Weekly Reader: Julien's Terror by Laura Rahme; Gripping Historical Fiction Novel Explores Real and Supernatural Horrors of France's Reign of Terror

Weekly Reader: Julien's Terror by Laura Rahme; Gripping Historical Fiction Novel Explores Real and Supernatural Horrors of France's Reign of Terror

By Julie Sara Porter

Bookworm Reviews




Spoilers: The period between 1789-1799 in France is among the most tumultuous times in World History. French government transformed from a monarchy, to a republic, to a dictatorship, to an empire over the course of ten years.

It's understandable that those times would have filled the people with plenty of stress, uncertainty, anxiety, and fear. People wondered if their closest friend during the Revolution would then denounce them to the guillotine during the Reign of Terror. It was hard to trust or rely on anyone.

Laura Rahme's novel Julien's Terror explores that stressful frightening time. Like good historical fiction, she fills her book with plenty of details about the time from clothing and activities to key players like Maximilian Robespierre, the Dauphin Louis-Charles, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Francois de Charette. Rahme however does not give us a dry history. She gives us an interesting story with fascinating characters to go with this exciting detailed history.

The most intriguing characters are Julien and Marguerite D'Aureville, the protagonists. They are a married couple who are on opposite sides of the political spectrum and it doesn't take long for them to be at odds with each other.

Julien is the son of former Revolutionaries who protested the French monarchy and got swept up in the subsequent Reign of Terror. However, Julien's father also brings terror to his own home. He is an alcoholic who physically and mentally abuses his wife and son. He is so reprehensible that it is actually a relief when Julien uses some stolen anti-Revolutionary pamphlets placed in the right positions to have his father arrested. What saves this from being a completely reprehensible is Julien's age 9, that he is protecting himself and his mother, and that he only intended for his father to be arrested and removed from the family. When his father is guillotined, Julien is sickened with the carnage and filled with remorse.

Marguerite is also a victim of these brutal times. She is the daughter of Royalist sympathizers who are imprisoned then killed in the opening chapter. She is adopted by her uncle and sees battlefields up front as she and other Royalists march with Charette but many are wiped out. She is filled with such trauma from these times that she is troubled well into her adulthood.

When Julien and Marguerite marry, things try to become normal. Julien develops an engineering career. Marguerite adjusts to becoming a middle class wife and bickers with her domineering mother-in-law. The troubles from their childhood seem to be behind them. Then Napoleon takes power and things get worse.


Julian becomes obsessive and paranoid with Marguerite. While he is not physically abusive, Julien is verbally abusive towards her. He is highly suspicious of her former aristocratic life and her relationships with other men particularly Max Von Hauser, an Austrian man. Marguerite also has her own mysterious behavior as well. Julien's admiration of Napoleon Bonaparte causes her to avoid speaking with him about politics while keeping her former allegiances with Royalists. She also meets Max at a cafe in private who provides an understanding ear and more. Julien and Marguerite's marriage is an example of a self-fulfilled prophecy. Julien's coldness and jealous suspicions that Marguerite is having an affair causes her to confide in friendship with Max and that friendship develops into a potential romance.

Julien's Terror explores how the times shaped Julien and Marguerite and their marriage. Since, they were on opposite sides during the war of the Revolution, they cannot fully trust each other when there appears to be peace. While the Terror of the old days is still in their subconscious, it infiltrates into their lives giving them their own terrors.

What starts out as a straight forward historical fiction about the French Revolution, takes a very bizarre turn halfway through giving the novel a supernatural tone. Julien visits a fortune teller whose predictions are right on the nose. There is a creepy apparition of a young boy who frightens Julian that may be a ghost or may be a hallucination. Then there is Marguerite whose behavior gets progressively stranger. She takes on different voices, acts like she doesn't know Julien or anyone else, and sings vulgar songs she didn't know before. She also disappears for several weeks with no memory of where she went. Is she lying? Does she have Dissociative Identity Disorder or has she been possessed by spirits?

The supernatural aspects turn Julien's Terror into a different kind of book than it was before. At first glance, it appears abrupt but the more the Reader thinks about it the more it makes sense. The magical aspects are given more realistic possibilities like they could be products of their insanity or repressed guilt and memories of what had gone on before.
The bigger possibility is that in the world of Julian's Terror, the disruption in the political and social world of the Revolution and Reign of Terror brought the disruptions in the spiritual world. The ghosts and possessions are  symbols of the horror that happened before and still occurs within a country that has not recovered and whose people continue to suffer.

Laura Rahme's book focuses on the terror that comes from a country in great political strife and from the people who lived during it and afterwards.