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The French Revolution: a History

First published: 1837
Pages: 894

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About this book

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.

About the author

Thomas Carlyle

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) was a Scottish essayist, historian, and social critic who became one of the most influential voices of the Victorian age. His major works include The French Revolution and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, and his forceful prose shaped a generation of thinkers.