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Synopsis

Children of the Revolution is a wonderful account of how the French repeatedly tried and failed to come up with a new, stable regime for themselves. For those who lived through the quarter-century from the storming of the Bastille to Napoleon’s final defeat, these events left such a profound mark that no subsequent king, emperor or president could ever match up. No regime seemed to be able to establish itself – whether in favour of, or against the Revolution’s values – without generating fresh, often murderous opposition. These fratricidal hatreds affected all aspects of French life, and distorted families, religion, art, foreign policy, and education, with each generation of the Revolution’s ‘children’ struggling with deeply divided loyalties.

This is a richly enjoyable and surprising book. It reveals a strikingly unfamiliar France: a country with an often-overwhelming gap between Paris and the provinces, in which feminism had its own, tortured history, and which managed to lie at the heart of modernity and yet was agonised by a sense of its fall from former greatness.

Robert Gildea ends Children of the Revolution with an account of the opening of the First World War, where France finally – and at a horrific cost – found the unity and sense of national purpose that had eluded it for so long, finally burying the ghosts of the Revolution.

Reviews

Critic Review:

'One of the most dependable and readable accounts'
The Sunday Times

'Far-ranging, original and very enjoyable'
The Daily Telegraph

'Elegantly written...Gildea's touch throughout the book is deft and assured...the narrative is energetic, and the descriptions of French life vivid'
The Literary Review

'Wide-ranging and erudite...a triumph'
The Independent- Book of the Week

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