The French Revolution

Thomas Carlyle tells the story of the Revolution as a kind of apocalypse — the old order's rot made suddenly, catastrophically visible — following it from the last starving years of the ancien régime through the fall of the Bastille, the Terror, and Napoleon's rise, in a prose style unlike any other history of its age: urgent, present-tense, thick with vivid physical detail, and unafraid to render its huge cast of kings, mobs, and revolutionaries as figures in a drama rather than names in a chronicle.

Carlyle published The French Revolution: A History in 1837, after losing the only manuscript of its first volume when a maid at John Stuart Mill's house mistook the stacked pages for waste paper and burned them; he rewrote the entire volume from memory and notes rather than abandon the project. The finished work made his reputation and remains, nearly two centuries later, as much a work of literature as of history.

This Bibliomancer edition presents the complete text, in three parts.