Born into a family of schoolteachers keen on preserving the language and the culture of Brittany, she graduated as a teacher of philosophy from the École normale supérieure de jeunes filles.

Like many of her fellow students, she joined the Communist Party but left four years later after the repression of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and decided not to become involved in politics.

She taught philosophy for a period but then turned to history after she met a group of historians, Denis Richet, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and François Furet, at the National Library of France.

She worked with them to produce the Dictionnaire critique de la Révolution française, which was published in English in 1988 as A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution.

Her analysis of the symbols and images of the many different festivals that she reviewed contributed significantly to the understanding of the Revolution and of French culture in general.