Book
The Devil’s Laughter
First published 1953
Jean Paul Marin enters adulthood marked by humiliation and imprisonment under the old social order of France. When revolution destroys the structures that once confined him, grievance and ambition carry him into a Paris where political violence, fear and rapidly changing loyalties make yesterday’s victim capable of becoming tomorrow’s participant in repression.
Yerby follows the emotional and social consequences of the French Revolution rather than treating 1789 as a clean break. Aristocratic privilege, revolutionary vengeance and the collapse of ordinary restraints feed into the militarised world from which the Napoleonic Wars emerge. Jean Paul’s career becomes a way of tracing how private injuries can be absorbed into mass politics and how liberation can coexist with terror and renewed hierarchy.
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