~ Author’s Preface ~
Here is a perplexing thing: A man in Canada in 2020 tries to write about the women’s side of the French Revolution. Why is that a man’s business? Also, of all historical events? It’s so remote from our time! Not so much, however, if one understands that the French Revolution is the origin of our own left and right political spectrum, our moderate versus radical antagonism, as well as some of our modern, institutional habits. Gender dynamics today parallel gender dynamics then, unfortunately, while the Women’s March on Washington parallels the Women’s March on Versailles, though possibly only in name since women today are disarmed. Anne-Josèphe herself was not French. She was still participating in and writing about the French Revolution, which is significant for me since I am not French, and I am concerned with and writing about the same. There will hopefully be a great deal more to signify but, insofar as anyone cares about anything or anyone, a transcendence is necessary.
Virginia Woolf pioneered a stream-of-consciousness narrative in her writing, which is the form this essay takes. This might cause confusion but the point to be made with this entire work isn’t to be a simple historical survey. Its goal is to give insights to our own concrete life. Where Husserl’s study of the crisis of the sciences afforded him “no other choice than to proceed forward and backward in a zigzag pattern”, so must I go forward and backward.
My post-secondary education, goals for my future (favouring co-operatives), and this play are all intertwined. I came to the University of Victoria to study economics and business. Sometime after getting a diploma in Business Administration, I saw The Thin Red Line (1998) for the first time, which was life-changing for me. It drew me to the film department and the philosophy department. A UVic business ethics course, however, steered me more to philosophy.
Cue a life of idleness and uselessness typical of the philosopher? Well, the most outlandish aspect of all this is that my inspiration for writing this play was through countless hours of modern-day idleness. That is to say, through video games. Yes, I did encounter Théroigne de Méricourt in Assassin’s Creed: Unity to begin with. But, now in hindsight, I can’t even bring myself to play it anymore because of my newfound snobbishness to the revolution’s historical representation!
I wanted to write an Anne-Josèphe-centric story but with philosophical undertones inspired by The Thin Red Line and, if possible, the Blade Runner films. That is why writing her story was put on hold yet kept in mind as I got an undergrad degree in philosophy between 2016 and 2019. I was searching all the while for the philosophy that would suit her story. What philosophy was relevant to her time and our time since we are modern audiences viewing her? It could not be solely Rousseau’s or Condorcet’s Enlightenment philosophy because our time has had its own developments that now make those figures too remote from us, as much as the French Revolution itself is remote from us. It could not be strictly through ancient philosophy, Empiricism, Romantic philosophy, and certainly not formal logic. I took additional political science courses, history courses, writing courses, and courses on gender. I was casting a wide, anxious net. I wasn’t sure, wasn’t sure…. Out of this noir/gothic fog, however, Existential Phenomenology emerged as the chosen philosophical method because existence as object is available to the subject’s exploration but likely never fully grasped. It had to be all of it.
Taken as a whole, my goal is to be a writer long past this play and be a good writer, at that, who appeals to every reader, not just my own demographic. Since the story centred Anne-Josèphe, I had to write well for women. If I hope to write well for women, that entails a necessarily endless amount of reading and understanding. I do not have the experience of being a woman but women do write about their experiences. So, I took to reading A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf first, which is incredibly significant to this project because she herself recommends men and women writers transcend their own genders in mind to more accurately depict those of others. To appeal to the minds of others, one must share their concerns, I thought.
For the French Revolution itself, I read Olympe de Gouges’ Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, listened to Suzanne Desan’s lecture series on the French Revolution and the Age of Napoleon, listened to Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, listened to an audio play of Beaumarchais’ Marriage of Figaro, listened to Voltaire’s Candide, then read Les Confessionsfrom Anne-Josèphe’s time imprisoned in Austria. Elisabeth Roudinesco is at the forefront of my thanks because her Théroigne de Méricourt: A Melancholic Woman of the Revolution is the most important book of historical and psychological significance to the play. I had read it before working on my degree so I had four years of forming the play’s structure in my head, over and over, to then very quickly put it to paper. Second to Roudinesco’s book in importance is Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. Michel Foucault’s research on modern institutions (taken in by listening to Discipline and Punish, Madness and Civilization, and the History of Sexuality, vol. 1) is also relevant to Anne-Josèphe in regards to the play’s tragic arch. Nearer to the end of the book’s publishing stage, I incorporated many primary sources from Dominique Godineau’s The Women of Paris and their French Revolution, which rounded out the second half of the play concerning Claire Lacombe and the Society of Revolutionary Republican Woman.
Having completed courses on Existentialism in my final year (2018-2019) where Beauvoir was featured throughout, as well as having read The Ethics of Ambiguity over the holidays, I made it through The Second Sex as an audiobook when it was released in December 2019 to then officially start writing the play while working. I finished a rough draft of Anne-Josèphe over the course of about four months, with a few weeks of COVID-19 isolation also put to use. Given The Second Sex’s existentialist significance, all my education goals felt like they came full circle to meet my personal passions because I realized The Thin Red Line (1998) and the Blade Runner films were existentialist too. Terrence Malick was a Kierkegaard and Heidegger academic while I think Blade Runner’s Existentialism becomes apparent if one follows the theory discussed in this introduction. The 2018 series adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects and Orson Welles’ 1962 film adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Trial get honorary mentions for also inspiring this play. All sources and inspirations are in the bibliography at the end of this book.
This introduction has a great deal of existentialist theory if you are interested in it but you are also free to advance to the play and come back later. I might exhaust you with the following jargon but, hey, this is how we millennials were taught to be in school so I need a means to unpack it all.