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

‘This book is excellent...Moore seems to have that rare gift of making a work both scholarly and yet as readable as a thriller...A marvellous book, which I would recommend to both the expert and the novice.’ Julian Fellowes

‘A fascinating spectrum of female experience inside the Revolution and among the ruins it left behind...extremely elegant and thought-provoking...In mapping these six varied and overlapping lives, Moore vividly reminds us of the immense struggle there has been to establish political rights for women.’ Daily Telegraph

‘Moore...catches the feeling of the turbulent times excellently...and never allows us to forget, as academic historians too often do, that people in the past were not abstractions, but men and women of flesh and blood, passions, enthusiasms, hopes, and fears.’ Allan Massie, Literary Review

‘Moore expertly captures the frustration of activist thinkers who happened to be female...Moore's poised, scholarly and entertining analysis reveals just how long and hard the road to civilisation always is, and how footsore it makes the vanguard.’ The Guardian

‘Fascinating... It’s the abundance of...details, and the verve with which she presents them, that makes Moore’s story so enjoyable.’ Sam Leith, Spectator

‘Spirited and engrossing... Drama is exactly the note Moore strikes with her lively narrative full of pungent details... Serious but entertaining.’ Independent on Sunday

‘It is no small task to bring together six such different lives against a historical background of rapid and complicated change but Lucy Moore has done it with skill and brio.’ Sunday Telegraph

‘This vivid, gripping book follows the fortunes of six women through one of history's most exciting – and dangerous – times.’ The Scotsman

‘Moore's criss-crossing narrative coalesce into a superbly tense life.’ The Observer

The bestselling author of ‘Maharanis’ recreates the lives of six remarkable women who, in a time of violent revolution, leapt at the chance to exercise their considerable charm, intelligence and acumen to make their mark on history.

At the heart of Paris’s intellectual movement, Germaine de Stael was a figure like no other. Fiercely intelligent and equally obsessed by love affairs and politics, she helped to write the 1791 Constitution at the salon in which she entertained the great thinkers of the age. Meanwhile, her working-class counterparts patrolled the streets of Paris with pistols in their belts. Theroigne de Mericourt was an ill-treated mistress when she fell in love with revolutionary ideals. Denigrated because of her sex, she nevertheless campaigned tirelessly until a mob beating left her broken in both mind and body. Last but not least came the glittering merveilleuses, whose glamour, beauty and propensity for revealing outfits propelled them to the top of post-revolutionary society. 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.

Writing with vigour and sympathy, Lucy Moore reanimates the lives of six remarkable women who, through their lives, loves and failures give the wider history of the Revolution a compassionate retelling that illuminates not only the brief, hopeful period in which equality seemed within reach, but also the ways in which it failed.