolutionary politics. The “sacred right of insurrection” that has propelled every major revolutionary change is now extinguished by military force.
France has entered a phase where the army, not the people, determines political outcomes. The nation becomes tidy – prosperous for some, hollow for many. Having slaughtered its own children, the Revolution is at last devoured by its own desire for rest.
The main takeaway of this lesson to The French Revolution by Thomas Carlyle is that revolution is not a clean march toward progress but a chaotic moral reckoning. Decadent monarchies under Louis XV and Louis XVI created conditions where desperate people, particularly women, upended the social order. The Revolution progressed through increasingly violent phases: from the hopeful Tennis Court Oath to the storming of the Bastille, the Women’s March on Versailles to the king’s execution, and finally to Robespierre’s Reign of Terror – where revolutionary purity devoured its own champions. Eventually, France found an exhausted equilibrium under Napoleon’s “whiff of grapeshot,” where military force replaced the people’s will.
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