Two views of the Revolution, as hope and as tragedy. The Fête de la Fédération of 14 July 1790 reveals a nation united in liberty…

…While in this hostile cartoon Robespierre is shown executing the executioner after the last citizen has been guillotined.

The revolutionary generation. Clockwise from the top: Madame de Staël, defender of liberty

Counter-revolutionary François-René de Chateaubriand

The Marquis de Lafayette, hero of the American and French Revolutions

Ex-bishop Talleyrand, the great survivor of regime change.

Paris old and new: grim alleys imagined by Gustave Doré

The wide boulevards built by Baron Haussmann, with the new Opéra in the background.

The Romantic generation. Clockwise from the top: liberal politician Adolphe Thiers

Painter Eugène Delacroix

Writer and prophet Victor Hugo

Félicité de Lamennais, who attempted to reconcile the Catholic Church with liberty and democracy.

The curé d’Ars, a country priest who worked to restore religious life after the destructiveness of the Revolution

A peasant family of the kind which bred generations of priests, here from the Auvergne.

Two women with public profiles: Delphine de Girardin, in a painting by Hersent, who declared that ‘the first duty of a woman is to be beautiful’

George Sand, the power behind Ledru-Rollin, minister of the interior in 1848.

Private and public society: the salon of Marie d’Agoult, where select writers and politicians networked

A much more diverse theatre audience that was never shy to voice its opinions.

The Realist generation. Clockwise from the top: scholar and thinker Ernest Renan

Novelist Gustave Flaubert

Republican politician Léon Gambetta

Revolutionary Louise Michel.

Paris under siege and Paris in revolution, 1870–71. national guardsmen hold off an invisible Prussian enemy

They build barricades against a defeatist and repressive government.

The generation of Rejuvenators, who shaped the Republic of the Belle Époque. Clockwise from the top: Aristide Briand, anarchist turned peacemaker

Alexandre Millerand, socialist turned nationalist

Joseph Caillaux, ‘plutocratic demagogue’

Henriette Caillaux, here shooting the editor of the Figaro to defend her honour.

Belle Époque France at ease with itself. The middle classes holiday at Trouville

While Louis Renault races one of his new machines.

Two faces of French feminism: former actress Marguerite Durand, who claimed that ‘feminism owes much to my blonde hair’

Madeleine Pelletier, a grocer’s daughter and psychiatric doctor who defended women’s right to abortion and campaigned with British suffragettes.

Despite these images of a divided society – the social elite hunting in the forest of Chantilly

Button-makers on strike in the Paris region – French society was becoming increasingly cohesive around a broad middle class.

The generation of Sacrifice, which brought together patriotism, faith and social conscience. Clockwise from the top: Charles Péguy

Marc Sangnier, leader of republican Catholic youth

Ernest Psichari, the model Catholic soldier

Raïssa Maritain, a Jewish refugee whose conversion to Catholicism was much acclaimed.

Faces of French nationalism. Clockwise from the top: national heroes Joan of Arc and Vercingétorix imagined together by sculptor Chatrousse for the Salon of 1872

Colonial proconsul Lyautey in France’s Moroccan protectorate

Big Bad Wolf Britannia confronts Red Riding Hood France at Fashoda on the Nile in 1898.

Peace and War. Socialist tribune Jean Jaurès addresses an antimilitarist rally on the outskirts of Paris in 1913

While in 1914 Renault taxis are used to transport troops to the battle of the Marne, where the German offensive was checked.