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The novel culminates in a grand siege of the Lantenac clan’s ancestral castle, the marquis defending, the revolutionaries assaulting.

It was he who led Gauvain to republicanism, and he loves him as the child he never had. Unknown to them, Cimourdain was Gauvain’s tutor. In a chilling scene in Paris, the leaders of the Republic - Danton, Marat, Robespierre - appoint a radical ex-priest, Cimourdain, to monitor Gauvain and to kill him if he should show any mercy. The Republic, however, does not fully trust Gauvain’s loyalty. The Revolutionary forces are commanded by his nephew, the youthful Gauvain, who rejects his aristocratic inheritance to support the Republic. The Vendean forces are led by the aged Marquis de Lantenac, a terrifying but superhumanly courageous nobleman of the Old Regime. We open in the woods of Brittany, where Revolutionary forces are struggling to suppress the counter-revolutionary uprising of the Vendee. Ninety-Three takes its title from the year 1793, the year I of the French Revolution, the year of the Great Terror. Ninety-Three is the last of Victor Hugo’s novels and provides in many ways a coda to his wayward intellectual career.