The French Revolution

The Ancien Régime

Before 1789, France was governed by what later generations called the Ancien Régime — an absolute monarchy in which the king ruled by divine right and society was rigidly divided into three estates: the First Estate (the clergy), the Second Estate (the nobility), and the Third Estate (everyone else — roughly 98% of the population). The First and Second Estates owned most of the land, paid almost no taxes, and held virtually all political power. The Third Estate — peasants, artisans, merchants, the urban poor, the rising bourgeoisie — bore the entire tax burden while having no political voice.

By the 1780s, the system was collapsing. Decades of war — most recently the French intervention in the American Revolution — had bankrupted the treasury. Bad harvests in 1787 and 1788 caused bread prices to skyrocket; in Paris the urban poor were spending up to 80% of their income on bread alone. Enlightenment ideas — the writings of Rousseau, Voltaire, Montesquieu — had spread through the educated classes, challenging the legitimacy of absolute monarchy and aristocratic privilege. The French state was broke, the people were hungry, and the intellectual framework of the old order was crumbling. As Dickens wrote: “It is likely enough that, rooted in the woods of France and Norway, there were growing trees, when that sufferer was put to death, already marked by the Woodman, Fate, to come down and be sawn into boards to make a certain movable framework with a sack and a knife in it, terrible in history.”

1789: The Revolution Begins

In May 1789, Louis XVI, desperate for revenue, convened the Estates-General — the representative assembly that had not met since 1614. It was supposed to vote on tax reform. It ignited a revolution instead. The Third Estate, representing the vast majority of the population, broke away from the other two estates, declared itself the National Assembly, and took the Tennis Court Oath (June 20), vowing not to disperse until France had a constitution.

On July 14, 1789, the people of Paris stormed the Bastille — a medieval fortress-prison that symbolized royal tyranny. It held only seven prisoners at the time, but its capture was a symbolic blow against the monarchy itself. The revolution spread across France. In the countryside, peasant revolts — known as the Great Fear — swept through the provinces, as rumors of aristocratic plots to hoard grain and massacre peasants triggered a wave of attacks on châteaux. In August, the National Assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, proclaiming that “men are born and remain free and equal in rights.”

1792–1793: The Republic and the Terror

The revolution radicalized dramatically after 1791. In April 1792, revolutionary France declared war on Austria and Prussia — it would be at war, almost continuously, for the next twenty-three years. In August 1792, the monarchy was overthrown. The royal family was imprisoned. In September, panicked by the advance of Prussian armies, Parisian mobs broke into the prisons and massacred over a thousand prisoners — the September Massacres, which Dickens portrays in the novel through the Carmagnole and the grinding of the grindstone at Tellsons Bank's Paris branch. The French Republic was proclaimed on September 22.

On January 21, 1793, Louis XVI was guillotined. Marie Antoinette followed him on October 16. The Terror — the systematic use of revolutionary justice against internal enemies — began in earnest. The Committee of Public Safety, dominated by Maximilien Robespierre, ruled France. The Law of Suspects (September 1793) gave revolutionary tribunals the power to execute anyone deemed insufficiently revolutionary. Approaching 17,000 people were officially guillotined during the Terror, with tens of thousands more killed in extra-judicial reprisals across the country. As Dickens shows, the Terror consumed not only aristocrats and priests but also fellow revolutionaries — Danton, Desmoulins, and eventually Robespierre himself, who was executed on July 27, 1794 (9 Thermidor).

Dickens's Portrayal of the Revolution

The novel concentrates on the peak of the Terror — roughly September 1792 through early 1794. Dickens's portrayal is remarkable for its ambivalence. On the one hand, the novel is absolutely clear that the aristocracy is guilty — the Marquis St. Evrémonde's casual murder of a child, the unjust imprisonment of Dr. Manette, the grinding, systematic oppression of the poor. The revolution is not an inexplicable outbreak of madness; it is the result of centuries of suffering. As Dickens wrote, the guillotine was forged “with the axes taken from the scaffold of the Bastille.”

On the other hand, the novel is equally clear that the revolution is not redemptive. The violence spirals out of control. The revolutionaries become as monstrous as the aristocrats they overthrew. Madame Defarge — the victim of aristocratic violence — becomes vengeance incarnate, a figure of terrifying inhumanity. The mob is a character in the novel, and Dickens renders it as a force of nature: the dancing Carmagnole, the street running with wine that turns to blood, the ceaseless knitting of the death register. The revolution does not bring justice. It brings only more death.