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FRENCH CROSSINGS: I. TALES OF TWO CITIES

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 November 2010

Colin Jones
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Abstract

Under the general title, ‘French Crossings’, the presidential addresses over the next four years will explore intersections and relationships between cultures, periods, disciplines, approaches, historiographies and problems, all within the general field of early modern and modern French history. ‘Tales of Two Cities’ takes as its approach both comparative history and l'histoire croisée. It compares and contrasts the very differing cultural impact on each side of the Channel of one of the most influential British novels about Franco-British political culture, namely, Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities (1859). The novel has been conventionally hailed in England, especially from the end of the nineteenth century, as a parable unfavourably contrasting France's revolutionary tradition with the allegedly more humane political evolutionism of England. In France, the novel has been largely ignored or else viewed as a Burkean rant. Yet Dickens's personal attitudes towards France and in particular Paris suggests a more ambiguous and complicated history. For Dickens, modern Paris, as regenerated under Haussmann, was a brilliant success story against which he contrasted both Paris in the 1790s and the social and political circumstances he claimed to detect within English metropolitan culture in the recent past and present. Dickens views the radical and disinherited workers’ suburb of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine less, it is suggested, as quintessentially French than as quintessentially plebeian, and the prospect of a slide into revolutionary politics as a lurking threat within England as well as France.

Type
Presidential Address
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 20 , December 2010 , pp. 1 - 26
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 2010

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References

1 Evans, Richard J., Cosmopolitan Islanders. British Historians and the European Continent (Cambridge, 2009), 12–13, 16CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The statistics are not very reliable, but probably do give rough approximations.

2 For a full list, see the website of the Society, http://www.royalhistoricalsociety.org (10 Jan. 2010).

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4 Michael Slater's definitional biography, Charles Dickens (2009), supersedes earlier lives. This paper also draws heavily upon Dickens's correspondence and journalism, for which I have used the authoritative The British Academy Pilgrim Edition of the Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Graham Storey et al. (12 vols., Oxford, 1965–2002), and The Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens’ Journalism, ed. Michael Slater and John Drew (4 vols., 1994–2000). For the novel, I have used the Penguin Classics edition, ed. Richard Maxwell (new edn, London, 2003). To lighten the footnotes I will henceforth bracket references to these in the text as follows: Letters; Journalism; and ATOTC, indicating volume and page numbers.

5 By chance, the lecture on which this paper is based was delivered on 27 November 2009, making it 150 years plus a day after 26 November 1859. 27 November 2009 was 150 years to the day when English readers awoke to discover that Sydney Carton had had his head cut off.

6 Cited in Slater, Charles Dickens, 618.

7 See e.g. Hancock, Claire, Paris et Londres au XIXe siècle: représentations dans les guides et récits de voyage (Paris, 2003), esp. 167ffGoogle Scholar; Dever, C., ‘“An Occult and Immoral Tyranny”: The Novel, the Police and the Agent Provocateur’, in The Literary Channel: The International Invention of the Novel, ed. Dever, C. and Cohen, M. (Princeton, 2002), 225–50, esp. 229ffGoogle Scholar.

8 Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations, special issue, ‘Memory and Counter-Memory’, 26 (1989), 7–24. Nora was introducing to an Anglophone audience a publishing project later conveniently issued in three volumes as Les lieux de mémoire (Paris, 1997). Parts have been translated into English and the project has spawned a veritable exegetical tradition – to which I hope to return in a future address.

9 George Orwell, ‘Charles Dickens’, in idem, Inside the Whale and Other Essays (1940), 1–85, at 25.

10 Cobb, Richard, A Second Identity: Essays on France and French History (Oxford, 1969)Google Scholar, esp. the Introduction, ‘Experience of an Anglo-French Historian’, 1–50. For more on Cobb, Colin Lucas, ‘Richard Charles Cobb’, in New Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; and my essay, ‘Olwen Hufton's “Poor”, Richard Cobb's “People” and the Notions of the Longue Durée in French Revolutionary Historiography’, in The Art of Survival: Gender and History in Europe, 1450–2000, ed. Ruth Harris and Lyndal Roper, Past and Present Supplement 1 (Oxford, 2006), 178–203.

11 Febvre, Lucien, Le problème de l'incroyance au XVIe siècle. La religion de Rabelais (Paris, 1947 edn)Google Scholar, 6: ‘le péché des péchés – le péché entre tous irrémissible’.

12 Cobb, A Second Identity, 50. Cobb prided himself as being a latter-day sans-culotte (the subject of his studies), and he shared with them a taste for rhetorical violence and exaggeration, irreverently nonconformist behaviour and wild drinking.

13 Evans, Cosmopolitan Islanders, 153 (and more generally 142–53).

14 Some of these ideas are explored in Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities and the French Revolution, ed. Colin Jones, Josephine McDonagh and Jon Mee (Basingstoke, 2009), ‘Introduction’, 1–23.

15 In discussing the play and its resonance, I draw heavily on Joss Marsh's essay, ‘Mimi and the Matinée Idol: Martin-Harvey, Sydney Carton and the Staging of A Tale of Two Cities’, in Charles Dickens and the French Revolution, ed. Jones et al., 126–45. Further details are in The Autobiography of Sir John Martin-Harvey (1933); Butler, Nicholas, John Martin-Harvey: Biography of an Actor-Manager (Colchester, 1997)Google Scholar; and H. Philip Bolton, Dickens Dramatized (1987).

16 Autobiography, 483; Butler, John Martin-Harvey, 106.

17 For Edwardian masculinity generally, see Tosh, John, Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Harlow, 2005)Google Scholar.

18 Though Martin-Harvey claimed to have played 5,000 performances, his biographer Nicholas Butler has documented 2,475 (5). For Dublin, cf. Joyce, James, Ulysses (9th reimpression, London, 1960), 911Google Scholar.

19 Cited in Marsh, ‘Mimi and the Matinée Idol’, 142 n. 3. For other studies on Dickens on film, see Judith Buchanan and Alex Newhouse, ‘Sanguine Mirages, Cinematic Dreams: Things Seen and Things Imagined in the 1917 Fox Feature Film A Tale of Two Cities’, and Charles Barr, ‘Two Cities, Two Films’, both in Charles Dickens and the French Revolution, ed. Jones et al., 146–65, 166–87, and, more generally, Jason W. Stevens, ‘Insurrection and Depression-Era Politics in Selznick's A Tale of Two Cities (1935)’, Literature Film Quarterly (2006), 176–94; and Pascal Dupuy, ‘La diffusion des stéréotypes révolutionnaires dans la littérature et le cinéma anglo-saxons, 1789–1989’, Annales historiques de la Révolution française (1966), 511–28.

20 For reception details, see also Letters, iii, 399, 502n, vii, 39–40, viii, 726–7.

21 Charles Dickens. The Public Readings, ed. Philip Collins (Oxford, 1975). For the abbreviated version of ATOTC (which was never in fact performed), see Slater, Michael, ‘“The Bastille Prisoner”: A Reading Dickens Never Gave’, Études anglaises, 23 (1970), 190–6Google Scholar.

22 See the excellent, if now dated, article, Annie Sadrin, ‘Traductions et adaptations françaises de A Tale of Two Cities’, in Charles Dickens et la France: Colloque international de Boulogne-sur-Mer, 3 juin 1978, ed. Sylvère Monod (Lille, 1979), 77–91. Cf., extending and updating this article, Jones et al., ‘Introduction’, esp. pp 7–8.

23 Symptomatically, the first paragraph was retained virtually verbatim even in the much scaled-down reading version.

24 It has been convincingly argued that Dickens was also moved in this regard by sympathy for English settlers caught up in the 1857 Indian Mutiny. Moore, Grace, Dickens and Empire: Discourses of Class, Race and Colonialism in the World of Charles Dickens (Aldershot, 2004)Google Scholar. Thanks to Margot Finn on this point.

25 Hippolyte Taine, Histoire de la littérature anglaise, started to be published in 1863, being added to and going into numerous later editions. I have consulted the 1881 edition, with 5 volumes. Also on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century reception in France, see Delattre, Floris, Dickens et la France: étude d'une interaction littéraire anglo-française (Paris, 1927)Google Scholar, and, more generally, Dickens, Europe and the New Worlds, ed. Annie Sadrin (Basingstoke, 1999).

26 Taine, Hippolyte, Les origines de la France contemporaine (Paris, 1876–94)Google Scholar. The volumes concerning the Ancien Régime (vol. I) and the Revolution (vols. II–IV) appeared in 1876, 1878 and 1885. For Taine, Le Bon and other analysts of crowd behaviour in this period, see Barrows, Susanna, Distorting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in Late Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven, 1981)Google Scholar.

27 Jeanneney, Jean-Noel, Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge: A View from Europe (Chicago, 2007)Google Scholar; and esp. idem, ‘Quand Google défie l'Europe’, Le Monde, 24 Jan. 2005, 13.

28 Dickens on France: Fiction, Journalism and Travel Writing, ed. John Edmondson (Oxford, 2006), vii. The number was almost certainly higher because of secret jaunts to the city with his mistress, Ellen Terman. Cf. Slater, Charles Dickens, 531.

29 Henry Fielding Dickens, cited in Dickens on France, ed. Edmondson, vii.

30 Letters, vii, 60: as cited in Slater, Charles Dickens, 356.

31 The flâneur has become a major focus of nineteenth-century scholarship since the rediscovery several decades ago of the work of Walter Benjamin. See in particular his The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA, 1999). See too Clark, T. J., The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers (Princeton, 1984)Google Scholar, and Schwartz, Vanessa, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin de Siècle Paris (Berkeley, 1998)Google Scholar. The gender politics of the flâneur are discussed in Nead, Lynda, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (New Haven, 2000)Google Scholar. On Dickens and the flâneur, see M. Hollington, ‘Dickens, Household Words and the Paris Boulevards’, in Dickens, Europe and the New Worlds, ed. Sadrin, 22–33.

32 For an overview of Haussmannisation, see Higonnet, Patrice, Paris, Capital of the World (Cambridge, MA, 2002)Google Scholar, and Colin Jones, Paris: Biography of a City (2004), esp. ch. 9.

33 The quotation comes from Baudelaire's poem, ‘Le Cygne’ (‘The Swan’) from Les fleurs du mal.

34 A good overview of how this the revolutionary tradition played out in French culture is provided by Ferguson, Priscilla Parkhurst, Paris as Revolution: Writing the Nineteenth-Century City (Berkeley, 1994)Google Scholar.

35 The personalisation of the Faubourg evident earlier (e.g. ATOTC, 191–4, 228–35) becomes mesmerically insistent from 318 until the end of the novel. Balzac's novel was published in 1835.

36 Hancock, Paris et Londres au XIXe siècle, esp. 57ff.

37 Gascar, Pierre, Le boulevard du crime (Paris, 1980)Google Scholar. This theatre district was much reduced by Haussmannisation from the 1860s in fact.

38 See Lefebvre, Henri, The Production of Space, trans. Nicholson-Smith, Donald (Oxford, 1991)Google Scholar.

39 Marxists Internet Archive: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1846/letters/46_09_16.htm (consulted 7 Jan. 2010). For Dickens, ct., for example, the correspondence at Letters, v, 15, where he affects to know nothing of what was taking place within Paris except at the theatre.

40 Slater, Charles Dickens, 473.

41 Mercier, Louis-Sébastien, Tableau de Paris (12 vols., Amsterdam, 1788; Slatkine reprint, Geneva, 1970)Google Scholar, vi, 26. There is an excellent modern edition edited by Jean-Claude Bonnet (Paris, 1994). For Dickens's sources more generally, see esp. Andrew Sanders, Companion to A Tale of Two Cities (1988); and ATOTC, Appendix 3.

42 See Sanders and ATOTC, as cited in the previous note. Mercier's depiction of the faubourgs is gloomy, but he does not highlight Saint-Antoine, which was far from being the most disinherited neighbourhood in 1789. In this respect, see Thomas Stammers, ‘The Faubourg Saint-Antoine and the French Revolution of 1789’ (BA dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2004).

43 Journalism, ix, 88. See esp Vanessa Schwartz, ‘Public Visits to the Morgue on the Thomas Cook Itinerary’, in idem, Spectacular Realities, 45–88. (For comparisons with shopping, see 59.)

44 In the notes of ATOTC, Richard Maxwell states that originally Dickens placed Darnay in the prison in the Luxembourg palace, only later relocating him to La Force, where particularly gruesome massacres took place in September 1792 (ATOTC, 476). Compelling also is the fact that unlike the Luxembourg, La Force is on the very edge of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. Prisoners sentenced to death by the Revolutionary Tribunal were transferred to the Conciergerie prison on the Ile de la Cité.

45 Pam Pilbeam, Madame Tussaud and the History of Waxworks (2003).

46 This is discussed in Keith Baker, ‘A Genealogy of Dr Manette’, in Charles Dickens and the French Revolution, ed. Jones et al., 64–74.

47 See below, pp. 1–39. Hutter, A. D., ‘The Novelist as Resurrectionist’, Dickens Studies Annual, 12 (1983), 23Google Scholar. According to anecdote, the young Dickens, when asked to provide a calling-card, wrote out ‘CHARLES DICKENS. Resurrectionist. In search of a subject’. Ibid., 32n.

48 Sadrin, Annie, Dickens ou le roman-théâtre (Paris, 1992), esp. 198–9Google Scholar.

49 Kaplan, F., ed., Charles Dickens's Book of Memoranda (New York, 1981), 1855, no. 21 (no pagination)Google Scholar; Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination. Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess (1876), is the classic study.

50 Labrousse, François and de Mallian, Julien, La Révolution française (Paris, 1847)Google Scholar. Labrousse's numerous other dramas included La Bastille (1837). This production was the last to be played at the Cirque Olympe with both a stage and a ring – thereafter the ring was removed and additional seating installed. This must have made the production particularly impressive. A. H. Saxon, Enter Foot and Horse. A History of the Hippodrama in England and France (1968), 131. Franconi was a favourite of Dickens: see Letters, e.g. vi, 117, vii, 541, viii, 95. For this world more generally, see Caroline Hodack, ‘Du théâtre équestre au cirque: commercialisation des loisirs et théâtralisation de l'histoire en France et en Angleterre, c. 1760–c.1860’ (doctoral thesis, École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 2004).

51 The metaphorical transmutation of wine into blood in the famous opening scene in the novel is recalled by Dickens's excited record of a melodrama in which the famous Lemaître, playing a murderer, was transfixed by the thought that his glass of wine contained blood (Letters, VIII, 536).

52 Slater, Charles Dickens, 28; Andrews, M., Charles Dickens and his Performing Selves (Oxford, 2006), 117Google Scholar; Bodenheimer, R., Knowing Dickens (Ithaca, NY, 2007), 178ffGoogle Scholar; and generally Jeremy Tambling, Going Astray. Dickens and London (2009).

53 Slater, Charles Dickens, 400.

54 ‘Paris Improved’, Household Words, Nov. 1855, 361.

55 Cited in Slater, Charles Dickens, 55.

56 Parallèle de Paris et de Londres. Un inédit de Louis-Sébastien Mercier, ed. Claude Bruneteau and Bernard Cottret (Paris, 1982), 10–12.

57 This was especially the case in that at this time Dickens was highly suspicious of Napoleon III's aggressive foreign policy. See Parry, J. P., ‘The Impact of Napoleon III on British Politics, 1851–80’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 11 (2001), 147–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

58 This was highlighted for me by Peter Mandler.