The Redemptive Power of Violence?: Carlyle, Marx and Dickens

Among the many questions raised by the French Revolution of 1789, one in particular haunted the imagination of the nineteenth century: its violence. No one could deny that the revolution of 1789 had produced momentous and lasting changes. The Europe of the Ancien Régime had been destroyed and all attempts to restore it had foundered. But these changes appeared to be inseparable from the violence which had brought them about. Violence, it seemed, had not been incidental to the revolution, but inherent in its popular character. Popular sovereignty had gone together with crowd coercion and a reign of terror. Hunger, long-held grievances and the provocations of the Old Order were among its precipitants. But by any measure it had been excessive, and its legacy had been an unforgettable cluster of images of the burning of châteaux, of the destruction of the Bastille, of angry crowds, summary justice and the lanterne, of the execution of a king and queen, and of most of the leaders of the revolution itself, of the Terror and the guillotine, of women with the ferocity of ‘tigers’ – the tricoteuses, of revolutionary armies, of the desecration of churches and the noyades of Carrier. (After the suppression of the rebellion in the Vendée, Jean-Baptiste Carrier, the revolutionary commissioner stationed at Nantes, dealt with the 6,000 suspects and prisoners by heaping them on barges which were steered into the middle of the river and sunk. Between November 1793 and February 1794 it is estimated that 3,500 were murdered in this way.)

Interest in the Revolution of 1789 was not dislodged by the occurrence of revolutions in 1830 and 1848. Politicians and historians from Croker to Acton continued to be preoccupied with 1789, while its perennial popularity as a theme in popular consciousness is suggested by its central place in Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors.¹ In 1830, significant liberal gains had been made without undue loss of life. But a succession of riots, uprisings and conspiracies in its aftermath suggested that the changes were but a stage in an ongoing process.² In 1848, the successes of the people had been shortlived. Only in the first great revolution had epochal change, mass political participation and violence run together.

It was this equation that remained so disturbing; and in many studies – beginning with Madame de Staël’s Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution (1818) – historians tried to distinguish the ‘good’ years of the liberal revolution of 1789–91 from the ‘bad’ years of Jacobinism and the Terror, 1792–94. But even in the ‘good’ years it was impossible to separate the achievements of the legislature from violence and crowd action. The storming of the Bastille and the burning of châteaux took place near the beginning of the Revolution in 1789. Was it therefore possible to detach the revolution from the violent and assertive actions of the people? In the English-speaking world, the person who had posed this question in its sharpest form was Thomas Carlyle.

Carlyle’s French Revolution was arguably the first of a new type of history in which a collective entity, the French People, was conceived as the active protagonist of the historical process.³ This approach had only been made possible by Carlyle’s intimate acquaintance with a tradition of thinking, until the 1820s little known outside Germany – the aesthetic and religious theories of Sturm und Drang and German romanticism.

Back in the 1820s, John Stuart Mill had perceived that the novelty of the revolution required a new sort of history. To understand ‘how a people acts’, it was necessary to know how its ‘civilisation, morals, codes of thought and social relations’ were shaped. As he wrote in his review of Sir Walter Scott’s Life of Napoleon in 1827,

heretofore, when a change of government had been effected by force in an extensive and populous country, the revolution had been made always by and commonly for, a few; the French Revolution was emphatically the work of the people. Commenced by the people, carried on by...