London And Paris During The French Revolution example essay topic

In A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens contrasts the Manettes' life during the French Revolution in both London and Paris. The story follows them throughout the trials of the Reign of Terror in Paris, to the safety and security of London. He also compares the cities themselves, one being overrun with poverty and oppression, and the other being safe and economically sound. He shows the differences in the quality of life in both cities, while developing a love story in which the lives of the characters are twisted within the French Revolution. In France before the revolution, many changes had been made to help the country, but the Deficit of Revenue was not one of them. Many of the aristocrats and clergy were exempt from paying taxes, yet the poorer citizens were taxed heavily to make up for it (Carlyle vii).

Louis XIV gave the upper class special power and privileges and ultimately caused France to weaken (Wright 31). Soon the common people were poor and starving. France had been suffering inflation for years; therefore, the government tried to tax the upper classes, but they refused to pay since they had been exempt for so long. Soon after, France endured many hardships, including drought and famine, and France became even poorer (Wright 31). In order to reform the financial status of France, Louis summoned the Etates-Generaux, who had not met since 1614.

The Etates-Generaux, or the General States, was a representative assembly that dealt with the matters of the state. It was made up of three groups: the church, the aristocracy, and the remaining ninety five percent of the population (Wright 33). On July 14, 1789, the French Revolution officially began by the storming of the Bastille. The reason the Bastille was attacked was because it was seen as a symbol of the King's power (Wright 34).

This led to ten years of attacks made upon the privileged because of the abuses the common people felt from the ruling classes. Soon after the Bastille was taken, many other outbursts and riots occurred in France. Many aristocrats' chateaux were burned, and this era of violence became known as The Great Fear (Wright 33). Many aristocrats and clergy fled the country in fear of being beheaded (Wright 34).

Louis was put on trial as a traitor and was executed on January 21, 1793. Many people led revolts and provided the revolutionary ideas that the upper classes feared. Denis Diderdiot and Voltaire were both progressive thinkers who looked to reason, not traditional values to solve problems. They "mocked the old order, with its myriad injustices, and urged the adoption of constitutional reforms on British lines" (Wright 32). Another revolutionary idealist was Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

He believed in the natural goodness of mankind. He suggested that sovereignty would rest in the general will of the nation (Wright 32). Ultimately, the power did rest in the will of the people. Paris was in turmoil because the people were hungry and poor. Those that represented the common citizens of France would not submit to their "superiors" because they were angry about their lack of political power.

They banned together, named themselves the National Assembly, and pledged to end feudal privileges. They vowed not to disband until France had a constitution. They soon adopted a Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, which was much indebted to the American Declaration of Independence. It included the inalienable rights of an individual, including those of "liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression" (Wright 33). In June 1792, organized mobs from Paris were growing more violent and desperate. They marched through the streets of Paris and broke down the gates of Tuileries to get to the king (Carlyle xv).

They also marched on Versailles and forced the king and the queen to move to the capital, where they became virtual prisoners of the revolution (Wright 33). The people were restless until they felt justice had been served for all the years they had suffered. In 1791, the French Assembly completed its constitution, giving the king limited power (Wright 32). Yet, the citizens were not seeing any change. Therefore, they became restless and wanted revenge. Royalist sympathizers were arrested and mobs entered prisons and slaughtered hundreds of prisoners.

These bloodbaths were known as the September Massacres. Between June 1793 and July 1794, over 40,000 people all across France were beheaded at the guillotine for crimes committed against the people. This period became known as the Reign of Terror. It was a result of the Committee of Public Safety wanting to stamp out all internal counter-revolutionary elements (Wright 33). The reason the guillotine was used was that it was fast and easy. There were many executions every day and, the revolutionaries needed an efficient way of taking care of those that had wronged them (Wright 21).

The Terror ended in 1794 with the fall of Robespierre, who had dominated the Committee of Public Safety (Wright 34). In 1795, a new constitution came into force under which a board of five directors held executive power. It became known as the Directory (Wright 34). Almost 100 years later, Charles Dickens, an English writer, feared social problems in England would result in revolution in England. He had read The French Revolution by Thomas Carlyle, and was inspired to write a love story in its setting. The revolution appealed to Dickens because it was an event of such human drama, and it was so important to history (Wright 33).

The book was published in weekly installments in a literary magazine. Dickens said of his intentions in writing A Tale of Two Cities: "It has been one of my hopes to add something to the popular and picturesque means of understanding that terrible time" (Wright 20). The story does just that. In every step of the story, and in every sentence, the horror of the harsh reality of the situation in Paris is revealed. The story is about the lives of Lucie Manette and her closest relatives and friends in both London and Paris during the French Revolution. The most important characters in the story were Lucie Manette, who is the central character, her father, Dr. Manette, who was a French prisoner for eighteen years, her husband Charles Darnay, who turns out to be the nephew of the Marquis St. Evermonde, his friend, Sidney Carton, who looks like him and dies for him, and Jarvis Lorry, who reunites Lucie with her father.

Dickens has many characters portraying the revolutionaries. Ernest Defarge, who in the beginning of the story is a friend to theManettes', is the leader of the revolution in Saint Antoine. His wife, Therese Defarge, also helps lead the revolution. Not only did she help fight, but she knitted the names of the people who were a threat to the common people of France into a blanket. Darnay was knitted into her list because he was the nephew of the Marquis St. Evermonde. He moved to London because he knew what his family was doing was wrong, and he did not want to be a part of it.

Dickens attempted to comment on French history by creating not only individuals, but also characters that seem to symbolize entire social classes. The little mender of roads, a common man thrust into the revolution, is one example. Lucie finds that after eighteen years, her father, who she believed was dead, was actually alive. He had been locked away in the Bastille, and was finally released. She traveled to Paris with friend, Jarvis Lorry and was reunited with her father.

They returned to London and she nursed him back to health, and five years later met Charles Darnay and Sidney Carton at a trial for John Bars ad, who was being accused of treason. Both men fell in love with Lucie, but Darnay married her. Eventually the riots in Paris had gotten very bad, and Darnay went to help some friends. Unfortunately, he was arrested because he was secretly a relative of a very powerful French family. Lucie and her family followed Darnay to Paris to save him from execution. They succeed once, but he was arrested again the same night, and they were unable to save him a second time.

Carton, who physically favored Darnay, traded places with him out of love for Lucie and disgust of his own life (Wright 19-20). Carton was beheaded at the guillotine feeling a sense of accomplishment that he thought he would never have felt if he had not traded places with his friend. Dickens' portrayal of the revolution is very accurate, considering he only read one book on it. It was said that he read it 500 times (Kiran-Raw). Many of the violent acts that took place in the revolution were a part of the story, such as the storming of the Bastille.

In fact, most of book three happened during the Reign of Terror (Kiran-Raw). That included the part when Darnay was being sentenced to death, and Carton took his place on the guillotine. In the beginning of the book, Dickens compares the monarchs of both countries, saying they both had a "king with a large jaw, and a queen with a fair face" (Dickens 13). Both monarchs felt that their countries were in good condition, but that was from their point of view. The conditions in Paris were also depicted very accurately. To show how hungry the people were in Paris, Dickens wrote about wine that was spilt in the street.

The people stopped everything they were doing to get a taste to wet their mouths. Mothers dipped rags into the wine and squeezed it into their babies' mouths. In this same scene, children built dams out of mud to trap the wine so they could easily sip it up. People were actually eating the mud just to get some nourishment from the wine (Dickens 36-37). The people of Paris were hungry and the city was becoming extremely unsafe. Dickens used the harsh conditions in Paris to contrast the safety in London.

Paris and London were extreme opposites. While London was secure and prosperous, Paris was violent and poor. When Lucie is reunited with her father, she tells him that they will "go to England to be at peace and rest" (Kiran-Raw). England was a safe haven for those escaping persecution from the violence of the revolution. Lorry complained of the difficulties in communications between the London and Paris branches of Tellsons' Bank, where he worked, brought about by the revolution. When Darnay renounced his family, he referred to England as his refuge.

In fact, Dickens speculates that there was so much security in England, he boasts of there not being a lot of law enforcement there (Dickens 14). Dickens writes that there is a happy and safe future in England awaiting the characters in Carton's thoughts while traveling to his execution, "I see the lives for which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful, prosperous, and happy, in that England which I shall see no more" (Chesterton). In the very first lines even, Dickens contrasts the two cities. He describes it as "the best of times" and "the worst of times" (Dickens 13).

The best referred to London, with the lives of those being safe and happy, while the worst was describing Paris, with all of the riots and unruly citizens. Dickens wrote that France was entertaining herself by causing her people to suffer. He described this entertainment by writing that France would sentence "a youth to have hands cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers, and his body burned alive, because he had not kneeled down in the rain to do honor to a dirty procession of monks which passed within his view" (Dickens 14). Yet, at the end of the story, Carton thinks to himself, "I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from the abyss" (Kiran-Raw). From the actions of the characters in the story, it is hard to see that the revolution would ever be over and that Paris could ever be beautiful.

The novel does not show that any characters could become the "brilliant people" who will make France rise from the "abyss" in the future. Dr. Manette comes the closest, since he had suffered the trials of the revolution, but his future was clearly in England with his daughter and son-in-law (Kiran-Raw). The harsh conditions of Paris in the story were extremely realistic compared to the actual revolution. The people of Paris were starved and worked to death. They had to work more than they should have had just to pay what the government taxed them. However, in the story, all the revolutionaries were more violent than some of the real revolutionaries.

Although there were violent ones, others were also people that had revolutionary ideas and views that could have helped the situation. Those people ended the true revolution. A Tale of Two Cities is undoubtedly a realistic, yet fictional account of the French Revolution. Dickens compares and contrasts the lives and events of both London and Paris in a very accurate manner. His intentions of writing to enlighten people of the history of the revolution were successful, while also extremely entertaining. Although it has been thought that Dickens created the characters out of people he actually was associated with, they fit the story properly.

The story truly digs into the heart of the revolution and the people it affected.