In this chapter, Dickens personifies Saint Antoine and describes it in such a way as to highlight certain qualities of the people. How are the people of Saint Antoine described? How is our view of them perhaps shifting?

The title of Chapter 22 refers to the French mob, and the people of At. Antoine, which Dickens compared in the previous chapter to a sea. It would be unnatural for a sea to continue rising past high tide except in extreme conditions, and the storming of the Bastille would seem to be the extent of furor that the mob has been capable of. Dickens suggests the unnatural character of the mob by saying that its level of engagement is continuing to rise. The brute force of the mob stems from the fact that it empowers those who have never been empowered before. Even if the lower classes are starving and their life is not meaningful, they have found new meaning in the fact that they have the ability to kill others.