Amid shelves crowded with sophisticated histories on the French Revolution, Thomas Carlyle’s classic remains the one book that makes history feel gloriously, terrifyingly alive like no other. Every Bastille Day, I find myself reaching for the same battered volume. It is not the newest history of the French Revolution. It is not the most balanced, the most archival or even the most reliable in the way modern historians would define ‘reliability.’ But for me, Thomas Carlyle’s T