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NOTES ON ISSUE 10: GLOSSARY
PART 2 OF 4
…the men sternly calling out to have
him killed with grass in his mouth. Once, he went aloft, and the rope
broke, and they caught him shrieking; then, the rope was merciful and
held him, and his head was soon upon a pike, with grass enough in the
mouth for all Saint Antoine to dance at the sight of.
Dickens’ account of Foulon’s lynching follows Carlyle’s in The
French Revolution:
We are but at the 22nd of the
month [of July, 1789], hardly above a week since the Bastille fell,
when it suddenly appears that old Foulon is alive; nay, that he is
here, in early morning, in the streets of Paris: the extortioner, the
plotter, who would make the people eat grass, and was a liar from the
beginning! – It is even so. The deceptive “sumptuous funeral” (of some
domestic that died); the hiding-place at Vitry towards Fontainebleau,
have not availed that wretched old man. Some living domestic or
dependant, for none loves Foulon, has betrayed him to the Village.
Merciless boors of Vitry unearth him; pounce on him, like hell-hounds:
Westward, old Infamy; to Paris, to be judged at the
Hôtel-de-Ville! His old head, which seventy-four years have
bleached, is bare;
they have tied an emblematic bundle of grass on his back; a garland of
nettles and thistles is round his neck: in this manner, led with ropes;
goaded on with curses and menaces, must he, with his old limbs, sprawl
forward; the pitiablest, most unpitied of all old men.
Sooty Saint-Antoine, and every street, musters its crowds as he passes;
– the Hall of the Hôtel-de-Ville, the Place de Grève
itself, will scarcely hold his escort and him. Foulon must not only be
judged righteously, but judged there where he stands, without any
delay…. With wild yells, Sansculottism clutches him, in its hundred
hands: he is whirled across the Place de Grève, to the “Lanterne,”
Lamp-iron which there is at the corner of the Rue de la Vannerie;
pleading bitterly for his life, – to the deaf winds. Only with the
third rope (for two ropes broke, and the quavering voice still pleaded)
can he be so much as got hanged! His Body is dragged through the
streets; his Head goes aloft on a pike, the mouth filled with grass:
amid sounds as of Tophet, from a grass-eating people. (173-4)
…on hearing when the day closed
in that the son-in-law of the dispatched, another of the people’s
enemies and insulters, was coming to Paris under a guard five hundred
strong, in cavalry alone. Saint Antoine wrote his crimes on flaring
sheets of paper, seized him – would have torn him out of the breast of
an army to bear Foulon company – set his head and heart on pikes, and
carried the three spoils of the day, in Wolf-procession through the
streets.
Dickens’ description of Foulon’s son-in-law’s death follows, again,
Carlyle’s description in The French Revolution. Foulon’s
son-in-law was Louis-Bénigne-François de Bertier de
Sauvigny (1737-89) (Sanders 123):
To
add to the horror …, word comes that Berthier has also been arrested;
that he is on his way hither from Compiègne. Berthier, Intendant
(say Tax-levier) of Paris; sycophant and tyrant; forestaller
of Corn; contriver of Camps against the people; – accused of many
things: is he not Foulon’s son-in-law; and, in that one point, guilty
of all? In these hours too, when Sansculottism has its blood up! The
shuddering Municipals send one of their number to escort him, with
mounted National Guards.
At the fall of day, the wretched Berthier, still wearing a face of
courage, arrives at the Barrier; in an open carriage; with the
Municipal beside him; five hundred horsemen with drawn sabers; unarmed
footmen enough: not without noise! Placards go brandished round him;
bearing legibly his indictment, as Sansculottism, with unlegal brevity,
“in huge letters,” draws it up. Paris is come forth to meet him: with
hand-clappings, with windows flung up; with dances, triumph-songs, as
of the Furies. Lastly, the Head of Foulon; this also meets him on a
pike. Well might his “look become glazed,” and sense fail him, at such
sight! – Nevertheless, be the man’s conscience what it may, his nerves
are of iron. At the Hôtel-de-Ville, he will answer nothing. He
says he obeyed superior orders; they have his papers; they may judge
and determine: as for himself, not having closed an eye these two
nights, he demands, before all things, to have sleep. Leaden sleep,
thou miserable Berthier! Guards rise with him, in motion toward the
[Prison of the] Abbaye. At the very door of the Hôtel-de-Ville,
they are clutched; flung asunder, as by a vortex of mad arms; Berthier
whirls towards the Lanterne. He snatches a musket; fells and strikes,
defending himself like a mad lion: he is borne down, trampled, hanged,
mangled: his Head too, and even his Heart, flies over the City on a
pike. (Carlyle 175-6)
Strange that Creation, designed
expressly for Monseigneur, should be so soon wrung dry and squeezed
out!… Thus it was, however; and the last drop of blood having been
extracted from the flints, and the last screw of the rack having been
turned so often that its purchase crumbled, and it now turned and
turned with nothing to bite, Monseigneur began to run away from a
phenomenon so low and unaccountable.
“Extracting blood from flints” is a phrase expressive of great
difficulty (since flint is a stone proverbial for its hardness). And
the “rack,” in the sense used here, refers to a
particular mode of torture: According to the OED, the rack
was “[a]n instrument of torture formerly in use, consisting (usually)
of a frame having a roller at each end; the victim was fastened to
these by the wrists and ankles, and had the joints of his limbs
stretched by their rotation.” Were the screw of the rack turned to the
point that “purchase crumbled, and it now turned … with nothing to
bite,” the individual being stretched by the rack would probably have
been stretched to the full extent of the machine – and almost certainly
stretched to death.
Monseigneur’s flight “from a phenomenon so low and unaccountable” is
the “First Emigration” of July, 1789 – the first flight of the
aristocracy after the fall of the Bastille. It is interesting to note
that Dickens’ metonymic use of “Monseigneur” (the use of an individual
title to stand for a whole group of aristocrats) follows, to some
extent, Carlyle’s figures of speech in The French Revolution.
Carlyle describes the First Emigration as follows:
Seeing
which course of things, Messeigneurs [plural of “Monseigneur”] of the
Court Triumvirate, Messieurs of the dead-born Broglie-Ministry, and
[other] such [prominent political figures under Louis XVI], consider
that their part, also, is clear: to mount and ride. Off, ye too-royal
Broglies, Polignacs and Princes of the Blood; off while it is yet time!
Did not the Palais-Royal, in its late nocturnal “violent motions,” set
a specific price (place of payment not mentioned) on each of your
heads? – With precautions, with the aid of pieces of cannon and
regiments that can be depended on, Messeigneurs, between the 16th night
and the 17th morning [of July], get to their several roads. Not without
risk! Prince Condé has (or seems to have) “men galloping at full
speed”: with a view, it is thought, to fling him into the river Oise,
at Pont-Sainte-Mayence. The Polignacs travel disguised; friends, not
servants, on their coach-box. Broglie has his own difficulties at
Versailles, runs his own risks at Metz and Verdun; does nevertheless
get safe to Luxemburg, and there rests.
This is what they call the First Emigration; determined on, as appears,
in full Court-conclave; his Majesty assisting; prompt he, for his share
of it, to follow any counsel whatsoever. “Three Sons of France, and
four Princes of the blood of Saint Louis,” says Weber, “could not more
effectually humble the Burghers of Paris than by appearing to withdraw
in fear of their life.” Alas, the Burghers of Paris bear it with
unexpected stoicism! (170-1)
As it advanced, the mender of
roads would discern without surprise, that it was a shaggy-haired man,
of almost barbarian aspect, tall, in wooden shoes that were clumsy even
to the eyes of a mender of roads, grim, rough, swart, steeped in the
mud and dust of many highways, dank with the marshy moisture of many
low grounds, sprinkled with the thorns and leaves and moss of many
byways through woods.
The “shaggy-haired man, of almost barbarian aspect” whom the
unsurprised mender of roads sees approaching is an agent of destruction
in the “Great Fear.” This “Fear” refers to the period between July 20
and August 6, 1789, during which – after the fall of the Bastille – a
number of châteaus were burned down (Maxwell 465). Dickens
follows Carlyle’s
account of this period, in which the destruction of aristocratic
property is largely attributed to the accumulated rage of the oppressed
common people. As Carlyle puts it at one point,
For
long years and generations it lasted; but the time came. Featherbrain,
whom no reasoning and no pleading could touch, the glare of the
firebrand had to illuminate: there remained but that method. Consider
it, look at it! The widow is gathering nettles for her children’s
dinner; a perfumed Seigneur, delicately lounging in the Oeil-de-Boeuf,
has an alchemy whereby he will extract from her the third nettle, and
name it Rent and Law: such an arrangement must end. Ought it not? But,
O most fearful is such an ending! (193)
In following Carlyle, however, Dickens
gives – as Richard Maxwell points out
in his edition of A Tale of Two Cities – a rather simplified
version of events. The Great
Fear was not so much a systematic revolt of the people against a
tradition of feudal oppression as the result of an unusually
combustible social atmosphere during the early days of the
Revolution: Some among the common people began to suspect the
aristocracy of plotting to overturn the reforms of the Revolution,
while some among the aristocracy began to suspect commoners of plotting
to destroy
aristocratic property. This state of mutual distrust led to the
destruction of several châteaus, but not
– as Dickens and Carlyle seem to suggest – through an upsurge of
systematic
destruction. As Maxwell
summarizes events, “In one case, peasants who gathered and armed
themselves against the anticipated threat [that aristocrats intended
attacks on small property-holders] took to looting and destroying the
local château; in many others the same result came about more
directly, châteaux sometimes being burned in the ‘king’s’ name.
Such acts helped to generate a widespread and self-reinforcing
paranoia” (465).
Whatever its historical inadequacies, however, Dickens’ representation
of the Great Fear accurately follows Carlyle’s, and is thematically
consistent with his general representation of the French Revolution in A
Tale of Two Cities (a representation in which the Revolution
results from the accumulated injustices of the ancien régime
against millions of commoners who, finally starved and taxed beyond
endurance, are driven to revolt). Dickens’ “shaggy-haired man, of
almost barbarian aspect” follows Carlyle’s description of a “flood of
savages” in the Fear:
Lank-haired
haggard faces; shapes rawboned, in high sabots; in woolen jupes, with
leather girdles studded with copper-nails! They rocked from foot to
foot, and beat time with their elbows too, as the quarrel and battle,
which was not long in beginning, went on; shouting fiercely; the lank
faces distorted into the similitude of a cruel laugh. For they were
darkened and hardened; long had they been the prey of excise-men and
tax-men; of “clerks with the cold spurt of their pen”…. Dull Drudgery,
driven on, by clerks with the cold dastard spurt of their pen, has been
driven – into a Communion of Drudges! For now, moreover, there have
come the strangest confused tidings; by Paris Journals with their paper
wings; or still more portentous, where no Journals are, by rumour and
conjecture: Oppression not
inevitable; a Bastille prostrate, and the
Constitution fast getting ready! Which Constitution, if it be something
and not nothing, what can it be but bread to eat?…
Fair prophecies are spoken, but they are not fulfilled. There have been
Notables, Assemblages, turnings out and comings in…. [Y]et still bread
comes not. The harvest is reaped and garnered; yet still we have no
bread. Urged by despair and by hope, what can Drudgery do, but rise, as
predicted, and produce the General Overturn?
Fancy, then, some Five full-grown Millions of such gaunt figures, with
their haggard faces (figures
hâves); in woolen jupes, with copper-studded leather
girths, and high sabots, – starting up to ask, as in forest-roarings,
their washed Upper-Classes, after long unreviewed centuries, virtually
this question: How have ye treated us; how have ye taught us, fed us,
and led us, while we toiled for you? The answer can be read in flames,
over the nightly summer-sky….
Seventy-two Châteaus have flamed aloft in the Mâconnais and
Beaujolais alone: this seems the centre of the conflagration; but it
has spread over Dauphiné, Alsace, the Lyonnais; the whole
South-East is in a blaze. All over the North, from Rouen to Metz,
disorder is abroad: smugglers of salt [violators of the salt-tax, the
“gabelle”] go openly in armed bands: the barriers of towns are burnt;
toll-gatherers, tax-gatherers, official persons put to flight. “It was
thought,” says Young, “the people, from hunger, would revolt”; and we
see
they have done it. Desperate Lackalls, long prowling aimless, now
finding hope in desperation itself, everywhere form a nucleus. They
ring the Church-bell by way of tocsin: and the Parish turns out to the
work. Ferocity, atrocity; hunger and revenge: such work as we can
imagine. (191-2)
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