In the 16th century, the Protestant Reformation launched an attack on privilege and the Catholic Church, but it rapidly became an established, bourgeois authority itself. Rural laborers and the urban poor, who were still being promised equality in heaven, began to question why they shouldn't have equality here on earth. A material and spiritual struggle erupted, and as the Goncourt Prize-winning author of The Order of the Day recounts here, Thomas Müntzer—a theologian loyal to neither Luther nor the Pope—waded into the fray to launch an insurrection through the Word.

"Cinematic…. [Vuillard] never forces analogies with the present, but the uprisings he describes feel like part of a war destined to rage in any era beset by gross inequalities."—The New Yorker