The Sword of Honor; Or, The Foundation of the French Republic: A Tale of the French Revolution

The French Revolution wasn't only guillotines and aristocrats fleeing Paris in carriages. It was blacksmiths and weavers and gutter-born children who believed they could reshape the world. Eugène Sue tells their story through John Lebrenn, a man who carries his ancestors' revolutionary dreams like a torch passed down through generations of struggle. This is the eighteenth volume in Sue's monumental series "The Mysteries of the People" - a sweeping chronicle of one proletarian family across the centuries. Here, the storm that has been gathering for volumes finally breaks in all its fury, sweeping away the rotting scaffold of feudal privilege. But as one tyranny falls, another rises. The crown gives way to the coin. The aristocrat is replaced by the banker. Sue doesn't let his readers off easy with triumphant endings; he shows revolution as an unfinished sentence, a people drilling for a final overthrow they may never live to see. For readers who want history from below, not from the marble halls - for those who suspect that every revolution eats its children and still might be worth fighting for.