The French Revolution: a History

Thomas Carlyle finished this three volume history in 1837, having rewritten the entire first volume from memory after a friend’s servant burned the only manuscript. It carries France from the exhausted last years of Louis XVI through the Bastille, the fall of the monarchy, the Terror, and out the other side in 1795. The method was both the scandal and the achievement. Carlyle wrote in the present tense, put the reader in the street with the crowd, and treated the Revolution as a judgment rather than a sequence of causes to be weighed and filed. Dickens kept a copy close while writing A Tale of Two Cities. It is history that behaves like poetry, and it still reads at speed. Free here in PDF and EPUB.