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Surrounded by echoes of other revolutions, including the Paris Commune and the Cuban revolution, two left-wing novelists dealing with the French Revolution give a problematic image of the sense of history. With the paradigm of progress in crisis and despite his goal of legitimizing the Terror, Hugo mostly highlights contradictions in the historical process, with violence justified only retroactively, while Carpentier criticizes both the revolutionary ideology and its betrayals. The novels also experiment with two further understandings of history: firstly, the paradigm of the catastrophe, which sees the revolutionary rupture as a process without subject and the expression of an upheaval as inevitable as it is frightening, and secondly, the genealogical paradigm, in which on the level of imagination, Hugo repairs the fractures of history while linking past and present, old and new regimes, whereas Carpentier highlights the irreducible plurality of cultures and the contradiction at the heart of the dream of brotherhood.