Public Libraries of Suffolk County, New York

Ribbons of scarlet, a novel of the French Revolution's women, Kate Quinn, Stephanie Dray, Laura Kamoie, Sophie Perinot, Heather Webb, E. Knight ; with a foreword by Allison Pataki

eng

illustrations

no index present

fiction

Ribbons of scarlet

Kate Quinn, Stephanie Dray, Laura Kamoie, Sophie Perinot, Heather Webb, E. Knight ; with a foreword by Allison Pataki

a novel of the French Revolution's women

In late eighteenth-century France, women do not have a place in politics. But as the tide of revolution rises, women from gilded salons to the streets of Paris decide otherwise, upending a world order which has long oppressed them. Blue-blooded Sophie de Grouchy believes in democracy, education, and equal rights for women, and she marries the only man in Paris who agrees. Emboldened to fight the injustices King Louis XVI, Sophie aims to prove that an educated populace can govern itself. But one of her students, fruit seller Louise Audu, is hungrier for bread and vengeance than for learning. When the Bastille falls and Louise leads a women's march to Versailles, the monarchy is forced to bend—but not without a fight. The king's pious sister, Princess Élizabeth, takes a stand to defend her brother, to spirit her family to safety, and to restore the old order, even at the risk of her head. But when fanatics use the newspapers to twist the Revolution's ideals into a new tyranny, even the women who toppled the monarchy are threatened by the guillotine. Putting her faith in the pen, brilliant political wife Manon Roland tries to write a way out of France's blood-soaked Reign of Terror, while pike-bearing Pauline Léon and steely Charlotte Corday embrace violence as the only way to save the nation. With justice corrupted by revenge, all the women must make difficult choices to survive, unless unlikely heroine and courtesan's daughter Émilie de Sainte-Amaranthe can sway the man who control's France's fate, the fearsome Robespierre

adult