“The
French Revolution” as symbolic history
Carlyle's
ascription of the authorship of "On History Again" to Diogenes Teufelsdröckh suggests that the Palingenesia,
a mythus intended to enable the rebirth of his
society, would take the form of epic history. The French Revolution
manifested the fundamental beliefs of Carlyle's own era just as the Trojan wars
manifested the beliefs of the Greeks. Yet this subject was problematical
because the revolution did more to destroy antiquated beliefs than to bring new
beliefs to life; the only belief his society retained was the belief in
unbelief that prevented him from authoring the new mythus
promised in Sartor Resartus.
Instead of creating a text that would bring about the birth of a new society,
he would demonstrate how the revolution continued to be reborn in his own era,
in the Paris Revolt of 1830 and the Reform Bill Of 1832. Sansculottism
"still lives," he was to write in the conclusion of The French
Revolution "still works far and wide. . .
as is the way of Cunning Time with his New-Births" (3:311). By concluding
his history of the revolution with the events of October 1795, just two months
before his birth on December 4, 1795, Carlyle suggested that he himself was the
first rebirth of the revolution, that it had indeed invaded the households of
the lowly (Rem., 30). (It is worth
recalling that in "Illudo Chartis"
Stephen Corry's father decides to send him to the University of Edinburgh
"in the ever memorable year Of 1795," an
event that the narrator compares to "a second birth" (King, 167). If
it was an "unhappiness to be born" in such an era, to be a rebirth of
its spirit, a history of the revolution would at least help one figure out
"what to make of" the "age," what it means to be born of
revolution (FR i: ii; HHW,
201).
Carlyle's problem in
writing The French Revolution was how to make it epic rather than
novelistic in the sense that he used these terms in "On Biography."
He wanted to avoid the problems raised by Sartor
Resartus, especially that of his own authority,
but he could not solve this problem simply by effacing the authorial ego.
Indeed, the narrator of The French Revolution is every bit as
prominent as the Editor of Sartor Resartus. Instead, Carlyle made himself into a
narrator who [62/63] interprets a society. He did not write The French
Revolution as a factual chronology of political events but as a sequence
of symbolic episodes through which the narrator, and the reader, discover the
meaning of their own era. For this purpose, he shaped a unique
historical narrator who speaks in the first person and present
tense, represents the voices of the historical actors, and interprets symbols
in order to create a double narrative, both epic and mock epic, of the
revolution.
The Editor of Sartor Resartus and the
narrator of The French Revolution both represent themselves as
interpreters. The Editor of Sartor must
make sense of the "chaos" of the clothes volume and the six paper
bags filled with random autobiographical fragments; the narrator of The
French Revolution must contend with an intransigent imbroglio of
historical documents. Each addresses the reader directly, setting himself the
task of enabling the reader to make sense of this material. Yet The
French Revolution reverses the procedure of Sartor
Resartus. While the Editor begins with random
symbols that he situates in a narrative framework of his own devising, the
narrator of The French Revolution begins with a narrative
chronology in which he must discover symbols.
The Editor attempts to
explain the clothes philosophy and the life of Teufelsdröckh
through narrative even though, as he represents it, the basic material of Sartor Resartus resists
chronological narration. Sartor does not present a
logical argument that develops from chapter to chapter; material from the first
book could even be interchanged with material from the last (Levine,
Boundaries, 41-43; see Gilbert, 433-36; Vanden Bossche, "Prophetic Closure," 212-13). The
autobiographical fragments, from which the Editor constructs book 2, arrive in
hardly any chronological, certainly no narrative, order. The patterns that the
Editor uses to organize these materials do not inhere in them, but are familiar
narrative paradigms that he imposes on them. To represent the process of coming
to understand the clothes volume, for example, he employs the convention of the
journey. Similarly, he fits the random autobiographical fragments to the
conventional pattern of spiritual autobiography (see Peterson, 49-57). To the
Editor, both the clothes volume and the life of Teufelsdröckh
are a chaos that must be interpreted, but the interpretation appears to come
from the preexisting narrative patterns he employs. rather than from the materials themselves. Like the novelist
in "On Biography," the Editor creates narratives that are
"Nothing but a pitiful Image of [his] own pitiful Self" (CME,
3:58). Because there is no original text, only an interpretation [63/64] of a
fictitious text, Sartor Resartus
represents the tendency of interpretation to overwhelm the interpreted text.
The narrator of The
French Revolution finds most of his historical materials already
arranged in chronological order in collections like the Histoire Parlementaire and the volumes of the Moniteur, but simply composing a chronological
narrative would not enable him to discover the meaning of those events. He
complains, furthermore, that the editors of the Histoire Parlementaire have already imposed a narrative depicting
the recuperation of Christianity and counters: "But what if History were
to admit, for once, that all the Names and Theorems yet known to her fall
short? ... In that case, History, renouncing the pretension to name it at
present, will look honestly at it, and name what she can Of
it!" (3:204). Although Carlyle's history also has
a thesis, he claims that he discovers it in the symbolic structure ofthe revolution itself. As opposed to Sartor's Editor and the editors of the Histoire
Parlementaire who derive their narrative
patterns from preexisting narratives, Carlyle's
narrator attempts to derive his interpretation from something outside of
himself, from the historical material itself.
Because the narrator of The French
Revolution can be regarded as a character whose role it is to interpret
the history of the revolution, Carlyle does not employ the omniscient mode of
historical narration, but a first-person mode that dramatizes the continuing
process of interpretation. The conventional omniscient mode — using the third
person and past tense to make history seem to "speak itself " —
creates the illusion of objectivity by treating the past as fixed and the
narrator's interpretation of it as exhaustive (Barthes, "Le Discours de l'histoire,"
68). This mode of historical narrative is so prevalent that Emile Benveniste designates it simply histoire
(208-9; see White, intro.). Conventional historians have long objected to
Carlyle's historical style. Recently, for example, Hugh Trevor-Roper complained
of the "over-dramatization ... highly personaijudgments
... rhetorical interruptions ... [and] grotesque egotism" of Carlyle's
histories (732). In fact, omniscient narrative only disguises the presence of a
first-person narrator and that narrator's ideological assumptions. Carlyle's
use of the first person and present tense makes his presence explicit. We can
see the difference between these two modes of history in the following
narratives of the procession of the Assembly of Notables on May 4, 1789, the
first from Archibald Alison's History of Europe from the Commencement of
the French Revolution in 1789 to the Restoration of the Bourbons in 1815
(1833) and the second from Carlyle's French Revolution:
On the evening
before [May 5, 17891, a
religious ceremony preceded the installation of the Estates. The King, his
family, his ministers, and the deputies of the three orders, walked in
procession from the [64/65] church of Notre Dame to that of St. Louis, to hear mass. The appearance of
the assembled bodies, and the reflection that a national solemnity, so long
fallen into disuse, was about to be revived, excited the most lively enthusiasm
in the multitude. The weather was fine; the benevolent and dignified air of the
King, the graceful manners of the Queen, the pomp and splendour of the
ceremony, and the undefined hopes which it excited, exalted the spirits of all
who witnessed it. But the reflecting observed with pain, that the sullen lines
of feudal etiquette were preserved with rigid formality, and they augured ill
of the national representation which commenced its labours with such
distinction. First marched the clergy in grand costume, with violet robes; next
the noblesse, in black dresses, with gold vests, lace cravats, and hats adorned
with white plumes; last, the Tiers Etat, dressed in
black, with short cloaks, muslin cravats, and hats without feathers. But the
friends of the people consoled themselves with the observation,
that, however humble their attire, the numbers of this class greatly
preponderated over those of the other orders. (i: 18 1-8 2; I cite the edition of 1839, but this
volume appeared in 1833. I choose Alison because his history represents
contemporary practice and Carlyle had some acquaintance with it: see CL,
6:373).
Behold, however!
The doors of St. Louis
Church flung open; and
the Procession of Processions advancing towards Notre-Dame! Shouts rend the
air; one shout, at which Grecian birds might drop dead. It is indeed a stately,
solemn sight. The Elected of France, and then the Court of France; they are
marshalled and march there, all in prescribed place and Costume. Our Commons'in plain black mantle and white cravat'; Noblesse,
in gold-worked, bright-dyed cloaks of velvet, resplendent, rustling with laces,
waving with plumes; the Clergy in rochet, alb, or
other best pontificalibus: lastly comes the King
himself, and King's Household, also in their brightest blaze of pomp,-their
brightest and final one. Some Fourteen Hundred Men blown together from all
winds, on the deepest errand.
Yes, in that silent-marching
mass there lies Futurity enough. No symbolic Ark, like the old Hebrews, do these men
bear: yet with them too is a Covenant; they too preside at a new Era in the
History of Men. (FR, 1: 134)
Alison effaces
himself by avoiding direct address of the reader (which implies a first-person
addresser), by avoiding commentary on events, and by employing a plain style
that seeks to efface writing itself. In order to avoid commentary, he imputes
judgments to others (for example, to "the reflecting" who observe the
preservation of feudal social distinctions). As narrator, he has no spatial
relationship to the scene [65/66] — he seems to be nowhere — whereas Carlyle
situates himself and his readers in the midst of the crowd watching the
procession. Carlyle begins by exhorting the reader, in an exclamatory
apostrophe — " Behold, however!" — to observe the scene he is describing. The second paragraph
of the passage from The French Revolution (of which I have
included only one-quarter) consists entirely of the narrator's commentary on
the meaning of the event and contains no narrative of the event itself. (C. F. Harrold has estimated that such commentaries constitute
nearly a third of The French Revolution; see "Carlyle's General
Method," 1150). Throughout the passage, Carlyle's language draws attention
to itself through the use of such rhetorical and literary devices as
apostrophe, repetition and variation, alliteration, metaphor, and allusion
(note the "Grecian birds" and the Ark of the Covenant). Most importantly,
Carlyle devotes a whole chapter to this episode because of its symbolic
importance-for him it foreshadows the whole course of the revolution-while
Alison gives only one paragraph to a ceremony that, for him, has little
significance in the chain of political events.
Carlyle's use of present-tense narration
collapses the distance between past and present, emphasizing that meaning is
not fixed in the past but is always in the process of being made. In a
narrative that treats events as if they were taking place before the narrator's
and reader's eyes, past and present are not separate, since the beliefs and
actions that had constituted the revolution also constitute the lives of the
narrator and his readers. Further, Carlyle dramatizes the revolution as it
lives on in the present in moments when the time of narration-the moment of
writing-converges with the time of historical events. When, for example, he
writes of d'Artois that he "now, as a grey
timeworn man, sits desolate at Grätz" and
informs us in a footnote that "now" means "A.D. 1834," the
year in which he is writing the passage, he abruptly brings the historical
actor from the past into the present (1:33). The "now" of this
passage is itself ever-shifting; the footnotes accompanying similar passages always
indicate the moment at which he writes, at least one such note appearing for
each of the three years 1834, 1835, 1836) during which he worked on the history
(1:224, 3:47, 312).
The first-person plural
(for example, "Our commons" in the quotation above) also telescopes
the distance between past and present, narrator and narrated (see Vanden Bossche, "Revolution
and Authority," 284-85; J. Rosenberg, 77-78). In the following passage,
the referent of the word we shifts as the narrator comments on Danton's defense of the September massacres: [66/67]
When applied to by
an offical person, about the Orl6ans Prisoners, and
the risks they ran, [Danton] answered gloomily, twice over, 'Are not these men
guilty?'-When pressed, he 'answered in a terrible voice,' and turned his back.
Two Thousand slain in the prisons; horrible if you will: but Brunswick is within a day's journey of us;
and there are Five-and-twenty Millions yet, to slay or save. Some men have
tasks,- frightfuller than ours!
It seems strange, but is not strange, that this Minister of Moloch-justice,
when any suppliant for. a friend's life got access to
him, was found to have human compassion. (3:47; emphasis added)
The first-person plural
("us") in the third sentence (beginning "Two Thousand slain . . .")
refers to Danton. Because there are no quotation marks to set Danton's speech offfrom the historical narrative (as in the first
sentence), however, the speech merges with the narration, the narrated with the
narrator. This elision continues in the concluding sentences, as the principal
location of the speaking voice slides from Danton and the past to Carlyle and
the present, the final sentence belonging only to the latter. The sentence that
comes between ("Some men have. . .") may be attributed to either man
and thus further merges them. If we read it together with the previous
sentence, it becomes a continuation of Danton's speech, "ours"
referring to the patriots who speak in the first person in that sentence. But
if we read it together with the final sentence, it becomes part of Carlyle's
commentary, suggesting that the "task" of the patriots in 1792 was
more frightful than "ours" in the 1830s.
Carlyle also employs this
technique to represent the revolution as a multiplicity of speakers and points
of view. By merging with the historical actors, he is able to sympathize with
each of them and to speak in all of their voices. He represents history as the
interaction of groups, as dialogues between personifications like
"universal Patriotism" and the "Legislative." In the
following passage, he uses dashes to indicate an exchange of speeches between
Parisian patriots and the revolutionary authorities:
Twelve Hundred
slain Patriots, do they not, from their dark catacombs there, in Death's
dumb-show, plead (O ye Legislators) for vengeance? . . . Nay, apart from
vengeance, and with an eye to Public Salvation only, are there not still, in
this Paris (in round numbers) "Thirty thousand Aristocrats," of the
most malignant humour; [67/68] driven now to their last trump-card?-Be patient,
ye Patriots: our New High Court, "Tribunal of the Seventeenth," sits
... and Danton, extinguishing improper judges, improper practices wheresoever found, is "the same man you have known at
the Cordellers." With such a Minister of justice,
shall not justice be done? — Let it be swift, then, answers universal
Patriotism; swift and sure! — (3:8-9)
While the
quotations within the speeches assure us that the scene is based on documentary
evidence, the dialogue compresses a long course of discussion and debate. These
compressed dialogues seek to represent, not the literal event, but its symbolic
meaning. Because the narrator merges with these voices rather than
distinguishing them as part of a past action, the text gives the impression that
the narrator is not the manipulator of the voices but the product of them. In Sartor Resartus, the
personae, who all sound like Carlyle, may be regarded as avatars of the
different aspects of his personality. In The French Revolution, he
tries to get beyond the authorial ego in order to represent the full range of
historical figures (see Bakhtin, 299). One effect of
this practice is Carlyle's even-handed sympathy for virtually every historical
figure in spite of his personal judgments of them. Although he admires Mirabeau
and Danton more than Robespierre and Louis XVI, he endeavors
to see why they acted in the way they did and how historical circumstances
shaped them (e.g., 3:106-7, 285-86). See especially the deaths of Mirabeau,
Marat, Marie Antoinette, Philippe d'Orléans, and
Mine. Roland (2:146, 3:169-70, 194-95, 207-10.
The narrator of The
French Revolution, a narrator who belongs to the world he narrates,
seeks to interpret this world by discovering its symbols. He suggests, in a
chapter entitled "Symbolic," that public events are "Symbolic
Representation [s]" of belief (2:47). Whereas Alison's narrative is
organized in terms of the day-by-day chronology of events, virtually every
subdivision of Carlyle's history, which often disregards chronology, focuses on
the discovery of the symbolic import of events. At every level of the
narrative, titles refer to literal events in which Carlyle discovers a symbolic
import. The titles of the three volumes of the history reveal its basic
structure, the initial rebellion against the old imprisoning order ("The
Bastille"), the attempt to author a new social order ("The
Constitution"), and the descent into complete destruction ("The
Guillotine"). The same is true for the other subdivisions of the history;
for example, the storming of the Bastille represents the determination of the
French people to break down the old social structure; "Viaticum"
represents not only the death of Louis XV but the last rites of monarchy;
"The Paper Age," not just the proliferation of printed matter but the
ephemerality of its paper productions; and
"Dishonoured Bills," not just the depletion of the treasury but the
figurative bankruptcy of the old order. Carlyle's depiction of the royal
family's unsuccessful attempt to flee France is almost allegorical. The
royal family flees in an overburdened and oversized [68/69] berline
that consequently moves so slowly — indeed, Carlyle exaggerated
its slowness — that it can be captured by a handful of peasants and
retired dragoons. Carlyle finds in the berline a
symbol of the accretions of privilege and meaningless tradition with which
monarchy had become encrusted and which made its downfall inevitable. Symbols
of power, they in fact have made the monarch powerless and given the upper hand
to the people.
In addition to discovering
the symbolic import of individual events, Carlyle creates ironic contrasts
through juxtaposition, often discovering that the symbolic import of one event
undermines the intended symbolic message of another. The French intend the
Feast of Pikes to express their belief in the principle of fraternity. But
Carlyle is suspicious of such "theatrical" displays, contrasting them
unfavorably with the ritual oaths they imitate, such
as the Puritan "Solemn League and Covenant" and the "Hebrew
Feast of Tabernacles," in which 'A whole Nation gathered, in the name of
the Highest" (2:47, 42). More significantly, however, the narrative that
ensues in the following section, which represents a mutiny in the army, reveals
that a violent feast of "pikes" will lead to anarchy, not fraternity.
Similarly, Carlyle plays on the idiomatic and literal meanings of the French
verb marcher ("to be in working order," but literally
"to march") in order to contrast the failure of the constitution with
the success of the troops from Marseilles.
While "believing Patriots" think "that the Constitution will
march, marcher,-had it once legs to stand on," Carlyle ironically
contrasts their enfeebled constitution, which grows "rheumatic,"
"stagger[s]" and finally "will not march," with the
vigorous Marseillais and their cry of "Let Us
March" that brings about the insurrection of August 1792 (2:5, 223, 237;
see 227).
If an epic represents the
belief of a people as manifested in its actions, then the French Revolution,
which manifested a nation's unbelief, provides problematic material for epic.
Within his epic framework, Carlyle represents the actions of the French people
as mockepic. The French need a deus
ex machina (Carlyle's use of the English equivalent
of this phrase, "god from the machine," already tends to deflate it)
but get only an ineffectual "Mars de Broglie" and a royal usher
"Mercury ... de Brézé" (I: 160). The epic
machinery that motivates the action of the history becomes mere
"preternatural suspicion" (1: 126-27). Homer's "wine-dark
sea" gets adapted as the mockheroic epithet
"sea-green" to describe Robespierre. Finally, Carlyle [69/70] echoes
"The Rape of the Lock" in his depiction of the queen preparing to
flee as an epic heroine outfitting her hero: "New Clothes are needed; as
usual, in all Epic transactions, were it in the grimmest iron ages; consider
'Queen Chrimhilde, with her sixty sempstresses,'
in that iron Nibelungen Song! No queen can stir
without new clothes" (2:157). Unlike Chrimhilde,
who married the indomitable Siegfried and wreaked terrible revenge on the
enemies who killed him, however, Marie Antoinette, married to the ineffectual
Louis XVI, is absurdly concerned with "perfumes" and
"toilette-implements" that burden the cumbersome 'Argosy"
in which the royal family insists on traveling
(2:157, 168; see CME, 2:238). Whereas Homer had been able to
"sing" the belief of a society in an epic poem, Carlyle can only express
unbelief through "prose." Echoing the traditional epic invocation, he
writes: "The 'destructive wrath'of Sansculottism: this is what we speak, having unhappily no
voice for singing" (1: 212; emphasis added). In a work that persistently
satirizes speech-making, it is particularly ironic that his epic must be
spoken.
Just as The French
Revolution's epic aspirations are undermined by mock-epic elements, so
its overt narrative structure, which represents a circular movement from the
institution of monarchical order through a period of transition following its
destruction and concluding in the constitution of democratic order, is
undermined by a parallel narrative that represents an uninterrupted current of
accelerating destruction and anarchy. The former narrative represents the
desire to recover authority while the latter suggests that the revolution can
do nothing but destroy it.
Both narratives share the
same starting point in volume I, the destruction of the monarchy as symbolized
by "The Bastille." Carlyle represents the bankrupt authority of the
monarchy through the inability of successive finance ministers to avert
financial default. Emptied of authority, the institution of monarchy produces a
king who can no longer create social order. Although initially Louis compels
obedience-he attempts to govern by royal edict-he cannot compel belief. This
situation cannot last long, and, with the storming of the Bastille, power
begins to shift to the people.
With volume 2, "The
Constitution," the two narratives diverge, the one representing the
National Assembly's attempt to author a constitution and the other the
increasing anarchy that undermines this enterprise. An "incipient New
Order of Society" appears to emerge [70/71] when the French express their
beliefs through the grand ritual oath of allegiance celebrated in "The
Feast of Pikes" (2:34). But the royalist mutiny in the army at Nanci exposes the absence of loyalty, the "unsightly
wrong-side of that thrice glorious Feast of Pikes" (2: 100). With the destruction
of royal authority, no single authority can establish itself, and the army,
which is "the very implement of rule and restraint, whereby all the rest
was managed and held in order," becomes "precisely the frightfullest immeasurable implement of misrule"
(2:73). In September 1791, the assembly completes a constitution intended to
produce a new social order. But the constitutional monarchy that gives the king
the power to veto all legislation only institutionalizes the conflict between
the monarchy and the middle class. Louis attempts to assert his authority by
vetoing all legislation, and, because authority is now fragmented, neither
Louis nor the assembly can govern. Anarchy increases and overwhelms the
assembly's attempts to establish order, and, on August 10, 1792, a new uprising
overturns the constitutional monarchy. just as the
storming of the Bastille had overturned the old regime, so the insurrection of
the tenth of August overturns the constitutional monarchy. Instead of
discovering authority, the constitution has further undermined it.
In the final volume of the
history, "The Guillotine," the attempt to author a second
constitution becomes completely submerged in the growing anarchy of the Terror.
Having discovered that authority could not be divided between the monarchy and
the people, the assembly proceeds to abolish the institution of monarchy
itself. "Regicide" completes the abolition of authority that began
with the storming of the Bastille: "a King himself, or say rather Kinghood
in his person, is to expire here" (3:107). However, when the people assume
the authority formerly held by monarchy, they fail to establish social order
and anarchy engulfs the nation.
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