ABSTRACT
Edme Thomas Liron is the ancestor with whom Riffaud feels most intimately connected, and his manuscript is the ‘family novel’ that she has consulted when weaving together the threads of her own life story. Liron was born on 9 October 1806 to Pierre and Marguerite Liron in the Nivernais village of Trucy. The son and grandson of shepherds, he was also a son of ‘the people’ both in terms of his social origins and in the general, romantic sense of the term mythologised by French novelists and historians: ‘peuple nation’, ‘peuple travailleur’, ‘peuple miséreux’, ‘peuple insurgé’3 – people of the nation, the workers, the wretched poor, insurrectionists. Liron was all of these: a patriot who believed in the destiny of his country; a manual labourer who never had job security; a poor man who sometimes went hungry; an insurgent who embraced revolt as some embrace faith, believing in its power to change the world.
