A New Take on the French Revolution : CITY OF DARKNESS, CITY OF LIGHT by Marge Piercy. Fawcett Columbine $25, 480 pages

In one sense, we don’t need to be reminded that women played a major role in the French Revolution. Most of us read Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities” in high school, and who could forget Madame Defarge, knitting as heads fell from the guillotine, or her drumbeating friend the Vengeance, screaming for aristocrats’ blood?

But these are purely fictional characters. In her 12th novel, Marge Piercy (“Gone to Soldiers” [Fawcett, 1988], “Vida” [Fawcett, 1985] “Woman on the Edge of Time” [Fawcett, 1985]) looks at six of the real people who made the revolution. Three are men, and famous--Danton, Robespierre and the Marquis de Condorcet. Three are women, of whom only one, Manon Roland, left much of a mark on history. The other two, Pauline Leon and Claire Lacombe, came from the lower classes and died unsung.

“Why write about the French Revolution?” Piercy asks rhetorically in the introduction to “City of Darkness, City of Light.” “For me, modern politics, the modern left (even the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ in a political context) began there, as did the women’s movement. . . .

“I have been passionately involved in left and women’s politics, have taken part in many demonstrations and countless meetings, and I know all of these characters very well indeed, under different names, of course. What went wrong personally and politically is thus fascinating to me. . . .

“Americans live in a . . . society that is becoming inured to violence (as 18th century France was). . . . We have a permanent underclass about which we are generating myths to justify their poverty and misery and our neglect. . . . I thought looking at French society in crisis . . . might illuminate our own situation.”

Given such explicitly ideological purposes--to affirm women’s contribution and to warn an increasingly non-egalitarian America--Piercy has written a notably broad, evenhanded, comprehensive book. Despite some limitations as a novel, it may be the best popular history of the French Revolution we’re likely to see.

Piercy’s prose, for someone who has published several volumes of poetry, is rather flat. Her use of modern, colloquial language is defensible but uninspired. She leaves us no images as memorable as Dickens’ or, for that matter, Victor Hugo’s in “Ninety-Three.” Her portraits of revolutionaries shy away from the murkier depths we suspect must have been there. But she is good at conveying the passions that animate political people--even better at showing us the sweep of events, the big picture of how those people interact.

Roland, a disciple of Rousseau and herself a prolific writer, believes it unseemly to upstage her husband but wields potent influence behind the scenes. In Paris, she runs one of the main revolutionary salons. A moderate Girondist, she is guillotined by the radical Jacobins in 1793. Dickens cites her as “one of the most remarkable sufferers by that . . . ax,” who “asked at the foot of the scaffold . . . to be allowed to write down the thoughts that were inspiring her.”

Lacombe escapes rural poverty at 15 by joining a traveling theatrical troupe. In revolutionary pageants, nearly nude, she becomes the sex symbol of Liberty, but she takes more pride in learning to shoot a pistol and acting in a play written by another woman, Olympe de Gouges. “If a man could make things happen,” she thinks, “perhaps a woman could too.”

Leon, who owns a small chocolate shop in Paris, is closest to Madame Defarge: neighborhood leader, hard-liner, street fighter. As a girl, she saw bread rioters tortured to death. She joins the women’s march on Versailles in 1789 and, with Lacombe, the bloody mob assault on the Tuileries in 1792. Leon and Lacombe are both single and readily inclined to question traditional male-female relations.

Because little is known about these two, Piercy can flesh them out the way she wants. They are earthy, lusty, practical. In contrast, Roland comes off as a bluestocking and a bit of a prig. Still, Piercy tries hard to make her sympathetic. Same with the men--Danton, the opportunist; Robespierre, the icy ascetic; Condorcet, the unworldly intellectual. Nobody is a villain here. Each means well and believes that he or she is serving the revolution by fighting the others. The result is tragedy--not an occasion for Piercy to lecture us, as we might have expected her to, but a sobering reminder of the tragedies of so many revolutions since.