Love and Liberty

Dumas went to Varennes in 1856 to find men who had seen the king's carriage stopped, and came back with this: the Revolution told from below by René Besson, a boy of the town who grows up into it. The Bastille, the flight of Louis, the Terror and the fall of Robespierre, all at eye level and from inside the crowd rather than above it. The narrator is invented; the old men Dumas sat with at Varennes were not, and the book is angrier than his usual manner. Fifty-seven plates, among them Daumier and Chardin, carry the century's own view of its people from the fêtes galantes of Watteau's age to the hardships of war.