A Tale of Two Cities: Guillotines and Grace
Finding Redemption in the Shadow of a Bloody Revolution
The French Revolution was a bloody disaster. Revolutionaries seized power, murdered the king, and unleashed a mob rule that sent thousands to the guillotine.
It was the first modern dystopia of the West, where man was presumed guilty until proven innocent, and neighbor betrayed neighbor out of fear and malice.
How can you resist such a Reign of Terror? How can you restore order, justice, and grace to a fallen world drunk on vengeance?
Charles Dickens provides the unlikeliest answer to this question in his life’s masterpiece, A Tale of 2 Cities. The novel provides a jarring yet ingenious answer on how to resist dystopias and restore sanity and virtue to a fallen world.
Here’s the wisdom of A Tale of 2 Cities, and what the story teaches you about conquering France’s Reign of Terror.
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Drunk and Disillusioned
A Tale of 2 Cities takes place between two cities — London and Paris. It’s set in the late 18th century, in which London is fairly peaceful, while Paris has become rife with Revolutionary fervor.
The novel has the unlikeliest of heroes, Sydney Carton, who is a drunken, disillusioned English lawyer. He’s intellectually brilliant, but despairs that he wasted his life on fruitless endeavors and empty careerism, with no legacy to leave behind after his death.
Only one thing brings Sydney solace in life — his love for Lucie Manette.
She’s his loving neighbor who bestows him with genuine kindness as if he were a beloved uncle. Sydney loves her, but can’t bear to bring his feelings to light. He merely clings to her memory for solace in his lowest moments of agony.
Nonetheless, Sydney eventually learns that Lucie has fallen into grave danger — her husband Charles has been arrested in France and faces the guillotine.
The news drives Sydney mad as if his own child were sentenced to death. His conscience is twisted with guilt, fear, and a broken heart for Lucie. In a moment of lucid clarity, Sydney summarizes the totality of his life and concludes thus far it’s been a waste.
Finally, he throws caution to the wind and does the unthinkable. He packs his bags and heads for Paris to confront the revolutionary terror himself (warning, spoilers to follow).
Facing the Guillotine
In Paris, no one knows Sydney's plan except for a mutual friend named Barsad.
The two arrive at the Bastille prison and bribe the jailer to arrange a private conversation with Charles.
In the prison cell, Sydney drugs Charles’ food in secret, making him fall asleep. Then he switches clothes with him, and forces Barsad to carry the unconscious Charles out of the jail while Sydney stays behind in his place (it’s explained earlier that the two bear a similar physical resemblance).
By the time Charles wakes up, it’s too late to change Sydney’s fate. The lawyer has taken his place under the guillotine, and dies a martyr’s death to save Charles’ life. The novel ends with Charles and Lucie reuniting and escaping to London, though heartbroken over Sydney’s sacrifice…
So what exactly does this teach us about stopping the Reign of Terror?
Dickens’ solution is as ingenious as it is devastating to swallow.
One might have wished that Sydney fought fire with fire — perhaps hiring mercenaries to storm the prison — but such an ending would deprive the story of its wisdom. Dickens’ jarring claim is not just that Sydney’s sacrifice is noble, but that it’s the greatest and noblest means of resisting a Reign of Terror.
Scholars point out that Sydney is a Christ-like character, and this is not just for dying a hero’s death. The first surprising aspect of Sydney’s sacrifice is that it ironically brings him personal redemption, a fact which he affirms himself:
“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done…”
Ironically, Sydney never found peace until he placed his head under the guillotine. A lifetime of misery and aimless career climbing was renewed with grace the moment he offered up his own life on the chopping block.
Yet still, Sydney’s death was far more than personal redemption. The final question remains, how did his sacrifice combat the French Reign of Terror?
Defeating a Dystopia
To appreciate the full impact of Sydney’s sacrifice, we have to first accept a difficult truth:
No individual can defeat authoritarian wrath through force alone.
USSR gulag survivor Alexander Solzhenitsyn said as much himself. He affirmed you don’t resist tyranny through violence alone, rather you destroy dystopia by refusing to lie:
“How can one preserve one's life and at the same time arrive at the truth? When you’ve robbed a man of everything, he’s no longer in your power—he’s free again…
Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.”
Solzhenitsyn concluded the only free man in the USSR was those who refused the lies of the regime, even if it meant death itself.
The lie of the French Revolution was that vengeance was justice, and the killing of the few can lead to the redemption of the masses. Sydney’s substitution with Charles rejects this logic outright. He doesn’t reject killing with more killing though, rather with an act inexplicable to their logic — placing his own head beneath the chopping block.
The point is, true resistance to tyranny is not force alone.
In fact, it’s asserted that vengeance — even administered against revolutionaries — often makes things worse. Fighting wrath with wrath simply begets more wrath, as “whoever slayeth man, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold.”
As Solzhenitsyn asserts, and Sydney demonstrates, the lie is the lifeline of the dystopia. The ultimate resistance of the lie is Truth, and Truth is inseparable from love, and there is no greater love than the man who lays down his life for his friends.
Conclusion
Tale of 2 Cities is both tragic and terrifying. It reminds you that the ultimate reality of love is none other than the bloody cross of the crucifix, or the mechanical evil of the guillotine.
True love is not expressed by soft and gentle niceties, rather it’s a full-hearted surrender that summons all your faculties of mind, body, and soul.
Not everyone is called to literal martyrdom, but everyone is called to carry their cross, and that’s a call that demands everything.
While A Tale of 2 Cities is a tragedy ending in tears, tradition doesn’t despair of Sydney’s demise, rather it celebrates his triumph. It reminds us of our limits, that we’re not called to be saviors to bring world peace, rather we’re called to meet life’s greatest evils with a self-sacrificial love that is undeserved and freely-given.
Such a love is a combination of justice and mercy — to never tolerate evil, but to freely offer grace to a world insane with wrath.
Man is most heroic, most himself, when he forgets himself in regard to the Good. It’s this very logic that immortalized Sydney, and is the only means of resisting a Reign of Terror.
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One of my favorite books, yet I hadn’t made all the connections you did. Relevant lessons then and now. Thanks for sharing.
Dickens, Dostoevsky, Chesterton, Solzhentsyn and Camus all confront the evil collective lies of tyranny using sincere, believable and often very flawed characters in their story telling.