Blood Sisters finally restores to history the voices of the women who witnessed the French Revolution. They left us an invaluable legacy - some eighty accounts of that they saw and experienced. From the sixteen page testimonial of the Widow Bault, wife of the concierge in Marie Antoinette's prison, to the ten volume memoirs of the prolific
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.Marilyn Yalom singles out those who authored the most unforgettable chronicles: the governess of the royal children; the servant attending Marie-Antoinette in her last days; Robespierre's sister Charlotte; the peasant woman from the Vendee who fought as a soldier; and of course, Mme Roland, whose autobiography has enchanted readers for centuries. 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 eloquently attest to the human costs of radical social change.
