A Tale of Two Cities (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Charles Dickens [6]
But as a novelist, Dickens, who loved Paris and traveled there often, offers more intuitive, closely observed reasons for the untranslatable quality of that city’s Revolution. In an 1856 article for his weekly magazine, Household Words, he calls Paris “the Moon,” and describes a culture of spectacle implicitly alien to his London readers. On the grand Parisian boulevards, Dickens watches the upper classes put on “a mighty show.” Later, he takes coffee and a cigar at one of Paris’s ubiquitous cafés, and participates in a kind of collective voyeurism unfamiliar to the English capital:
The place from which the shop front has been taken makes a gay proscenium; as I sit and smoke, the street becomes a stage, with an endless procession of lively actors crossing and re-crossing. Women with children, carts and coaches, men on horseback, soldiers, water-carriers with their pails, family groups, more soldiers, lounging ex quisites, more family groups (coming past, flushed, a little late for the play). . . . We are all amused, sitting seeing the traffic in the street, and the traffic in the street is in its turn amused by seeing us (“Railway Dreaming,” pp. 373-374).
Paris is a society of spectacle, a glamorous outdoor “stage” where citizens are both actors and audience. Later in the article, however, Dickens describes a more sinister aspect of this culture of display when he is jostled by the crowds at the Paris morgue, whose “bodies lie on inclined planes within a great glass window, as though Holbein should represent Death, in his grim Dance, keeping a shop, and displaying his goods like a Regent Street or boulevard linen-draper” (p. 375). Dickens is unnerved here, as he was at Horsemonger Lane, by a society that places no restraints on visibility, even to preserve the solemnity of the dead.
It is a short step in Dickens’s imagination from the peep-show atmosphere of the Paris morgue in 1856 to the ritual slaughter in the Place de la Révolution during Robespierre’s “Reign of Terror” of 1793-1794. A Tale of Two Cities shows the dark side of urban theatricality, that a public appetite for glamorous “show” can rapidly degenerate into an insatiable hunger for “scenes of horror and demoralization.” The essentially theatrical quality of Parisian social life produces a theatrical Revolution. At the revolutionary “trials” at the Hall of Examination, Madame Defarge, we are told, “clapped her hands as at a play.” There is something uniquely Parisian, too, in the spectacle of the liberation of the Bastille (with only seven prisoners inside) and in the rituals of the Terror itself, as the tumbrils roll daily to the guillotine watched by knitting ladies, who take up seats in their favored spots each morning as if at a sideshow or circus. As Dickens describes it, even the victims of the Terror cannot escape the theatrical atmosphere of the proceedings. Among the condemned, “there are some so heedful of their looks that they cast upon the multitude such glances as they have seen in theatres, and in pictures.” Contrast this with Charles Darnay, who, on trial for his life earlier in the novel, disdains “the play at the Old Bailey”: He “neither flinched from the situation, nor assumed any theatrical air in it.” Our hero disappoints us on occasion, but here, by resisting being converted into a spectacle, he defends the most important social principle of the novel: the dignity of the private citizen in the face of the howling mob.
Theatricality is not the monopoly of the Terror. As the scene of the royal procession at Versailles shows, public exhibition was a deep-grained aspect of French court culture that, when revolution came, translated easily in the imagination from the palace to the public square:
Soon the large-faced King and the fair-faced Queen came in their golden