Les Grandes Familles Books in Order

The series usually known as Les Grandes Familles, and sometimes grouped under the broader title La fin des hommes, is Maurice Druon's three-book portrait of French high society between World War I and the eve of World War II. Rather than focusing on a single quest or mystery, it follows bankers, aristocrats, politicians, mistresses, heirs, and strivers as their private lives and public ambitions keep colliding.

A few figures give the trilogy its spine. Simon Lachaume begins as a gifted young teacher from a peasant background and climbs toward power in politics. Around him are the Schoudlers, a banking and newspaper family, the fading aristocratic La Monnerie clan, and people like Sylvaine Dual, who tries to turn beauty and nerve into a career and a future. Later books give more space to the younger generation, especially Marie-Ange and Jean-Noël, who inherit not stability but the mess made by their elders.

The setting is just as important as the cast. Druon moves through Paris drawing rooms, ministries, newspaper offices, theatres, stock market schemes, and country houses that look solid until the money starts to go. Interwar France is not just background decoration here. Political instability, social snobbery, economic shocks, and changing ideas about status all shape what these characters think they can get away with.

It is not a cozy family saga.

What carries the books forward is the steady link between appetite and decline. Affairs turn into leverage, wealth turns into dependence, and social polish hides panic, vanity, and cruelty. Druon can be very hard on his characters, especially when they confuse power with worth, but he also understands how people get trapped by class, desire, and the need to keep up appearances. The result is sharp social drama with the pull of a page-turner.

Despite the size of the canvas, Druon writes with a clean forward push. Each volume picks up the consequences of the last, so promotions, scandals, inheritances, and market shocks do not stay neatly contained. The books are full of conversations, compromises, and small humiliations that later bloom into much larger disasters. That makes the trilogy feel less like a static social panorama and more like a slow-motion collapse.

The trilogy begins with La fin des hommes, continues with La Chute des Corps, and closes with Rendez-vous aux enfers. The first volume won the Prix Goncourt in 1948, and the cycle later reached the screen in a 1958 film adaptation and a 1989 television adaptation. If you like social novels that show how public institutions and private weakness feed each other, this is the kind of series that keeps widening as it goes.