The French Revolution: A History
A three-volume narrative history of the French Revolution from 1789 through the Reign of Terror to 1795, written in a torrential present-tense prose that treats the Revolution as epic drama rather than detached chronicle. Page count is for the standard complete single-volume edition in print: the Modern Library Classics paperback (2002, unabridged, introduction by John D. Rosenberg), 848 pages.
848 pages of prose "so dense and impenetrable" that one reader reported severe headaches from the effort. Another calls it "this massive, discursive mess that takes for granted a pretty substantial knowledge of the players going in": deputies and journalists arrive unintroduced, because Carlyle assumes you know the story before he starts shouting it. Reading it means researching it ("Kindle tells me I looked up 700+ words," and that reader liked the book). Decode the archaic torrent and you still don't get history, you get sermon: "the style of writing is quirky and polemic and the tone unabashedly self-righteous," Robespierre tried and convicted in every scene he enters. Readers who made this their first book on the Revolution say flatly they wish they hadn't.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
