The French Revolution was a dark and primitive period in history that took place from 1789 to 1799, when commoners attacked aristocrats because of their selfish and inhumane treatment of the lower class. In Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, the storm of the French Revolution is brewing and plots to overthrow the cruel aristocracy are underway. The aristocracy is hated by the commoners of France due to their harsh and abusive behavior towards the poor and their excessive lifestyle which exposes them to hunger and want. However, the revolutionaries' plans include actions that reflect the aristocrats' behavior towards them. Dickens's symbols of the millstone scene, bluebottles, and knitting encompass his theme of men's inhumanity to one another. The millstone scene represents inhumanity due to the amount of blood resulting from the killings, the sharpening of their weapons and the revolutionaries gathering and wearing the clothes of the people they had killed. A millstone sits in the middle of a courtyard and is surrounded by men with ravenous eyes, torn clothes and blood on every limb. When Lorry and Lucie arrive in the courtyard, Lorry hides Lucie's eyes from the barbaric scene. Dickens describes that “the eye could not detect a single creature in the group free from traces of blood” (203). Men are described as creatures, not humans. They have lost their humanity, and that humanity is replaced by a lust for blood and death. The animals are covered in the blood of murdered people and only seek out more blood. The men rush to the whetstone when Dickens says: "As they supported each other and then passed to the whetstone, the men were bare-chested, with the stain all over the middle of the paper..... .aristocracy.In conclusion, the three symbols of bluebottles, knitting and the millstone scene show how wild one man is towards another, the cold and inconsiderate feelings a man has for the one who suffers , and how passive he is towards life. one man is for another. Dickens uses these symbols to introduce the reader to the theme of man's inhumanity and through these symbols embodies the harshness of the French Revolution. The French Revolution anchored men and women in their most primitive state of mind, which took over any sense of feeling and humanity. Overall, the inhumanity of the novel's characters is difficult for the reader to believe or imagine, but Dickens highlights this defining element of the revolution through the scene's symbols of the millstone, the bluebottles, and the knitting. Works Cited Dickens, Charles. A tale of two cities. Mineola: Dover, 1999. Print.