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Hugo's last novel returns to the year the Revolution turned on itself. In 1793, with the king executed and France at war with most of Europe, the royalist peasants of the Vendée rise against the Republic, and three men are set against one another: the Marquis de Lantenac, an old aristocrat who lands from England to lead the revolt and who will do anything for his cause; Gauvain, his great-nephew, a young Republican commander who believes the Revolution must be merciful to be worth anything; and Cimourdain, Gauvain's former tutor, a priest turned revolutionary of absolute conviction, sent by Paris to watch him and, if necessary, to condemn him.

Around them Hugo sets the civil war at its most savage — a corvette crossing the Channel with a loose cannon smashing its own gun deck, a woman searching the burning countryside for three children carried off by soldiers, and a besieged tower where the whole argument comes down to a locked iron door and a choice that no political principle can make for you.

Written in 1874, when Hugo had watched the Commune and its suppression, this is his verdict on revolution itself: that terror and mercy are both real, that a good man may be obliged to kill his conscience, and that above the absolute of the Republic there is a higher absolute. It is the most tightly built book he ever wrote. This is an unabridged recording of a fresh modern translation.