Thursday, February 6, 2014

I want several quotations and events which refer to liberty, equality and fraternity and Dickens' view of these events in A Tale of Two Cities.

It is interesting how Dickens expresses his disgust for
both the luxury of the French aristocracy and how they treat the poor in France of the
time, but also his distaste and repugnance for the violent measures that the "patriots"
took in their revolution. One direct reference to the three pillars of the French
Revolution can be found in the first chapter of Book the Third, which describes some of
the changes that have happened in France as a whole after the storming of the Bastille
and other events that transpired afterwards:


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Every town-gate and village taxing-house had its
band of citizen-patriots, with their national muskets in a most explosive state of
readiness, who stopped all comers and goers, cross-questioned them, inspected their
papers, looked for their names in lists of their own, turned them back, or sent them on,
or stopped them and laid them in hold, as their capricious judgement or fancy deemed
best for the dawning Republic One and Indivisible, of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or
Death.



Note here the
adjectives Dickens uses to describe these three aspects of the revolution. The
revolution is based on "capricious judgement" or "fancy" rather than any other more
objective qualities. Most worrying and disturbing, of course, is the way that "Death" is
placed after "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity," suggesting that this is the most
important aspect of the revolution that has occurred.

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