HER OWN REVOLUTION

A young woman hatches a plan to save French royalist sympathizers from the guillotine in Borchert’s historical novel.

This book is the second installment in the Château de Verzat series, which chronicles the experiences of various women living during the French Revolution. This entry follows the exploits of Geneviève, the 17-year-old daughter of public prosecutor Antoine Fouquier-Tinville. Geneviève hopes to travel to America to reunite with her beloved Henri Detré, who has fled the revolution with his sister, Joliette de Verzat, the subject of the previous book in the series. As women are denied an education in revolutionary France, Geneviève poses as her brother to attend university, laying the foundation for an income to fund her passage. She later finds work as a clerk in her father’s offices handling the lists of prisoners destined for the guillotine. When one of the lists contains the name Louis Lagarde, whom she knew at university, Geneviève devises a plan to save his life. The narrative deals expansively with issues of gender and power against the backdrop of the French Revolution. Reflecting on women’s rights in 18th-century France, Geneviève poignantly reflects, “Liberty? All women were free to do was starve.” Borchert’s prose is clean, although there are several occasions in which her characters’ actions are overembellished (“He wiped his hands down the front of his leather apron….He let out a puff of air….[He] looked like he’d eaten a sour cherry”). The author deploys simple, effective similes to vividly animate the characters (“She trembled like a leaf in a windstorm”). Borchert has a keen eye for historical and geographical detail, even alluding to the “mushroom tunnels” that run beneath Paris. All of these elements make for a suspenseful page-turner with an unexpected love story thrown in for good measure.  

A captivating tale of female triumph in the late 18th century.