Children of the Revolution is a wonderful account of how the French repeatedly tried and failed to come up with a new, stable regime for themselves. For those who lived through the quarter-century from the storming of the Bastille to Napoleon's final defeat, these events left such a profound mark that no subsequent king, emperor or president could ever match up. No regime seemed to be able to establish itself - whether in favour of, or against the Revolution's values - without generating fresh, often murderous opposition. These fratricidal hatreds affected all aspects of French life, and distorted families, religion, art, foreign policy, and education, with each generation of the Revolution's `children' struggling with deeply divided loyalties. This is a richly enjoyable and surprising book. It reveals a strikingly unfamiliar France: a country with an often-overwhelming gap between Paris and the provinces, in which feminism had its own, tortured history, and which managed to lie at the heart of modernity and yet was agonised by a sense of its fall from former greatness. Robert Gildea ends Children of the Revolution with an account of the opening of the First World War, where France finally - and at a horrific cost - found the unity and sense of national purpose that had eluded it for so long, finally burying the ghosts of the Revolution.