Carlyle responded to the French Revolution with a mixture of awe and complicity and grim enthusiasm, combined with horror and pity. He never really adjusted to the more tranquil period of the 1850s and ‘60s, which he viewed, with a kind of baffled impatience, as stagnation.

The French Revolution, though he was condescending to its sentimentalities and appalled by its atrocities, appealed to his Old Testament and Calvinist sensibilities, as a divine scourging. Carlyle's ambivalence comes out most clearly in his treatment of what he calls “Sansculottism” — fuelled by hunger and desperation, capable of heroism and atrocious cruelty. Carlyle at his most abstract presented the Revolution as the clash of such personified abstractions: “Sansculottism”, “Patriotism”, “Respectability”, “Philosophism”, “Clubbism”. But his rhetoric is often highly concrete and these abstractions are sometimes given physical characteristics reminiscent of allegory; those of “Sansculottism” (sometimes also personified as the poverty-stricken Paris suburb of “Saint-Antoine”) are almost tangible: “many-headed, fire-breathing”.

The Paris mob is sometimes “sooty Saint-Antoine”, just as the courtiers are “the Oeil-de-Boeuf” (a salon of assembly in the palace of Versailles). In reintroducing characters — in a useful mnemonic but also a deliberate evocation of epic convention, for Carlyle saw the Revolution as epic — he tags them with a repeated adjective or phrase in Homeric fashion: “Usher Maillard, “Méry of the Thousand Orders”, “Old-Dragoon Drouet”.

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