Tale of Two Cities – The French Revolution

Many people mistakenly think of the student’s uprising in Paris and Les Miserables when they think of the French Revolution.  They think of students being shot on the baracade and the incredible pity felt for those people who lost their lives in an attempt to make a difference in their country.  You hear much of the set up for the reasons behind their revolt and they’re much the same as the French Revolution.  The people are starving.  It seems financially France was in turmoil.  The common man was forced to suffer and was often arrested for minor offenses turning major, like the theft of bread to feed their startving family.  In truth, the french Revolution began in 1789 and the story of Les Miserables, not until 1815.  As much as it doesn’t attach to the right time period, it certainly makes an impact that thirty-five years later there were still problems with the economy in France and they had not truly recovered.

In truth, you kind of pity the characters in Les Miserables.  They’re suffering and forced to go through some horrible conditions.  Their lives are restricted to what’s available to them.  They’re only trying to make the world a better place for their people.  That’s got much in common with the beginning of the French Revolution.  These problems were supposed to be fixed in the former revolt, but the need for this later uprising proves that there was nothing solved at all.

In great contrast, there is the story of A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens.  He paints a horrible, grotesque image of the revolution.  True, the man was not alive to see it happen for himself.  He was born later in 1815, if I remember correctly, ironically, the year Les Miserables was originally set.  That the two stories should become so intwined is almost interesting, at least it is to me.  However, given his life having been so close to the events themselves, it is likely that he was told a far purer story of what went on than someone of our modern day.  Though the vision was still likely distorted, it’s a clearer picture than the diluted information that has passed on to these times.

In the early days of the revolution, it’s easy to have pity on the people.  Many of the poor are starving.  They’re facing malnutrition, poverty, disease, and extreme poverty.  Many families were cruely taxed.  The aristocracy thrived and indulged while their people starved.  The poor were taxed heavily by both church and state in an attempt to balance off the massive national debt caused by previous wars and the support of the American Revolution.  The crops were not thriving and all across Europe, famine was a problem.  Unfortunately for France, they were suffering far more as they were already in such financial crisis before they faced this international famine.  It was a difficult and trying time where their queen was quoted to say, truthfully or not, "Let them eat cake!" and another noble man said he didn’t care whether or not the commoners ate grass to survive.

A Tale of Two Cities paints a much darker portrait of the French Revolution.  The storming of the Bastille is written in gory detail, yet somehow is incredibly vague.  The details include men and women armed with anything they could find, sometimes noting at all, tearing down the walls so they could reign victorious over the day.  As I recall, only about fifteen prisoners were released that day, some of them nobility and even a man tried for murder.  In that one case, perhaps this isn’t the sort of man you want let loose in the population again, but the violent rage of the people, inspired as an angry mob to storm the Bastille, were not thinking clearly.

Again, he gives description of a moment of mob mentality when the nobles are pulled from their houses and beaten to death in the streets.  In a fitting and historically accurate end, the man who insisted the peasants could eat grass was beaten to death, decapitated, and had his head shoved on a pike with his mouth stuffed with grass.  Many men were slaughtered to have their heads shoved on a pike by the people taken in a determined rage to somehow win their freedom.

Dickens only vaguely describes the involvement of women in the revolt, yet still it was powerful and very unwomanly.  A mob of women took to Versailles and stormed the place.  They demanded that the king move back to Paris as a sign of good faith.  Rarely in history do we see such a revolt by women.  Very rarely did women step outside their place in society, but in this case, they did so in a brutal, demanding, and very unwomanly way.

Again he describes the mob as they go on a killing frenzy, murdering the people, some after trial, but some who never get to see their day of injustice.  In many cases, it seems injustice it was, at least in the eyes of Dickens.  As he paints the scene of the trials I can hear the voices of the mob screaming "Crucify him!" from some rendition of the crucifiction of Jesus Christ.  He describes the people worshiping the guillotine, wearing small icons of it around their necks, and talking about her justice as though she were God.  The church was run out of the city and Notre Dame renamed the Temple of Reason, quite ironic since the people were anything but reasonable.  They slaughtered many to sate their vengeance, long after all the nobility were fled or dead.

Through all the bloodshed, madness, and vengeance, the people were still hungry.  They were still starving, no matter what their constitution and their government tried to do to prevent it.  There was still extreme poverty.  Anyone with money had to fear the guilotine’s mighty wrath, or imprisonment for no crime but being successful.  Wrath and fear ruled the day, even long after their king and queen, blamed for all their failures, and the aristocracy that supported them were long dead.  Though they had soaked their clothes in the blood of their king in their victory over the monarch, they still had no food to fill their bellies.

All I can think about is what this time says about the madness of a mob.  Individualized thinking disappears as people become enraged and move as a passionate stampede, a herd running out of control.  All it takes is a few brilliant leaders to convince the people they have a solution and a problem large enough to drive them to passion.  Hunger and starvation are powerful, motivating tools, but it’s almost disturbing that these people in their primal, animalistic, even murderous rage didn’t realize that the answer to their problems certainly wasn’t their actions.  It became a violent time of fear, far darker and more brutal than the rule under the nobility that came before it.

It truly makes me wonder about people, about human kind as a whole.  In this modern day we talk about humanity.  We talk about the rights of the peo

ple, and what every man, woman, and child deserves.  In many ways, people state that they’re above those violent things, and yet still people are empassioned to act with mob mentality.  All through history there are records of violent mobs or violent protests.  It almost seems like a primal part of human nature that we try to deny, to hide from even ourselves.  We don’t like to look at that aspect because it’s thoughtless, violent, and cruel.  Sometimes the rage carries on far beyond the point where the needs are met.  Sometimes it’s just a result of chaos.  It’s hard to say what makes these mobs act the way they do, but in modern times, we swear they don’t exist.  We swear that we’d never act that way ourselves, but with the rich getting richer and the poor falling more and more into poverty, what would we do if there was a day when the majority of the population could not afford to feed their children and starvation ran rampant?  As much as we like to deny the possibility, it could still happen today.

These aspects of human nature are terrifying.  That such mob action and such can have such an incredible, overwhelming power to compel people to do things they normally wouldn’t do.  It’s frightening, and I hope to whatever power may be out there that I am spared from such a sight in my lifetime.

~*~Raven Night~*~