Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France - Softcover

Moore, Lucy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060825278 ISBN 13: 9780060825270

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2008

Synopsis

The ideals of the French Revolution inflamed a longing for liberty and equality within courageous, freethinking women of the era—women who played vital roles in the momentous events that reshaped their nation and the world. In Liberty, Lucy Moore paints a vivid portrait of six extraordinary Frenchwomen from vastly different social and economic backgrounds who helped stoke the fervor and idealism of those years, and who risked everything to make their mark on history.

Germaine de Staël was a wealthy, passionate Parisian intellectual—as consumed by love affairs as she was by politics—who helped write the 1791 Constitution. Théroigne de Méricourt was an unhappy courtesan who fell in love with revolutionary ideals. Exuberant, decadent Thérésia Tallien was a ruthless manipulator instrumental in engineering Robespierre's downfall. Their stories and others provide a fascinating new perspective on one of history's most turbulent epochs.

About this title

About the Author:

Lucy Moore was born in 1970 and educated in Britain and the United States before reading history at Edinburgh University. She is the author of several books, including the critically acclaimed Maharanis. She lives in London.

From Booklist:

*Starred Review* "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" for the six women through whose public and private lives Moore presents a fresh history of the French Revolution. Salonnieres Germaine de Stael and Manon Roland were early enthusiasts but later paid a price (a very heavy price in the case of Roland, who was guillotined) for their moderate views. Theroigne de Mericourt and Pauline Leon sought more activist roles. One of glamorous beauty Theresia de Fontenay's romantic entanglements helped trigger Robespierre's fall, and Juliette Recamier, a schoolgirl when the Revolution began, became an icon of the next generation. Using the Revolution's progress as her framework, Moore (who also wrote Maharanis, 2004), interweaves the six women's stories to show how each helped steer or was steered by the course of events. For all their talk of equality, some of the Revolution's most fervent leaders were uninterested in, if not violently opposed to, women's rights, and Moore's subjects had to contend with this as well as with the general havoc of the time. Riveting and revelatory. REVWR
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0060825278
• ISBN 13: 9780060825270
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 528