Benedetta Craveri presents in this book the lives of seven bright and virtuous young aristocrats; tells us how these children of the Enlightenment tried to reconcile a life of privilege with the need for change commensurate with the precepts of the French Revolution. With the balance of rigor and narrative mastery that characterizes it, Craveri also offers us a new and original approach to one of the most convulsed eras in the social and political history of our civilization; the end of the Old Regime and the beginning of European democracy.

Refined and adventurous, representatives of a way of life that was about to end, conceived marriage as a convention of artifice as they alternated an exciting love life without brakes or limits with political activity; they sought to make a place near power through witty strategies, chameleon alliances, and shrewd and often cruel intrigues.

Ideological dissidents in varying degrees and forms of the absolutist regime whose days were numbered, the Duke of Lauzun, the Viscount and the Count of Ségur, the Duke of Brissac, the Count of Narbonne, the Knight of Boufflers and the Count of Vaudreuil– the seven protagonists of this book – were dragged by historical circumstances and also by their lineage. Everyone paid a high price for it and chose different paths: some opted for weapons, others for exile, but for all came relentlessly the end of a previously shared world.