The conspiracy

Bertrand Rosenthal is a student at a French university, where he works alongside classmates on a scheme to carry out perilous acts in the name of revolution. While the conspiracy takes shape, he is also drawn into a love affair that carries its own considerable risks, and the two threads pull against each other.

The novel is set among young political activists in interwar Paris. It was written by Paul Nizan, a French writer and member of the Communist Party whose fiction often explored the moral choices of committed young men. Nizan was killed in action in 1940.