The Guillotine or the Cross
Not long ago, a group of activists gathered in front of Jeff Bezos’ Washington D.C. home. In a scene they intentionally lifted from the early nineteenth century, these protesters of the Amazon founder had gathered to construct a device that would symbolize their opposition to his wealth: a nearly full-sized guillotine. Now, twentieth-century conservatives of the Burkean stripe frequently warned of the incipient Jacobinism of progressive politics, but surely they thought of “Jacobin” as a kind of metaphor, a florid way of gesturing at a continuing problem. Still, here we are in 2020, and the guillotine made for Jeff Bezos is a physical reality, or at least was for a short time. In some sense, the thing is still a metaphor—surely its builders saw it as a symbol, more than anything else—but the fact is that we are one shocking step closer to the return of the Terror than we were before.
The question is what to make of it. Historically based symbolic actions like these, of their very nature, cry out for reflective interpretation. The guillotiners at Bezos’ house may have wanted to connect their protest to the grand ideals of La Révolution Française: liberty, equality, and fraternity. But it seems clear that the even larger point they wished to make was about the deep structural cause of the revolution in that day and in this: an ossified class-and-wealth divide running down the center of an apparently healthy modern culture. Acknowledged by both right and left today, the divide persists despite all arguments against it. Perhaps the time has come, suggests the Jacobin, for a clearer, more embodied message. It may be that only violence will bring about the changes we need.
Perhaps, but before following our imaginations deeper into conflict, it is worth asking whether we are seeing the situation clearly. Could we do better at imagining the problem? The last two centuries are rich with artistic reflections on the French Revolution, but the greatest of them is Charles Dickens’ 1859 novel, A Tale of Two Cities. A fair reading of that work will acknowledge the two poles of its judgment on the Revolution: on the one hand, it makes clear the radical injustice of the ancien régime and the suffering of the general population during that time; on the other hand, it leaves us with no doubt about the dehumanizing failure of the Revolution’s radical phase, and especially the guillotine. Dickens’ Tale thus leads us to care deeply about the structural wrongs and imbalances of a wealthy society, while nevertheless cautioning against violent response. There is, he suggests, a better way forward.
Some of the novel’s most famous scenes establish the painful class divide of late eighteenth-century France, creating the palpable sense that something must give: this cannot go on much longer. In brilliant satirical chapters, Dickens sketches the otherworldly, Rococo luxury of the monseigneurs and their assembled, aristocratic hangers-on. A lord’s morning hot chocolate is delivered with liturgical stateliness, amidst a crowd of well-starched sycophants, all blithely unconcerned with the world outside their mansion houses. That outside world is established unforgettably in the famous scene outside a wine merchant’s shop. A barrel falls upon the cobbles, splitting open, and the whole impoverished neighborhood hurries over:
Some men kneeled down, made scoops of their two hands joined, and sipped, or tried to help women, who bent over their shoulders, to sip, before the wine had all run out between their fingers. Others, men and women, dipped in the puddles with little mugs of mutilated earthenware, or even with handkerchiefs from women’s heads, which were squeezed dry into infants’ mouths; others made small mud-embankments, to stem the wine as it ran; others, directed by lookers-on up at high windows, darted here and there, to cut off little streams of wine that started away in new directions; others devoted themselves to the sodden and lee-dyed pieces of the cask, licking, and even champing the moister wine-rotted fragments with eager relish.
The blood-red wine, Dickens darkly suggests, is not only indicative of present need, but prophetic of future violence. One day soon, these urban poor will rise up, and we readers will feel it only right that they do so.
Readers, however, will find the actual mode of their uprising troubling. The storming of the Bastille is cathartic, and seems just—we see prisoners there, kept for years at the careless whim of the aristocracy—but Dickens invests the ensuing Terror and its guillotine with a hideous air of primal religious violence. Memorably, his depiction blends the bleakest humor with a kind of theological critique: “the sharp female called La Guillotine,” he tells us,
was the popular theme for jests; it was the best cure for headache, it infallibly prevented the hair from turning grey, it imparted a peculiar delicacy to the complexion, it was the National Razor which shaved close: who kissed La Guillotine, looked through the little window and sneezed into the sack. It was the sign of the regeneration of the human race. It superseded the Cross. Models of it were worn on breasts from which the Cross was discarded, and it was bowed down to and believed in where the Cross was denied.
De Agostini Picture Library
The point is that one model of propitiation, the generous self-gift of Christ on the cross, has been replaced by another, the vindictive slaughter of any who are taken to be enemies of the Revolution. The latter mode just feels better. After all France has suffered at the hands of the old order, mercy seems unacceptable, even outrageous, giving no satisfaction. Madame Defarge, whose family has born so many wrongs, will brook no forgiveness: “tell Wind and Fire where to stop,” she says, “but don’t tell me.” Even as we feel the just foundations of her anger, Madame Defarge’s regime—the regime of La Guillotine—Dickens portrays as a ghastly overreach. Suffering for suffering, violence for violence: this cannot be the solution to the problem.
By contrast, the novel also bodies forth a different possibility in the lives of several characters, most notably Sydney Carton. After years of unhappiness and dissolute waste, he is moved by the sacrifices of others to offer his own life for that of a friend, trading places with the condemned Charles Darnay and going to the guillotine. Murmuring the gospel words, “I am the Resurrection and the life . . . . whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die,” Carton transforms the guillotine into another cross, exchanging bilious resentment for loving mercy. The startling beauty of his act bears witness to another way, and the only way to escape the ceaseless round of violence and death. His self-donation on behalf of others explodes the system of cruel, tribal blood-letting from within. As right as the way of the guillotine may feel on its own terms, one cannot now unsee Sydney Carton’s sacrifice: a different logic of response, transcendent in its origins, stands forth in magnificent clarity.
Thus, Dickens’ Tale presents life as a drama of response. In his world, the fundamental question is how to answer the good, and especially the evil, of life. Two basic options emerge: either the path of retribution, which insists on an ethic of repayment, or the path of the gift, which embraces the primordial fact of gratuity. These are the ways, respectively, of Madame Defarge and Sydney Carton. If the former is right, then every evil (as well as every good) must be repaid; history is a balance sheet, or “register,” as Madame would say, and the work of reconciling its sums is never through. The goal we aim at is an expert balancing of the scales of justice, with all debts paid, but the palpable impossibility of that aim results in an inevitable, idling bitterness. There will always be one more wrong to redress, and the violence must ever continue. Indeed, on this account—still followed by would-be guillotiners today—violence is the fundamental reality of existence.
On the other hand, the way of the gift presumes that goodness is more basic than evil. Free and gratuitous, goodness is the gift we do not deserve, and cannot repay. We can only appreciate it, and love it for what it is despite ourselves. On this view, evil too must escape repayment, for the only adequate response to suffering turns out be giving better than one gets. Injustice finds no terminus save in mercy, for only unmerited compassion can draw good out of evil, creating goodness where there was none before. Sydney Carton’s generous act does what the guillotine by itself could never do: participate in just such a re-creation of the world. Here is the childishly simple truth on which Dickens has founded his Tale, a truth that still resonates today, for those who have ears to hear. It is still the best of times, still the worst of times, but there is no time that cannot be redeemed by love.
Dwight Lindley is an associate professor of English at Hillsdale College, where he teaches classes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature. He has published essays on Austen, Newman, George Eliot, Hopkins, Woolf, and literary theory.
Dan Walck Deposition of Christ from the Cross