• The text is a critical text based on the collation of the first edition of 1837 as copy-text against the Second Edition of 1839, the Third Edition of 1848, the Uniform Edition of 1857-58, and the Library Edition of 1869-71.
• The extensive notes explain classical, literary, and historical allusions, and in many instances provide direct links to Carlyle's primary source volumes.
• The emphasis throughout allows readers uninterrupted access to Carlyle's text, while providing them with signposts to future reading and research.
• A select bibliography features a number of recent studies by Antonia Fraser, Mona Ozouf, Munro Price, Simon Schama, and Timothy Tackett that adopt 'Carlylean' approaches in their treatment of the French Revolution.
• Feature chronologies of both Thomas Carlyle and the French Revolution

   
'It is I think the most radical Book that has been written in these late centuries . . . and will give pleasure and displeasure, one may expect, to almost all classes of persons.' Carlyle
  
Thomas Carlyle's history of the French Revolution opens with the death of Louis XV in 1774 and ends with Napoleon suppressing the insurrection of the 13th Vendémaire. Both in Its form and content, the work was intended as a revolt against history writing itself, with Carlyle exploding the eighteenth-century conventions of dignified gentlemanly discourse. Immersing himself in his French sources with unprecedented imaginative and intellectual engagement, he recreates the upheaval in a language that evokes the chaotic atmosphere of the events. In the French Revolution Carlyle achieves the most vivid historical reconstruction of the crisis of his, or any other, age.
  
This new edition offers an authoritative text, a comprehensive record of Carlyle's French, English, and German sources, a select bibliography of editions, related writings, and critical studies, chronologies of both Thomas Carlyle and the French Revolution, and a new and full index. In addition, Carlyle's work is placed in the context of both British and European history and writing, and linked to a variety of major figures, including Edward Gibbon, Friedrich Nietzsche, George Eliot, John Stuart Mill, Hegel, and R. G. Collingwood.