A Tale of Two Cities

A Tale of Two Cities By: Charles Dickens follows Paris and London during the years surrounding and during the French Revolution.  During this time in history their was much fighting and oppression between the bourgeoise and the proletariats.  The proletariats in France overthrow the bourgeoise but instead of following the Marxist ideal of creating a society were everything is shared, they use their newfound power to torture and hang the the old bourgeoise.  It was a time of great bitterness and destruction.  As the opening line states the wide variety of emotions and thoughts about this time "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way–in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only."
This book was published in 1859, while the French revolution was only sixty years previous.  

The class differences within this book are drastic.  The class you were born into determined almost everything about you, how you acted, especially towards other classes, what you wore and how much money you had.  There was really no room for social mobility.  This is why the revolution was so violent and drastic that the proletariats led.  One of the most cold-blooded acts I found within this book is when a French aristocrat Marquis Evremonde runs over a child of the lower class with his carriage when going through a town.  Evremonde feels no remorse for what happened, he even gets angry about the time wasted in stopping his carriage after the child was hit. He tells the mourners that they didn't even think of the injury that his horses sustained in hitting the boy.  These type of actions by the bourgeoise created a deep distrust and hatred of their bourgeoise members in society.  Evremonde goes to his chateau to meet his nephew(Charles Darney), who gives up the Evremonde name because of the family's harsh treatment of the common people.  Marquis Evremonde is killed that night by the French revolutionaries.

This emphasis on the class system before and the changes after the French Revolution shows the power struggle that was found between the bourgeoise and the proletariats.  That the working class cannot stay satisfied in their position when others have greater power and more wealth.  This revolution is a classic Marxist result of contradiction of ideologies of how the social order should be set up and the tension that grows because of it.  This knowledge of how Marxism played a role in the French Revolution shows that this book is more than a historical fiction novel, it has many political and socioeconomic tones within it.  This also proves that the economy and it's state in the different classes drives the history.  Because of the dissatisfaction of the proletariats in their position they started this violent revolution.