In Search of Lost Time: (Pre-)Revolutionary France

After watching a video on techniques for motivating one's self to do what one would like to do in life, taking precise steps, I decided that what I want to do is to make advances toward writing my long-expected French Revolution story. It will be just for myself; I don't want to publicize a distorted or inaccurate version of history, and instead respect the truth. It might also be a way of working through the coronavirus crisis in parallel: following another topsy-turvy development in history.

The approach I am still taking is the one I took to university essays during the last two years, which is to keep researching and researching, and note-taking and note-taking, until something crystallizes. Plot, characters, setting — all of this must be inspired in the course of gathering subject matter.

Besides I want to write a historical setting with a well-rounded overview of what is going on, more than any one person could have in reality — a heightened reality, as it were. Even though I am living in the present, for instance, there are wheels within wheels of what is happening that I am not privy to. In the context of this story, I could do the 18th century French equivalent of flying into the Chancellor's office and listening to her conversations with German state ministers or with foreign leaders about policy.

Conversely, a French statesman in 1789 likely had little idea of the life of a farmer in one of the remote provinces, so a novelist would need to mend that gap. I think it would still be difficult to have the insight into the Third Estate nowadays, because the historical record is not full of 18th-century French farmers' diaries. I have often thought that it might be easier to approach that reality by reading memoirs and reporting written by people who live in countries with a huge gap between rich and poor in the modern day. At least I presume that social mobility is easier now than then, in most countries, so these records would be easier to find for the present day.

But perhaps I am trying to impose logic and integral order that did not exist in pre- and Revolutionary France: maybe the people of France were no connected dots, instead overlapping spheres of individual feeling and action.

The experience of attempting to research, and reflections about 'leadership' because of my experience in the company I work for (it is incredibly hard even to 'lead' ten people, and as such I have no idea how one would lead a country of millions), have made me determined not to write of the aristocracy. It is not a milieu I have germane life experience about.

The material for my research has also changed. Researching the archives of the French National Library, as I did over the past 3 years, was interesting. But it was also stultifying, insofar as there were mostly high-level, official documents or speeches. They did not give a detailed idea of the situation on the ground.

Therefore the approach I have taken this month is to find little French museums that describe their exhibits on their websites. (Although this has left me with the guilty feeling that I need to support local museums more; many websites are now out of service or minimalist. And of course all of the websites that do exist have messages affirming that the museums are shut due to the coronavirus.) This has been surprisingly rewarding; even a throwaway sentence in the caption for a painting or a document offers little insights that are widely illuminating.

I have also set up new spreadsheets. In one spreadsheet, I am tracking social-historical context that would have informed a French and particularly Breton person's worldview in the 1780s and 90s: dishes, local factories, clothing, military organization, etc. In another, the biographies of French people in the 18th century, arranged by last name and labelled by estate (aristocracy, clergy, populace), field of work, etc. In another, a year-by-year, month-by-month chronology of what happened in France and overseas from around 1760 to 1790.

Besides I have calendars for each year from 1789 through to 1793, and I add events to them along with the URLs where I found the information.

Along the way I am learning about American history during the War of Independence, and World War I through a museum that concentrates on French-American relations. I am also becoming aware that it is impossible to write of 18th century French trade and wealth without broaching the subject of slavery, since it was evidently still going strong and there seem to be fine initiatives investigating this being conducted by French museums today. Looking at 18th-century sketches of plantations, for example, with the fields and the workers' huts, is kind of revolting now; but it was apparently a 'normal' part of business back then.

The research is rewarding, as mentioned; but it is exhausting whenever my curiosity fizzles on a subject, and I mechanically keep recording information to keep up the system.

Yesterday, by way of relaxation, I gave myself a treat by watching a documentary about Marie Antoinette on the website of the Franco-German cultural television channel Arte. It was not comprehensive — Stefan Zweig's biography goes far deeper, for example — but it was helpful to visualize her haunts at the Petit Trianon and it supplied much food for thought. For example, I think it was arguing that Marie Antoinette had sympathetic and sane impulses (like a desire for privacy and simplicity) in what was, from a modern perspective, an insane social environment; but she was not careful or reflective in how she carried them out.