French Literature Reviews - 2026

Thomas Dodman, Les Volontaires. Roman familial de la Révolution française
History, Politics and Society

Gabriel Noël has just turned 21 when he enlists in the volunteer battalions of the revolutionary army in August 1791. It is here that historian Thomas Dodman encounters him through his correspondence with his adoptive mother and sister, Élisabeth Dufresne and Charlotte de Visme—his "good family" in Sommerviller, Lorraine. Élisabeth is a woman of letters: she frequents the salons of

Lunéville and has raised her children according to Rousseau’s principles. Charlotte fancies herself a sans-culotte and, alongside her mother, takes an active role in the village school. Gabriel is, in a way, Émile at war: a soldier-citizen caught between his ideals and disillusionment. He will spend five years in the army before returning home to marry his sister in Sommerviller, where he will serve as mayor until his death in 1850.

The fruit of a decade-long journey through archives and attics, this book chronicles three lives that are at once singular and ordinary, set against the backdrop of rural France swept up in the upheavals of the Revolution, the restoration of order under the Empire, and the dawn of nineteenth-century modernity. The historian's prose weaves seamlessly through the gaps and details of the archival sources to trace the silhouettes of three individuals within their era. Citizenship, education, patriotism, women's rights: the tortuous birth of a society of equals unfolds through the lens of the intimate. In doing so, it crafts a deeply felt, long-durational history of the French Revolution.

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Thomas Dodman is a historian of modern France. A member of the editorial board of the journal Sensibilités (Éditions Anamosa), he teaches at Columbia University in New York. He co-edited Une histoire de la guerre, directed by Bruno Cabanes (Seuil, 2018), and is the author of Nostalgie, histoire d’une émotion mortelle (Seuil, 2022).

This study draws upon a decade of archival research to examine the French Revolution through the personal correspondence of a soldier and his adoptive family in Lorraine. Situated within modern French historical scholarship, the work engages with themes of citizenship, education, patriotism, and women's rights during a period of profound political transformation. By tracing the lives of Gabriel Noël, Élisabeth Dufresne, and Charlotte de Visme, the text explores the intersection of private experience and public upheaval, moving from the revolutionary years through the Napoleonic Empire into the nineteenth century.

Readers interested in the social history of the French Revolution and the methodology of microhistory may find this work relevant. The volume reflects on the birth of a society of equals by examining the everyday realities, ideals, and disillusionments of ordinary individuals caught up in the sweeping political changes of their era, grounded in the close reading of surviving familial correspondence and local archival records.