PART TWO – ‘You are supposed to suffer to make others laugh or grieve’

This is a continuation of We. The Revolution (Polyslash, 2019) between Shelley and Burke: Gamifying the Romantic debate on the French Revolution, Part 1, available here

The gameplay loop of We. The Revolution is based on the player’s balancing of their reputation between four factions in Paris – the ‘common folk’ (an agglomerate category which includes the sans culottes, the enragé, and associated journalists like Jean Paul Marat), the ‘revolutionaries’ (shorthand for reformist intellectuals, including the Jacobins and the Girondins), the ‘aristocracy’ (who only emerge after the execution of Louis XVI, and who encompass ideas associated with the émigré nobles who fled the Terror, as well as providing a framework for considering attitudes lingering from the ancien regime) and, finally, Fidele’s own family, consisting of his father, Aldric, adult son, Bernard, younger son Frederic, and wife Mathilde. The game takes place primarily in the courtroom, with Fidele presiding over cases which combine famous historical trials (Louis XVI & Marie Antoinette, Madame Roland, Charlotte Corday) with fictional examples chosen either to exemplify in-game themes such as fratricide, or to explore the social fallout of the Terror and the revolutionary war (returning soldiers with PTSD, rival merchants accusing one another of counter-revolutionary activity). The player must read witness statements and trial reports for each case, question the witness, and deliver a verdict of (initially) execution, acquittal, or prison – until the Reign of Terror begins in earnest at the start of Act II and Robespierre, in a speech inspired by his famous declaration of 5 February 1794 that ‘Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue’ (Robespierre, ‘On the Moral and Political Principles of Domestic Policy’) reduces the player’s agency to either execution or acquittal. The game then also introduces some new mechanics, a board-game inspired movement of pieces around a map of Paris, as Fidele attempts to seize control of its districts from other revolutionary leaders, quash local riots, and evade gangs of Muscadin reactionaries.

Readers familiar with the chronology of the French Revolution will already be noticing some gaps in We. The Revolution’s structure as a historical narrative – Louis XIV’s trial was not presided over by a mere Parisian district court judge, the conservative militia group known as the Muscadins did not rise to prominence until 1794, after the Thermidorian coup against Robespierre, making their presence from the early game paradoxically anachronistic. Other anachronisms and historical liberties trouble the game’s narrative – the murder of Jean Paul Marat (1743-93) does not take place on 13 June 1793, it is delayed until after the death of Robespierre, and its association with the latter’s ‘Purge of the Girondins’ in June of that year is erased. Marat’s assassin, Charlotte Corday (1768-93), does not appear as a sympathiser with the conservative Girondin Revolutionary faction, taking revenge on their behalf against a rival polemicist out of a Plutarch-inspired sense of civic virtue. In place of this we have a very abstracted sense that Corday’s motivations had something to do with feminism and women’s political liberation. The game places the death of Marat right in the middle of its version of the Thermidorian reaction. This time the progress of the Revolution is halted to allow the brother of the protagonist, who was believed dead until this point, to enter the story at the head of an army of disaffected criminals, soldiers, and emigres who fled the terror, until his army is ultimately routed by Napoleon, who only appears extremely briefly at the end of the game, but not in time to save our protagonist, who is murdered by his brother in a rigged game of dice which ends the narrative.

The sequence which is central to the game’s narrative, and articulates most clearly itsessentially Burkean argument that the French Revolution merely represented one more cycle in an unbroken series of episodes of human violence and corruption, is the encounter with The Puppeteer. In the final act, after Fidele is near-fatally stabbed by his wife, he wakes up in a puppeteer’s shop filled with marionettes of the various characters who have populated the game, with his wounds being healed by a mysterious figure called the Puppeteer, who gives the following cryptic metatextual monologue about the player’s actions in the game:

I am the Truth about your unhappiness and the Lie about your greatness. They are both the reasons for your presence in this place. Are you ready to admit that it is my performance, my show? I am the Truth overcoming the Lie that you keep telling yourself. The Lie that you are here for power. For the numerous choices and endings. I have not designed you for that. You are supposed to suffer to make others laugh or grieve.

(‘The Puppeteer’, We. The Revolution, Act III)

The player is then given the option to die, ending the game a few hours early, or keep persisting in the romantic role of heroic defender of Paris at Napoleon’s side, but the effective ending of the game’s narrative with this fourth-wall break constitutes its strongest point of critique. By drawing the player’s attention to the playful nature of the narrative they have just experienced. The game emphasises its own ‘ludic’ qualities, to use the term favoured by game scholars to define games as distinct from other forms of narrative experience. We. The Revolution explicitly alludes to itself as  performance’, highlighting the provisionalness and mediation behind the story it is telling, and the ‘choices and endings’, as a shorthand for player interaction, in which player input effects the outcome of the narrative, an experience which  most people play video games with branching storylines in order to explore, We. The Revolution converts the player into an avatar of historical causation. The ideologies at play in the game’s cast of characters are revealed to be empty and performative, and the player’s own emotional engagement with each trial is hollowed out and rendered simply another stage in movement towards an inevitable conclusion. The historical and fictional elements of the game emerge as parallel case studies in the ultimate futility of interpersonal relationships in the face of historical necessity.

As game scholars such as Katherine Isbister have argued, the presence of choice and agency allow the medium a far greater degree of emotional intensity than forms such as film or text with traditionally fixed narratives. As she puts it ‘because each choice results in feedback from the game world…[players are presented with] interesting options that have emotionally resonant outcomes, including feelings such as pride and affection.’ (Isbister, How to Play Video Games, p. 136; How Games Move Us, p. 2) We. The Revolution, with its profoundly nihilistic gameplay loop and shallow characters, does not succeed at creating pride or affection, its emotional tenor is far bleaker, trading on compromise, revulsion, and guilt, but the importance of choice in creating these emotions is just as significant. By the moment of the Puppeteer’s revelation, it is a relief to learn that your actions are essentially meaningless, because they have drawn out only the cruelty the game necessarily caused Fidele to perpetuate.  Digital games have been recognised as having an ‘inherently metaphorical relationship [to] past action by communicating about it through the often-vast abstractions of contemporary gameplay’ (Chapman, ‘Privileging Form over Content’, n.p). What this metaphorical abstraction is conventionally used for in historical games like the Age of Empires or Civilisation series is a privileged perspective, giving the player power and agency over sweeping historical events. In We. The Revolution, the abstraction forces you to consume the meaningless cruelty of the French Revolution as a spectacle, then be chastised for doing so.

Returning to Shelley and Burke, and the question of what the French Revolution reveals about the self, we can see that the promise of the Romantic moment lies, ultimately, in the resonances between a heroic, virtuous, interior self, and the ‘spirit of the age’, mediated by the creative imagination of a poet-legislator. The failure of the French Revolution is tragic because it signifies the over-reaching of the utopian self, not because it evinces any corruption in those ideals themselves. What Burke, and the conservative lineage which followed have always argued is that this was false optimism, and the failure of the Revolution speaks to an essential weakness in human nature. What We. The Revolution does is use procedural rhetoric, the term coined by game studies theorist Ian Bogost to describe the way in which a games system creates an argument, to force the player into a Burkean reading. (Bogost, Persuasive Games, 2008, p. 3) We approach the game with excitement, idealism and, depending on our level of immersion, a sense of empathy, only to have it pared down and ultimately rendered meaningless by the game’s final twist. We do not only have the fragility and cruelty of human nature explained to us by means of historical examples, we experience the deterioration of our own sensibility throughout the game, until we are unable to take refuge in our own feelings of empathy or human warmth as an argument against the games case for counter-revolutionary despair.

Bibliography

Bogost, Ian, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames, (MIT Press, Cambridge: MA, 2008)

Brown, Marshall, ‘Romanticism and Enlightenment’, in The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, ed. Curran, Stuart (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 25-47

Burke, Edmund, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Mitchell, L.G, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)

Chapman, Adam, ‘Privileging Form Over Content: Analysing Historical Videogames’, in Play the Past, (2012).

Elshtain, Jean Bethke, ‘Hannah Arendt’s French Revolution’, Salmigondi, 84 (1989)

Isbister, Katherine, ‘Parappa the Rapper: Emotion’ in Payne, Matthew Thomas and Huntemann, Nina B, How to Play Video Games, (New York University Press: New York, 2019), pp.134-140.

— How Games Move Us: Emotion by Design, (MIT Press, Cambridge: MA, 2017).

Robespierre, Maximilien, ‘On the Moral and Political Principles of Domestic Policy’, Speech delivered 5 February 1794, in Hassall, Paul, ed. The Internet History Sourcebooks Project, (Fordham NY, 1993-2021)

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, The Major Works, eds. Leader, Zachary, and O’Neill, Michael, (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003)

— ‘Percy Bysshe Shelley to [a publisher], 13 October [1817]’ in Jones, F. L ed. The letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley,  Volume 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964). [accessed via Oxford Scholarly Editions Online (2015).

We. The Revolution, (Polyslash, 2019)

Wordsworth, William, The Major Works, ed. Gill, Stephen, (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000)

[Full Spoilers]

This two part blog post (Part 2 available here) by myself is the next in our Romanticism Now series, which hosts discussions of the resonance of Romanticism and the Romantic era in contemporary pop culture. Please approach us with your takes on film and television, music, theatre, video games, memes, or any other aspects of pop culture which reflect a Romantic sensibility. If you would like to submit a piece for the Romanticism Now series, or any of the other BARS Blog series’ please don’t hesitate to get in touch with me, Jack Orchard, here.

I am the Communications Assistant for the British Association of Romantic Studies and the Content Editor for Electronic Enlightenment, my research focuses on reading practices in eighteenth-century correspondence, women’s writing, and the relationship between eighteenth-century texts and contemporary video games.

PART ONE – The Spirit of the Age

We. The Revolution is a stylish visual melodrama/court room simulator/resource management PC game released in2019 by the Polish developer Polyslash. It traces the career of a fictional Parisian judge, Alexis Fidele through (roughly) the flight of Louis XIV to Varennes, to the Reign of Terror and the Fall of Robespierre, before concluding with a fictional rendering of the Thermidorian reaction. In the following two-part blog, I would like to explore the ways in which its representation of the French Revolution not only asks some of the same questions which the Romantic poets had about the meaning of the event, but uses the genre of the video game to answer them in new and creative ways.

From the first speculations by conservative thinkers like Edmund Burke, through to the present day, the French Revolution has been translated into public consciousness as a battleground for defining human nature. Its legacy stages a conflict between an idealistic vision of human nature – the perfection of human reason articulated by Rousseau and championed by early revolutionary ideologues, against the cynicism of the conservative tradition arguing for the necessity of tradition and structure to ward against humanity’s baser instincts.

The French Revolution as providing a ‘unique…conjuncture of historical and personal factors’ (Dawson, p.52-3) is epitomised by the two lines of poetry which constitute the apparent high-water mark of Romantic revolutionary idealism, William Wordsworth’s famous declaration in The Prelude (1805) that ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive/ But to be young was very heaven!’ (The Prelude, [1805], X.692-4). However, as P.M.S Dawson has noted ‘this is a retrospective view’ in 1805, heavy with the knowledge that ‘the extravagant promises [of the Revolution] had not been kept’. (Dawson, p.52) For Wordsworth, the first generation of Romantic poets in which he participated, and even more so for the second, epitomised by the more overt politics of Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, the Revolution provided an inescapable provocation to consider the relationship between political identity, poetic creativity, and emotion.

It is Shelley who provides the fullest account of the Romantic reading of the Revolution in his Laon and Cynthia (1817), a symbolic epic in Spenserian stanzas which documents, in his words, the  ‘beau ideal’ of Revolution as a triumph of ‘individual genius’, figured as the transcendence of the individual over ‘antient notions’ (Shelley to [Longman & Co.], 13 October 1817, Oxford Scholarly Editions Online). In the poem’s preface, Shelley encapsulates the question provoked by his subject:

‘Can he who the day before was a trampled slave suddenly become liberal-minded, forbearing, and independent? This is the consequence of the habits of a state of society to be produced by resolute perseverance and indefatigable hope, and long-suffering and long-believing courage, and the systematic efforts of generations of men of intellect and virtue. Such is the lesson which experience teaches now. But, on the first reverses of hope in the progress of French liberty, the sanguine eagerness for good overleapt the solution of these questions, and for a time extinguished itself in the unexpectedness of their result.’

(Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Preface’ to Laon and Cynthia [1817], p.132)

Like Wordsworth, with his blending of the joy of youth with the spirit of revolution, Shelley moves between the socio-political and the personal – answering the questions of citizenship by deferring to individual feeling. Marshall Brown has identified the Romantic period in general, and Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (1820) specifically, with the imagined ‘dawning of a new age and the awakening of a new humanity’ (‘Romanticism and Enlightenment, p.41), with the French Revolution as one of its apexes. Shelley gives this ‘new humanity’ its most utopian articulation in A Defence of Poetry (1821), which argues for the inherent ‘virtue, love, patriotism [and] friendship’ of the poetic vocation. This essay not only contains his famous statement of the political role of the poet, that ‘Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World’, but also asserts the essential resonance between individual genius and political consciousness:

[Poets] measure the circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit, and they are themselves perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its manifestations; for it is less their spirit than the spirit of the age.

(Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, 1821, p.701)

For Shelley, the Revolution’s failure is merely a testament to human despair in the face of historical setbacks, not a reflection of a deeper corruption in human nature which the Revolution merely exemplified. For the other side of the debate, following Edmund Burke, however, this is exactly what the Revolution shows us:

We do not draw the moral lessons we might from history…You would not secure men from tyranny and sedition by rooting out of the mind the principles to which these fraudulent pretexts apply? If you did, you would root out everything that is valuable in the human breast… Wise men will apply their remedies to vices, not to names; to the causes of evil which are permanent, not to the occasional organs by which they act, and the transitory modes in which they appear. Otherwise you will be wise historically, a fool in practice…It is thus with all those who, attending only to the shell and husk of history, think they are waging war with intolerance, pride, and cruelty, whilst, under colour of abhorring the ill principles of antiquated parties, they are authorizing and feeding the same odious vices in different factions, and perhaps in worse.

(Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France [1790], p.141-2)

Like Shelley, Burke, writing in response to the nascent evolution, sees the course of events in France as a reflection of human nature but, not only is this nature ultimately corrupt unless constrained by society, but any attempts to mediate its baser aspects will fall into meaningless cycles of violence. The Burkean conservative reading has been carried into the 20^th century as the deep existential horror of the ‘Frankfurt school’, epitomised by Hannah Arendt and Albert Camus, who drew a line from the French Revolution directly to the Holocaust, arguing that it ‘unleashed new possibilities for terror by relocating all human meaning and purpose in historic necessity, in a supposedly inexorable law of historic logic’ (Elshtain, p.205). It is this reading which, I believe, informs the reading of the French Revolution offered by We. The Revolution and, in the second part of this blog, to be shared tomorrow, I will give an outline of the game, and explore the way in which it offers a Burkean refutation to the Romantic reading of Revolution in a means unique to the narrative possibilities of the game genre.

For Part 2 of this post – click here