Dan's Papers - May 29, 2009

Recently, I felt an urgent need to reconsider the French Revolution, or, more specifically, the Reign of Terror that followed on its heels. This quest started when I came across A Place of Greater Safety, a historical novel about the revolution by the British writer Hilary Mantel. Mantel's story revolves around three leaders of the revolution, George-Jacques Danton, Maximilien Robespierre, and Camille Desmoulins, and their families, friends, and lovers. It is a tour de force that eloquently details the facts of the revolution through dramatic portraits of the famous and infamous figures of the time.

Yet the why of the Terror remains elusive in this epic novel. Unsatisfied, I toyed with the idea of reading some "real" history, but Simon Schama's Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution looked dry and daunting (all 1,000 pages of it); and I couldn't seem to summon the heart to read Thomas Carlyle's classic, The French Revolution: A History, at a mere 400 pages. Then I thought of Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities and found in a bookshop the wonderful Vintage Classics edition, with an Introduction by the very Simon Schama whose book I'd rejected. Not only that, but in the Preface written by Dickens (which I had long forgotten) he offers a loving "thank you" to "Mr. Carlyle" for his informative book on the French Revolution and for personally lending him original source material and books from his own library. I was home free! Dickens had relied upon Carlyle's research, so by reading Dickens, I told myself, I had no need to read Carlyle.

A Tale of Two Cities does exactly what I wanted a book about the French Revolution to do: It tells a compelling story filled with memorable characters like Madame Defarge, knitting away in her mad frenzy of revenge, and brilliantly sums up the why of the Terror in a few deft phrases. There is, of course, the well-known first line of the book: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times ..." But towards the end of the book I found what I was seeking. There, Dickens describes the Reign of Terror as "a frightful moral disorder" and "the suicidal vengeance of the Revolution." For him the Terror was caused by the same things that had led to the overthrow of the monarchy: the "unspeakable suffering, intolerable oppression, and heartless indifference" of the Ancien Régime. Once the revolutionaries unleashed the violent forces of revolution in the name of liberté, égalité, fraternité, they could not control them. These forces took on a momentum of their own, spawning a mindless and indiscriminate wave of mob violence and bloodshed that contaminated the relationships among the revolutionaries, twisting their idealism and desire for social justice into an internecine killing spree in which the guillotine reigned supreme.

I finished A Tale of Two Cities with a great sigh of satisfaction and thought of having a mini-Dickens-fest over the summer. What to read next? Hard Times? Bleak House? Little Dorrit? All of these books appealed to me because they seemed to resonate with our own "hard times." A fierce critic of the injustice and poverty of Victorian society, Dickens offers a profound understanding of the human cost of class differences brought about by the rise of capitalism and the industrial revolution, where great wealth was achieved through the exploitation of poor "unfortunates," people confined to the very bottom of the socio-economic system. In his stories he condemns debtors' prisons; money speculation that leads to the collapse of banks; the poorly run bureaucracy of the British Treasury (which, like all bureaucracies, seems like an animal with many hands and no head or heart); and the British court system, where the cost of litigation fills the coffers of lawyers while bankrupting their clients.

Dickens has a remarkable grasp of the machinations of institutional corruption, the mediating role of organized labor, and the workings of money. Presenting all this insight in cautionary tales of woe and redemption, Dickens conjures up a delightful roster of characters with the most whimsical names. Taking Mr. Gradgrind, Mrs. Sparsit, Inspector Bucket, Miss Flite, Prince Turveydrop, and Peepy Jellyby on an outing to the beach sounds like The Very Bestest Thing To Do for a summertime Dickens-fest.

A Tale of Two Cities, By Charles Dickens, 380 pages, Vintage Classics, Random House.