A Tale of Two Cities (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Charles Dickens [7]
An aide to Thomas Jefferson (who served as ambassador to France from 1785 to 1789) saw in the King’s levée an “Oriental splendor and magnificence”; the wild geographical inaccuracy of the description only reinforces our sense of how deeply alien French court culture was to the emergent liberal Anglo-American sensibility. The grotesque pomp and negligence of the royals that Dickens describes might itself have represented sufficient justification for revolution, were it not for the mindless response of “the mender of roads,” a hapless would-be revolutionary who shows himself so susceptible to the glamour of court spectacle that he weeps and wishes long life to those very people he has sworn to destroy. The dangers of a society of spectacle are summed up in his response: Whether it is the court of Louis XVI or Robespierre’s revolutionary committee, no government that asserts its power in the form of public exhibition can guarantee control of its audience’s reaction. The irrational fervor inspired by spectacle may distract the people from ideology, as it does the mender of roads at Versailles, who is disarmed by “sentiment”; but spectacle may just as easily produce the murderous revolutionary dance of the carmagnole, and the tumbrils that bring everyone—Louis and Robespierre, royals and revolutionaries alike—before the indiscriminate justice of the guillotine.
A tale of two fundamentally different cities, then? Given Dickens’s fascination with mob violence, it is not surprising that his only other historical novel, Barnaby Rudge (1841), describes the most significant popular uprising in London’s history, the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780, during which mobs roamed the streets for three days and ransacked Parliament. Nevertheless, the fact that Dickens needed to draw on events from the prerevolutionary era (and that the protest itself fizzled) suggests that the Gordon Riots are the exception proving the rule for the history of English civil unrest. Dickens’s London, with its bad weather in place of sunny boulevards, and private clubs instead of cafés, does not possess the physical or cultural conditions for successful revolt. Mobs form in London in A Tale of Two Cities—at Darnay’s trial, and the burial of Roger Cly—but just as quickly melt away.
But the society of spectacle has a second, more sinister aspect from which England is not immune: paranoia. Dickens in Paris watching the passing crowds, who in turn watch him, might pass for a harmless afternoon’s entertainment in the city, but when the opportunity for seeing and being seen is hardened to an expectation, or even a right to total visibility, it is a short distance to paranoia and a culture obsessed with secrets. When there is no escape from the social gaze, voyeurs quickly turn into spies and informants, and the least assertion of individuality or privacy is interpreted as a guilty secret that needs to be exposed.
Dickens reminds his readers that “our English reasons for vaunting our superiority to secrecy and spies are of very modern date,” and looks back in the novel to a time when the governments of both France and England were fully closed, decision-making structures, dependent on an invisible trade in secrets in their dealings both with each other and with their own citizens. We are introduced to this paranoid world from the novel’s first pages, in which Dickens powerfully creates a mood of secrecy, intrigue, and fear of exposure that feeds the atmosphere of almost every scene that follows: “The Dover mail was in its usual genial position that the guard suspected the passengers, the passengers suspected