I finished rereading A Tale of Two Cities last night. (Yes, yes, to those of you keeping track, I just finished Barnaby Rudge and am midway through Bleak House. I love my Dickens! You can’t keep me down!) When last I read it, I was a sophomore in high school, and my impression of certain aspects of the book have changed a great deal since then. At the time, I thought Dickens quite despised the French Revolution. Now, perhaps enlightened through the medium of Barnaby Rudge as to what Dickens describing a mass political movement he despised looks like, I am amazed I saw it in that way. Dickens, keenly sensitive to any injustice or cruelty, felt very strongly that the French people were reacting to the most heinous provocation in an understandable, nay, inevitable manner. He also felt, it is clear, that in the strength of their feeling the human virtues of mercy, compassion and empathy were lost in favor of bloodlust and hatred.

Realizing this has brought my musings back once more to the French Revolution. The Revolution has always fascinated me. As far as I can recall, my two first exposures to it were these: watching Casablanca as a child, and asking my parents what that song was, that everyone sang it together so movingly to the Germans’ discomfiture; and, probably later on, watching the Leslie Howard Scarlet Pimpernel - a story scarcely calculated to arouse sympathy for the Revolutionnaires. But somewhere along the line, in the strains of the Marseillaise or the image of Liberty Leading the People, I was infected with a fascination with the Revolution. I read Simon Schama’s book Citizens in high school, and would love to reread it if I could find it among my effects. All the literature and lessons about the period that were brought to me through French class I lapped up eagerly. I searched persistently for a text of the collected letters and writings of the Desmoulins. I perused the Declaration of the Rights of Man. I embraced both the thrill and the horror of the events.

In truth, I agree with Dickens. The fire of the Revolution was vicious, indiscriminate, and of course culminated in the holocaust of the Terror. But I cannot help but look before the fall, and see the ideals that burned before those flames. To read about the Revolution is to believe that individuals and their emotions matter, that a sum of individual human beings can indeed be far greater than those component entities.

It was the curse of the French Revolution, I feel, and probably the curse of most revolutions, that those expelled from power do not vanish. We lucky little Americans could push the Brits back across the sea - where could the French push their aristos? Into their palaces and castles? (And let them remain intact, and in the hands of those who built them on our backs?) Into foreign courts? (And let them raise armies among their kin and kind?) Into the commonfolk? (And let them scheme at our backs?) No. The terrible logic, and the terrible weight of so much hatred, doomed the Revolution, like so many others, to wallow in blood. It is not only the martyred patriots who water the tree of freedom—and blood spilled in hatred does not raise a healthy tree.