A Tale of Two Bodies

The Corporeal Politics of Dickens’s Revolution

Introduction: The Spilled Wine of Revolution

Charles Dickens opens his chronicle of the French Revolution not with a political treatise but with a shocking, corporeal image: a burst cask of wine staining the streets of the Parisian suburb of Saint Antoine. The “hungry” citizens descend upon the spill, lapping it from the mud, their hands and faces smeared a grotesque red, a sight that “painted Saint Antoine with the scarlet colour of the wine” (Dickens 29). This scene, a proleptic vision of the bloodshed to come, establishes the central argument of this essay: that in A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens critiques revolutionary fervour by dramatizing a violent conflict between two competing conceptions of the human body. The novel stages a struggle between the sanctuary of the idealized “domestic body”—the private family unit—and the chaos of the public, “collective body” consumed by the carnivalesque fervour and biopolitical machinery of the revolution. While scholarship has long focused on the novel’s engagement with history and its timeline as a “revolutionary calendar” (Hutter 281), this analysis employs the theoretical lenses of Mikhail Bakhtin and Michel Foucault to argue that Dickens’s critique is fundamentally corporeal, measured in the dismemberment and desecration of the human form.

Theoretical Frameworks: Bakhtin and Foucault

Dickens’s fiction has always shown a preoccupation with the grotesque, where the physical body serves as a map of social and psychological states (Bowen 45). In A Tale of Two Cities, this tendency is sharpened by the historical stakes. To understand the novel’s depiction of revolutionary violence, two theoretical frameworks are essential. The revolutionary mob is best understood through Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque, a force that inverts social hierarchy through the celebration of the “material bodily lower stratum” (Bakhtin 19). The carnivalesque body is collective, porous, and grotesque; it delights in consumption and excretion, temporarily dissolving the boundaries of the individual in a moment of communal, ecstatic release. Conversely, the state’s power is legible through Michel Foucault’s theory of biopower, particularly his analysis of public execution as a spectacle where sovereignty is “inscribed upon the body of the condemned” (Foucault 49). For Foucault, the scaffold is not merely a tool of death but a political stage where the state demonstrates its ultimate authority over the life and body of its subjects. The first manifestation of this politicized body emerges not from the state, but from the streets, in the form of the Bakhtinian carnivalesque.

The Carnivalesque Unleashed: The Collective Body

The collective body of the revolution is born in the wine cask scene. This is a moment of pure Bakhtinian energy, where the starved, individual bodies of the poor merge into a single, consuming organism. The narrator emphasizes the loss of individuality: “one man… knelt down, took a scoop of said muddy wine and drank. He was seen by another; another saw him; and so the crazy dance began” (Dickens 29). This “dance” is a primal, carnivalesque ritual that momentarily frees the populace from the rigid social order. The grotesque imagery of a “wild-looking woman” wringing wine from a soaked piece of wood into her baby’s mouth underscores the inversion of norms; an act of nurturing is twisted into a desperate, public spectacle (Dickens 30). This energy finds its political focus in the storming of the Bastille. Here, the mob is described not as a group of individuals but as a singular, monstrous force: “a living sea… flashing weapons, blazing torches, and furious countenances” (Dickens 213). Its violence is ecstatic and festive, a true carnivalesque uprising that culminates in the parading of the governor’s severed head on a pike—a grotesque trophy celebrating the downfall of the old regime. This transformation of the populace into a weapon is perfected in the scene at the grindstone, where revolutionaries sharpen their bloodied blades. The men are described as “haggard figures,” their identities erased and replaced by their function as agents of death, their bodies and clothes soaked in the “red colour” that has come to define the collective (Dickens 252).

The Machinery of Control: The Politicized Body

If the mob represents the spontaneous, carnivalesque politicization of the body from below, the guillotine represents the systematic, Foucaultian politicization from above. The guillotine is the novel’s ultimate instrument of biopower, a machine that transforms human bodies into political statements. It is the chilling centrepiece of a new form of national recreation (Dickens 347), turning mass death into a daily public spectacle that reaffirms the Terror’s authority. Foucault argues that the spectacle of punishment is a “political ritual” that activates power relations (Foucault 57), and Dickens dramatizes this perfectly. The citizens of the new Republic deify the machine, personifying it as “La Guillotine,” the “sharp female” who is the “cure for all diseases” and the nation’s best advocate (Dickens 265). Charles Darnay’s trials exemplify this process. Before the Revolutionary Tribunal, his individual identity, history, and character are irrelevant; his body is reduced to a political symbol—“the emigrant Evrémonde”—an object to be claimed, condemned, and ultimately offered up to the guillotine’s altar. The state exerts its power not by engaging with his personhood but by asserting its right to extinguish his physical existence. This is the core of biopower: the reduction of the human to bare life, a body to be managed and, if necessary, eliminated by the sovereign.

Sanctuary Under Siege: The Domestic Body

In stark opposition to the chaotic, public bodies of the revolution stands the novel’s idealized sanctuary: the “domestic body” of the Manette-Darnay family. As Catherine Waters notes, the Dickensian family often functions as a “redemptive enclave,” a private haven from the ravages of the public, industrial world (Waters 88). In A Tale of Two Cities, this ideal is embodied by the family’s home in Soho, a space defined by quiet, love, and the sacredness of memory. It is a cohesive unit, a single body bound by affective ties, and its gravitational centre is Lucie Manette. Lucie, the “golden thread,” is the force that literally “recalls to life” her father and binds the family together (Dickens 80). Her power is entirely domestic and restorative, focused on healing the wounds inflicted by the political world. This sanctuary, however, is constantly under siege. The threat of the public sphere manifests as the recurring motif of “hundreds of footsteps” echoing from the street, a sound that foreshadows the approach of the revolutionary mob and the inevitable intrusion of political violence into their private refuge (Dickens 118). The domestic body is a fragile construction, defined by its desperate attempt to keep the politicized world at bay.

Complications and Contradictions: Blurring the Bodies

The novel’s central tension culminates where this fragile boundary breaks down. The neat binary of the public versus the domestic body is deliberately complicated by two key figures: Madame Defarge and Sydney Carton. Madame Defarge is the revolution personified, the agent who carries the violence of the collective body directly into the domestic sphere. A seemingly private, feminine act—knitting—is her political weapon, transforming a domestic craft into a register of death. Her own body is a vessel of historical trauma, her quest for vengeance fuelled by the destruction of her own family by the aristocracy. She represents the impossibility of sanctuary, demonstrating how private grievance can fuel and sustain public terror.

Sydney Carton, conversely, resolves the novel’s central conflict by inverting its terms. His final act is a profound paradox: a public death, performed on the Foucaultian stage of the guillotine, for an intensely private purpose. By sacrificing his own body, he preserves the domestic body of the Darnay family, allowing them to escape and reconstitute their sanctuary. His body becomes the site where the political and the domestic violently converge. In a final assertion of agency, he co-opts the state’s machinery of death, transforming an act of political erasure into a moment of personal redemption and transcendent love. His famous final thought, “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done,” is a testament to the power of a private, affective choice to imbue meaning into a public, political execution (Dickens 364). He reclaims his body from the state at the very moment it is destroyed.

Conclusion: A Corporeal Critique

In conclusion, A Tale of Two Cities presents a powerful and enduring critique of revolutionary excess that is not ideological but fundamentally corporeal. Through the theoretical lenses of Bakhtin and Foucault, the novel’s central conflict becomes clear: it is a battle for the human body. Dickens contrasts the grotesque, carnivalesque energy of the collective mob and the cold, biopolitical machinery of the Terror with the fragile, sacred sanctuary of the family unit. The revolution’s ultimate horror, in Dickens’s estimation, lies in its violent politicization of human flesh, its transformation of individuals into instruments of mob violence or symbols of state power. By championing Sydney Carton’s sacrifice—an act that uses the machinery of public death to save a private life—Dickens makes his final argument. The true measure of a society’s health is not found in its political structures, but in its ability to protect the sanctity of the individual and the affective bonds of the domestic body.

This article was developed through an iterative collaboration between our Editor-in-Chief and multiple AI language models. Various LLMs contributed at different stages—from initial ideation and drafting to refinement and technical review. Each AI served as a creative and analytical partner, while human editors maintained final oversight, ensuring accuracy, quality, and alignment with AuthZ's editorial standards.