Böcker i Routledge Studies in the Modern History of France-serien

Bonnier's biography reads like an absorbing novel, with its twists and turns, reconstructed dialogue and author's acute observations. As well as being a tragic human story, It is an illuminating study of the convoluted political context of the affair, which will be unfamiliar to some Anglophone readers.

The book addresses how work became so central to our systems of citizenship and social recognition by considering the French context in the long transition between the 1789 and 1848 revolutions and focusing on a specific 'fragment' of history in the early 1830s marked by a pandemic crisis and the first consequences of industrialisation.