Sepinwall uses the long career of Henri Gregoire, parish priest, deputy and constitutional bishop, as a vantage point on how French universalism was assembled. Gregoire lived through four monarchs, an emperor and five revolutionary governments, and he turns up at the centre of the Tennis Court Oath, the nationalisation of the church, the abolition of the monarchy, the campaign against regional dialects and the attack on slavery. The organising idea is regeneration, the remaking of people through political action, which the book presents as the mechanism that allowed revolutionary universalism to absorb Jews, people of colour and speakers of patois into one nation. Inclusion carried a price, since those groups had to surrender what marked them out, and women were held to be fixed by nature and therefore beyond regeneration. Sepinwall reads her subject in three registers, as window onto his age, as agent who shaped events, and as a symbol later claimed by admirers and enemies alike.