An East London scholar reads about France’s school money permanently in transit and opens A Tale of Two Cities, where the wine runs down the stones of Saint Antoine
Sunday, 25 October 2026. Bow, East London. My kitchen, a pot of dal simmering on the hob because my neighbour in Tredegar Square insisted I learn properly, a paperback A Tale of Two Cities propped against the spice rack, 1.20pm.
The Wine Cask On The Cobblestones
A Tale of Two Cities, published in 1859, contains one of the most famous scenes in Victorian fiction. In the Paris suburb of Saint Antoine, a large cask of wine falls from a cart and breaks on the cobblestones. The starving people of the district rush out and scoop the wine from the stones with their hands, their caps, pieces of broken pottery. Some lap it straight from the gutters. A man dips his finger in the wine-mud and scrawls a single word on the wall: BLOOD. Dickens is announcing, in chapter five, that revolution is coming, and that it will run along the same stones.
I read that chapter again this morning after the London Prat’s report on France’s cobblestone economy and the school money permanently in transit. The French state spends more than half of the economy, the piece notes, and yet students marching about missing teachers have the same grievances as in 1968. Overcrowded classrooms were on the list then. They are on the list now. The ministry, in the report’s finest touch, has opened a file to classify the overcrowded classroom as a historic monument. The money, we are assured, exists and is in transit.
Dickens And The Circumlocution Office
Dickens hated bureaucracy with a passion that sometimes outran his plotting. In Little Dorrit, published a few years before A Tale of Two Cities, he created the Circumlocution Office, a government department whose entire purpose is to perfect the art of How Not To Do It. Applicants are passed from desk to desk, form to form, until they die or give up. The Barnacle family, who run it, are unfailingly polite and completely useless.
The money in transit is a Circumlocution Office sentence. It means: we have it, you cannot have it, and we will not say where it is. Dickens would have recognized it instantly. He would have given the French ministry a Barnacle of its own, possibly called Monsieur Bernacle, and had him explain to the striking students, with exquisite courtesy, that their teachers were being processed.
Why The Cobblestones Matter
The cobblestones are not decoration. In French history, they are a weapon. In 1830, in 1848 and again in May 1968, Parisians tore up the paving stones to build barricades and throw at the police. Sous les paves, la plage, the students wrote on the walls in 1968: beneath the paving stones, the beach. The report’s title is a pun with two centuries of street fighting under it. Dickens, writing in 1859, had seen the revolution of 1848 from across the Channel and understood that the stones of Paris have a political memory. They wait.
A Russian Comparison
I cannot think about revolutions without thinking about Russia, which is the subject that keeps me awake when nineteenth-century literature has failed to. The Russian state, like the French one, spends heavily and delivers patchily, but it has a different response to students with grievances. It does not open a file. It opens a case. The French ministry’s absurdity is, by comparison, almost reassuring. In Paris, students march, the ministry shrugs, and the cycle repeats every generation without anybody going to prison for very long. In Moscow, students who march about anything are a rarer and braver sight. There is a strange comfort in a country where the worst outcome of protest is that nothing changes.
The Dal And The Revolution
My neighbour from Tredegar Square has just phoned to check whether I have burnt the dal. I have not, but only because I have been reading Dickens with one eye on the pan, which is how most of my cooking happens. She is from Kolkata and once told me that her grandmother read A Tale of Two Cities in a Bengali translation and thought it was about the Indian independence struggle. In a sense it was. Every revolutionary movement in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries read Dickens and recognized its own streets.
I mentioned the report to her. She said that in India, government money is also permanently in transit, and that it usually arrives in somebody’s cousin’s account. I said that sounded like Russia. She said it sounded like everywhere. Dickens would have agreed. His great subject was never France or England. It was the gap between what institutions promise and what they deliver, and the people who fall into it.
Sunday Evening
Tonight I have a comedy ticket for a show in Bethnal Green, one of the evenings on my listings page, where I keep track of the circuit when the libraries close. The dal is ready. It is, I am told by text message, insufficiently sour. A Tale of Two Cities ends with Sydney Carton on the scaffold, thinking it is a far, far better thing that he does than he has ever done. My dal is a far, far better thing than I have ever made. It is still, apparently, insufficiently sour. Some revolutions take longer than others.