Not only overly self-indulgent, he is also completely indifferent to the lives of the peasants whom he exploits. The Marquis orders his carriage to be raced through the city streets, delighting to see the commoners nearly run down by his horses. Furthermore, the Marquis’ lack of sympathy is evidenced as he tosses a few coins for the father of the child whom his carriage tramples to death. In tossing the coins to Gaspard, he aims to buy his way out of the predicament and rid his own conscience of the nuisance of Gaspard’s grief. He believes that it is the commoner’s lot in life to struggle and suffer.
The Marquis serves as a warning of the violence and bloodshed to come, initiated by the masses that can no longer abide the aristocracy’s heartless oppression of them. He is found dead with a knife through his heart. Attached to the knife is a note that reads: “Drive him fast to his tomb. This, from JAQUES.” Accordingly, the Marquis stands as a symbol of the ruthless aristocratic cruelty that the French Revolution seeks to overcome.
Quite the reverse, practically all of the French peasants lived in poverty. Dickens sets the atmosphere of a grim world of the very poor and the conditions of Frances’s streets as they were at the time. Dickens uses repetition in Chapter 5 to emphasize the hunger of the peasants. “Hunger. It was prevalent everywhere. Hunger was patched into them with straw and rag and wood and paper; Hunger stared down the smokeless chimneys . . . Hunger was the inscription on the baker’s shelves . . .” With this repetition, Dickens demonstrates that hunger dominates every aspect of these peasants’ lives—they cannot do anything without being reminded of their hunger.
The lower reaches of French society certainly lived in a state of nearly perpetual crisis. Although the French Revolution will not erupt for another fourteen years, this is exemplified in the broken wine cask scene in which the suffering and rage that will lead the French peasantry to revolt. Everyone suspends his business and rushes to drink the wine. “All the people within reach had suspended their business, or their idleness, to run to the spot and drink the wine…and not only did it all get taken up, but so much mud got taken up along with it.” With his depiction of a broken wine cask outside Defarge’s wine-shop, and with his portrayal of the passing peasants’ scrambles to lap up the spilling wine, Dickens creates a symbol for the desperate quality of the people’s hunger.
This hunger is both the literal hunger for food—the French peasants were starving in their poverty—and the metaphorical hunger for political freedoms. On the surface, the scene shows the peasants in their desperation to satiate the first of these hungers. But it also evokes the violent measures that the peasants take in striving to satisfy their more hostile cravings. The scene surrounding the wine cask contains a nightmarish quality. For instance, the narrative directly associates the wine with blood, noting that some of the peasants have acquired “a tigerish smear about the mouth.” The ominous portrayal of a drunken figure scrawling of the word “blood” on the wall with a wine-dipped finger similarly prefigures the violence. The liquid smears the peasants’ hands, feet, and faces, foreshadowing the approaching chaos during which the blood of aristocrats and political dissidents will run as freely.
Throughout the novel, Dickens approaches his historical subject with some ambivalence. Dickens deeply sympathizes with the plight of the French peasantry and emphasizes their need for liberation. This is illustrated in Book the Second, Chapter 22 when Defarge arrives bearing news of the capture of Foulon, a wealthy man who once declared that if people were starving they should eat grass. The peasants put his head on a pike and fill his mouth with grass. When they have finished, the peasants eat their “scanty and insufficient suppers,” parents play with their children, and lovers love.
While he supports the revolutionary cause, he often points to the evil of the revolutionaries themselves. For in fighting cruelty with cruelty, the peasants effect no true revolution; rather, they only perpetuate the violence that they themselves have suffered. In Cly’s funeral scene, an importance lies in its depiction of the horde attending Cly’s funeral. Here, Dickens continues his criticism of mob mentality: Cruncher participates in the burial of a man he does not know. His spirited condemnation of the deceased testifies to the contagious nature of the crowd’s anger and excitement. Hence, Dickens makes his stance clear in his suspicious and cautionary depictions of the mobs.
Dickens sharply criticizes this mob mentality, which he condemns for perpetrating the very cruelty and oppression from which the revolutionaries hope to free themselves. The scene surrounding the wine cask is the novel’s first picture of the mob in action. The mindless frenzy with which these peasants scoop up the fallen liquid foreshadows the scene at the grindstone, where the revolutionaries sharpen their weapons (Book the Third, Chapter 2). The description of the people in blood-stained rags, “not one creature in the group free from the smear of blood,” immediately recalls the breaking of the wine-cask outside Defarge’s shop; there too, the people’s rags are stained. The scene evokes the frantic and mindlessly violent mob of the revolution.
Possessing a remorseless bloodlust, Madame Defarge embodies the chaos of the French Revolution. For this woman possesses a vengeance and hatred that exceed all bounds. As such, Dickens uses her as an example of the vices that society perpetrates. The initial chapters of the novel find her sitting quietly and knitting in the wine-shop. However, her apparent passivity belies her relentless thirst for vengeance. With her stitches, she secretly knits a register of the names of the revolution’s intended victims. In Book the Second Chapter 21, she serves as one of the leaders among the mob in the storming of the Bastille. Then, in Book the Third Chapter 3, Lucie, turning to Madame Defarge, begs her to show Darnay some mercy, but Madame Defarge coldly responds that the revolution will not stop for the sake of Lucie or her family. As the revolution breaks into full force, Madame Defarge reveals her true viciousness.
Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities emphasizes the tendency toward oppression and violence as the causes of the French Revolution. Though Dickens sees the French Revolution as a great symbol of transformation and resurrection, he emphasizes that its violent means were ultimately hostile to its end. The story, as well as the age, is marked by competing and contradictory attitudes. Just the same, Dickens wrote the story in order to warn his Victorian inhabitants of what may happen if England did not make the necessary economic, judicial and political reforms. He warned them that if they did not change their ways, a revolution might occur, as it did in France.
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (New York: Signet Classic, 1997), 13.
