Anderson Rearick III’s Reviews > The French Revolution: A History > Status Update

“Is not Sentimentalism twin- sister to Cant, if not one and the same with it ? is not Cant the materia pritna of the Devil ; from which all falsehoods, imbecilities, abominations body themselves; from which no true thing can come? For Cant is itself properly a double-distilled Lie ; the second-power of a Lie.” The Biblical echo runs all through this wor.

A jacquerie is a violent, spontaneous uprising of peasants against the nobility, originating from the 1358 French revolt during the Hundred Years' War. Synonyms include peasant uprising, rural revolt, insurrection, or riot. It was named after "Jacques Bonhomme," a mocking term for peasants. I recall this term coming up in Tale of Two Cities, but had no idea it dated so far back.

The American revlution pleases the French society. The ideas of the enlightenment sound good in the salons though no one seems to connect them to their own state.

So, however, in this world of ours, which has both an indestructible hope in the Future, and an indestructible tendency to persevere as in the Past, must Innovation and Conservation wage their perpetual conflict, as they may and can.

Meanwhile it is singular how long the rotten will hold together, provided you do not handle it roughly.

This sounds a lot like Dickens, “OR is this same Age of Hope itself but a simulacrum asHopetoooftenis? Cloud-vapourwithrainbows painted on it, beautiful to see, to sail towards,—which hovers over Niagara Falls ? In that case, victorious. Analysis will have enough to do.”

Carlyle describes the masses: Dreary, languid do these struggle in their obscure re- moteness ; their hearth cheerless, their diet thin. For them, in this world, rises no Era of hope ; hardly now in the other,—if it be not hope in the gloomy rest of Death, for their faith too is failing. Untaught, uncomforted, unfed ! A dumb generation ; their voice only an inar- ticulate cry :

“The oak grows silently, in the forest, a thousand years ; only in the thousandth year, when the woodman arrives with his axe, is there heard an echoing through the solitudes ; and the oak announces itself when, with far-sounding crash, it falls. How silent too was the planting of the acorn ; scattered from the lap of some wandering wind !” The unpleasant perception that a great tree like a great stat can fall.

“The new Louis with his Court is rolHng towards Choisy, through the summer afternoon : the royal tears still flow ; but a word mispronounced by Monseigneur d'Artois sets them all laughing, and they weepnomore. Lightmortals,howyewalkyourlight life-minuet, over bottomless abysses, divided from you by a film !” Classic Carlyle!

John Holland Rose wrote in his introduction “Carlyle's work is the outpouring of a vehement nature, the protest of a mind flaming up in revolt against the evils of his time. It is that of one crying in the wilderness ; and the sons of wisdom will not expect from this John the Baptist of modern thought the elegances of those who wear soft raiment and aspire to dwell in kings' houses.”