France, less favoured on the whole as to matters spiritual than her sister of the shield and trident,* rolled with exceeding smoothness down hill, making paper money and spending it.* Under the guidance of her Christian pastors, she entertained herself, besides, with such humane achievements as sentencing a youth to have his hands cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers, and his body burned alive, because he had not kneeled down in the rain to do honour to a dirty procession of monks which passed within his view, at a distance of some fifty or sixty yards.*
It is likely enough that, rooted in the woods of France and Norway, there were growing trees, when that sufferer was put to death, already marked by the Woodman, Fate, to come down and be sawn into boards, to make a certain movable framework with a sack and a knife in it, terrible in history. It is likely enough that in the rough outhouses of some tillers of the heavy lands adjacent to Paris there were sheltered from the weather that very day rude carts, bespattered with rustic mire, snuffed about by pigs, and roosted in by poultry, which the Farmer, Death, had already set apart to be his tumbrils of the Revolution. But that Woodman and that Farmer, though they work unceasingly, work silently, and no one heard them as they went about with muffled tread: the rather, forasmuch as to entertain any suspicion that they were awake was to be atheistical and traitorous.
* Britannia, symbol of Great Britain, takes the form of a majestic lady in robes, holding a shield and trident.
* Louis XVI’s ministers of the economy came and went in rapid succession. At the time of which Dickens was writing, a policy of strict controls on spending and taxation was pursued under Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, a free trade enthusiast; he had some success, too, but vested interests quickly rebelled and ousted him. In fact, Turgot was suspicious of paper money (as opposed to gold or silver coins of intrinsic value), and in particular of a policy of recklessly printing money — quantitative easing, as we call it today — to manage the national deficit as he believed it caused inflation. It was the revolutionary National Assembly that decided in 1790 that issuing paper money would stave off bankruptcy and resolve a national grain crisis — with catastrophic results.
* A real event, which Dickens probably learnt about through the protests of Voltaire. It happened in 1766, when Chevalier François-Jean Lefebvre de la Barre was sentenced to this horrible death by France’s secular courts for failing to doff his hat to a Corpus Christi cross-procession some thirty yards away. Other charges included possession of pornographic literature, singing bawdy songs, and gross and indeed unsanitary sacrilege. The bishop of Amiens tried to get the sentence commuted to life imprisonment. François-Jean was spared some of the vilest punishments, but he was nonetheless beheaded.
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