“Rebels” With A Cause: Thomas Carlyle and Curtis Yarvin, Reactionary Monarchists Who Believed They Were Outcasts Because They Spoke Truth to Woke Power, When Actually They Just Costumed Gutter Racism in Intellectual Prose. Also, Whined About Being “Cancelled” Even Though They Never Shut Up and Influenced The Most Powerful People In Culture and Government.

A Tale of Two Cities is the Great Novel for our times, not just because all modern politics is fallout from the collapse of feudalism, symbolized by the Fall of the Bastille.

There is a clear, self-acknowledged lineage from the “House Philosopher” of today’s Techno-Fascist MAGA Movement, Curtis Yarvin, to his intellectual idol Thomas Carlyle, the most influential British philosopher of the 19th Century and the key source for Charles Dickens’ historical fiction of the French Revolution, A Tale of Two Cities.

In his 94-page essay on Thomas Carlyle, Curtis Yarvin plainly states:

I am a Carlylean. I’m a Carlylean more or less the way a Marxist is a Marxist. My worship of Thomas Carlyle, the Victorian Jesus, is no adolescent passion—but the conscious choice a a mature adult. I will always be a Carlylean, just the way a Marxist will always be a Marxist. And it is not too late for you to join us yourself! It’s a big tent, this cult of Carlyle.

Charles Dickens would count himself in this cult of Carlyle as well—but, and this is what makes A Tale of Two Cities so fascinating—Dickens might have worshipped at the Church of Carlyle, but his actual beliefs were quite different. To begin with Carlyle was an atheist, whereas Dickens was quite religious and is most famous for, more or less, inventing Modern Christmas. But more to the point, Carlyle and Dickens had very different views about history—not about what happened, but more about the idea of “history” itself.

Dickens began as a journalist, he never stopped doing journalism, and his habits and methods were that of a journalist. Dickens famously walked the London streets 20 miles a time, hung out in pubs (there are at least a dozen pubs still today that tout “Dickens Was Here”), and would visit prisons, ragged schools, slums—wherever there was a story, Dickens went there, with his notebook, and turned the lives of people into characters. Whatever else we can say about Dickens, he was interested in people. In fact, Charles Dickens’ first published work was Sketches by Boz, a collection of 56 short bits on London scenes and people, written under the pen name “Boz,” which earned him enough clout to begin work on The Pickwick Papers.

Thomas Carlyle, the “Sage of Chelsea",” didn’t really care about people. He was a polymath who inhabited the Life of the Mind. We will talk about him much more later, but Carlyle really didn’t think about, or care for, everyday people. This disposition led him to his most enduring idea: Carlyle’s reaction to the social upheavals caused by the European Potato Famine and the “Hungry 40s” was the Great Man Theory of History, in which history is “made” by the inherently superior men who are unafraid to use overwhelming violence to Restore Order.

The revolutionary period of the 1700-1800’s spawned Liberal Democracy and various forms of Socialism, whose conflicts with Reactionary Conservative Monarchical Dynasties led to Europe’s collapse during World War I. Thus, the Great Hero Who Restores Order became the philosophical underpinning of Nazi politics: According to Goebbels’ diary, in Hitler’s final hours in the Fuhrerbunker, he took comfort in reading Carlyle’s biography of Frederick the Great, which convinced Hitler that he was, indeed, a Great Man of History Restoring Order for the Master Race.

Carlyle’s status as the Nazis’ intellectual godfather is how Yarvin connects the English, American, and French Revolutions to Fascism to MAGA. Yarvin has written that Hitler was a “genius” (but, to be fair, he endorses Hitler’s ideas but not necessarily his methods and aesthetics), then brings that past into the present.

You don’t need to “read into” Yarvin’s writings to connect the Nazis to what ICE is doing in Minnesota: In late December 2025, Yarvin said that “Hitler Spoke The Truth to Germans” and that “all serious historians agree” that Hitler was a “genius,” which justifies self-proclaimed Hitler admirer, Holocaust denier, and Donald Trump dinner guest Nick Fuentes’ call to ethnically cleanse Minnesota of its Somali population.

How MAGA “Thinks” Begins With Dickens’ Source for the French Revolution

So, yes, if you want to understand how MAGA thinks, you have to understand Curtis Yarvin, who “has shaped J.D. Vance’s thinking more” than anyone. And to understand Yarvin, in Yarvin’s own words, then you need to understand Thomas Carlyle’s study of the French Revolution. Much of Yarvin’s thinking evolves from his analysis of the French Revolution, which, in Yarvin’s mind, resulted from Enlightenment French intellectuals getting brain poisoned by the American and English revolutionaries’ revolt against their rightful kings.

Thomas Carlyle was also Charles Dickens’ major literary and intellectual influence, and hisThe French Revolution: A History is Dickens’ is chief source material for A Tale of Two Cities. Dickens and Carlyle were so close that the famously curmudgeonly Carlyle was so impressed by A Christmas Carol that, upon reading it, he immediately went out and bought a turkey. In fact, Dickens’ portrayal of celebratory feasts in A Christmas Carol grew directly from the economic exploitation of the Industrial Revolution and the Hungry 40s: “How Victorians’ Fear of Starvation Created Our Christmas Lore.”

So, when Dickens decided to write an historical fiction of the French Revolution, he asked Carlyle, who founded the London Library with books from his personal collection, for sources. According to Dickens, Carlyle sent “two cartloads of books” to his house–and though there’s a bit of legend here, Carlyle’s influence on A Tale of Two Cities and, thus, the popular memory of the French Revolution, is profound.

But Dickens’ book isn’t just Carlyle’s philosophy in an historical fiction. Rather, the brilliance of Cities is that Dickens begins with Carlyle’s narrative and fashions something entirely his own, and in many ways, deeply contradictory to the thinking of Carlyle: A deep meditation on what it means to be a Christian in a time of state terror.

Dickens opens Cities with the most famous line in literature: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” We will deep dive into this paragraph, but for now, understand that Dickens is saying: No matter how extraordinary the time in which you live–whether 1789, 1859, or 2026–it’s always been like this! In one of Cities’ most literary passages, Dickens describes the boots headed to the Bastille as echoing from Paris to London, and from aristocrats’ crimes in the past to the revolutionaries’ revolt in the present, the repercussions of which we experience in our time and space, which then echoes on to other times in other places.

And so it is with Curtis Yarvin and the philosophy of MAGA: Curtis Yarvin traces his philosophy from the English, American, and French revolutions, idolizing Carlyle as the antidote to all this rabble, then follows the path through Fascism right up to MAGA and the need to ethnically cleanse Somalis from Minnesota.

All of this is why A Tale of Two Cities is the Great Novel to read during the Second Trump Administration: It helps us understand how we got here, what’s happening now, and what we can do about it.

The “Wonderful Corner for Echoes” in Bedford Square, London That Inspired Dickens’ Metaphor for History During the “Storming of the Bastille” Chapter in A Tale of Two Cities.

Who Is Curtis Yarvin?

An intensely boring, predictable pseudo-intellectual, a partially homeschooled student who was told he had a High IQ, which gave him a pathologically overinflated sense of his own intelligence, turning him into one of those reflexively contrarian man-boys who provokes the sheeple who haven’t read, and anyway wouldn’t understand, Thomas Carlyle and Hans-Hermann Hoppe.

You will be shocked to discover that Yarvin’s father was overbearing, his childhood “seems to have left him a lifelong feeling of inadequacy,” and he likes to burnish contrarian bonafides by talking about his Jewish Communist grandparents from Brooklyn rather than his WASP grandparents from Tarrytown. The High Priest of the Far Right lives in Berkeley after having bought a condo in Haight-Ashbury.

So, yes, he’s a self-styled Edgelord who literally created the “Red Pill” meme on his Mencius Moldbug blog. Long story short, he went to Silicon Valley, made some money as a successful software designer, started a “self-directed study of computer science and political theory” (literally doing his own research), and then wrote neo-Monarchist blogposts that caught the attention of Peter Thiel-sphere tech guys and far-right agitators.

Having spent a lot of time reading and reading about Curtis Yarvin, I can report: He is not very interesting, and virtually none of his work holds up to serious scrutiny. But if you want more, his “Unqualified Reservations by Mencius Moldbug” blog is the primary source, and the definitive Yarvin biographical essay is this Ava Kofman New Yorker piece.

Curtis Yarvin Believes That He Is Giving You The Red Pill By Intellectualizing Racism, But He Really Red-Pilled Himself By Internalizing the Only Praise He Got as a Child: Having a High IQ.

What Does Yarvin Believe?

As far as I can tell, there are three pillars of Yarvin’s “philosophy,” if you can call it that:

Hereditary Monarchy, Scientific Racism, and the Technological Republic.

If you think of these three strands interwoven, like a triple helix, this gets you really close to what’s happening in the Second Trump Administration. It can be hard to follow Yarvin’s meandering, try-hard ahistorical thoughts: Just know that Curtis Yarvin likes to say things like, “Napoleon was a start-up guy,” and that, mostly, he told Silicon Valley Tech Lords, Far-Right Racists, and Incel College Republicans what they wanted to hear.

The Three Pillars of Yarvin: The Monarchy and Aristocratic Court of the Sun King Louis XIV, the Scientific Racism and Colonial Defense of Thomas Carlyle, and the Technological Surveillance State of Peter Thiel.

Hereditary Monarchy

Curtis Yarvin is, at his core, a biological supremacist. He talks a lot about “biological roots of intelligence,” which has influenced J.D. Vance. Translated into an historical analysis, this means, of course, there is a “natural” aristocracy that should be headed by a hereditary monarch. Yarvin’s favorite monarch is Louis XIV, France’s “Sun King” who consolidated the realms of Gaul, creating Versailles as both a literal palace for, and the idea of, a ruling elite. Louis XIV’s governing philosophy is contained in the famous “L’état, c’est moi”: “I am the state.” To Yarvin, in news that would startle the 98% of France who weren’t aristocrats during the 1700s, an absolute monarch would be a benevolent ruler because “ransacking the state holds no meaning because it’s all his anyway.”

Thus, Yarvin believes that the English, American, and French Revolutions were illegitimate. He refers to himself as a “Jacobite,” the self-styled term for restorationists of the Stuart Monarchy of 1603. Why? According Austrian School economist of the Far Right Hans-Hermann Hoppe:

Essentially, revolutions act like cults; they delegitimize everything outside of them. The idea that we live in a kind of cult of the present that delegitimizes the past was somewhat new to me. And when you’re in a cult, it feels like the rest of the world is in a cult.

This is an interesting take, considering that Hoppe and Yarvin are famous today mostly because of the influence of a tiny cabal of Silicon Valley tech billionaires. But, to be fair, Yarvin’s take is also influenced by Thomas Carlyle, who absolutely describes the French Revolution as an insane and dehumanized cult—which is also conveyed by Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities, though, as we will discuss, Dickens has a much more nuanced take on the situation.

Scientific Racism

All these Far Right guys are IQ-obsessed, genes-determinists who want to legitimize their gutter racism with “science.” Curtis Yarvin was just the smartest-sounding one to publish it on a blog during the Tea Party era anti-Obama backlash.

If you want specifics, this account of his interview with New Labour former communications chair and podcaster Alastair Campbell from the 2024 Let the Light In London Conference is a great shorthand. Here, Curtis Yarvin talks about his “satirical” Mencius Moldbug essay “Race: A Modest Proposal,” modelled on the famous Jonathan Swift satire. Yarvin proposes mandatory DNA tests before filling out the census, that kind of thing.

I put “satire” in quotations because it’s clear that Yarvin isn’t really kidding. He believes deeply in hereditary aristocracy headed by a hereditary monarch. When you combine this with his well-documented love of using the n-slur, this represents his true beliefs:

Race, of course, is hereditary by definition… Transferable titles of hereditary nobility will end up in the hands of those most capable – a reality confirmed again and again by 21st Century science.

This excerpt from Ava Kofman’s New Yorker profile tells us what he said, on the record, about “ghetto Blacks,” which represents most of what you read on Mencius Moldbug:

I’d been pressing him on how he would define success in the second Trump Administration. Answering himself, he said that the “obvious solution” to problems of inner-city drug abuse and poverty would be to “put the church Blacks in charge of the ghetto Blacks.”

And:

“Unless we can totally reëngineer DNA to change what a human being is, there are many people who should not live in a modern way but in a traditional way,” he concluded.

If I were being ungenerous, I would say that Yarvin’s “Race: A Modest Proposal” is a direct rip-off of…Thomas Carlyle’s “satirical” piece “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question,” which originally used the Hard-R, and is definitely one of the most racist essays from the very racist Victorian era. Carlyle wrote this fake interview with “Phelin M’Quirk” to provoke debate with his intellectual rival John Stuart Mill, where he hides behind the satire facade to argue that obviously unintelligent and weird looking Black people should be enslaved in the West Indies to improve their condition, conditions on slave ships were exaggerated, and on and on.

As we will talk about, Carlyle’s supposed “satire” turned out to be…exactly what he thinks, which he exposed as chair of the Eyre Defence Fund, an organization that raised money to defend Governor Edward John Eyre’s declaration of martial law in the Morant Bay Rebellion, resulting in a charge of “mass murder” for the slaughter and systematic execution of over 400 Black men and women in Jamaica after the abolition of slavery.

(By the way, Dickens also supported Eyre. We will get to all that).

As with his idol Carlyle, it seems obvious that Yarvin hid his real thoughts behind a satire that he knew was unpalatable. But that was 2010, today he’s saying it out in the open:

Whatever the exact solution, he has written, it is crucial to find “a humane alternative to genocide,” an outcome that “achieves the same result as mass murder (the removal of undesirable elements from society) but without any of the moral stigma.”

And, wouldn’t you know it, in his defense of colonialism at the Let the Light In London Conference, Yarvin cites…Governor Eyre as a “good ruler.” “The Third World is a world crying out to be ruled,” he says, mock-proposing a more “efficient” way of doing Apartheid in South Africa: Disenfranchising anyone with an IQ of “less than 120.”

Or, to cross the strands of Hereditary Monarchy and Scientific Racism:

Since racial equality is a myth, democracy cannot work: ‘If negroes are unsuited for representative government, the fault lies entirely with the latter…’

The Morant Bay Rebellion by William Heysham Overend (1865), and Curtis Yarvin Telling Alastair Campbell That Governor Eyre Maybe Didn’t Go Far Enough (2024).

The Technological Republic

So, if you have a hereditary monarchy that rules over the genetic inferiors, how do you keep everybody in their proper place?

The Technological Surveillance State. Or, as Palantir CEO and confirmed techno-fascist Alexander Karp titled his Yarvin-inspired book, The Technological Republic.

This is where Yarvin brings Carlylean thought into the internet age.

Luke Munn’s article in The Conversation is a succinct, precise description of how Curtis Yarvin imagined the “Technological Fascism” of the Second Trump Administration. It is worth reading in full.

Back in 2012, Curtis Yarvin created a blueprint for “How to Reboot the US Government.” First, retire or fire as many government employees as you can, except for the police and military. Seize government funds and direct them toward the surveillance and police state, Defund universities and all scientific research. Ignore the courts, and co-opt if not outright purchase press outlets. Then, shut down elections because “Democracy was beta tested and failed to deliver.” Now, “The political operating system must be ripped out and replaced.”

Yes, you read that right: Curtis Yarvin proposed something like DOGE during the first Obama term.

What do you replace the “operating system of democracy” with?

The “Technological Republic.”

Hugely influenced by Yarvin during the Mencius Moldbug days, Karp argues that an efficient, well-run republic should do away with elections, and be based on “a founder culture that came from tech.” Or, as Yarvin puts it, “A government is just a corporation that owns a country.” Or, as the DOGEfather Elon Musk put it, “the government is simply the largest corporation.”

Curtis Yarvin Wrote the Blue Print for This in 2012

Once you rid the republic of democracy, instead of a king, the elites appoint the country’s CEO. The CEO would dismantle what Yarvin calls “The Cathedral”: all the education, humanitarian, religious, journalism, academic, and other “woke” institutions that promote such niceties as civil rights, equal opportunity, that stuff.

This opens up the space for the fascistic Technological Republic: Merge tech firms in the new government structure to conduct mass surveillance, replace workers with AI–basically turn the entire society into the Digital Panopticon where our betters watch over the plebes to ensure the smooth administration of society.

So, all of the OpenAI, Palantir, Elon Musk’s companies–all of these Silicon Valley data farming, collection, and analysis companies are part of the plan. This is how you actually administer a Thomas Carlyle-inspired hereditary monarchy based on scientific racism in the sprawling digital age: Terror through technology

All of this is what Curtis Yarvin imagined in his Mencius Moldbug blog while Trump was still a registered Democrat. All of this Techno-Fascist MAGA Movement of the Second Trump Administration draws primarily from the philosophy of Thomas Carlyle. Charles Dickens’ primary influence in writing A Tale of Two Cities is Thomas Carlyle, and it’s Charles Dickens who, as we will talk about, contemplates the “cult of Revolution,” the “fear of the uncontrollable masses,” the beginnings of the surveillance state, the first use of state terror explicitly as a political tactic, and how technological change collapsed one form of government and ushered in the next.

Above: “The Grindstone” by Fred Barnard (1874), Illustration for the Household Edition of A Tale of Two Cities. Below: Palantir CEO Alexander Karp Explaining How the Technological Republic Would Restore Order Through a Digital Version of the Panopticon, Like the Presidio Modelo That Once Held Communist Revolutionary Fidel Castro.

Dickens Would Say That the Best of Times and the Worst of Times Happened Before, Are Here, and Will Come Again

This is not to say that the Yarvin/Thiel/Vance/Trump Techno-Fascist Terror State is an inevitability. In fact, Charles Dickens has something to say about that, which offers an alternative to Carlyle’s proto-fascism. This very image of the turning of the grindstone is how Dickens explains why this will all, eventually, collapse–because it always does, and comes back around again. He gives us a way to think about living through The Worst of Times that is well worth reading in our time. Really, Yarvin himself seems to believe that Dickens’ conclusion will win out in the end, with a sentiment that mirrors Dickens’ philosophy of human nature:

“Unless we can totally reëngineer DNA to change what a human being is, there are many people who should not live in a modern way but in a traditional way,” he concluded. “And that is a level of revolution that is so far beyond anything the Trump-Vance regime is doing.”

Why? Yarvin quotes the French Revolution’s Archangel of Terror, Louis de Saint-Just, who championed the Reign of Terror and makes a brief unnamed appearance in A Tale of Two Cities:

“He who makes half a revolution digs his own grave.”

Louis de Saint Just and Robespierre at the Hotel de Ville, Jean-Joseph Weerts (1897), Depicting the Two Architects of the Reign of Terror The Night Before They Were Guillotined by the Thermidorian Reaction, Which Attempted to Restore Order to the Chaotic Republic.

Curtis Yarvin, If You Asked Him How to Deal With Revolutionaries: “The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that guillotines–for lack of a better word–are good. Guillotines are right. Guillotines work. Guillotines clarify, cut through, and capture the essence of the revolutionary spirit.”

The Author From Deep Within the Stacks London Library, Founded in 1841 by Thomas Carlyle, Author of The French Revolution: A History and Charles Dickens’ Primary Source for A Tale of Two Cities.

What Is History, Exactly?

Historiography is the study of how we come to understand history. Said another way: It’s the study of the methodology that creates both the historical record and our analysis of that record.

Or, the history of history.

Historiography isn’t merely an academic exercise. History is the stories that shape society, in large part to justify The Way Things Ought To Be. These stories are foundational not just for abstract political ideas, but in the concrete ways the law is written and executed, how policymakers decide who-gets-what, and how people relate to one another.

This is why historiography matters: Who controls the history is, mostly, who controls the material conditions of the present and the future.

For our present moment, the historiography of the French Revolution is the most important historiography to understand–even for Americans, more important than the civic mythologies of the Founding Fathers, the Civil War and World War II.

So, why choose the French Revolution as Year One?

Because this is when Enlightenment ideas were put into practice, tearing down the feudal system and ushering in the modern world’s three major political movements: Liberal Democracy, Socialism and Communism, and Fascism.

The arc of the modern world begins with the Storming of the Bastille, which eventually gave rise to Napoleon, who emerged from the rubble of the Revolution as the world’s first nationalist dictator. Napoleon’s mission was to Make France Great Again, creating a model for “enlightened despots” whose fear campaigns are drawn from tropes lifted directly from the streets of Paris during the Revolution.

This is also why A Tale of Two Cities is the classical work of fiction for our time. Charles Dickens’ chief source for A Tale of Two Cities is Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution: A History, which lionized Napoleon for his willingness to fire cannons at a street revolt in 1795 Paris. Carlyle wrote that Bonaparte quelled the uprising with a “Whiff of Grapeshot,” where “the thing we specifically call French Revolution is blown into space by it.”

From here, Carlyle would go on to write On Heroes, Hero-Worship, & the Heroic in History, whose thesis is “Great Men should rule and that others should revere them.” Carlyle invented the “Great Man” Theory of History that is widely, and controversially, the basis for much of the teaching of history in American schools. For reasons that should be obvious, he is regarded by “People’s History” advocates as the intellectual founding father of Fascism—so much so that Goebbels’ diary says that he and Hitler were reading Carlyle’s biography of Frederick the Great in the Führerbunker.

From here, Thomas Carlyle

Corporal Bonaparte Ordered a Whiff of Grapeshot in the Streets of Paris, Which Thomas Carlyle Interpreted as Just a Great Man Doing a Great Thing for the Nation.

“Bonaparte Orders to Shoot at the Section Members” by Yan Dargent (1866), Which Appears in Adolphe Theirs’ Histoire de la Revolution—Published Five Years Before President Thiers’ Ordered the Army of the Third French Republic to Fire on His Fellow Frenchmen to Destroy the Paris Commune During The Bloody Week.

Lenin Literally Took Notes and Put This Theory into Practice During the Bolsheviks’ October Revolution and Won the Russian Revolution. Since the Whiff of Grapeshot, Every Dictator Raises the Specter the French Revolution to Justify Firing on Protesters in the Streets For the Good of the Nation.

What Sparked the French Revolution?

In May 1787, Royal Finance Minister Charles Alexandre de Calonne told the Assembly of Notables, the congress of high-ranking nobles and clergy, that King Louis XVI’s monarchy was so broke that major tax reform was necessary to keep France solvent. The Assembly couldn’t agree on a fix, so they called the Estates General, the “estates of the realm,” to consider reforms. In other words, the Enlightened nobles told the King that to raise revenue, he needed the consent of the people.

As discussed by Thomas Piketty’s hugely influential 2014 book (which grew out of the 2008 financial collapse), Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 1789 France suffered some of the worst wealth inequality in history: The top 10% held 90% of the kingdom’s wealth, and of that, the top 1% held about 60%.

Why? Louis XVI’s predecessors consolidated the realms of France by, mostly, exempting land-owning nobles and the Catholic Church from property taxes, leaving the vast majority of people with the smallest amount of wealth to finance the monarchy.

So, to satisfy the bankers, Louis XVI needed the assent of his subjects to levy new taxes. But when the Estates General wouldn’t ratify the King’s proposals, he locked the Third Estate (representing everyone but the nobles and clergy) out of the convention, triggering a revolt that resulted in the Tennis Court Oath, when representatives from all the Estates swore not to separate until Louis consented to a Constitutional regime.

From this moment, the feudal system started to dismantle slowly, then sometimes all at once, in kingdom after kingdom across Europe for the next two centuries. In its place rose different types of governments, the major movements being Democracy, Communism, and Fascism. These are, roughly, the same major movements that dominate today.

There’s an often misattributed 1972 quotation by Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai from a conversation with an American diplomat who asked, “What has been the impact of the French Revolution?” To which Enlai replied, “It’s too early to say.”

This is either wholly apocryphal, or more likely, a mistranslation about the 1968 student uprising in Paris.

Either way, it feels true because it is impossible to understand these three political movements without understanding the French Revolution. All of their various revolutionaries created and implemented their ideas based on their analysis of what began in 1787 Paris. Mostly, they looked at the same set of facts and drew wildly different conclusions–both infused by their contemporary politics, but also by developing their contemporary politics based on their historical analysis.

This is why the French Revolution’s historiography matters: Today’s historical actors are still acting in the traditions established by those who literally interpreted the French Revolution–then went out and changed the world based on their historical analysis.

Do you think the fall of the American Republic might be predicated on our enormous wealth inequality that’s the result of exempting the ultra-rich from paying their fair share of taxes?

That’s French Revolution stuff.

Do you think the specter of radical left-wing street violence so haunts reactionary centrists and conservatives that they would go to war with their own countrymen rather than institute wide-scale social reforms?

That’s French Revolution stuff.

And on and on. Once you study the French Revolution, you begin to see it everywhere in our politics.

A Rabble of Hungry Peasants Storm a French Prison Right Before Their Rent Is Due, and 156 Years Later, These Guys End Up at Some Crimean Resort Trying to Figure Out How to Defeat Hitler and Emperor Hirohito (Unknown Photographer; Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin at the Yalta Conference, 1945).

This Approach to the Historiography

The French Revolution is the most contested historiographical space, so we won’t cover close to all of it. Mostly, we will trace the development of Democracy, Communism, and Fascism from their French Revolution roots, with a narrow focus on the most important writers and historical actors. You may be surprised by how many names and ideas you already know.

Along the way, we will explain why certain historical sources and authors are important to A Tale of Two Cities, mostly confined to the final section on Thomas Carlyle and the philosophical underpinnings of Fascism. Armed with this historical knowledge, as we read A Tale of Two Cities, we will be able to understand:

1) How Dickens analyzed the causes of the Revolution,

2) How this understanding flows from Dickens’ view of human nature,

3) How this view of human nature informs his individual theory of history,

3) How Dickens’ Christianity flows from these views on human nature and history,

4) How these ideas can help us grapple with our current political moment, and

5) How to think deeply about all of it….because Dickens accomplishes, through fiction, what is beyond the scope of historians, philosophers, and politicians.

French Revolution Primary Sources

The French Revolution’s primary sources are, at once, very vast but with significant holes in the historical record. There are troves of open-access collections: My go-to is the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University’s Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, a free, curated, and peer-reviewed site supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

In written form, most primary sources are: 1) official government documents, 2) transcripts of speeches at national assemblies, 3) transcripts or reports of speeches given at political clubs, 4) journalism and pamphlets, 5) paintings and illustrations, 6) personal notes and diaries from famous figures, 7) letters written by eyewitnesses, and 8) maps that show the movement of events.

As for tangible objects, dozens of museums house French Revolution artifacts: In Paris, the main sources are the Musée Histoire de Paris Carnavalet, which recently underwent a four-year renovation to create an entire permanent exhibition of primary sources from the Revolutionary Era, from the Estates General to Fall of King Louis-Philippe during the Revolution of 1848. And the Panthéon, Paris’ monument to the Republic, where not only are the Republic’s heroes buried–but more importantly, its artwork conveys the mythology of the Republic.

Aside from the major museums, you can find interesting primary sources at small, niche places like the Musée de la préfecture de police (The Paris Police Museum). Below are my pictures of a restored National Guard uniform from the Revolutionary Era, an original peace-keeping order from the 1789, and a guillotine.

Sorry Everybody, It’s Only a Model Guillotine.

The Hole in the Primary Source Record: The Literal Voice of the Sans-Culottes and the Rural Peasantry

For me, it’s the voice of rural peasants and the Sans-culottes, the poor working class of Paris who did not wear fancy knee breeches–in their own voice.

Plenty of sources describe what the urban poor and rural peasants did, and plenty of letters, notes, and artistic renderings that give impressions of who they were. But rarely do you hear them in their own voice.

What’s often called “The Voice of the Sans-culottes” is, mostly, from the pens of politicians who claimed to represent them. These were the “salon radicals”: The (mostly) lawyers whose politics claimed to support the poor, and often did. In fact, most of the written primary sources are from these educated leftists.

But as for the people they claimed to represent, we really just rely on others’ impressions.

Even a book from the Marxist press like The Permanent Guillotine: The Writings of the Sans-culottes is, in its own description, “an anthology of figures who express the will and wishes of this nascent revolutionary class.” There were some middle-class leaders in the Enragés, the political faction representing the Sans-culottes during the worst of the Regin of Terror, including, for example, the priest Jacques Roux. But even he was college educated.

This makes sense: Many of the urban poor and rural peasants were illiterate–and, because paper was taxed, the actual working poor didn’t have the means to create records of their condition. In a haunting passage from A Tale of Two Cities, we will see that the rural peasants destroyed written records of their feudal obligations: Dickens imagines the peasant uprisings of 1793, in which rural peasants set fire to aristocratic mansions across France, creating a chaotic apocalypse straight out of Paradise Lost.

Perhaps the best example of this reflection of the poor’s voice is Jacques Hébert’s journal Le Père Duchesne. Hébert was a Revolutionary extremist who had extraordinary influence during the worst of the Terror. He was a member of the Jacobin Club in its most radical form, the Cordeliers Club that met in the most radical area of working class Paris, sat on the Paris Commune, which is largely responsible for the Insurrection of August 10th, the September Massacres, the Purge of the Girondins, and the Reign of Terror.

This Guy Was Just Mad As Hell and Not Going To Take It Anymore.

Le Père Duchesne was a fictionalized character that “voiced” the anger of the Paris working class, casting the Sans-culottes as the patriotic soul of the Revolution. Though he did not invent Duchesne, Hébert used his character to voice both the desires and the idealization of the populist Enragés, through this hard-working, salt-of-the-earth stove repairman. The conceit is genius: Because stoves are a luxury item, Duchesne has access to the homes of the aristocrats, so he simply reports and opines on the eccentric extravagances and casual cruelty of nobility.

This excerpt is representative of most Duchesne articles: His foul-mouthed bluntness is simply how the workingman talks, as opposed to those hypocritical rich dandies who barely lift a finger but eat four meals a day. Duchesne works hard, goes home to his loving family and thankful dog, over dinner telling his kids to always be loyal to the Republic and to cheer the guillotining of all their political enemies as traitors.

This is where Dickens’ fiction really does contribute to our human understanding of the Revolution. Duchesne is obviously a propaganda cartoon, a proto-vision of the German Volk in Nazi propaganda. In contrast, Dickens’ main characters in Paris, the Defarges, are his composite pictures of the Sans-culottes, but drawn with a complex human dimension.

In Contrast, Dickens Concluded That These Ladies from St Antoine, the Poor Neighborhood Near the Bastille, Had a Plan and Knew How to Pull it Off. Saint Antoine by Fred Barnard, Composed for the Original Publication of A Tale of Two Cities.

The Defarges hold the Enragés’ politics that for the new nation to live, the aristocrats must die. In Dickens’ telling, the Aristocrats v. the Sans-culottes turns into a kind-of race war, each side refusing to see the other as human. Yet, Dickens draws the Defarges not as idealized cartoons, but as literate, skilled, and strategic community organizers. They employ sophisticated methods to coalesce support in the Parisian underground–they are effective underground organizers who exploit the horrors around them to foment a Revolution. They are skilled politicians, even if they are never represented in any assembly.`

In one memorable passage, Dickens imagines the Defarges as a quiet, homely married couple sitting on the porch, wondering about the future after they’re gone–here, wondering if the Revolution will ever come in their lifetime. Madame Defarge tells her husband, take comfort my love, the Revolution comes like an earthquake after years of shifting earth underground, and then it arrives suddenly to do its destructive work. They even hold secrets from each other, with Dickens skillfully creating a portrait of people who, on some level, know what they’re doing is wrong, but social and cultural conditions force them to do it anyway.

In this way, when the Reign of Terror comes, we see the Sans-culottes as blood thirsty demons, as George Orwell said of A Tale of Two Cities. But by drawing them as humans who fall into this devilry, Dickens explains how extreme poverty and extreme wealth dehumanizes: The aristocrats are inhuman to create such conditions, leading the poor to become dehumanized themselves, and so the whole Revolution becomes this Hell between warring demonic factions.

This is why Dickens fills a legitimate gap in the early historiography of the French Revolution: Unlike Hébert’s cartoons, Dickens imagines a more human internal portrait of the Sans-culottes. He uses his novelist and journalistic skills to conjure the psychology of the St Antoine neighborhood during the 1790s, apart from the political propaganda of the far-left salon radical class.

The Wine-shop by Fred Barnard for the Original Publication of A Tale of Two Cities. Dickens Thought it All Went Off the Rails, But at the Beginning, The Defarges Were Savvy Community Organizers Who Suffered No Fools.

Figuratively and Literally on the Left is Thomas Paine, Figuratively and Literally on the Right is Edmund Burke. Their Debates Over the French Revolution Created Today’s Political Left and Right.

The Great Democratic Debate of Constitutional Monarchy v. Republic: Edmund Burke v. Thomas Paine

Burke and Paine were not so much historians of the Revolution as actual participants. Edmund Burke was a legendary MP who deeply influenced Britain’s foreign policy towards Revolutionary France while the Reign of Terror was happening. Thomas Paine not only sparked the American Revolution with Common Sense, but later joined the French Revolution and ended up in a Paris prison during Terror, spared from the guillotine only by a clerical error inside the prison and was released in the general amnesty following the Thermidorian Reaction against Robespierre.

Their vicious, public debate about the French Revolution is, literally, where the political terms “Left” and “Right” come from. Inside the first French National Assembly after the Tennis Court Oath, the more radical, anti-monarchy members sat to the left of the President’s chair, and the more traditional members sat to the right. This physical description was used to shorthand the basic dispositions of Burke and Paine.

Edmund Burke is widely considered the Founding Father of Conservatism, Thomas Paine the Founding Father of Progressivism. So, yes, the fundamental dispositions of today’s politics is directly born out of contemporaneous analyses of the French Revolution. For more, I highly recommend the indomitable Stephen West’s Philosophize This! episode “Are You Left or Right?”

Edmund Burke

Edmund Burke is still today a primary source for British Tories and American Republicans. He believed that virtue is the foundation for society, that institutions–religious, government, business, and otherwise–were necessary for the “moral stability” of the nation. So, for Burke, social change must be incremental, that radicalism is per se immoral and indefensible, no matter what ideals or material conditions the radicals advocate for.

To this end, Burke actually supported America’s grievances against King George III and Parliament, opposing the use of force in the colonies. Burke did not support American independence, but he did propose a resolution to allow the Americans to elect their own Parliamentary representatives and create a General American Assembly. Burke sympathized with the Americans because he saw British policy as incredibly disruptive to their established patterns of taxation and governance. The policy wasn’t conservative.

As for the French Revolution, Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France was the defining intellectual argument against the Revolution–so much so that Louis XVI himself had it translated into French. Today, it’s regarded as the founding document of conservatism, arguing for traditionalism, in all its forms, as the political philosophy that facilitates national virtue:

Society is indeed a contract…but the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee…to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties. It is to be looked on with other reverence…It is a partnership in all science, a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection….it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.

Burke’s preferred governance is gradual reform under a Constitutional order based on traditional principles, held together by a king and administered by an aristocratic elite. Revolution in the name of “abstractions” like “liberty” and “rights” are too speculative, and so will be defined by the regime of the day to justify its inevitable tyranny. Only rights that are “inherited,” justified by “antient” constitutions and established by tradition, can form the basis of a virtuous nation.

Engraving (1851) of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s “The Club,” Where Edmund Burke (Front Center, Red Coat) and the Boys Agree That National Stability Is Only Protected When the King Asserts His Godly Command to Rule Over the Rabble.

Thomas Paine

Reflections sparked a “pamphlet war,” first with legendary feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (mother of the future Frankenstein author Mary Shelley), who wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in a Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke; Occasioned by His Reflections on the Revolution in France. Basically, she called Burke a sexist, aristocratic toady for the King and the Church of England. Wollstonecraft extended these arguments two years later in her seminal work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

Second, Burke prompted a two-volume response by Mary Wollstonecraft’s acquaintance, who ran in the same intellectual circles as her future husband William Godwin, the Englishman turned American Thomas Paine. Yes, that Thomas Paine, whose The Rights of Man: Being an Answer to Mr. Burke’s Attack on the French Revolution is one of the founding documents of modern progressivism.

Thomas Paine is most known to us as the author of Common Sense, which rallied American patriots to the revolutionary cause. But Paine is much more than that: Born and worked as an Excise Officer in England, he racked up debts, divorced his wife, somehow met Benjamin Franklin, who got him on a boat for Pennsylvania, where he wrote magazine articles denouncing slavery and advocating for an American republic, was dispatched to Paris to lobby for French funding of the American Revolution, moved back to England where he wrote Rights of Man, which got him indicted for seditious libel, prompting him to flee to Paris, where we was elected to the National Convention of the French Republic, got thrown in prison and nearly guillotined, met Napoleon (who claimed to sleep with a copy of Rights of Man), moved back to America and feuded with George Washington, dying in Greenwich Village in 1809, had his bones dug up to be given a hero’s burial back in England, and still today people claim to own pieces of his skull.

So, what did Paine write to Edmund Burke that got him indicted for seditious libel?

Primarily, that hereditary government is incompatible with individual liberty.

Burke argued that centering society on a monarch creates stability, with a small ruling class lording over the poor. For Burke, private property and lawful inheritance are the mechanisms of that stability: the ruling class bequeath their property and titles to their sons, who are trained in the art of good governance of the people. Thus, the wisdom of the ages is passed down through the educated class such that government itself is a “contrivance of human wisdom.”

Paine said this was a weak defense of feudalism, which was dying with the rise of Enlightenment ideals. As such, he dedicated Rights of Man to the great founders of the American and French Revolutions: George Washington, who refused to become emperor and willingly gave up power to establish the democratic republic; and Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette, who renounced his aristocratic title in Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

To answer the Political Question, Paine argued that human rights originate in nature. They are not a benevolent gift bestowed by a divine monarch–nor are they granted by political charters, which implies that they can be revoked. That which comes from nature cannot be taken by man.

What does this mean for constitutions? Each citizen enters into a contract with each other to “produce a government,” which safeguards inalienable, natural rights. So, the only legitimate governments arise from the consent of the people from below, not monarchs from upon high. This requires the complete eradication of hereditary government and noble titles.

To answer the Social Question, Paine argues that poverty deprives you of individual liberty, so any government that allows crippling poverty undermines its own legitimacy. So, social welfare is a natural right, not charity–he harshly criticized England’s Poor Laws (the main target of Dickens), saying that any government that allows its citizens to suffer poverty violates their natural rights, not just because of the poverty, but through the infliction of workhouses, debtors prisons, and the death penalty.

Thus, Paine advocates for the redistribution of lands and wealth, as well as tax reform and public education. Of these, Paine agrees with Burke, saying that education is the most important, but for a completely different reason. Rather than hoarding education for a small ruling elite, Paine says that all citizens should learn the Enlightenment principles that make democracy possible, and that education is the means by which individual citizens escape the cycle of poverty that oppresses their natural right. Monarchs and titled nobles, he says, are incapable of carrying out such a program because education is what gives them power, land is what gives them serfs, inheritance hoards their wealth, and they will never institute the tax reform to provide the means of the social welfare that is everyone’s natural right.

So that’s why Rights of Man was seditious libel: Though Paine never outright says, “Overthrow King George III,” he “suggests” a written constitution deliberated by a far more democratic body than the British Parliament, the elimination of aristocratic titles, a progressive income tax that would break the feudal system, and replacing the Poor Law with subsidized public education.

Rights of Man was a political document for its times, with a whole bunch of specific proposals for the government, which, truth be told, do not completely add up. But its enduring legacy is as a defense of the French Revolution’s declaration of a republic, laying out a progressive vision of government to counter the conservative Burke.

Marie’s Crisis Cafe, Around the Corner From Stonewall in Greenwich Village, Today is a “Broadway Showtunes ‘Sing-Along’ Piano Bar.” It’s Built on the Site of Thomas Paine’s Last Home, Where He Died in 1809.

Behind the Bar is a WPA Mural of the American and French Revolutions, With an Homage to Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man.

As for Dickens, he will agree neither with Burke nor Paine because of his views on human nature. Dickens certainly does not believe in any sort of humane, enlightened monarchy or church. But neither does Dickens believe that institutionalized education or democratic governments will make things better. Dickens believes that human nature is evil: We are all born sinners, so whatever form of government you dream up is going to be corrupt because human beings are corrupt. This is key to understanding the turn of A Tale of Two Cities in the third act.

The Liberal, Democratic Reformers: François Mignet and Adolphe Thiers

These next two writers worked after the fall of Napoleon, during the Bourbon Restoration and the July Monarchy of King Louis-Philippe, France’s “bourgeois” monarchy that lasted from 1830-1848. They championed the “liberal nobles,” the enlightened aristocrats who understood the need for reform, some of whom like the Marquis de Lafayette, crossed the Atlantic to fight in the American Revolution.

François Mignet’s Histoire de la révolution française (1824) was the first comprehensive history available to the general public, selling an incredible 200,000 copies. Mignet was from the Vendée region along the Atlantic coast, a conservative royalist region that erupted in civil war during the Revolution and experienced the bloodiest of the Terror. So, Mignet’s analysis is that both the conservative royalists and the Jacobin republicans were too extreme. Thus, the liberal nobles who advocated for the Rights of Man, but without overthrowing the entire social order, were the enlightened men of France.

In Mignet’s telling, men like the Marquis de Lafayette are the heroes of the “First Revolution” of 1789, which enshrined rights in France’s political order. The “Second Revolution” of 1793 was led by the villains, where men like Georges Danton, Maximilian Robiespierre, the radicals of the Cordelier Club and the Enragé, attempted to overthrow the social order, descending France into the bloody chaos that Mignet’s father experienced in the Vendée.

Mignet didn’t advocate for a republic: he was a constitutional monarchist who used his stature as historian of the revolution to advocate for the Duke of Orleans, Louis-Philippe, to rule as “King of the French” after the fall of his absolutist Bourbon cousin Charles X in 1830.

Here’s where Mignet’s analysis of the French Revolution had a very real impact on world history: Mignet deeply influenced the man he worked alongside, Adolphe Thiers, who published his own 10 volume history of the French Revolution in the 1820s. This was a radical act for both Mignet and Thiers: They interpreted the French Revolution’s heroes as the liberal nobles, who staunchly opposed the absolutist Bourbons who were restored after the fall of Napoleon.

This bravery gave Mignet and Thiers political credibility during the Revolution of 1830. Mignet, mostly, stayed a historian until he died in 1884 at the age of 87. Thiers, though, embarked on a long, consequential political career that lasted through the July Monarchy (serving as Prime Minister twice), the Second Republic, the Second Empire, eventually becoming the President of France during the Third Republic in 1871.

A Paris Commune Pamphlet Reviving Jacques Hébert’s journal Le Père Duchesne, Depicting “Le Dictateur Thiers” Riding a Snail. The Communards and Thiers Both Understood Themselves as Acting as Direct Descendants From the First French Revolution.

When he held power, Thiers put his analysis of the original Revolution into practice: After Emperor Napoleon III was captured during the Franco-Prussian War, Thiers headed the Government of National Defense and was forced to negotiate a humiliating peace with Otto von Bismarck in the Palace of Versailles. After the National Assembly voted for the armistice, Thiers embarked for Paris, but the working classes of the city–who made up most of the National Guard–had radicalized into a socialist movement.

Long story short, Thiers chose to wage war against his own capital to stamp out the Paris Commune radicals looking to overturn the social order and create something entirely new. In this regard, Thiers’ legacy is The Bloody Week—and, important to world history, the Paris Commune was the last revolutionary uprising of Karl Marx’s time. Marx’s analysis of the Thiers and the Commune deeply influenced a young Vladimir Lenin, who would not make the same mistakes as the Commune when the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917.

It’s fair to say that, in this moment, Thiers chose the violence that his liberal noble heroes of 1789 did not, that King Charles X in 1830 did not, that King Louis-Philippe in 1848 did not, and they all ended up in exile or guillotined. Thiers’ choice to crush the Paris Commune was deeply analyzed by Lenin in his study of the French Revolution, creating a roadmap for the Communists after the fall of Czar Nicholas I’s Russian Empire and the Provisional Government in 1917.

The Rue de Rivoli After the Bloody Week and the Fall of the Paris Commune (1871). Echoing Maximillian Robespierre’s Admonition “Did You Want a Revolution Without A Revolution?”, Adolphe Thiers Was Willing to Stop Another Reign of Terror By Doing a Reign of Terror. Lenin Took Notes.

The Bounds Between Democracy and Communism: François Guizot and Jules Michelet

Before we tackle the Marxists, we will backtrack to a man specifically namechecked in the very first paragraph of The Communist Manifesto, François Guizot. Similar to Thiers, François Guizot began professional life as a historian, parlaying his prominence into a long, consequential career in French politics, spanning the July Monarchy’s Revolution of 1830 to the Revolution of 1848 and the Second Republic.

Guizot was born in 1787, and during the Napoleonic Era, he became a writer and minor bureaucrat. During the Bourbon Restoration, Guizot was in and out of government, eventually settling into an appointment at the University of Paris. There, he published long treatises on representative government, focused less on France and more on Great Britain and its revolutions. In this, he originated the concept of the “History of Civilization,” the idea that, over time, nations create the institutions that are “necessary to uphold their emancipation.” Something like a theory of “total history.”

Guizot was a staunch institutionalist because, well, his father was guillotined during the Reign of Terror in 1794. Guizot is best described as a conservative-liberal: Absolutely opposed to the radicals who executed his father, but also of the opinion that absolutists, whether in the vein of the Jacobin Radicals or Napoleon Bonaparte or the Restored Bourbons, could never bring a nation stability because they provoked those same radicals. So, Guizot favored “a monarchy limited by a limited number of bourgeois.”

Long story short, Guizot’s philosophical underpinning made him popular with King Louis-Phillipe, but Guizot was too much of an academic to really understand practical politics or good governance. Ultimately, his Prime Ministership doomed the July Monarchy in 1848. Guizot was incapable of reform when, clearly, some compromise for expanding the vote for Parliamentary elections was necessary. Louis-Phillipe listened to Guizot for too long, and eventually the streets of Paris rose up in revolt. Guizot’s resignation caused much celebration, but it wasn’t enough.

Over the course of three days, blood was shed across the city, with revolutionary National Guards closing in on the Tuileries Palace. Adolphe Thiers advised the King to escape Paris, then lead columns of regular troops into Paris to crush the revolt. But Louis-Phillipe didn’t have the stomach to fire on his people and destroy this great city. He abdicated and fled to England. Twenty-three years later, Adolphe Thiers would prove that he did have the stomach for it.

Guizot, on the other hand, retired from public life and went back to writing. When he analyzed the rise of constitutional monarchy in England and republicanism in America in Discours sur l’histoire de la Revolution d’Angleterre, he found a people building institutions that would settle the peace and provide prosperity. To Guizot, France and Europe had not settled the History of Their Civilizations, which is why they lagged behind their English-speaking brethren.

In his analysis of the rolling series of French Revolutions, which guillotined his father and nearly strung him up in the streets, Guizot concluded that the toppling of French institutions, rather than reforming them, never gave France a firm enough foundation on which to build a great nation.

Guizot’s analysis is obviously self-exonerating, even if it might be persuasive. The truth is that he practiced government like an academic: the historian subsumed the statesman. He spent so much time and energy legitimizing the constitutional monarchy of King Louis-Phillipe that he didn’t develop the skill of practical government or an ear for politics.

In the end, Guizot so mishandled a simple non-crisis that it brought down the monarchy: Les Campagne de banquets. The Banquet Campaign was, really, a trolling exercise by the moderate liberals: Guizot’s cabinet became more authoritarian, aggressively enforcing the law prohibiting “public assemblies,” so liberals sponsored private dinners that properly toasted the King, but were really an excuse to organize and denounce the monarchy. Rather than relent one inch, Guizot called in the police and military to stop a Paris banquet from celebrating the international icon of democratic republicans, George Washington, triggering a riot that conflagrated beyond his ability to handle.

A minor figure during this era of academic and intellectual repression was Jules Michelet, the Chair of the History Department at the Collège de France. Michelet secured this position after working under the traditionalist historian…François Guizot, then part of the Literary Faculty at the College de France.

As an academic, Michelet was devoted to Enlightenment ideals–appropriating the old art criticism term “Renaissance” in his Histoire de France to describe the wholesale modernization from the Middle Ages, when mankind was “reborn.” He was a staunch republican whose work contributed to the radicalization of students that led to the Revolutions of 1848. In fact, the cancellation of his lectures on January 2nd, 1848 led to a large-scale student demonstration against King Louis-Philippe and Guizot, the momentum of which morphed into the Campagne de Banquets.

Michelet is the great democratic republican of the early French Revolution historiography, who today would be classified as a democratic socialist, becoming such a popular teacher that he triggered demonstrations against his stodgy former boss who wanted everybody to sit down and shut up.

François Guizot Accepts the Charter of Government From “Citizen-King” Louis-Philippe I (1830). The Foundation Wasn’t Deep Enough to Hold Up the House of Orlean, But Guizot Didn’t Do Much to Buttress the Supports. Marx and Engels Predicted as Much, and Wrote The Communist Manifesto.

Marx and Engels Saw That There Could Be No True Brotherhood Between The Members at the Country Club and Their Caddies, No Matter How Well You Tip.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

In 1848, only months before François Guizot triggered the collapse of France’s constitutional monarchy, Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx declared that “the spectre of communism” is haunting “old Europe,” who have entered into a holy alliance to perform the exorcism. Guizot is right there, next to the Pope and Tsar.

Why?

Guizot’s analysis of the French Revolution was that a peaceful and prosperous nation could only exist on a foundation of traditional institutions, governed by a monarch and the slimmest of democratic principles. More than that, and it’s guillotines and student riots and barricades in the streets.

Marx and Engels saw the French Revolution fundamentally differently: How can there be Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité when the wealth of the nation isn’t shared? How can we be free and equal brothers when my labor enriches the men of leisure, who profit off my sweat and blood?

“Marxism” is far too complicated to get into, and from here, I will just refer to writings by “Marx,” but we must acknowledge that Friedrich Engels was, really, his full partner. I will narrow this to Marx’s writings on the French Revolution, even though I really should include a section on French Socialist Louis Blanc, whose 12-volume history of the French Revolution lifts Gracchus Babeuf and The Conspiracy of Equals (we will talk about them below) up from historical obscurity. Blanc also first used the term “capitalism” in its modern context, as well developing the concept of “The Right to Work,” meaning that if a society requires you to work to live, then you have, well, a right to work. Blanc was able to put this theory into practice as part of the Provisional Government of 1848 after the fall of the July Monarchy with the creation of the National Workshops. In this, you can perhaps see a proto-version of the Works Progress Administration and the New Deal.

This discussion of Marx and his followers will be helpful because much of Dickens’ understanding of the French Revolution mirrors Marx’s, even if Dickens thought it was a literal apocalypse and Marx saw the beginnings of a glorious socialist future.

The best source for understanding the intellectual underpinnings of “Marxism” is from the “Revolutions” podcast and Mike Duncan’s The Three Pillars of Marxism episode. Or, as none other than Vladimir Lenin wrote in The Marxist Doctrine: Marx was a genius who synthesized the classical German philosophy of Hegel, the classical English political economy of Adam Smith, and “French socialism combined with French revolutionary doctrines” into one cohesive theory.

So, why did Marx hate François Guizot’s analysis of the French Revolution so much that he namechecked him in the first paragraph of The Communist Manifesto?

For Marx, the French Revolution was a bourgeois revolution that answered the Political Question. Yes, it broke the absolute monarchy of the Bourbons, but a liberal noble like the Marquis de Lafayette, who drafted (with input from slaver “gentlemen planter” Thomas Jefferson) the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, did not seek to upset the social order. He drafted a set of political rights, similar to the United States’ Bill of Rights, that declared citizens of the nation equal under the law.

To Marx, this was all a ruse to say that we are all free and equal brothers, but without the wealth redistribution that would actually make us free and equal brothers. The rising professional class increasingly held the majority of the nation’s wealth, but because of the ancient feudal order, little power in the affairs of state. So all the Declaration does is break apart the feudal order, held together by an absolute monarch, leaving a power vacuum to be filled…by whom?

The bourgeoisie themselves! The very liberal nobles, professional class, and provincial land-owners who wrote the new rules and toppled the old regime.

Marx Thought This Was a Bunch of Pretentious Bullshit Written to Mythologize the Wealthy’s Hostile Takeover of Inept, Ossified Feudal Monarchies.

This is incredibly important to understanding the roots of the Cold War that dominated 20th Century life across the planet. And it’s based in Marx’s analysis of the French Revolution.

In Marx’s analysis of the French Revolution, they looked past the liberal nobles of 1789 and the Jacobins of 1793. Those first two revolutions were merely political revolutions. For Marx, the first revolutionary to try to answer the Social Question was Gracchus Babeuf and the Conspiracy of the Equals.

Marx himself called Babeuf “the first modern Communist.”

“Gracchus” Babeuf was François-Noël Babeuf, taking the name of the Roman Gracchi Brothers, who served in the “plebeian tribunates” that were established after the fall of the kings, creating the Roman Republic. The Gracchi probably triggered the Republic’s collapse by instituting wide-scale land reform: They established a commission to survey land, assert state claim, and then redistribute it to the peasants. This move towards equality upended the entire social order of the Republic.

For Babeuf, this was the promise of the French Revolution. As in Rome, the revolutions of 1789 and 1793 merely established political rights. But to truly usher in Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, “Society must be made to operate in such a way that it eradicates once and for all the desire of a man to become richer, or wiser, or more powerful than others.”

Babeuf worked as a land surveyor at the Revolution’s beginning, so he saw the actual, material effect on the peasantry literally in his daily work. Later, he founded Le Tribun du Peuple, a political journal where Babeuf advocated for what, today, would be considered bedrock socialist principles: a progressive income tax, land redistribution, the abolition of private property, and others.

Babeuf was executed as part of the Conspiracy of Equals, a failed coup against the French Directory that ruled after the execution of Robespierre. The Conspiracy’s Manifesto of Equals unmistakably reads today as the first pronunciation of Marxist principles: Denunciation of the “gutless and rich landowners,” “the new political Tartuffes seated in place of the old,” “the goal of society is the common happiness.”

Perhaps the most important idea Marx borrowed from Babeuf was the Two-Stage Theory of Revolution. In the words of Babeuf’s co-conspirator and actual author of the Manifesto, Sylvain Maréchal, “The French Revolution is nothing but the precursor of another revolution, one that will be greater, more solemn, and which will be the last.” Basically, the Bourgeois Revolution ushers in the democratic political rights, creating the space for the Socialist Revolution of wealth redistribution that will create true Liberté, Egalité, and Fraternité.

According to None Other Than Karl Marx Himself, Gracchus Babeuf Was the First Communist.

Marx fleshed this out in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852). Of all the articles linked to, this is the one worth taking the five minutes to read in full. Marx opens with his famous quotation that the great historical figures occur twice, “the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” Here, he lists the tragic figures of the original French Revolutionary period (Danton, Robespierre, Napoleon Bonaparte), and says, look, the Second Empire of Napoleon III is a joke, a sad parody of what happened from 1789-1814.

So, what happened from 1789-1814? In Marx’s view, the original French Revolution was capitalism overthrowing feudalism, with the “Rule of Law” and the “Rights of Man” as the legal foundation for rule by the capitalist bourgeoisie.

The rest of Marx’s essay employs an historical analysis to create this political theory, based in German philosophy (he borrows the “second as farce” quotation from the greatest of German philosophers, Hegel), British economics (he develops his theory around economic class), and grounded in the history and politics that played out in France.

Marx even dabbles in a bit of literary theory, saying that:

“The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future…Earlier revolutions required recollections of past world history in order to drug themselves concerning their own content. In order to arrive at its own content, the revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead. There, the phrase went beyond the content; here the content goes beyond the phrase.”

In other words, the French Revolution was a pathetic cosplay of the Roman Republic.

To Marx’s point, the author of The Declaration of the Rights Of Man, the Marquis de Lafayette, drew from his greatest influences: George Washington, the father figure in his life, and Thomas Jefferson, his intellectual guiding light. As we know, the Founding Fathers in the United States self-consciously modeled their new republic on Rome (that’s why it’s called the “Senate,” for example). In France, Lafayette modeled this thought, and even his political antithesis Maximillian Robespierre modeled his “Republic of Virtue” on the ideals of the Romans.

It’s why the Panthéon looks like that, it’s why our dollar bill looks like that, it’s why Napoleon said “I am a true Roman Emperor, I am of the best race of the Caesars–those who are the founders.”

The Best of the Race, in the Grand Tradition of Trying to Conquer All of Europe to Prove Yourself the Master of the Master Race.

Georges Lefebvre and the Marxist Tradition

The most influential historian who later worked in the Marxist tradition is Georges Lefebvre, whose The Coming of the French Revolution, was published in 1939 and, yes, it’s hard to see his analysis outside the context of Communism and Fascism rising out of the economic degradation of Europe after World War I. Lefebrvre is history’s foremost expert on the French peasantry, writing several histories of the Revolution from the 1920s through World War II. As such, Lefebvre–who grew up working class, educated in public schools–introduced the concept of History From Below: “history seen from below and not from above.”

This is the historiographical stance that history is best understood through the lives and social conditions of the vast majority of common people, rather than through the lives and actions of the “Great Men” of history–which often simplifies conflicts into hagiographical hero’s journey or tragic figure narratives. In the United States’ context, you may recognize this as the Howard Zinn A People’s History of the United States approach to history, whose narrative is grounded in the struggle of marginalized people fighting and gaining rights, rather than “Great Men” bestowing them from upon high.

This will become very important when we get to Dickens’ source material for A Tale of Two Cities, Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution: A History. As we will see, Thomas Carlyle invented the “Great Man” theory of history. In many ways, the “history wars” of today are still a battle between “People’s History” and “Great Man” theories. Progressives tend to be “People’s History,” grounding the nation’s narrative in the various “grassroots” struggles for equality. Conservatives tend to be “Great Man,” seeing authority figures pronouncing great decrees based on traditional values from upon high. The struggle between these approaches often decides which textbooks get state contracts.

As for A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens seems to be at war with his own source material: His novelist’s instinct is to humanize people, especially the poor. But he is also damning of the people! So, A Tale of Two Cities sometimes reads like A People’s History of the Reign of Terror, In Which The People Created a Literal Hell on Earth.

Back to Lefebvre, many of the French Revolution’s early histories left the Sans-culottes and the French peasantry voiceless: They were described and chronicled, but from the outside. Lefebvre’s extraordinary contribution, which started as his doctoral thesis, was actually collecting the existing documentation on the material conditions of the peasants’ lives. Lefebvre synthesized these documents into existing sources and analyses, creating a more total picture of the Revolution: Imagine a prestige “limited series” on the French Revolution, where each episode gives a perspective, and you see other events and characters from other episodes intersect from totally different perspectives, and that’s Lefebvre’s work.

Which is, largely, what Dickens accomplishes in A Tale of Two Cities. But where Lefebvre worked with the tools of a historian, Dickens borrowed from existing histories, synthesizing them through his novelist’s instincts, to create his total picture. Working in the Marxist tradition (though Lefebvre was much more of a social democrat than a communist) Lefebvre’s narrative sees the French Revolution as class struggle, where Dickens sees it as a Christian morality play.

Georges Lefebrve’s Chief Contribution to the French Revolution Historiography Was His Pain-staking Documentation of The Great Fear of 1789, In Which the French Peasants Generally Panicked About Everything Across Rural France.

Lenin, Stalin, and the Communists

There is way too much to cover, just know this: Much of this Marxist class struggle analysis is the foundation for Lenin’s Bolshevism, and his literal playbook for how to pull off the Russian Revolution, when it finally came, was firmly rooted in his understanding of the French Revolutions and the Paris Commune.

Literally, Lenin wrote extensive histories of the French Revolution, and deeply analyzed the contemporary political events in France to develop his playbook. And then the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917 came, and he emerged the winner—largely by not making the mistakes of those revolutionaries who came before him.

It is, in no way, too much to say that the rise of Communism and the Cold War resulted from the historiography of the French Revolution.

Let’s briefly identify some insights–from Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and others–that became part of Communist theory and practice. Some of these are described in detail by Dickens before Marx published his analysis, almost as if Dickens looked through a microscope to see the beginnings of Communism in a petri dish labelled “Class Conflict.” Really, most of Dickens is itself Class Conflict.

First is the identification of the Proletariat as the “Revolutionary Class.” Marx’s “discovery” of the revolutionary class, the “Proletariat” grows directly out of his analysis of the French Revolution. It wasn’t just the bourgeoisie who toppled the regime: The urban working class Sans-culotte tipped the scales with direct action in the streets, marching on Versailles, and organizing on their own, apart from the salon radicals and liberal nobles. More than just their poverty, the urban workers’ proximity to power is the special ingredient that gives them revolutionary power.

This is precisely who Dickens personifies in the poor neighborhoods of eastern Paris, and describes how the Sans-culotte were able to radicalize their brethren in the countryside. Dickens describes several seminal events of the French Revolution from the perspective of the Sans-culottes, without naming them, of course, because “The Women’s March on Versailles” wasn’t The Women’s March on Versailles while the women were marching on Versailles.

Second is Dekulakization. The kulaks are the sub-class of wealthy peasants and provincials who stood to lose the most by the redistribution of land and nationalization of the economy. Stalin identified them as enemies of Communism and killed about 5 million of them. Dickens identifies this class (the “Farmer-Generals”) in Cities, and describes how they merged noble titles and actual wealth to create the counter-revolutionary reactionary class. If you understand Stalin’s great terror campaign, you’ll immediately recognize this in Dickens.

Third is Terror as a Political Tactic. Lenin and Dickens came to the same conclusion about why the French Revolution basically invented “terror” as a political tactic: Poverty itself is dehumanizing, so the aristocrats got exactly what they deserved and should have expected—and once old authority is broken, and there’s nothing to constrain people’s behavior, this opens the door to terror. In literatures, this is Joseph Conrad’s explanation for genocide in Heart of Darkness. As for Lenin, he downplayed the violence of the Reign of Terror as either necessary or justified—you can’t have a revolution without a revolution.

Dickens saw poverty as inflicting a cycle of violence, which stops only when the poverty stops…or just wears itself out. In A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens seems to anticipate Stalin, that revolutionary violence only leads the oppressed to become the oppressors. If you want to boil Cities down to a thesis, Roger Daltry pretty much nails it.

They Assessed the Incomplete Work of the French Revolution and Paris Commune, and When Their Time Came, They Chose Ultra-Violence to Finish the Job. And Started the Cold War, And Killed 20 Million of Their Own People, and Brought the World to the Brink of Nuclear Annihilation. In 1859, Charles Dickens Also Assessed the French Revolution, Saw an Apocalypse, and More or Less Predicted This Future.

Thomas Carlyle Freaks Out After Seeing Parliament Burn, Gets Infatuated With Napoleon and Frederick the Great, Lets His Racist and Antisemitic Freak Flag Fly, and Less Than a Century Later Hitler Says, Yes, This is All Correct, We Need a Final Solution.

In his Preface to A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens cites two sources for his novel: The Frozen Deep, a play by his friend Wilike Collins in which Dickens himself played the lead character in a production staged in his own house (more on this later), and…

Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution: A History. One of the strangest history books ever conceived.

Dickens wrote that he hopes to “add something to the popular and picturesque means of understanding that terrible time,” but “no one can hope to add anything to the philosophy of Mr. Carlyle’s wonderful book.”

This “wonderful book” will become one of the source texts for Fascism, with Thomas Carlyle as the “Founding Father of Fascism.” In his time, Carlyle was the “Sage of Chelsea” and “the undoubted head of English letters,” but history has not looked kindly upon his becoming the dictator-apologist and originator of the “Great Man Theory of History”. And, an open racist and colonialist who advocated for the “beneficent whip” to keep the lesser races in their place across the British Empire.

But for me, this does not mean that A Tale of Two Cities is a fascist text at all. In fact, Dickens adds quite a bit to the philosophy of Carlyle’s book, asking tough questions about the Christian faith, human nature—and how these intertwine into history, politics, and why things are the way they are and will always be.

We will first discuss Thomas Carlyle himself, his philosophy, and how he came to be regarded as the proto-Fascist philosopher.

Thomas Carlyle: One of the Most Consequential Men of History You’ve Never Heard Of. He Was One of the First English Language Chroniclers of the French Revolution, and One of His Books Ended Up in the Führerbunker. He Was Charles Dickens’ Friend and Idol, But They Ended Up Seeing the Revolution Very Differently.

Thomas Carlyle

Thomas Carlyle was born into modest circumstances in 1795 in a tiny Scottish village to James Carlyle, a stonemason and farmer, and Margaret Aitken Carlyle, a servant. James and Margaret were deeply religious, and though they were poor laborers, they taught him reading and arithmetic. His mother apparently suffered from manic episodes, so little Thomas dove into his studies, gaining entry to the University of Edinburgh. Legend has it, he walked 100 miles to attend college.

Thomas Carlyle is one of the great polymaths in Scottish intellectual history, and that’s saying something. Carlyle is credited with genuine astronomical, mineralogical, and mathematical discoveries, like the Carlyle Circle. He spent some post-graduation time as a minister, teacher, and writer. Most relevant to us, Carlyle dove into Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which threw him into a crisis of faith: “I read Gibbon, and then first clearly saw that Christianity was not true.”

In this early biography, you can see the seeds of Carlyle’s philosophy being planted. His parents imbued him with the Calvinist thinking of the Scottish Presbyterian church: God chooses only the predestined “Elect” for Heaven. His scientific and mathematical mind needed to make sense of the world, ordered by clear and inviolable rules and principles. So, when he read Gibbon, he filtered it through this sense of the Elect and the need for order.

Thus, when Gibbon says that Rome’s progression of kings and emperors and caesars fell because barbarians broke the social order that imbued the empire with “civic virtue,” well, you can see the beginnings of the “Great Man Theory of History.” If you remove God from the equation, then embody civic virtue in a special Elect that excludes the barbarians, this is the foundation for the modern concept of the nationalist dictator.

At this point, Carlyle was still in his twenties, and though enormously talented, was not yet a made man of letters. So in 1834, the newly-married Thomas and Jane Carlyle did what most British intellectuals end up doing: Moving to London. Carlyle was looking for a publisher for his, in my view totally unreadable, German-philosophy-inspired, semi-fictional-autobiographical “comic” novel Sartor Resartus, Soon, they moved into 5 Cheyne Row in Chelsea, which became their home, and a secular place of pilgrimage for British writers and intellectuals, for the next fifty years.

For the next fifty years, this house is where Carlyle became the most important intellectual of his day, befriending and influencing nearly every single significant British writer, scientist, politician, clergyman during his life. Today, it’s a British National Trust museum simply known as Carlyle’s House, mostly done up as Jane kept it.

The Author In Front of Carlyle’s House on Cheyne Row. It’s Open on Wednesdays, the Only Time You Can See the Desk Where He Wrote Proto-Fascist Biographies of Great Men

Today Carlyle is a mostly obscure figure, his reputation taking a major hit during and after World War II, for reasons that we’ll get to. But for now, understand that his influence on English letters during the 1800s is almost impossible to overstate.

This 1857 Article from The Atlantic Wants You to Put Some Respect on the Name of Thomas Carlyle.

What work put Carlyle on the path to high-priesthood of modern literature, to whom all contemporary minds are indebted?

Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution: A History

Sartor Resartus didn’t sell well, and Carlyle, true to his Calvinist roots, wondered whether he was destined for greatness. He needed a new subject, something grand in scope and stature that could contain all his ideas about history, art, religion, nature….everything. His friend and intellectual rival, the utilitarian liberal radical John Stuart Mill, approached Carlyle about completing one of his unfinished projects, a sweeping history of the French Revolution. Carlyle agreed, and Mill dumped all his primary and secondary sources at his doorstep.

On October 16th, 1834, the Palace of Westminster caught fire in an accident involving the “tally sticks” officially used by the Exchequer to record the budget. The sticks were to be burned in the House of Lords’ furnace, in a ceremony that Charles Dickens described in a speech to the Administrative Reform Association as an “obstinate adherence to an obsolete custom.” Carlyle witnessed the conflagration that swallowed most of the medieval palace, and four days later, he wrote to his brother he would publish a volume on the French Revolution.

“The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, October 16, 1834” by J.M.W. Turner. Thomas Carlyle Saw This and Said, Now I’ve Got to Speed-Write This History of the French Revolution!

Carlyle finished Volume 1 of the manuscript, gave it to Mill for review, and on March 6th 1835, a stricken Mill appeared at Carlyle’s House in Chelsea. Apparently, Mill’s housemaid thought it was trash (perhaps she wasn’t wrong?!), and used it kindling (again, perhaps not wrong??).

After talking it over, Carlyle declared that it “shall be written again,” the subsequent rewrite, which Carlyle called “an improvisation,” took on “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” that “come hot out of my own soul.” This is key to understanding this hugely influential, highly experimental, and for my eyes, profoundly weird approach to history.

Carlyle’s Style in The French Revolution: A History

As a polymath, Carlyle wrote in different styles. In his early career, Carlyle wrote theoretical mathematics papers and published scientific articles. As he transitioned into philosophy and history, especially after discovering German philosophy, he employed a more florid style. He made money translating Johann Wolfgang von Goethe from German to English, a literary more than scientific exercise (this will become important later!). Then with Sartor Resartus, Carlyle transitioned into semi-fiction.

So, Carlyle was unafraid to experiment stylistically, and for the French Revolution, he did an impression of epic Greek and Roman poetry: A narrative history centered on characters, employing figurative language sewing together several narrative arcs into grand set pieces. Carlyle invokes Clio, the Muse of History, writing in the first-person plural in the present tense, as if Carlyle himself is the muse transporting us to July 1789 Paris in the middle of the action:

“The Bastille is besieged! On, then, all Frenchmen that have hearts in your bodies! Roar with all your throats of cartilage and metal, ye Sons of Liberty; stir spasmodically whatsoever of utmost faculty is in you, soul, body, or spirit; for it is the hour! Smite, thou Louris Tournay, cartwright of the Marais, old-soldier of the Regiment Dauphiné; smite at that Outer Drawbridge chain, though the fiery hail whistles round thee!”

The whole thing is like this!

Carlyle was reacting to the detached style of his greatest influence, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Carlyle felt that mere scholarship was inadequate for History. He wanted to do more than argue an interpretation based on a reasoned analysis of a deep reading of primary and reliable secondary sources. Having worked as a scientist and mathematician, Carlyle didn’t see History as a science. It needs narrative as well, something to explain the humanity of History.

As they write in their Introduction to The French Revolution: A History, David Sorenson and Brent Kinser say that Gibbon’s History “helped extinguish Carlyle’s belief in orthodox Christianity, but it also awakened in him an abiding appreciation of history as a spiritual exercise.”

So, how does an agnostic Roman Empire enthusiast engage in history spiritually?

By writing History like it’s Epic Poetry. With far more dashes and exclamation points.

The National Endowment for the Humanities Makes a Good Point: Thomas Carlyle and the Painter Eugene Delacroix Tell the Story of the French Revolution in The Same Tone.

Carlyle’s Theory of History

Carlyle’s Epic Poetry form was calculated to meet his philosophical function. Most of his Theory of History was developed in Sartor Resartus, then applied in The French Revolution: A History.

To unpack this, we need to understand the foundation of German philosophy, the Hegelian Dialectic. This is the Thesis / Antithesis / Synthesis formulation in which you start with a thesis idea, propose its antithesis, then bring these opposites into union with the synthesis.

So, for Caryle, he begins with a series of paradoxes: History is not a science because, unlike the “hard” sciences, there are no immutable laws of human experience that explain Why Things Happen in a predictable way. On the other hand, the “truths” of the poets are too abstract to explain Why Things Happen because they are narrative concoctions unmoored to the empirical facts in the historical record.

So, the facts are the facts, but the facts aren’t enough. Accuracy is important, but inadequate, because no historical record is ever complete, and an interpretation of facts is always subject to revision.

To bring these opposites into union, imagination can fill in the gaps between known facts, as long as that imagination is reasonable enough to create plausible explanations for Why Things Happen.

For Carlyle, this is the difference between fictional and historical narratives. Fictional narratives are abstract philosophies expressed in concocted narratives. Historical narratives flow from specific facts where the historian fills in gaps using tools from the poets and scientists, both imagination and reason, to create a human impression of the experience.

This is why Carlyle’s French Revolution is so chaotic. Events in real life do not unfold according to clear narrative because chance, free will, and coincidence defy systematic narrative and cause-effect reasoning.

Some Religious Scholars Call This the “Devil’s Logic” Because It Defies The Absolute Moral Authority of God.

For Carlyle, history is not science, it’s not poetry, so what is it?

Natural Supernaturalism

To way oversimplify this, Carlyle saw the supernatural in the chaos of nature. The world has too many variables, both scientific and human, to be predictable. This disorder is actually proof of the Divine: Only the Divine can understand the ordered disorder of the Universe.

In this way, miracles are the natural extension of science because their very defiance of scientific explanation is how you know it’s a miracle. Imagination and faith are an extension of reason because reason can only understand what’s in the physical world, that’s how you know the supernatural is in the realm of imagination and faith.

So, all things in nature are both physical realities with abstract symbolic meaning. This is what Carlyle considered his “Philosophy of Clothes”: “All visible things are emblems.” Basically, clothes are the outward symbols of who we are underneath, so to understand the man, you need to understand how he chooses to dress. From here, he gets into all sorts of trippy Transcendental ideas that deeply influenced Emerson and Thoreau, but that’s the gist.

Once we understand that physical reality is imbued with abstract symbolic meaning, then we can really read History in all its factual and poetic glory. This is how Carlyle developed the idea of the “Bible of Universal History”: The “right interpretation of Reality and History” that combines facts and poetry into the Great Epic that is the life-cycle of all societies.

So, what is the narrative arc of this Great Epic?

The “Burning of a World-Phoenix”: the cycle of a civilization that burns itself to ashes, then renews and rises again.

In other words, the Cycle of Revolution. Literally derived from the old French word for revolving celestial bodies, which the French first applied to History to describe the overthrow of the English Stuart Dynasty in the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

This is the most important idea that Dickens borrows from Carlyle, employing symbolism over and over in A Tale of Two Cities to convey the natural and, especially for Dickens, supernatural inevitability of the Revolution: the bloody grindstones sharpening guillotine blades, the fountains of Paris washing the blood away, that kind of thing.

But there is a crucial difference between Dickens and Carlyle: Dickens wrote about the World-Phoenix in an explicitly Christian context, asking us to consider what it really means to follow Jesus’ example literally. Carlyle, on the other hand, finds the World-Phoenix in the actions of Great Men, who bend history to their will.

That’s why all this matters for us. All of that intellectual gobbledygook is how Thomas Carlyle gets to the Great Man of History, and how he becomes the Founding Father of Fascism.

The Secrets of the Universe Are Held Within the Refractory Clothes-Philosophy of World-Embracing Phantasms of TIME and SPACE.

How does Carlyle get from the French Revolution, to the Great Man Theory of History, to the Intellectual Underpinnings of Fascism?

Upon The French Revolution: A History’s release, his rival and admirer John Stuart Mill compared it to the Iliad and the Aeneid, writing that “This is not so much a history, as an epic poem…the history of the French Revolution, and the poetry of it, both in one; and on the whole no work of greater genius, either historical or poetic, has been produced in this country for many years.”

For me, more than the Iliad or the Aeneid, Carlyle’s influence that advances him to Great Man Theory is John Milton and Paradise Lost, which begins:

Of Man's First Disobedience, and the Fruit

Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste

Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,

With loss of Eden, till one greater Man

Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,

The “one greater man”? Christ, who plays the role of God on Earth, who will restore Order after the Apocalypse.

The entire theology of Paradise Lost is outside our scope, but in short: Chaos was the “original matter” that existed before God created the Universe. The original matter was a chaotic mess–but it was not evil because “it contained the seeds of all subsequent good.” As Milton put it:

It was in a confused and disordered state at first, but afterwards, God made it ordered and beautiful.

That’s the role of the Greater Man, the Son of God, the Christ. To return and restore beautiful order to God’s creation.

But what if, like Carlyle, you believe that “Christianity was not true”? Who plays these roles in our world?

According to Carlyle, “The History of the world is but the Biography of great men.” The charismatic ones we should follow.

“Satan Arousing the Rebel Angels” by William Blake (1808). I Will Humbly Submit That Thomas Carlyle Got Paradise Lost So Wrong He’s Actually Glorifying This.

In 1840, directly following the success of The French Revolution: A History, Carlyle published On Heroes, Hero-Worship, & the Heroic in History. In it, he identifies six types of Great Men (Divinity, Prophet, Poet, Priest, Man of Letters, and King). His Hero Kings are Oliver Cromwell and…Napoleon Bonaparte, who, in Carlyle’s telling “bl(ew) into space” the French Revolution with his “Whiff of Grapeshot.” In other words, the Revolution descended France into chaos, and the Great Man Bonaparte put it back in order:

“His mission is Order; every man’s is. He is here to make what was disorderly, chaotic, into a thing ruled, regular. He is the missionary of Order…Is not all work of man in this world a making of Order? The carpenter finds rough trees; shapes them, constrains them into square fitness, into purpose and use…it is tragical for us all to be concerned in image-breaking and down-pulling; for the Great Man, more a man than we, it is doubly tragical….While man is man, some Cromwell or Napoleon is the necessary finish of a Sansculottism.

Carlyle’s hero-kings were more highly evolved specimens, with superior intellect and natural leadership, but also are “the living light-fountain…not as a kindled lamp only, but rather as a natural luminary shining by the gift of Heaven.” And on and on and on.

In other words, their natural charisma is why we should follow them to greatness.

So, Carlyle constructs Great Man Theory from epic poetry about God, arguing that they have the singular ability to bend history to their will through their natural gifts and charisma, and that we should not only want this, but we should literally worship them for doing so.

For me, this is what takes us back to Milton, who Carlyle wrote about in letters to his wife and was the touchstone British writer for the Victorians. The heroes Carlyle describes aren’t God, but Satan. I mean, that’s very famously the entire point of Milton’s Epic: His Satan is so charismatic that it’s easy to see him as the rebellious hero fighting to restore order against a tyrannical God whose world descended into chaos!

This is also the point of Goethe’s Faust, which gave us the Faustian Bargain. And whom Thomas Carlyle championed in the English speaking world through his translation work. We, the Christian reader, must have the moral discipline to resist the allure of the charismatic Satan, lets we lose our eternal soul!

But, Napoleon is exactly this kind of charismatic leader: Brilliant general whose strategies revolutionized warfare for a century, rationalized the French bureaucracy to administer an entire Continental System, wrote the Napoleonic code that created a Rule of Law to replace the Personal Rule of Kings…

And yet, Napoleon became Emperor years after order was mostly restored following the Reign of Terror—and his wars killed 5,000,000 people in 12 years. Napoleon was a charismatic leader who is almost single-handedly responsible for a proportional number of deaths as World War I.

As for Carlyle’s other Great King, Oliver Cromwell? Ask the Irish about Oliver Cromwell–even The Cromwell Association more or less admits that he committed war crimes during an ethnic cleansing campaign in Ireland, though they do say their guy “was sent to Ireland because it was in chaos.” That’s always the reason The Great Man Has To Restore Order.

Do Great Men Create Wars That Result in 5,000,000 Corpses Strewn from Lisbon to Moscow? Thomas Carlyle Emphatically Thinks So. “Napoleon’s Retreat from Moscow” by Adolphe Northen (1851).

Carlyle’s Path to the Führerbunker

Carlyle would make a career writing hagiographies of Great Men, most notably his History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Called Frederick the Great. It’s fair to say that this biography isn’t Carlyle’s most “Great Man” work: I haven’t plowed through all 21 books, but in what I’ve read, his Frederick is genuinely an enlightened absolutist whose diligent labor builds a great nation in all manner of sciences and arts.

Applied in the military context, Frederick the Great’s modernization project lays the groundwork for what would become the “militarism” of Prussia, in which the great Prussian war machine would later embody nation’s glory, ultimately becoming the force that unified the German states.

This is where Frederick’s legacy was consciously, openly appropriated by the Nazis–so much so that it was criticized during the Third Reich in American newspapers. In this telling, Frederick the Great and Peter the Great “really merited their adjectives” for creating great nations from stagnant feudal societies–and surely Frederick “would look upon Hitler and his undertakings with disgust and hostility.”

Why? Frederick was “one of the great cosmopolitans of European history” who “harried no Jews and antagonized no Catholics.” What Hitler and Goebbels did was use Frederick to dress up their rank bigotry as a project of national greatness, to transform the Final Solution into some sort of victory against Germany’s enemies, somehow like Frederick against all of Continental Europe during the Seven Years War.

This is where Carlyle became useful for the Nazis: His extravagant Great Man Theory provided them with the Charismatic Leader Mythology, grounded in both German philosophy and secular deity worship, that allowed Hitler to cast himself in the tradition of Frederick.

The German use of Carlyle was not simply confined to philosophy journals. The most influential German-language author of his day, the aforementioned writer of Faust Johann Wolfgang von Goethe called Carlyle “a moral force of great importance.” Carlyle’s Frederick biography was read in German schools to help create a shared memory for the new empire. Carlyle’s cosmic Theory of Order was used as an intellectual foundation for Prussian militarism, which led to Heroes and Hero-Worship being used to teach leadership principles. Later German writers claimed that Carlyle’s obvious Volkscharakter means that he must have had German blood.

William Joyce, the American-born Nazi propagandist, moved to England, joined the British Union of Fascists, then founded the National Socialist League, where he named its political arm…

The Carlyle Club.

“Germany’s Savior” Postcard from 1933, Depicting Hitler Shaking Hands With Paul von Hindenburg In Front of the Literal Spirit of Frederick the Great. Thomas Carlyle is In Part Responsible For This.

“What the King conquered, the Prince founded, the Field Marshall defended, and the Soldier saved and united” Nazi Postcard from 1933, Depicting Hitler in the Tradition of Frederick the Great, Otto von Bismarck (the chancellor who unified Germany), and Paul von Hindenburg, great Field Marshal of World War I and Second President of the Weimar Republic. Thomas Carlyle Provided the Intellectual Framework For Hitler to Put Himself On the Card.

The Secret Sauce of Carlyle’s Proto-Fascism: Overt Racism and Virulent Antisemitism

Great Man-ism alone doesn’t explain the affinity that Fascists had for Carlyle. He published one of the most racist essays you’ll ever read, “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question” (1849)--which Carlyle titled with the hard-r in 1853.

The essay’s frame narrative is an anonymous speech transcribed by a reporter, which feels like a sheepish attempt to distance the author from the views, which is colonial gutter racism, shocking even for its time. Carlyle’s “satire” is directed at “My Philanthropic Friends” like the abolitionist John Stuart Mill (again!), who “shall hear what I have to say on the matter; and probably you will not in the least like it.” After his and Mill’s public debates, in subsequent publications Carlyle dropped the frame narrative entirely, leaving no distance between him and his racism.

As someone who has read a lot of colonialist English racist authors as part of a Literature degree, in my considered view, Carlyle puts on a racism master class. Slave ships weren’t that bad, you can’t stop the slave trade, so why not ship them to the “sugar colonies” of the West Indies where they can be tended to by benevolent white masters, and on and on.

Recalling Oliver Cromwell, Carlyle even goes in on the Irish, who–like their inferior race pumpkin-obsessed brethren in Africa–are subhuman potato mongers. More or less, Carlyle blames the potato blight of the Hungry 40s and the starvation of millions of Irish not on English colonial expropriation of the remaining potato crop, but the fact that the Irish are such unevolved heathens that they deserved to be “sluttishly starving.”

To understand the depth of Carlyle’s racism, and why the Fascists shined to him, It’s worth reading a passage in full. Here, he equates Irish and Africans because in Carlyle’s mind, “Africa” isn’t a continent of peoples, but just sorta where all the subhuman “blacks” live. And, because the Irish are just as barbarian as the “African”, this is how Carlyle bolstered he Nazi “master race” narrative that justified conquest of “inferior” whites across Europe: The West Indies are just “black Ireland.”

If the Africans that are already there could be made to lay down their pumpkins and labor for a living, there are already Africans enough. If the new Africans, after laboring a little, take to pumpkins like the others, what remedy is there? To bring in new and ever new Africans, say you, till pumpkins themselves grow dear—till the country is crowded with Africans, and black men there, like white men here, are forced, by hunger, to labor for their living? That will be a consummation. To have “emancipated the West Indies into a black Ireland–”free,” indeed, but an Ireland, and black! The world may yet see prodigies, and reality be stranger than a nightmare dream.

Our own white or sallow Ireland, sluttishly starving, from age to age, on its act-of-parliament “freed,” was hitherto the flower of mismanagement among the nations; but what will this be to a negro Ireland, with pumpkins themselves fallen scare like potatoes? Imagination cannot fathom such an object; the belly of chaos never held the like.

This Isn’t What Carlyle Was Talking About, But There Really Is a Black Irish Community on Montserrat in the West Indies. It’s Complicated, But They Celebrate St. Patrick’s Day on an Island Where Thomas Carlyle’s Hero Oliver Cromwell Deported Trouble-making Irish to Work the British Sugar Plantations.

At this point, do we even need to talk about the antisemitism? In his chapter on John Locke in A History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell traces the development of Fascism through Fichte, Byron, Carlyle, and Nietzche, whose logical outcome was Hitler. In 1930, H.J.C. Grierson delivered a lecture in Manchester documenting Carlyle’s antisemitism and other master-race writing entitled “Carlyle and the Hero.” Three years later, he changed the title to “Carlyle and Hitler.”

This was Charles Dickens’ primary source for A Tale of Two Cities, but as we will discuss in Part 5, Dickens used that history to develop a completely different meaning of the French Revolution.

How Did Dickens Get From That to This?

Because Charles Dickens’ source material was created by the proto-Fascist philosopher, does that mean that Charles Dickens was also a proto-Fascist, or that A Tale of Two Cities is a proto-Fascist book? Not really.

Thomas Carlyle’s Influence on Charles Dickens and A Tale of Two Cities

First, Dickens’ view of human nature, especially in his later career, leaves no room at all for the idea that a Great Man Will Come to Save Us. As George Orwell noted, in Dickens’ early career, to achieve his hit-making happy endings, rich guys showed up and showered everybody with money to make their problems go away. But as Dickens got older, and accumulated money in his own right, that “Good Rich Man” character tended to disappear. In A Tale of Two Cities, nobody is showing up to strong-arm the Reign of Terror to a halt. In fact, it ends well before Napoleon’s “Whiff of Grapeshot,” and as we’ll discuss…..Dickens just sorta skips right over all that Empire business.

Second, Dickens absolutely borrows from Carlyle’s conception of the “Bible of Universal History” and “Burning of the World-Phoenix” theory of history. But crucially, Dickens comes to the opposite conclusion of Carlyle. No spoilers, but as discussed, Carlyle concludes that charismatic leaders are the drivers of history, perhaps accidentally invoking Satan in Paradise Lost. Dickens is a deeply Christian man, unlike Carlyle, so he contemplates the Burning of the World-Phoenix according to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Dickens doesn’t ask, How does a Great Man create Order from Chaos? Rather, he asks, in the midst of apocalyptic chaos, what does following Christ’s example really look like? Yes, A Tale of Two Cities asks, What Would Jesus Do?

This is where I think Dickens’ reputation as a “popular” or, as Aldous Huxley wrote, “vulgar” writer is unfair. As we will painstakingly document, Dickens’ can bring all the Milton and Shakespeare allusions and deep historical understanding as well as a giant like Thomas Carlyle.

But for me, Dickens’ gift is to package this in compelling narrative, conveyed through striking visual poetry, with a “narration camera” that anticipates the grand epics of cinema, filling in the blanks between facts with convincingly human portraits–while contemplating the great questions of History and the Divine.

Dickens structures Cities somewhat on The French Revolution: A History, opening in pre-Revolution gathering of clouds before the storm. And Dickens borrows some of Carlyle’s poetic motifs, and descriptions of certain scenes, etc. Dickens reconceptualizes Carlyle’s first-person plural, present-tense muse-narrator as an all-encompassing God Tense narrator with, well, Charles Dickens playing the role.

For me, here’s what it comes down to: Dickens creates a moral treatise that asks why things got this way and what we should when it gets this way. In contrast, Carlyle created a roadmap for Fascists. Carlyle’s writing reads like… the work of a failed fiction writer with an exaggerated sense of his own genius, who is prone to unintentionally comic purple prose and unbearably pretentious over-writing. And Charles Dickens is one of the great prose stylists in the English language.

A Tale of Two Cities isn’t a melodrama stuffed into The French Revolution. It’s a treatise all its own.

When You’re In the London Library During COVID, and You Find Their Copy of A Tale of Two Cities From an Original 1859 Publication.

But Let’s Not Forget Charles Dickens’ Colonialism, Racism, and Antisemitism

In the end, it must be said: Charles Dickens sent his sons to serve across the British Empire (the British Navy, East India Company, Bengal Mounted Police, Canada’s Northwest Mounted Police, Australia’s Parliament). He wrote to a friend that if he were the Commander in Chief in India, he would “do my utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested…and raze it off the face of the Earth.” And there’s plenty more that historians are grappling with, which was re-engaged after the George Floyd protests in 2020.

Dickens was an abolitionist who was shocked and scandalized by American slavery during his American tours. But he did join Thomas Carlyle and the racist reactionaries in The Eyre Case, involving the debate over whether the British Governor of Jamaica should have been prosecuted for killing or flogging over a 1,000 Blacks, and burning over a thousand of their buildings.

The original version of Oliver Twist is shockingly antisemitic to today’s ears–he refers to Fagin as “The Jew” 257 times. But when Eliza Davis, a Jewish woman whose husband bought one of Dickens’ homes, complained that he had “encouraged a vile prejudice against the despised Hebrew,” Dickens stopped the printing of Oliver Twist to change the text, and later edited out Jewish stereotypes of Fagin and stopped doing antisemitic voices during public readings.

Or, in the most charitable light, Charles Dickens learned not to be antisemitic because he has Jewish friends now.

And, as we’ll talk about, the play in which he borrowed part of the Cities plot is an attack on the Inuit, accusing them of both sabotaging a failed English arctic exploration and for the cannibalism that was likely committed by the ill-equipped English themselves.

Long story short, I will write more about this later—it’s become the most discussed area of Dickens Studies in the Charles Dickens Society.

Alec Guiness’s Fagin in David Lean’s 1948 Oliver Twist Was Created to Look Like George Cruikshank’s Illustrations from the 1838 Publication. Jewish Activists Blocked Its Release in the U.S. Because it Seemed Wrong to Promote Antisemitic Stereotypes Three Years After the Liberation of Concentration Camps.

Other Sources for A Tale of Two Cities

A Tale of Two Cities is less “Based on a True Story” and more “Inspired by True Events.” Think of it this way: The “story” of Cities draws from the aforementioned Wilkie Collins play The Frozen Deep. The “true events” come from Dickens’ various French Revolution sources.

For now, I want to set aside Dickens’ construction of the main plot inspired by The Frozen Deep: Both because of potential spoilers, but also because of the enormous drama surrounding The Frozen Deep, even aside from the cannibalism-inspired native-savage plot. Dickens and Wilkie Collins were good friends and traveling companions, so much so that the Dickens Museum created a whole exhibition dedicated to them.

We will cover most this, but long, long story short: Dickens starred as the leading man in The Frozen Deep, his marriage was falling apart because his wife had ten kids and spent most of her adult life pregnant, so he became infatuated with an eighteen year old he shared the stage with, carried on an affair, sued his publishers who wouldn’t publish his letter regarding the allegations, tried to have his wife committed, went through a public divorce, got in a trainwreck (literal one, not figurative) that he fled so his mistress wouldn’t be revealed.

The legendary academic Claire Tomalin found the receipts and documented the whole thing in The Invisible Woman, which was adapted into a movie with Ralph Fiennes as Charles Dickens. It’s really all just too much for us now.

Charles Dickens Played the Lead, Then Partook of a Half-an-Hour of Refreshment

As for the true events, in a letter to Carlyle, Dickens asked for sources specifically about ordinary lives in France, and within two weeks, “two cartloads of books” were delivered to his house from Carlyle’s London Library. Knowing Dickens, he probably exaggerated this to preempt accusations of historical inaccuracy, but he does seem to have aligned his fictional plot to Carlyle’s telling of historical events. Still, Dickens leaves out many “set pieces” of the Revolution: The Flight to Varennes, Louis XVI’s execution, and others. He selects other events (the Women’s March to Versailles and the September Massacres, most notably) as ways to advance the personal story that happens within the Revolution.

For those steeped in the Revolution’s history, Dickens’ narrative is disorienting: The relatively short time between the book’s opening at the Storming of the Bastille feels shorter than it was, but then the climactic piece during the height of the Massacres and the Terror feel much longer than it was. To give Dickens the benefit of the doubt, this feel of the passage of time was, likely, what people experienced: The September Massacres only occured for four days, but they were the longest four days of any Parisian’s life.

Other researchers have dug into the particulars of what was on Dickens’ bookshelf at his various houses (he seems to have swapped one copy of Carlyle’s book for another at one point), and what Carlyle might have pulled off the shelves of the London Library, which he likely footnoted in his own book.

This leads us to Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s twelve-volume work Le Nouveau Paris (1797) and Tableau de Paris (1788). The stories of the Monseigneur’s ostentatious chocolate, the out-of-control carriage of the Monsieur de Marquis, the traumatized Dr. Manette, and others seem drawn from details in these books–and in some cases, Dickens directly lifts paragraphs of details to construct scenes and portraits.

The Author’s Pictures From Deep Within the Stacks London Library, Founded in 1841 by Thomas Carlyle, Author of The French Revolution: A History and Charles Dickens’ Primary Source for A Tale of Two Cities. I Eventually Found a Source for the Source, Louis Sebastien Mercier’s Tableau de Paris, But Unfortunately, It Isn’t Carlyle’s Copy

Dickens’ Methodology

As far as we can tell, Dickens had a main plot in mind, and a few subplots, and needed actual events and eye-witness accounts to build out the entire multi-dimensional narrative. He read Carlyle and Mercier and Rousseau and a few other volumes (doesn’t seem to be “two cartloads” of sources), and with his novelist’s eye, picked out some colorful details and anecdotes to build scenes. From here, he built characters out of these scenes, then stitched these characters into this grand narrative. If you understand A Tale of Two Cities as a prestige tv limited series, with each episode focused on specific characters or places, then brought together in the final episodes, that’s what Dickens does.

This is why, I think, Dickens’ overall interpretation of events is convincing: He used the same types of sources as many later historians. Dickens was criticized for “not being a philosopher” or whatever, but he seems to have done as much homework as needed to create a narrative. A Tale of Two Cities’ genius isn’t that it’s a comprehensive history, but it’s a deeply human impression of the terror: Think of it more as a series of slice-of-life sketches–the kind of writing that made Dickens’ career–than a twelve-volume magnum opus. For reference, to prepare for my own trip to the London Library, I used J.A. Falconer’s “The Sources of A Tale of Two Cities” and Andrew Sanders’ “‘Cartloads of Books’: Some Sources for A Tale of Two Cities.”

The Plagiarism Scandal

One final note: Dickens might have plagiarized the plot from a play staged in London in 1856, two years before he began working on Cities. Watts Phillips’ The Dead Heart is also set in the French Revolution, beginning in 1771, a man gets thrown into the Bastille via lettre de cachet, when he’s released his brain is broken by the experience…the plots are so closely drawn that it can’t be coincidence. And even though Phillips’ work was produced well before Dickens began work, it was the less-famous Phillips who took the plagiarism accusation.

Entire articles and investigation have tried to unravel this, and most Dickensians conclude that Dickens didn’t plagiarize from Watts, but they relied on the same sources. For me, it seems a bit convenient that Watts and Dickens would have drawn from the same details in Carlye’s and Mercier’s works to create very similar plots. And, we know that Dickens was an avid theatergoer, fancied himself an actor himself, so it seems possible that he would have attended Watts’ play, or at least been told of the plot.

I can put together the story like this. This was an extremely chaotic period in Dickens life: Feuding with his publishers, scrambling to pay for his large family and extravagant lifestyle, decades of workaholism shredding his nerves, growing disillusioned with his wife, and then, needing a hit, taking a big swing by concocting a sweeping historical fiction based on the French Revolution. He’s got a seed idea for a plot, but needs to plant it in the history. Then his buddy Carlyle dumps two cartloads of books at his house while he’s also running charities, lobbying Parliament, and starting up his own literary magazine.

And now you see this play from a much less famous writer that’s already started the seedling. So you dig it up, plant it in your own book, figuring that, now that it’s on the estate of the famous Charles Dickens, it’s your tree now. I can prove that, nobody has, but I can see how Dickens would have gotten there. We’ve all been tempted to cheat on our homework when we don’t feel like we have time to do it.

They Had a Lot in Common!

Ok, now that we’re finally to the end, remember that all this is important to our discussion of the book. We will tackle:

1) How Dickens analyzed the causes of the Revolution,

2) How this understanding flows from Dickens’ view of human nature,

3) How this view of human nature informs his individual theory of history,

3) How Dickens’ Christianity flows from these views on human nature and history,

4) How these ideas can help us grapple with our current political moment, and

5) How to think deeply about all of it….because Dickens accomplishes, through fiction, what is beyond the scope of historians, philosophers, and politicians.

These Guys Both Understood That Attention Is More Powerful Than Money

Days before the Second Inauguration of Donald Trump, I listened to this podcast episode, a conversation between Ezra Klein and Chris Hayes on Hayes’ new book, The Sirens’ Call. I haven’t read the book, but based on this conversation, this is how I understand the thesis:

In the post-industrial modern world, our most important and scarcest commodity is attention.

In Hayes’ framing, our political system is best understood as “Attention Capitalism.” Meaning, as modern technology has increased our ability to produce “content,” power is increasingly concentrated in those who command attention on their content. Money is important because it buys the means to produce, distribute, and control content, but money itself is really just a means to the attention that influences minds and directs actions.

Whatever you think of Hayes and Klein, it’s not a coincidence that two guys who rose up out of the Blog Era of the early internet to become international media stars hit upon this thesis. For me, Hayes and Klein are two of the most thoughtful left-of-center pundits, diving deeper into philosophy and history in their longform podcasts and books. Here, Hayes traces “Attention Capitalism” to the Industrial Revolution, in which:

“human effort gets embedded in a set of in a set of institutions–legal institutions, market institutions–that commodify it so that every hour of wage labor is equal to every other hour of wage labor and then sold on a market for a price.”

That is what tech companies do with attention: Literally, our attention–through clicks, time spent on sites, other measurables–is commodified, priced, and sold. Now, this is how our politics is conducted.

For me, this is the story of the 2024 Election: If you watched the campaigns through traditional outlets–the conventions, the debates, the rallies, the mainstream media–the Democrats were winning. But, what the Trump Campaign understood better, which made the vital difference, is that the real attention of low-information, low-engagement voters isn’t held in these spaces: There’s a whole media ecosystem driven by social media content, podcasters, etc. that wield real influence.

It Was Cool, But The Voters Harris Needed Weren’t Watching

The task of understanding how to deal with the daily onslaught of Trump is understanding how to manage your own attention. Focusing on the day-to-day details of this controversy or that outrage actually obscures things. In fact, that’s what the authoritarian thrives on: By extracting your attention, you become distracted and exhausted so that eventually, as Winston Smith says in the last line of 1984, “He won victory over himself…He loved Big Brother.”

He Won the Victory Over Himself By Giving Big Brother All His Attention. “Nineteen Eighty-Four” by Michael Radford (1984).

This is where the first paragraph of A Tale of Two Cities (read it here) really is prescient, anticipating the melding of politics and media in the post-Industrial Age, written by the man best positioned to understand it. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” isn’t Dickens’ thesis: He synthesizes the paradox after a dash that directs you to his point:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way–in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Now you see it. It’s the best and worst of times at the same time depending on who you’re giving your attention to. On Chris Hayes’ MSNBC or Ezra Klein's podcast, it really is the worst of times: Democracy is falling apart, the Trump Dictatorship will evolve into some form of the Third Reich and Putin’s Oligarchy. On Fox News, and more importantly, the entire underground right-wing media ecosystem, it’s the best of times because President Trump is here to restore order after the worst of times under Joe Biden.

In other words, the “noisiest authorities” tell us how to feel through media ecosystems that create the vibes which infect our thoughts and influence our political actions. The joy and the outrage: Everything has to be good or evil in the superlative all the time to keep our attention.

Charles Dickens was, first and foremost, a media man. He began professional life as a Parliamentary reporter, and never stopped doing journalism throughout his prolific career as a novelist. In 1836 at 24 years old, he first gained fame with Sketches by Boz, a series of short biographical sketches of real people that read with Dickens’ characteristic detailed, witty prose. This merging of “sketched” non-fiction into fiction led to The Pickwick Papers, which catapulted Dickens into international stardom. Dickens’ timing couldn’t have been better: Lord Stanhope’s cast iron printing press produced more books, with more advertising, shipped widely on new railways.

Long story short, Dickens created himself as the world’s first “authorpreneur,” Using the “sketches” format, Dickens negotiated an arrangement that made serialized storytelling a viable business. In his deal with Chapman and Hall, Dickens “revolutionized nineteenth-century publishing, distribution, bookselling, author-publisher relations, copyright provisions, and of course fiction itself.”

Dickens’ weekly sketches commanded attention across the world, but because his publisher Chapman and Hall owned Pickwick’s copyright, Dickens didn’t reap the rewards. Charles Dickens never let it go, beginning Charles Dickens’ lifelong feud with publishers who didn’t seem to understand that they were profiting off the audience’s attention on Charles Dickens, which should be owned and monetized by Charles Dickens.

Dickens continued to publish serially, his fiction headlining weekly magazines that were, content-wise, mostly non-fiction journalism focused on social justice issues. Dickens’ fiction was headlining these subscriptions, so in the 1850s, he negotiated a deal to own 50% of Household Words, a weekly publication of un-bylined journalism that became a vehicle for Dickens’ serialized novels. He also assured that Household Words was “Conducted By Charles Dickens.”

Dickens, more than his publishers, grasped how technological advancements created more avenues for attention. Dickens wrote for a mass audience, and encouraged his publishers to distribute his work through media designed to reach different segments of that audience. He sold cheap pamphlets of his work, laden with advertisements that targeted the working class. He sold subscriptions to Household Words that targeted the middle class. With A Christmas Carol, he sold gold-flecked heirloom books. He started touring, earning a substantial income from live performances. He created his own small theater company (starring him in the lead, where he met his mistress).

The Author’s Picture of Original A Tale of Two Cities Pamphlets, Held at the National Art Library in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Forster Collection of Dickens’ Personal Artifacts.

To be clear, Dickens was terrible with money, overspending and overextending almost his entire life. But, better understood, Dickens spent money to gain attention, creating a public life in which he played the role of “Charles Dickens.” He understood himself as a brand, which he married to his writing style: Dickens wrote in “First Person Omniscient,” using “I” to tell a story as if he, Charles Dickens, is right there in your sitting room telling you a story. All the pieces in Household Words are “conducted” by Charles Dickens. Even his amateur theater troupe was “Under the Management of Mr. Charles Dickens.” In this way, Dickens created himself as an individual brand, designed to transcend his publishers in the same way that, say, Miley Cyrus transcended Disney and Hannah Montana.

The Tavistock House Theater Was Actually Dickens’ House Off Tavistock Square.

This active curation of Brand Dickens was the performance of Dickens’ life So, when the publishers Bradbury and Evans refused to print Dickens’ “personal statement” about his very shady divorce, he quit Household Words to self-publish and (mostly) self-own a new journal: All The Year Round.

Dickens bet on himself, believing that he, as a personal brand, was bigger than the legacy platforms most artists relied on. ATYR was, like Household Words, a middle-class publication mostly filled with social-justice journalism. Dickens launched ATYR with the first serial of A Tale of Two Cities right there on the cover, and it was the best of times for Dickens, with subscriptions so successful that he immediately paid off all the production costs and turned a profit of, in today’s dollars, about $100,000. Dickens was so petty that he sued Bradbury and Evans for the name Household Words, won the suit, and then titled it All the Year Round. A Weekly Journal. Conducted by Charles Dickens. With Which Is Incorporated Household Words.”

He Bet On Himself And Won Bigger Than Any Author In History: Dickens Launched His Self-Published Journal With What Became the Best Selling English Language Novel of All Time.

This is Dickens’ personal context when he wrote the first paragraph of A Tale of Two Cities. All his attention had been directed at his own attention. By this time, he was something like a proto media-mogul. He’d become a worldwide celebrity, toured the United States, invented modern Christmas, lobbied for successful Parliamentary legislation, founded philanthropies–most of his waking moments were spent getting and directing attention. Dickens also understood that his fame would outlast his life, that attention would be paid to it, so he fed his abandoned autobiography to his best friend and hand-picked biographer to curate his legacy after he died.

More than any other public figure, Charles Dickens understood that cultural and political influence ran partly through money, but mostly by being one of the “noisiest authorities” ginning up the day’s events in the superlative degree. Everything is evidence that society is wise/foolish, believable/incredulous, Light/Dark, hope/despair, everything/nothing, that we’re all going direct to Heaven or direct the other way. That’s how a media man moves copy! Nobody moved more copy than Charles Dickens!

A true testament to Dickens’ insight is that he recognized that what was happening to him wasn’t, in itself, new. Technology made it seem new, but really, he was experiencing newly amplified human nature. The methods and scale are new, but society has always been like this. The authorities are just a little bit noisier.

In the Enlightenment France that laid the intellectual groundwork for the Revolution, the noisiest authorities were Voltaire and Rousseau. They debated the nature of the Social Contract so vigorously that today, they’re buried opposite each other in the basement of Pantheon like they’re going to yell at each other forever. In the Victorian England that laid the groundwork for our modern Anglo-American political traditions, it was the formation of the debate between the political right and political left fought by Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine.

So, dear reader, if you think you live in extraordinary times, perhaps you do, but we’ve been here before. If you believe that political polarization is the product of the pernicious rewiring of our brains by social media, I think Dickens would say that technology only amplifies human nature, just as it amplified his celebrity in the Industrial Revolution. We’ve always been this way: The Times were like this in 1789, here in 1859, and whenever you’re reading my words in the future.

Deeper than that, Dickens also understood that his brand of journalism–substantive, social justice based–was competing for attention with tabloid journalism. Voltaire and Rousseau may be famous today because they were important thinkers who influenced the Revolution, but what actually consumed people’s attention in the Age of Enlightenment? What did your average Londoner consume other than the great debate between Burke and Paine?

Dickens has an answer for that in the third paragraph of Cities, which is key to his thesis. Nobody understood how tabloid journalism moved copy more than the most famous celebrity in England, much of it about him. So, he details a couple obscure allusions that would have been familiar to his readers, which illustrates his point.

Dickens references Wesleyan “prophetess” Joanna Southcott. Dickens mashes up some dates with some other obscure references to get to 1775, but here’s what his readers would have recognized: Joanna Southcott was an unknown servant who declared herself a Woman of the Apocalypse, came to London to sell “Seals of the Lord” to the “Elect” destined for heaven, and in 1814, as age 64, declared herself pregnant with the Messiah. She did, in fact, have some abdominal swelling, but it was a serious medical condition that led to her death. This gave rise to the Southcottians, a not-insignificant sect who believe that “Joanna Southcott’s Box” contains prophecies that will save England.

This is, of course, very stupid tabloid stuff, and true to form, Dickens chose a story that lasted well beyond his years: Through the 1970s, the Panacea Society lobbied for the requisite “24 Bishops of the Church of England” to open the box. In the Year of Our Lord 2024, the “prophet’s cradle” made news on the BBC.

The Lord Requires 24 Bishops To Open This Thing

More ridiculous is Dickens’ second allusion, the Cock Lane Ghost. The details aren’t important (I will post my personal videos from Cock Lane itself, telling you all about “Scratchy Fanny’s Ghost”), but here’s the high-level: William Kent’s wife died in childbirth, he lived in sin with her sister Fanny, she died of smallpox, the landlord Richard Parsons sued on the broken lease, Parsons lost, but then claimed that Fanny’s ghost haunted Cock Lane, and he started charging admission to see the house, developing a small cottage industry of freak-show curiosity in a narrow backstreet near Smithfield Market.

Again, this is all very stupid, but it led to over a decade’s worth of high profile lawsuits, public séances(!), Parliamentary investigations, including an on-site inspection by the famous politician Horace Walpole, and a personal documentation of a séance by Samuel Johnson.

The Author’s Picture of the Entrance to Cock Lane Before Investigating This Whole Scratching Fanny Thing For Himself

After announcing Southcott and Cock Lane’s importance in the 1775 public’s attention, Dickens tells us:

“Mere messages in the earthly order of events had lately come to the English Crown and People, from a congress of British subjects in America: which, strange to relate, have proved more important to the human race than any communications yet received through any of the chickens of the Cock-lane brood.”

Dickens’ point: To move copy, the media gins up stupid tabloid non-stories, which distract our attention from actual stories, like the Declaration of Independence.

Both Dickens’ obscure allusions, which would have been familiar to his readers, have a common thread: Though obviously untrue and unimportant, the media amplification turned them into actual things that had to be dealt with by actual public officials. They took up important people’s attention!

Joanna Southcott attracted huge crowds across England, which had to be addressed by Church of England officials. Petitions to open her box took up time and energy during the Crimean War and World War I. The Cock Lane Ghost had to be dealt with by actual political luminaries of the time. England’s “most accomplished man of letters” Dr. Samuel Johnson, the literal guy who invented the literal dictionary, had to conduct an “investigative séance” of this nonsense, only to find out that the landlord’s daughter was hiding a piece of wood that made the “Scratching Fanny” noise.

This is how the paranoid style of tabloid journalism transmogrifies into conspiracy theory, which ends up doing actual damage in real life. The attention makes it real, and it has to be dealt with while the “mere messages” from colonial subjects are cared about only by “elites” who are trying to tell you what’s important. As somebody who spent two minutes reading about Melania’s meme coin yesterday, I can personally attest that Trump 2 is going to be the Cock Lane Ghost every day for the next four years.

So, if you think you live in the worst of times, that everything is dumb and driven by conspiratorial nonsense that’s distracting people from what’s really important: Well, Charles Dickens is here to tell you that it’s always been like this. He’s an Attention Merchant Of The Highest Order and knows how that game is played.

An Original Illustration of the Falling of the Bastille in A Tale of Two Cities by Hablot Browne (1859).

But A Tale of Two Cities isn’t some sensationalized, exploitative version of the French Revolution designed to sell copies to the lowest common denominator. He’s here to draw your attention to important things, and for me, it provides a clear moral path for understanding revolutionary moments like ours.

Among literary people, Cities is low on the Dickens Power Rankings. Jeff Daniels in “The Squid and the Whale” calls it “minor Dickens,” but I think that undersells it. This is Dickens’ novel that speaks through time, and it’s the one that speaks most to this moment. We live in revolutionary times, and this book helps us process the what, how, and why of social upheaval. That’s what we’ll explore in our reading of the book.

If you’re looking to train your attention on something other than the second Trump Presidency, reading A Tale of Two Cities is a great way of understanding what we’re going through without getting ground down in the everyday. What they want is your attention, and looking to the wisdom of people who’ve been here before is a way of engaging the moment without letting it exhaust your most precious commodity, your attention.

So, welcome to this journey through time. I’ll see you back here next week, when we pick up in 1775 on the Dover Road to France, recalling a dead man to life.