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.
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?
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…
“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.