Page 303 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol IV

1604 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

Charles Dickens: Commentary on the

French Revolution in A Tale of Two Cities

Charles Dickens (1812–1870) was one of the most weapon that was thrown up from the depths below,
prolific and popular authors of the nineteenth cen- no matter how far off.
tury by age twenty-four, when he published Pickwick Who gave them out, whence they last came, where
Papers (1836). It has been estimated that 10 percent they began, through what agency they crookedly quiv-
of the population in Victorian England were Dickens ered and jerked, scores at a time, over the heads of the
readers. In A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Dickens crowd, like a kind of lightning, no eye in the throng
provides a stirring account of a popular uprising could have told; but, muskets were being distributed—
during the French Revolution, in this case led by the so were cartridges, powder, and ball, bars of iron and
famous, ever-knitting Madame Defarge, whom Dick- wood, knives, axes, pikes, every weapon that distracted
ens introduces in the first few pages of his classic ingenuity could discover or devise. People who could
work. lay hold of nothing else, set themselves with bleeding
hands to force stones and bricks out of their places in
Saint Antoine had been, that morning, a vast dusky
walls. Every pulse and heart in Saint Antoine was on
mass of scarecrows heaving to and fro, with frequent
high-fever strain and at high-fever heat. Every living
gleams of light above the billowy heads, where steel
creature there held life as of no account, and was
blades and bayonets shone in the sun. A tremendous
demented with a passionate readiness to sacrifice it.
roar arose from the throat of Saint Antoine, and a for-
As a whirlpool of boiling waters has a centre point,
est of naked arms struggled in the air like shriveled
so, all this raging circled round Defarge’s wine-shop,
branches of trees in a winter wind: all the fingers con-
and every human drop in the caldron had a tendency
vulsively clutched at every weapon or semblance of
to be sucked towards the vortex where Defarge himself,

judicial murder of over a thousand prisoners, many of tracted civil war in the Vendée, one that would kill at least
them priests whose only crime had been refusal to take 100,000 people. Civil war elsewhere in France, particu-
the obligatory oath to the nation.When the feared inva- larly in the south, resulted from conflict between cen-
sion by foreign armies failed to materialize and Paris tralizing Jacobins, who wished to see Paris take the lead
calmed down, the newly elected Convention, which in governing the country, and decentralizing “federal-
declared France a republic early on 22 September, was ists,” who sought greater autonomy for the provinces.
nevertheless preoccupied with the troubling question of Both sides supported the republic and opposed monar-
the king’s fate. After divisive debates during the fall and chy, but they fought each other as bitterly as revolution-
winter of 1792–1793, on 21 January 1793, Louis XVI aries fought royalists.
went to the guillotine, a decapitating instrument widely
hailed as democratic because it provided an equal death The Reign of Terror
for all culprits. (Prior to the Revolution beheading had War, both foreign and domestic, provided justification for
been a privilege reserved for the high-born; more painful the revolutionaries’ most repressive laws. On the strength
executions had been the lot of the common folk.) of the belief that traitors were endemic, the Convention
For many observers in France and around the world, passed a series of laws depriving suspects in political
this act of regicide took the Revolution beyond the pale. cases of due process and leading to thousands of judicial
For devout Catholics in the Vendée region in western murders known as the Reign of Terror.Yet this tyrannical
France, the killing of the monarch, whom God had cho- development was not simply a top-down policy. It had its
sen to rule over the kingdom, was not merely unjust; it roots in popular fears and resentments. In September
was sacrilege. Partly as a result of this outrage, the revo- 1793, during one of a series of insurrections that char-
lutionary government found itself involved in a pro- acterized the Revolution, armed crowds demanded the