For the avid reader, discerning collector and real Éric Vuillard - fan,
a new, signed, 1st UK edition / 1st printing hardcover copy of
Éric Vuillard
The War of the Poor
Translated by Mark Polizzotti
Picador, London / UK, 2021
"The fight for equality begins in the streets.
From the internationally bestselling author of The Order of the Day: Éric Vuillard once again takes us behind the scenes at a moment when history was being written.
The history of inequality is a long and terrible one. And it’s not over yet. Short, sharp and devastating, The War of the Poor
tells the story of a brutal episode from history, not as well known as
tales of other popular uprisings, but one that deserves to be told.
Sixteenth-century
Europe: the Protestant Reformation takes on the powerful and the
privileged. Peasants, the poor living in towns, who are still being
promised that equality will be granted to them in heaven, begin to ask
themselves: and why not equality now, here on earth?
There
follows a violent struggle. Out of this chaos steps Thomas Müntzer: a
complex and controversial figure, who sided with neither Martin Luther,
nor the Roman Catholic Church. Müntzer addressed the poor directly,
encouraging them to ask why a God who apparently loved the poor seemed
to be on the side of the rich.
Éric Vuillard tells the story of
one man whose terrible and novelesque life casts light on the times in
which he lived – a moment when Europe was in flux. As in his blistering
look at the build-up to World War II, The Order of the Day, Vuillard 'leaves nothing sleeping in the shadows'." (panmacmillan.com)
"This brief, ardent book, half-historical essay and half-revolutionary tract,
mingles swift-moving tableaux from the preacher’s life and age with
Vuillard’s pulpit homilies on oppression and resistance . . . its
incendiary prose well served by Mark Polizzotti’s translation, has scenes of firecracker intensity." (Financial Times)
"Éric Vuillard is a writer and filmmaker born in Lyon in 1968 who has written nine award-winning books, including Conquistadors (winner of the 2010 Prix Ignatius J. Reilly), and La bataille d’Occident and Congo
(both of which received the 2012 Prix Franz-Hessel and the 2013 Prix
Valery-Larbaud). He won the 2017 Prix Goncourt, France’s most
prestigious literary prize, for L’ordre du jour." (panmacmillan.com)