Dickens's French Revolution: A Warning Aimed at England

Charles Dickens published A Tale of Two Cities in 1859. The French Revolution he was writing about had ended, in its most violent phase, in 1794, sixty-five years earlier. The gap is not incidental. Dickens waited for distance because he needed it. To write historical fiction well, as Margaret Atwood observes in her Rebind commentary on the novel, you need to know how it came out. “Right in the midst of these events,” she says, “you really have no perspective on them and you don’t know what’s going to be important and what isn’t because you haven’t seen how it’s played out.” Dickens had that perspective. And he used it to write a warning: not about France, but about England.

Forty Years of Preparation

The French Revolution did not begin in 1789. It began, Atwood argues, about forty years earlier: in the intellectual ferment of the Enlightenment, in the mass printing presses that made ideas newly portable and in the tax system that ground the poor of Saint Antoine while the aristocracy perfumed itself at Versailles.

“There were forty years of preparation leading up to the French Revolution,” Atwood says. “Then you get the revolution proper, which goes from moderate to extreme very quickly, and then goes pear-shaped very quickly.” The ideas were Enlightenment ideas: liberty, equality, the rights of man. The execution was something else.

What Dickens showed his English readers, in the wine lees writing “blood” on the wall of Saint Antoine, in the crowds licking spilled wine from cobblestones covered in horse dung, was what forty years of preparation looks like on the ground. “How hungry do you have to be to lick up wine from a street that’s covered with horse poo and dirt?” Atwood asks. “I would say pretty hungry. And that’s his point.”

The Revolution’s Mechanism

The movement from moderate to extreme, in Atwood’s reading, follows a predictable mechanism. Free speech is the revolution’s first demand as the established order must be challenged, and only speech can challenge it. “People are always in favor of free speech when they want to have the free speech to bring down the established order,” Atwood says. “And then once they’ve done that and get power, they’re not in favor of free speech — because it might threaten the revolution, or whoever is in power right now.”

Robespierre championed free speech on the way up. But one of the first things he did when he consolidated power was shut down the printing presses. The Marquis d’Evrémonde, in his last conversation with his nephew, speaks the language of the philosophes (“Rational creature,” “natural destiny”) while defending a system that runs children under carriage wheels. Atwood catches this precisely: “Rational creature — this is Voltaire.” The Enlightenment’s vocabulary had been absorbed by the system it was supposed to overthrow.

“Revolutions are not about making everything wonderful and equal and fair and just for everybody,” Atwood says. “Those are the ideas that are proposed, but it just about never works out.”

The Terror: What Actually Happened

The Reign of Terror, the period from September 1793 to July 1794, killed approximately seventeen thousand people by official execution, and perhaps forty thousand more by other means. Of those officially executed, only about twenty percent were aristocrats. The Revolution consumed primarily the people it claimed to liberate: merchants, peasants, workers, clergy. The seamstress in the tumbril beside Sydney Carton at the novel’s end is Dickens’s portrait of this arithmetic.

Atwood grounds the novel’s final chapters in this history. The chapter Dickens titled “Fifty-Two” refers to the number of prisoners awaiting the guillotine on the morning Carton takes Darnay’s place. “From the farmer-general of seventy, whose riches could not buy his life, to the seamstress of twenty, whose poverty could not save her,” Dickens writes. Atwood reads this as historical fact embedded in fiction: the Terror made no distinctions.

The Thermidorian reaction, the counter-revolution that overthrew Robespierre in July 1794, is what Carton’s dying prophecy refers to. “In the Thermidorian reaction,” Atwood says, “the friends of the people who’d had their heads cut off cut the heads off the people who had cut the heads off their friends.” Vengeance upon the avengers. The Revolution was not over until Napoleon, and arguably not until 1815. Dickens knew all of this when he wrote the prophecy. His Carton was not being sentimental. He was being accurate.

Dickens’s Warning to England

The novel Dickens was writing was aimed less at France than at England, and specifically at what England might become if it did not address what it was.

Tellson’s Bank, the London institution Jarvis Lorry has served his whole life, is described as dark, decrepit, and proudly so. Its partners consider their rotting timbers a mark of respectability. This, Atwood reads, is Dickens’s portrait of the English establishment’s relationship to reform: pride in the way things have always been done, contempt for anyone who suggests they might be done better. It is the Marquis’s château, smaller and shinier on the outside.

The mob that gathers around Roger Cly’s funeral in London, breaking shop windows, threatening passersby, running out of control, is placed by Dickens in the novel before the French mob violence, deliberately. The sequencing is the argument. “Dickens is saying to the English: you’re not above this,” Atwood says. “You can get out of control and be a rampaging mob and threaten the lives of innocent people too.”

The warning Dickens issued in 1859, Atwood argues, has not expired. “We are living in a paradigm shift age like the French Revolution,” she says. “The United States is doing right now what the French Revolution did back in the 18th century, including rearranging the calendar.” The burn-it-all-down impulse recurs. The problem with burning it all down is that afterward there is nobody left who knows how to do anything.