1793. France tears itself apart.
The Revolution has devoured its king and now turns its fury inward. In Paris, the guillotine works day and night as the Committee of Public Safety purges enemies real and imagined. In the Vendée, peasants rise in rebellion, rallying to the white flag of the Bourbons and the Catholic faith the Republic has condemned. Between these forces, France drowns in blood.
Three men will determine the fate of thousands.
Marquis de Lantenac is the royalist general whose tactical brilliance and aristocratic ruthlessness make him the Revolution's most dangerous enemy. He fights to restore the old order, to preserve a world of hierarchy and tradition against the chaos of equality and change.
Gauvain is the young revolutionary commander pursuing Lantenac-his own great-uncle-across the burning countryside of Brittany. He believes in the Revolution's promise of liberty and justice, yet cannot abandon compassion even for those who would destroy everything he fights for.
Cimourdain is the former priest turned revolutionary zealot, Gauvain's mentor and political commissar. His devotion to republican principles is absolute. Mercy is weakness. Compromise is treason. Justice demands sacrifice-of others, of himself, of everything human that might stand in the way of the greater good.
When these three collide at the siege of La Tourgue fortress, when Lantenac must choose between escape and saving innocent children, when Gauvain must choose between duty and mercy, when Cimourdain must choose between love and principle-the Revolution itself will be weighed and judged.
Victor Hugo's final novel is his darkest and most philosophically profound-an epic meditation on the moral paradoxes of revolution, the terrible cost of political transformation, and the question of whether any cause, however just, can justify the human suffering it demands. With the wisdom of age and the passion that never left him, Hugo confronts the century's central political question: How do we change the world without becoming monsters?
Some revolutions devour their children. Some devour their souls.
From the author of Les Misérables-the masterwork that asks whether history's arc bends toward justice or only toward more refined forms of tragedy.
