They are called Bourgeois and their patronymic is also a way of life. They are eight brothers and two sisters, born in Paris between 1920 and 1940. They grow in the trail of the Great War and the first fruits of the second. At the favorite places of bourgeois society - the army, the navy, the medicine, the bar, the business - they are part of the historical events and the social evolutions. From decolonization to post-May 1968, their existences embraced a whole era. The march of the world never discourages their deployment. From Jules the elder to Marie the last, the appearance and disappearance of the characters, their aspirations and their commitments punctuate the formidable horology of this novel very different from a simple family saga. For this is the century that is reconstructed in short discontinuous sequences, like a vast mosaic where the portraits of the ten members of the siblings are gradually detached - and a little their ancestors, and already their children. On this vertiginous round of time, Alice Ferney poses a look of novelist and historian. At the height of contemporary it redo the crossing. Going unceasingly from the singular to the collective, from individual fate to the national epic, she gives us to see the History being made, the errors, the guilty silences, the erroneous choices explained by the confusion of the present. Ample and captivating, Les Bourgeois proves to be a formidable analysis of our roots: a book that spends a whole French century in the sieve of the family novel.--Summary by Actes Sud.