Grand Strategies by Charles Hill

Author:Charles Hill [Hill, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-300-16593-7
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2010-07-02T16:00:00+00:00

This grand awakening soon turns on itself. The people suspect, denounce, condemn, and swiftly execute the supposed enemies of the people—not just aristocrats but others too, until “along the Paris streets, the death carts rumble, hollow and harsh. Six tumbrels carry the day’s wine to La Guillotine. All the devouring and insatiable Monsters imagined since imagination could record itself, are fused in one realization, Guillotine.” Madame Defarge, the calm center of the revolution, sits knitting, the most famous image in A Tale.

The two cities now grow unlike. Dickens counterpoises England and the virtues of the English to the fury of the French. Tellson’s bank branch becomes a refuge for Parisians fleeing execution. The French Revolution threatens to engulf world order; English common sense upholds the civilized system. England is a haven for sanity. Private life can exist in London; in Paris everything is acted out in front of the People, who become a mob.

History records of the French Revolution that the Terror had become a system, the arm of the revolutionary regime. In the spring of 1794 came the Law of 22 Prairial (June 10), which permitted charges to be brought against “counterrevolutionaries” merely on the basis of denunciations. Robespierre presided over the session of 22 Prairial. The number of arrests between 1793 and 1794 reached a half million. Some 16,600 were executed after summary sentencing by a revolutionary court; others were put in prison without trial. The Terror—death by guillotine, or firing squad—continued until March 1794.

A Tale of Two Cities presents a full array of the characteristics of revolution and terrorism in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Spying and surveillance turn families, friends, and communities against their own. History is abolished or declared to begin again; all past governance, as Rousseau said, has been illegitimate—only the revolution is authentic. Violence purifies. As in medieval times, it bears proof of rectitude, or sin. Hobbes is contradicted in his analysis of human nature, as is his proof of the origins of the state, for death is eagerly sought. The present must be sacrificed by “martyrs” for the sake of the future. Beheading takes on a special meaning. The seat of reason is struck down by revolutionary reason, and civilization itself is rejected and destroyed. Religion is banned and condemned. “Sainte Guillotine” replaces the Christian Cross as the focus of veneration.2 The “original sin” of Christian doctrine is replaced by the original sin of membership in a counterrevolutionary class, a secular sin for which no salvation is available. Above all, the individual is enveloped and erased by the collective. The married love of a man and a woman becomes the symbol of all that the revolution abhors as Charles Darnay and Lucie stand before the slaughter machine.

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