Liberty Live And Times Six Women

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.