Blood sisters - Marilyn Yalom

"Blood Sisters" restores to history voices of the women who witnessed the French Revolution. They left us an invaluable legacy - some 80 accounts of what they saw and experienced. From the 16-page testimonial of the Widow Bault, wife of the concierge in Marie-Antoinette's prison, to the 10 volume memoirs of the writer Mme de Genlis, their stories describe how they participated, individually and collectively, in the revolutionary saga, and how they sometimes succeeded in manipulating a political system designed to exclude them. The memoirists of "Blood Sisters" portray themselves as active participants, cheering the revolution on its course, or more frequently resisting it.;The most unforgettable chronicles are singled out: those of the governess of the royal children; the servant attending Marie-Antoinette in her last days; Robespierre's sister, Charlotte; and the peasant woman from the vendee who fought as a soldier. Aristocrats and bourgeois women, royalists and republicans, even the few peasant and working class women who left accounts of their experiences - all were bound together by a common nightmare. Their writings attest to the human cost of radical social change.