Paris, September 1792. France has plunged into revolution, soon to be bloodied by the excesses of terror. Paris is lacking everything, the people are starving while the profiteers of the revolution are celebrating. Then there is this organized theft to seize the crown jewels. It’s the garde meuble at Place de la Concorde, the very place where the blood of the revolution’s fanatical victims is spilled daily.
Enemy of the people, a vague enough term to justify the guillotine. The crown jewels are about to be stolen by a team of thieves. While the story is true, it becomes intertwined with a novel of love, espionage, and crime. There are many heroes. Who is who? One gets lost amidst corrupt politicians, complicit police officers, English agents, and our heroine who above all wants to save her son.
All these characters gather in Paris to dispose of the loot. The heist of the century, one might say. The Regent and other diamonds belonging to the crown of France, and thus to the state, are stolen. The author takes us through an investigation sabotaged by the high-ranking accomplices of the thieves.
The king is guillotined, along with men and women whose fault is not being patriots in the sense that France’s leaders understand the term. The much-criticized Cour des Miracles still exists, equality remains a pious wish, and poverty is even more glaring with a ruined country. We are in the realm of the arbitrary.
If the Bastille had been taken under the pretext of freeing the country from despotism, it has plunged it into a bloody dictatorship.
The theft of the Regent lets us experience the Paris of this time where human life had little value. A book that is both historical, a love story, an espionage novel, and a detective story with heroes, villains, the corrupt, and the incompetent, ultimately resembling our modern world but without the guillotine.
Thierry Jan
