Part 4: The French Revolution’s Contribution to Fascism

Charles Dickens’s Primary Source for A Tale of Two Cities Was the Founding Father of Fascism

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.