romanticism of the thirties and forties, interpreting
history in terms of the {4} individual; but they differed in their
political bias. These works were written by Carlyle, Louis Blanc,
Lamartine and Michelet.

Carlyle's French Revolution belongs far more to the domain of
literature than to that of history. Its brilliancy may still dazzle
those who are able to think of Carlyle as no more than the literary
artist; it will not blind those who see foremost in him the great
humanitarian. He was too impulsive an artist to resist the high lights
of his subject, and was hypnotized by Versailles and the guillotine
just as his contemporary Turner was by the glories of flaming sunsets
and tumbling waves. The book is a magnificent quest for an unfindable
hero, but it is not the French Revolution.

Carlyle's French contemporaries add the note of the party man to his
individualistic impressionism, and all three are strong apologists of
the Revolution. Lamartine extols the Girondins; Blanc sanctifies
Robespierre, whom he mistakes for an apostle of socialism; Michelet, as
enthusiastic as either, but larger in his views and much more profound
as a scholar, sees the Revolution as a whole and hails in it the
regeneration of humanity. Within a few days of the publication of his
{5} first volumes, France had risen in revolution once more and had
proclaimed the Second Republic. She then, in the space of a few
months, passed through all the phases of political thought which
Thiers, Blanc, Lamartine and Michelet had glorified--the democratic,
the bourgeois, the autocratic republic, and finally the relapse into
the empire--the empire of Louis Napoleon.

And, essentially, the histories of the Revolution produced by these
writers were special pleadings for a defeated cause, springing up in
the year 1848 to a new assertion. Under the Second Empire, with
autocracy even more triumphant than under the brothers of Louis XVI,
they became the gospels of the recalcitrant liberalism of France;
Michelet the gospel of the intellectuals, Blanc the gospel of the
proletarians. De Tocqueville added his voice to theirs, his _Ancien
Regime_ appearing in 1856. Then came 1870, the fall of the Empire, and
1871, the struggle between the middle class republic of Thiers, and the
proletarian republic of Paris. The latter, vanquished once more,
disappeared in a nightmare of assassination and incendiarism.

It was under the impression of this disaster th