Used book – Helvétie, Maurice Denuzière

765 pages. paperback. Fifteen years after the publication of his first historical novel, Louisiana, which broke all sales records, made him an international bestseller, and revived the genre in France, Maurice Denuzière presents Helvetia, the first volume in a new novel series. While the setting and atmosphere are very different, we find here the novelist's mastery and the meticulous investigator's expertise. After introducing the public to a former French colony across the Atlantic, Denuzière now invites us to discover the beginnings of a Europe to come. Through a series of destinies subject to intrigues, religious antagonisms, and profiteering, he shows how the European idea was, as early as 1800, thanks to philosophers, writers, and military figures, omnipresent on the shores of Lake Geneva. At a time when our fate seems irrevocably linked to that of a European community whose future is uncertain—whether it will assert itself or, once again, remain an unfulfilled dream—the author evokes the promises and failure, brought about in the 19th century thanks to England, of a federal Europe. He paints a microcosm of the Vaud region where, while Europe is aflame with war, the sweetness of life and a carefree attitude prevail against the passage of time.