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.

'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

On every generation to which it gave birth the French Revolution left its mark. A mark of hope for a new dawn, a new order of the world, but also a mark of tragedy, of a project that came to grief in anarchy, bloodletting and despotism. It proclaimed the power of man’s reason to achieve progress and happiness in the world, the rights of man to liberty and equality which every government should protect, the sovereignty of the people, the virtues of self-government, and the duty of French citizens to spread liberty among oppressed peoples abroad. And yet the Revolution spawned new tyrannies, the tyranny of the masses who insulted and abused their elected representatives, a revolutionary dictatorship that terrorized its enemies and the plebiscitary dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte who appealed to disgruntled masses over the heads of politicians. Liberty was sacrificed to equality, and difference was eliminated in the name of the public interest. The fanaticism attributed to religion was replaced by a revolutionary fanaticism that terrorized its enemies and then consumed its own in a fratricidal struggle. Revolutionaries spawned new armies that set fire to Europe for a generation in the first manifestation of total war.

The Revolution divided the French into two irreconcilable camps. Each had its own defined sense of what France should be, claimed total legitimacy for itself and demonized its opponents. One camp dreamed of bringing back the Ancien Regime, monarchy by divine right, a social hierarchy dominated by a noble caste, and the supremacy of the Catholic Church which sanctified the monarchy and was protected by it. It abhorred the Revolution, forgetting that for three years monarchy, Church and Revolution had coexisted, denouncing the violence it had unleashed from the taking on the Bastille on 14 July 1789, when the head of its governor was paraded on a pikestaff by the mob. Attempts to reform the Catholic Church quickly gave way to it's destruction, the closure of churches, the massacre of priests and nuns, the silencing of bells. The monarchy was overthrown by a republic, and the Republic executed the king. A reign of terror was orchestrated against the enemies of the Revolution, using the guillotine, grapeshot and drownings, and putting rebel provinces to fire and sword. For the counter-revolutionaries no compromise was possible with the Revolution: it would be terminated and those who had promoted it, beginning with the regicides who had voted for the King’s death, would themselves be put to death. Neither could there be any deal with the regime of Napoleon to which the Revolution gave rise: he was regarded as a despot, a usurper and warmonger.