Nietzsche hated Carlyle and the two men were basically opposites, although both are taken as inspirations for the right today. Carlyle spoke about 18th-century France as a “despotism tempered by epigrams”, whereas Nietzsche adored the epigram—he admired La Rochefoucauld above all, whereas for Carlyle men like that were the problem. For Nietzsche, the French court in the late 18th century was, contra Carlyle, not “decadent” but represented a true golden age characterised by lightness, wit, and scientific enquiry—for Carlyle it was a godless age peopled by haughty arrogant aristocrats; and the revolution was a judgement on these men—richly deserved.
Carlyle noticed that democracy in America was inspired by “Hebrew Puritans” but he failed to connect this fact to his black beasts, the philosophes; for Carlyle, a Puritan himself in essence, the problem with France was not enough porridge oats and hard work—he had a Protestant peasant’s Scotch answer for everything. The French in the 18th century were sensual, sexy, and atheistic (Latins, basically)—unbearable for a Scotch peasant like Carlyle. Of course, it is this very “judgement be upon thy heads” attitude that ultimately lies behind the French Revolution—it took Nietzsche to see that it was Christian morality turned secular that actuated the revolutionary spirit.
For Carlyle, the problem is not enough “Hebrewism”; he never made the connection between his much-despised Democracy (always capitalised to be Germanic—Carlyle was a pretentious writer) and Puritanism. His ideal would be for the aristocracy to become Puritan, then they would be virtuous, then they would not be overthrown—which they would not be, for they would no longer be aristocrats.
This is why Carlyle venerated Cromwell—an ugly fuck. Cromwell was a “Puritan aristocrat” and I bet my bottom dollar that if Carlyle had been alive in the early 20th century that he would have been an apologist for Stalin. That’s because Stalin was a 20th-century Cromwell—Carlyle would have moralised about his “austere lifestyle”, his “commitment to the nation”, his “love for serious projects” like the vast dams and canals; above all, he would have admired his commitment to “work”—work, not aristocratic leisure, is good; hence Carlyle truly is the father of that very 20th-century invention, the labour camp. “Those who do not work, shall not eat,” said Lenin, channeling the Bible—and Carlyle would approve. Nietzsche, by contrast, celebrated aristocratic leisure as the mother of invention and of beauty—you need a leisured aristocracy who efflorescences with power to create anything beautiful, even to do real scientific enquiry.
Carlyle was a big hypocrite because he liked to inveigh about “God almighty, who in the end, when thou’st turned to dust, as all creatures, king or peasant, must” but he himself did not believe in God. He was functionally atheist but liked to moralise and preach like the miserable bastard he was so that everyone who read him would feel guilty and be poisoned with his shit. And shit is the operative word. Carlyle was a constipated Scot, his bowels were rotten with too many healthful porridge oats—from his earliest days he suffered from constipation and it came out in his writing, verbose and pretentious (windy and empty).
He had a hot wife, but he refused to bang her and she wasted away—childless, unfucked; and that was because Carlyle was a constipated moralist. He needed an enema and a good fuck, then he might have said something worthwhile. It’s often said he anticipated Hitler, but I think that he was more like Lenin and Stalin—secular moralists who venerated the labour camp.
Nietzsche has his own defects, of course, and 18th-century pre-revolutionary France was not a model to follow; it was decadent and its atheism and witty epigrams were hollow. It’s just in my view there is another way between windy Christian moralism and secular Christian philosophes who are totally frivolous and uncommitted to anything—and who are empty but in a different way to the great windbag Carlyle.