Family portraits

The forgotten women of the French Revolution by Hortense Belhôte

With the Centre Dramatique National d’Orléans and Hortense Belhôte
Starting from my own family history, with its discontinuities, deviations, adoptions, appropriations, and other colonial indigestions, my attention turned to 1789 and the revolutionary period as a melting pot of founding myths, with a simple question: which stories can we draw on to feed the evenings of our future children? Little by little, as if exploring a family album, a gallery of antiheroes emerged: Dubarry and Zamor, St. George and D'Eon, Thomas Alexandre Dumas and his son, Jean Amilcar and Mme Royale, Madeleine and Marie Guillemine Benoist, Ourika and Claire de Duras... Some are well known, others less so, but what they all have in common is that they do not meet the criteria for pantheonization because they are too monstrous, too failed, or too sad.
It is to this "fourth order" population that we wish to pay tribute, not to establish new devotions, but to avoid the sclerosis of amnesiac nationalism. For if our ancestors, the French, the "Real" ones, those in the paintings, those of the first July 4th, were Black, emancipated women, and non-binary people, then the entire paradigm of otherness must be reconsidered. Who is on the margins and who is at the center? On what sediments does our common foundation rest? And are we living in an era as unprecedented as we think? So let's listen carefully, because it's all of us who are being talked about.