The Sword of Honor, volumes 1 & 2

Most persons know the French Revolution as a tremendous outburst in human affairs. Many know it as one of the race's great steps forward. That however, it was the revolution which carried into power the then rising bourgeois, now capitalist class that this class while appealing for and using the help of the working class secretly hated and feared the demands of the latter and blocked them at every opportunity that finally the bourgeoisie, having obtained as revolutionists, by the aid of the workers their end of the revolution became as violently reactionary as had been the nobility they fought and ruthlessly shot and guillotined to pieces the then definite proletarian movement for full political equality and collective ownership of the tools of production that is an insight into the French Revolutionary period hitherto vouchsafed to few. To that insight Eugene Sue's genius has with the present thrilling novel made straight the way for all.