Gods Are Athirst (1953)

A young painter becomes a revolutionary magistrate in the Paris of 1793, carrying an ideal of justice into decisions over other people's lives. The pressure falls on intimate loyalties as much as public principles. Also translated as The Gods Will Have Blood, this relatively compact novel makes fanaticism a developing habit of judgment. Anatole France writes retrospectively about the Terror, with irony that leaves room to question his characters' own accounts of their virtue.