How Does Dickens Present The Abuse Of Power In A Tale Of Two Cities

Dickens’ book Tale of Two Cities has excellent symbolism throughout the book, especially in the category of food and drink. He uses this symbolism to show us the collapse of French society. One big way he shows us that is through the use of alcohol. Another important way he shows us this is through the use of the upper class, most prominently the marquis. Now one might ask why does he do this? Well, the best answer to that question is to show how detrimental the corruption of power is in societies. Dickens uses food and drink to portray the collapse of French civilization through his use of the alcohol and the marquis in order to show the readers the corruption and abuse of power happening in the government and upper class. With this in mind,

For some background information, there were three estates in France, the 1st estate, the aristocracy, the 2nd estate, the clergy, and the 3rd estate, the rest, which made up over 90% of the population. The third estate was very poor and someone was always starving. I mentioned earlier how the city that this took place in was extremely poor because its residents were entirely third estate people. However the marquis, a very well off aristocratic land owner, lived just down the road from the town. This marquis does something that I find very interesting, he has people make him chocolate . The book says “morning’s chocolate”(119), implying that he has this daily. Something important to point out is that chocolate was very expensive back then, and the marquis was having it every day. And while the marquis is having his luxury food every day, the people in the town are starving to death, going so far as to drink wine out of the streets like I mentioned earlier, further showing the corruption in the aristocracy. Something else very important was the fact that the French Revolution was mainly caused by the lack of food and drink for the third estate and how much the first and second estate had, shown by the marquis. Harold Bloom reminds us that “The Marquis tells Charles Darnay that his only philosophy is ‘repression’.” This means that the marquis believes he is completely above and in charge of anyone of lower class than him, hence why he treats them so poorly. Repression is when you subdue someone by force, and by using force, he drives them to fear, and usually fear will lead to resentment, resentment to anger, anger to violence. The revolution was the first ever genocide that was recorded in Europe, where the people had finally had enough and lashed out, killing all the aristocracy. I said the