Top Highlights

• The Queen had repeatedly urged her imperial brothers to come to her rescue; and the King had explicitly asked the rulers of Prussia, Russia, Spain, Sweden, and Austria-Hungary to collect an armed force to restore the royal power in France.
• the swelling conflict between religion and the state, and the effort to make worship of the state a substitute for religion.
• weaving into one narrative all memorable aspects of European civilization in those twenty-seven years: statesmanship, war, economics, morals, manners, religion, science, medicine, philosophy, literature, drama, music, and art;
• fond interest in Napoleon as no mere warmonger and despot, but as also a philosopher seldom deceived by pretense, and as a psychologist who had ceaselessly studied human nature in the mass and in individual men.
• BOOK I THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 1789–99