What the Postcard Cropped Out

Every city shows you its best angle and hides the rest. That's not an accident. It's a choice, the same way a highlight reel is a choice — you never see the footage that got cut, and you rarely think to ask who's holding the camera. Every skyline is a magic trick: look here, at the spires and the gilded domes, and please, whatever you do, don't look down.

I spent a week doing exactly that in Paris. Then I went underground, and the trick stopped working.

The Paris sewers, courtesy of the internet, because the smell was so bad that taking a photo was genuinely the last thing on my mind. I was focused on one thing: finding the exit.

Our class visited Notre-Dame on a Tuesday, all craned necks and cathedral light, the kind of morning that photographs itself. A few days later we descended into the Paris sewers. On paper these are two unrelated field trips — one a pilgrimage to human genius, the other a tour of human plumbing. Victor Hugo, who apparently could not write a single chapter of Les Misérables without detouring into a meditation on the soul of civilization, insisted they were the same story told from opposite directions. I used to think this was one of his more indulgent digressions. Barricades are exciting. Sewage infrastructure is not. Why interrupt Jean Valjean's escape to give the reader a guided tour of Parisian drainage history?

Because he wasn't writing about tunnels. He was writing about the parts of ourselves we flush and never think about again. Notre-Dame had asked nothing of my body. The sewers asked immediately. The ceiling dropped low enough that I ducked out of instinct before I'd even registered why, and the air changed in a way no photograph of a cathedral has ever prepared you for — not the postcard stench you brace for, but something mineral and old, like a basement that has been wet for two hundred years and stopped apologizing for it.

Somewhere below the walkway, water moved with a sound I felt more than heard. Down here we walked in a single file without anyone organizing it, the tunnel deciding our formation for us. Nobody photographed anything. I don't think it occurred to a single person in the group to try.

One line from the novel followed me down into that tunnel and hasn't quite left since:

“Humanity is identity. All men are made of the same clay… But ignorance, mingled with the human paste, blackens it.”

— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

I'd underlined this weeks earlier, back home, where it read as a tidy observation about morality — the kind of sentence you nod at and move past. Standing in the dark beneath the Rue de Rivoli, ducking under stone with water running somewhere I couldn't see, it read as something closer to an indictment.

Hugo isn't saying some people are born saints and others born villains. He's saying we start identical, and then circumstance gets its hands on us. Ignorance is the sculptor. Poverty is the sculptor. Indifference — maybe the most patient sculptor of all — works slowly, over generations, until the shape it leaves behind gets mistaken for someone's nature, rather than what it actually is: the residue of everything a city declined to fix.

It would be easy to say Hugo believed in inevitable moral progress — light wins, justice arrives, the arc bends — and to say I don't. But that flattens him into something less interesting than what's actually on the page. Hugo doesn't write like a man who thinks improvement is automatic. He writes like a man holding onto hope with both hands, in a country that had just finished eating itself in revolution after revolution, fully aware of how easily the barricade could go the other way. His optimism isn't naivety. It's a decision he keeps making, book after book, against a mountain of evidence that should have talked him out of it.

So the disagreement, once I take him seriously, gets smaller and sharper. Hugo believes humanity can move toward justice. I believe it can too — I just don't believe anything guarantees that it will. The sewer is a useful place to think about the difference because a sewer makes the point brutally well: something can exist beneath your feet for years without you ever choosing to look at it. Infrastructure for seeing clearly is not the same thing as the will to see.

That gap — between the capacity for progress and the choice to exercise it — is where I think modern history becomes difficult to romanticize. We learned to split the atom and almost immediately learned how to turn that knowledge against entire cities. We built technologies capable of connecting billions of people and discovered they could distribute cruelty as efficiently as solidarity. We became extraordinarily good at changing the world without becoming equally good at deciding what kind of world deserved to replace it.

None of that proves progress is a myth. It proves progress is not a law of physics. It is closer to a door left unlocked: nothing stops us from walking through it, and nothing makes us.

Hugo, I think, would agree with more of this than I first gave him credit for. He just never stopped believing people would eventually choose to walk through the door. I'm less sure.Not because I think we’re worse than he thought, but because every generation gets handed the same unlocked door and has to decide, from scratch, whether to open it, armed with nothing but whatever wisdom the previous generation bothered to leave behind.

The names change. The architecture changes. The people standing comfortably aboveground change. The question underneath does not: who gets left in the tunnels, and who decided that was acceptable?

Before this trip I experienced places the way most people do: as a checklist. Notre-Dame was architecture. The sewers were engineering. A prison was history. A slum, if I noticed one at all, was scenery on the way to somewhere prettier. Hugo ruins this way of seeing, and I mean that as a compliment. Once you accept that a civilization’s underside and its overside belong to the same civilization — built from the same money, the same labor, the same century of decisions — you can’t un-accept it. Now, when I walk into a museum, I wonder what paid for it. I wonder who wasn’t allowed inside when it opened. I wonder whose labor made the beauty possible, and what else that money might have built. It is an exhausting way to tour a city. I suspect it's also the only honest one.

A civilization's museums tell you its favorite story about itself. Its sewers, its shelters, its underfunded hospitals — those tell you what actually happened while the story was being written. Both are true. Only one gets marketed. The other has to be walked into, on purpose.

There's a reason, I think, that Jean Valjean's last great act of heroism — carrying a half-dead Marius to safety — happens not on a mountaintop or a barricade but in a sewer. He wades through the exact filth the rest of Paris has paid good money to forget exists. Hugo could have staged that rescue anywhere. He chose the drain. For most of the novel, Valjean is trying to escape what society has decided he is: prisoner, criminal, irredeemable man. But underground, stripped of witnesses and recognition, none of those categories matter. There is no audience in the sewer. No institution tells him what the right thing is. No monument will be built to the decision he is about to make. There is only another human being who will die if Valjean stops carrying him. And he doesn’t.

Maybe that is where Hugo’s faith in progress actually lives—not in the belief that history naturally improves, but in the stubborn possibility that a person can encounter everything designed to make him indifferent and refuse to become indifferent anyway.

That is harder for me to argue with.

I had spent much of Les Misérables looking for Hugo’s answer in revolutions, laws, barricades, and declarations about humanity. Paris put the answer somewhere less impressive. Beneath the monuments. Beneath the politics. Beneath even the streets.

A man is carrying another man through the dark. Nobody is watching. He carries him anyway.

What Are We Really Worshipping?

Some monuments inspire awe. Others inspire reflection. Notre-Dame did both.

Victor Hugo never asked me to believe in God. He asked me to question the institutions that claim to speak for Him.

That distinction didn't fully resonate with me until I walked into Notre-Dame.

As I stood inside Notre-Dame, sunlight, stone, and nearly nine centuries of devotion surrounded me.

Stepping inside, I understood why millions of people have traveled here for centuries. Sunlight poured through the stained glass windows, illuminating towering stone columns that have stood for nearly nine hundred years. Every carving, every arch, and every pane of glass reflects an astonishing level of craftsmanship and devotion. Even as someone who is not Christian, I couldn't help but admire the cathedral and appreciate the role it has played in French history.

But as I stood beneath its soaring ceiling, another thought quietly entered my mind.

How could a Church capable of creating something this magnificent coexist with the poverty that shaped so much of France's history? What responsibility comes with possessing such extraordinary wealth in the name of faith?

As I looked around the cathedral, I found myself wondering whether admiration and discomfort could exist at the same time. Did questioning the institution somehow diminish the beauty of the building? Or was asking difficult questions actually another way of appreciating it?

These weren't questions I expected to ask while admiring stained glass windows. Ironically, they were questions Victor Hugo had already begun asking nearly two centuries ago.

Before this course, I assumed Les Misérables was simply a story of redemption. Somewhere between turning its pages and walking through the churches of Paris, those churches stopped feeling like places to visit and started feeling like places to think. I hadn't expected one of Hugo's central questions to follow me there. Instead, I discovered that he is making a much more nuanced argument, carefully distinguishing between faith and religion and suggesting that while the two often overlap, they are not always the same thing.

As I continued reading, I realized Hugo wasn't criticizing faith itself. He was warning us what can happen when religious institutions become more concerned with preserving themselves than living out the values they were created to uphold. They develop hierarchies, accumulate wealth, and sometimes become more concerned with preserving itself than serving the people it exists to help. Faith, however, is something entirely different. It is deeply personal. It is found in compassion, sacrifice, forgiveness, and the quiet choice to place another person's dignity before your own comfort.

He doesn't leave this as an abstract idea. He gives it a face in Bishop Myriel.

Although he is a bishop, Hugo presents him as someone who rejects the privileges of his position. Rather than living comfortably, he gives away much of what he has to the poor. He measures devotion not by ceremony or status, but by generosity. Bishop Myriel never asks Jean Valjean to become more religious. He simply chooses mercy when everyone else expects punishment. In that single act, he accomplishes what doctrine and authority never could: he changes the course of Valjean's life.

One passage in particular stood out to me:

“To crush fanaticism and to venerate the infinite, such is the law... to purify belief, to remove superstitions from above religion... to clear God of caterpillars.”

— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

It is one of the most striking metaphors in the novel. Hugo is not asking readers to abandon religion. Instead, he argues that religion must continually be stripped of the "caterpillars" that cling to it: fanaticism, superstition, corruption, and empty displays of piety that obscure its original purpose.

Hugo wasn't alone in asking these questions.

He was writing in the wake of the Enlightenment, when philosophers across Europe were reexamining institutions that had long been accepted as unquestionable. Voltaire criticized religious intolerance and abuses of power. Rousseau argued that people are fundamentally good and that society often corrupts them. Diderot sought to make knowledge accessible through the Encyclopédie, challenging the idea that truth belonged only to religious or political elites. Across France, people were beginning to question not only the divine right of kings but also the authority of institutions that claimed moral superiority.

What makes Hugo's response so compelling, however, is that he refuses to throw faith away alongside those institutions. Instead, he asks readers to separate the two.

Standing inside Notre-Dame, that distinction suddenly felt tangible. I wasn't looking at hypocrisy carved into stone. I was looking at a monument built by generations of people whose motivations were undoubtedly varied. Some gave because of genuine devotion. Others sought influence, prestige, or power.

The beauty of Notre-Dame doesn't become less beautiful because of those questions. If anything, the questions make the cathedral even more compelling.

Walking out of Notre-Dame, I realized the questions hadn't ruined the experience. They had deepened it. I admired the cathedral just as much as when I first stepped inside. The difference was that I no longer saw it as just an architectural masterpiece. I saw it as a physical reminder that even the noblest institutions are still created by imperfect people.

A few days later, that same idea resurfaced in an entirely different way.

We visited Saint-Sulpice, the church where Marius and his grandfather attend Mass in Les Misérables. While walking through the sanctuary, I noticed a young couple a few pews away. The woman carefully positioned her boyfriend, motioning for him to bow his head and clasp his hands together in prayer. She stepped back, took a few pictures, looked them over, adjusted his pose, and took a few more. A minute later, they smiled, put away the phone, and walked straight back out of the church.

I found myself quietly amused.

Maybe they had prayed before I arrived. I have no idea what was in their hearts, and that's not really the point.

What stayed with me wasn't the couple themselves. It was how instinctive it has become to curate moments before we experience them. Even a church, a place intended for quiet reflection, had become another backdrop for a perfectly composed photograph.

After spending weeks with Hugo, I couldn't stop thinking about the difference between performing faith and living it.

Religion can become performative when institutions prioritize appearances over compassion. But individuals can do the same thing. We have become remarkably good at documenting experiences while they are happening. Sometimes I wonder whether we have become equally good at inhabiting them. Social media hasn't invented performative behavior, but it has certainly amplified it.

Jean Valjean becomes Hugo's clearest example of what faith looks like when it is lived rather than displayed. Throughout the novel, he returns again and again to the mercy Bishop Myriel first showed him. His compassion for Fantine, his sacrifices for Cosette, and even his decision to spare Javert all reflect a life shaped by grace rather than obligation. Hugo suggests that faith is measured less by the rituals we perform than by the way we treat the people around us.

Faith is not something that can be photographed. Hugo knew that long before Instagram did.

As I left Saint-Sulpice, I realized I wasn't questioning faith. If anything, Les Misérables strengthened my appreciation for it. What I found myself questioning instead was something much broader: how easily both institutions and individuals drift toward appearances. Churches can become consumed by opulence and prestige. We can become consumed by image and performance. The temptation is the same: to mistake the outward expression of our values for the values themselves.

That may be why Hugo's distinction between religion and faith continues to resonate nearly two centuries later. We still ask whether governments, universities, religious organizations, and other institutions live up to the values they proclaim. Hugo gently reminds us that the same question belongs to each of us. It is easy to appear compassionate, principled, or faithful. It is much harder to quietly become those things.

Notre-Dame taught me to question institutions. Saint-Sulpice taught me to question myself.

I arrived in Paris expecting to admire the places Hugo wrote about. I left seeing them through his eyes.

Victor Hugo never asked me to believe in God.

After tracing Hugo's Paris, I think I finally understand what he was asking instead.

Faith, Hugo reminds us, is never proven by the buildings we admire.

It is proven by the lives we choose to build.

Who Gets to Decide Who the People Are?

Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People (1830), photographed in the Louvre. Revolutionary art often celebrates those behind the barricade. But who was standing on the other side?

Who are the people?

It is a question that sounds almost too simple to ask. Yet standing in the streets of Paris where the barricades of Les Misérables once stood, I realized it may be one of the most difficult questions any society can answer.

Our class had spent the afternoon tracing the route of the June Insurrection of 1832. We walked through streets that today are filled with cafés, tourists, and cyclists, yet beneath the pavement lies the memory of one of France's most famous acts of resistance. Victor Hugo transformed these streets into the setting of Les Misérables, where a small group of students and workers built barricades knowing they would almost certainly die. Standing where those barricades once rose, I found myself thinking less about the students behind them than about the people standing across from them.

The National Guard.

Growing up, I always associated uniforms with protection. Whether police officers, firefighters, or soldiers, uniforms are designed to communicate safety and stability. They represent institutions that exist to preserve order. I had never stopped to consider that the same uniform could symbolize something entirely different depending on where someone was standing.

The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789). It proclaimed liberty, equality before the law, and freedom from arbitrary imprisonment. The challenge was never simply defending these ideals, but deciding who had the authority to define them.

Founded to defend the people in 1789, the National Guard later found itself facing citizens who believed they, too, were defending the people.

The National Guard was established during the French Revolution in 1790, shortly after the fall of the Bastille. It emerged alongside revolutionary ideals that sought to replace arbitrary royal authority with the rule of law. France had just rejected the lettres de cachet, royal orders that allowed people to be imprisoned without trial, and adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, proclaiming liberty, legal equality, and protections for individual rights. The National Guard was created to defend those principles and protect the Revolution itself.

At first glance, it seems like a straightforward story. A force created to defend freedom. A symbol of a nation determined to break away from oppression. But history rarely remains straightforward. Just forty-two years later, Hugo presents an entirely different image. During the June Rebellion of 1832, the National Guard stood opposite the students gathered behind the barricades. These young men believed they were fighting for liberty, justice, and a better France. Many of them saw themselves as heirs to the Revolution of 1789. Yet the National Guard, born from that very Revolution, was now firing upon them.

What changed?

Initially, I assumed the answer was obvious. Perhaps the National Guard had abandoned its purpose. Perhaps the students had become radicals standing in the way of progress. But the more we discussed Les Misérables throughout the week, the more I realized Hugo is asking something much deeper than who was right or wrong.

The National Guard never stopped believing it was protecting France. The students never stopped believing they were fighting for France. The conflict was never simply about power. It was about who had the authority to define the people. Perhaps every revolution reaches the same moment: when both sides become convinced that they alone are defending the people.

The June Rebellion of 1832. Victor Hugo transformed this failed uprising into the climactic scene of Les Misérables, challenging readers to look beyond who won and ask what each side believed it was fighting for.

History often encourages us to divide the world into heroes and villains because it is easier that way. We celebrate revolutions that succeeded. We criticize governments that failed. Looking backward, the answers can appear obvious. But for the people actually living through these moments, certainty rarely exists. Governments rarely see themselves as oppressive. More often, they believe they are preserving stability. Protesters almost always believe they are demanding justice. Both frequently claim to be acting on behalf of the people. Both hope history will eventually prove them right.

Walking through Paris forced me to acknowledge how uncomfortable that tension really is. Hugo refuses to portray history as a simple struggle between good and evil. Instead, he presents competing visions of justice, each convinced of its own legitimacy. The National Guard is not depicted as inherently evil, nor are the students portrayed as unquestionably righteous. They simply represent two different visions of what France should become. That complexity is precisely what has allowed Les Misérables to remain relevant for nearly two centuries.

Leaving the barricade, I found it impossible not to think about our own time. Conversations surrounding policing continue to raise many of the same questions Hugo explored in 1832. Public trust in law enforcement often depends on lived experience, historical memory, and political belief. Some see police as protectors of democratic order; others point to moments when state authority has undermined those same ideals. The circumstances are different, and history should never be forced into easy comparisons. Yet the questions themselves remain remarkably familiar.

What has endured is something more fundamental: every generation must decide where the line between authority and justice should be drawn.

That realization made me think differently about institutions themselves. We often imagine that organizations possess fixed identities. We describe them as good or bad, trustworthy or corrupt, heroic or oppressive. Yet institutions are ultimately shaped by people, by governments, by public expectations, and by changing political ideals. The same institution can be remembered as a symbol of liberation in one generation and as an obstacle to progress in another.

Perhaps that is why Hugo's barricades continue to resonate. They are not simply monuments to revolution. They are reminders that democracy is never static. The values a society claims to defend must constantly be examined, questioned, and redefined.

Earlier in the course, Professor Chater challenged us to think carefully about the difference between a riot and an insurrection. At first, I assumed the distinction depended on violence. After standing where the barricades once stood, I am no longer convinced it is that simple. Perhaps those labels often depend less on what happened than on who is telling the story, who prevails, and who ultimately writes the history books.

Standing in a quiet Parisian street, it was difficult to imagine gunfire echoing between the buildings or barricades stretching across the road. The city has moved on. Cafés occupy spaces where students once prepared to die. Tourists wander through the neighborhood without realizing the history beneath their feet.

Yet the questions remain. Who speaks for the people? When does protecting order become resisting progress? And perhaps the most unsettling question of all: Who gets to decide who the people are?

If I had stood on that street in June of 1832, would I have believed the students were defending France? Or the National Guard?

I left the barricade without an answer.

Somehow, I think that is exactly what Victor Hugo intended.

Where Stories End

The Conciergerie, a former royal palace and prison on the Île de la Cité, stands illuminated along the Seine River in Paris, France. Photo courtesy of Introducing Paris.

Yesterday, I walked through the heavy stone doors of the Conciergerie and into one of the darkest chapters of the French Revolution.

The prison is quieter than I expected. Thick stone walls absorb every sound, and the narrow corridors feel almost suspended in time. It is difficult to imagine who once waited behind these walls: Marie Antoinette, awaiting her execution, ordinary seamstresses, laborers, priests, and thousands of others whose stories have long since disappeared from history.

Walking through the prison, I found myself thinking less about the executions themselves than about the waiting. Every prisoner entered the Conciergerie knowing there was a chance they would never leave alive. Every morning, names were called. Those selected climbed into tumbrils waiting outside and began the short journey to the guillotine. I left the prison wondering what the final walk must have felt like. Today, I found out.

Our class retraced the route that Sydney Carton takes in A Tale of Two Cities after exchanging places with Charles Darnay. We left the Conciergerie behind, crossed the Seine, and walked along the Rue Saint-Honoré toward the Place de la Révolution, where the guillotine once stood. Everything about the afternoon felt ordinary. People hurried home from work carrying shopping bags. Cyclists wove between tourists taking photos of the Louvre. Couples sat outside cafés drinking coffee beneath striped awnings. Street musicians filled the air with music as traffic flowed steadily through the city. Had I not known the history, nothing about the walk would have suggested what had once happened there. That was the strangest part.

Place de la Concorde, where Paris' most beautiful square conceals one of its darkest histories. Standing beneath the Luxor Obelisk, it is difficult to imagine that the guillotine once occupied this same space.

In A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens describes the tumbrils carrying prisoners through these streets toward their deaths. The journey is heavy with silence and inevitability. Walking the same route today, it was almost impossible to reconcile Dickens’ Paris with the one around me. Modern Paris feels vibrant and alive. Yet beneath the cafés, boutiques, and wide boulevards lies the memory of a city where crowds once gathered to watch people die. By the end of our walk, we reached the Place de la Concorde. Today it is one of Paris’ most beautiful public squares. The Luxor Obelisk rises from the center. Elegant fountains sparkle in the afternoon sun. Tourists gather to photograph the Eiffel Tower in the distance.

Today, Place de la Concorde is filled with tourists, gardens, and grand architecture. Two centuries ago, this was the Place de la Révolution, where thousands, including Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, were executed.

Two centuries ago, this same square was known as the Place de la Révolution. The guillotine stood here. Louis XVI died here. Marie Antoinette died here. Danton died here. Eventually, Robespierre himself died here. Thousands of others – many remembered only as names on execution lists – met the same fate. Standing in the middle of the square, I found myself searching for some visible reminder of what had happened. There is no guillotine. No bloodstains. No crowds. History has quietly disappeared beneath fountains, gardens, and traffic circles.

Somehow, simply knowing what had happened was enough to change the way I saw the space. What struck me most was the difference between the real prisoners and Sydney Carton. Marie Antoinette never chose this journey. Neither did the countless anonymous prisoners who left the Conciergerie each morning. Sydney Carton did. That single difference transformed his final walk from an execution into a choice. Yesterday, while standing inside the prison, Carton’s sacrifice still felt like fiction. Today, after walking his route through the streets of Paris, it felt profoundly human. Dickens transformed an ordinary walk across the city into one of literature’s greatest acts of self-sacrifice and altruism. For the first time, I understood why.

The walk lasted no more than thirty minutes. I found myself slowing my pace, almost subconsciously trying to imagine what it would have felt like to know that every step brought me closer to my final destination. History often feels enormous when we read about it. Revolutions span years. Thousands of people die. Political systems collapse. But walking Carton’s final journey reminded me that history is also measured in individual footsteps. Every person who left the Conciergerie made this same journey knowing it would be their last.

As I stood in the Place de la Concorde, surrounded by tourists laughing, taking photographs, and moving on to the next attraction, I realized something that surprised me. The most powerful part of Bookpacking isn’t standing where history happened. It’s walking through places that no longer look like history at all. Yesterday, the Conciergerie showed me where prisoners waited. Today, the streets of Paris showed me where their stories ended. And somewhere between those two places, Sydney Carton stopped feeling like a fictional character and began to feel like someone I had quietly walked beside.

Before coming to Paris, I thought Sydney Carton’s final words were about sacrifice. After walking his final journey, I think they’re about something else entirely. For the first time in his life, Carton knew exactly who he wanted to be. The “far, far better thing” wasn’t the guillotine. It was the choice he made before he reached it. Standing in the Place de la Concorde, I finally understood that the most important part of Carton’s story was never how it ended. It was how he chose it would end.

““It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.””

— Sydney Carton

Why England Never Had Its Bastille

When I imagined London before arriving, I pictured history frozen in stone: Buckingham Palace standing proudly behind its gates, Parliament overlooking the Thames, Westminster Abbey preserving centuries of monarchs beneath its vaulted ceilings. I expected these places to feel like relics of the past. Instead, they felt surprisingly alive.

Civil servants hurried past Westminster carrying coffee cups. Tourists crowded around the palace gates waiting for the Changing of the Guard. Politicians walked into Parliament as casually as office workers beginning another Saturday morning. The same institutions that have existed for centuries continue to shape Britain today, not as museums, but as living centers of power.

That realization stayed with me through our first class and exploration, where we were introduced to a question that seems simple until you begin walking through London itself: Why wasn’t there a revolution in England like there was in France?

As we walked from Piccadilly through St. James towards Buckingham Palace and Westminster, I noticed how closely Britain’s symbol of power exists beside one another. The monarchy, the Parliament, the Prime Minister’s residence, and Westminster Abbey are all within walking distance. Each represents a different form of authority – royal, political, and religious – but together they reveal how closely intertwined Britain's institutions remain. Coming from the United States where political institutions are relatively young, I couldn’t fathom how old these buildings are. Westminster Abbey has hosted coronations for nearly one thousand years. Parliament still meets by the same river where generations before debated Britain's future. Rather than replacing its institutions through revolution, England seems to have attempted to reshape them over centuries. 

The Palace of Westminster, where centuries of British political tradition continue to shape government today.

Standing inside Westminster Abbey, I found myself imagining the centuries of people who had stood in the very same place before me.

During our seminar, Professor Chater introduced a Victor Hugo quote, “the feudal illusion”, which is the idea that England preserved many aspects of its aristocratic traditions instead of violently rejecting them. Before arriving in London, I assumed England had simply escaped revolution altogether. Our seminar complicated that assumption. England experienced its own political upheaval in the seventeenth century when King Charles I was executed after the English Civil War, and Oliver Cromwell then abolished the monarchy and ruled as Lord Protector, so for a brief period England became a republic. Yet unlike France, where revolution permanently transformed the political landscape, England eventually restored its monarchy. Rather than dismantling its political system entirely, it absorbed that period of upheaval into its history. Walking through Westminster, the monarchy no longer felt like a relic of the past but instead it felt like an institution that had repeatedly adapted in order to survive. The grandeur of these buildings makes power seem timeless, even natural. Standing before Buckingham Palace, it becomes easy to forget that monarchies are human institutions created, challenged, and reformed over time. Their beauty almost disguises the inequalities they once represented. 

Throughout the week, we discussed how Britain and France developed two very different historical identities. Britain came to represent continuity: loyalty to institutions, constitutional monarchy, and gradual political change. France, particularly in Dickens' imagination, became associated with revolution, equality, rebellion, and the violent rejection of the old order. Of course, history is never that simple. These are broad narratives rather than absolute truths. But walking through London helped me understand why those stories continue to resonate. The city's landmarks celebrate endurance. They tell the story of institutions that have adapted instead of disappeared.

Charles Dickens understood this contradiction well. Although A Tale of Two Cities focuses on the French Revolution, it is told through English eyes. Dickens condemns the cruelty of the French aristocracy while simultaneously warning readers about the dangers of revolutionary violence. He portrays London as deeply flawed, yet capable of reform without complete destruction. Visiting London's political heart helped me understand why Dickens viewed the French Revolution from such a distinctly English perspective. Suddenly, his England wasn’t simply a setting on a page – it was standing right in front of me. 

Certainly, London isn’t only a city of palaces and parliaments. A few days later, we visited Newgate Prison, the Old Bailey, and the neighborhoods that shaped Dickens himself. These places reminded me that England was hardly free of injustice. Poverty, overcrowding, and inequality existed here too. Dickens devoted much of his writing to exposing those realities. The difference wasn’t that England had solved these problems – it hadn’t – but that its path toward change looked different. 

The Old Bailey, London's historic criminal court and the site of Charles Darnay's trial in A Tale of Two Cities. Standing here, Dickens' fiction felt inseparable from the city's history.

A peaceful demonstration near Russell Square, where centuries-old traditions meet modern political expression.

Later in the week, I was walking back to my accommodation near Russell Square Gardens when I heard chanting echoing through the streets. Curious, I followed the sound until I reached the edge of a massive demonstration. Thousands of protesters carrying Palestinian flags filled the roads surrounding the square. People of all ages held handmade signs while speakers addressed the crowd, and police calmly redirected traffic as the march passed through central London. I stopped for several minutes, simply watching the crowd move through the streets.

While observing the protest, I found myself thinking back to our very first seminar.

Only days earlier, we had spent the afternoon exploring Westminster and discussing why England had never experienced a revolution like France's. Here I was again, watching ordinary people gather to demand justice – not for Britain, but for people thousands of miles away. It struck me that although England preserved institutions like the monarchy, it has also developed a long tradition of public protest and political expression. The monarchy remained in Buckingham Palace, Parliament continued its business, and yet the streets belonged to the people.

That contrast fascinated me. A country can preserve centuries old traditions while still making space for citizens to challenge those in power. Perhaps England's history isn't defined by the absence of political passion, but by the different ways that passion has been expressed. Dickens constantly asks what happens when injustice is ignored. In A Tale of Two Cities, France reaches a breaking point because generations of suffering eventually erupt into revolution. Walking through London made me wonder whether England's answer has often been something else – not silence, but conversation. Protest instead of insurrection. Reform instead of rupture.

I still don't know why England never experienced a revolution quite like France's. But after spending this week walking its streets, I no longer think that's the most interesting question. The more interesting question is how a nation manages to preserve institutions that are centuries old while making room for new voices demanding change. And in London, I realized those two stories are unfolding at the very same time.