The Pocket Bible

Eugene Sue's The Pocket Bible, also known as Christian the Printer, is a sweeping historical novel of the Protestant Reformation, where printers, reformers, and ordinary families are swept into a world of faith, violence, and political upheaval. In Paris in 1534, the crowded city seethes with crime, superstition, class division, and religious hypocrisy, while the honest Lebrenn family struggles to survive as manuscript culture gives way to the printing press. Against this backdrop, Christian Lebrenn and Bridget confront ominous signs of danger, from a grotesque Dominican procession exposing the profiteering of indulgences to the suspicion that theft and piety may be dangerously entwined. The novel then plunges into the horrors of persecution, as condemned heretics are led to the flames before Notre Dame in a scene of royal and clerical cruelty that devastates their kin. Yet Sue balances atrocity with defiance: Josephin the Franc-Taupin turns a siege into a deadly trap, helping fugitives escape to La Rochelle, where Huguenot resistance wins rights and amnesty from Charles IX. Spanning family saga, social commentary, and revolutionary history, the book closes on a fierce vision of rebellion as the road to liberty, with notes and footnotes reinforcing its documentary, polemical force. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.