Liberty

"At the heart of Paris's intellectual movement, Germaine de Stael was a figure like no other. Passionate, fiercely intelligent and as consumed by love affairs as she was by politics, she helped to write the 1791 Constitution at the salon in which she entertained the great thinkers of the age. At the other end of the social scale, her working-class counterparts patrolled the streets of Paris with pistols in their belts. Theroigne de Mericourt was an unhappy courtesan when she fell in love with revolutionary ideals. Denied a political role because of her sex, she nevertheless campaigned tirelessly until a mob beating left her broken in both mind and body. Later came the glittering merveilleuses, whose glamour, beauty, and propensity for revealing outfits propelled them to the top of post-revolutionary society. Exuberant, decadent Theresia Tallien reportedly helped engineer Robespierre's downfall - in so doing, she and her fellow 'sans-chemises' ushered in a new world that combined sexual license with the amorality of the new Republic." "Lucy Moore reanimates the lives of six women from these three very different segments of French society. Through their lives, loves and failures, the wider history of the Revolution receives a retelling that illuminates not only the brief, hopeful period in which liberty and equality seemed within reach, but also the ways in which they were betrayed."--BOOK JACKET.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.