5 Revolutionaries Who Need Movies Made About Them

Our occasional series about history’s most interesting people and events that have been overlooked by Hollywood. See also our articles about travelers, scientists, queer people, writers, artists, Renaissance women, Medieval women, 18th-century people, pirate women , journalists, Tudors, and suffragists who need movies made about them, plus overlooked moments in time. We’ve also nominated Rose Bertin and several of Henry VIII’s wives for specific screen treatment.

We like a good rabble-rouser around here, but so many biopics focus on the same people and time periods. There’s the French Revolution with the royals and Robespierre, the American Revolution with Washington, and not a lot else. So let’s nominate some lesser-known revolutionary leaders whose stories would kick ass onscreen. Workers of the world unite and give us some good frock flicks!

Olympe de Gouges (May 7, 1748 – November 3, 1793)

A butcher’s daughter who became a playwright and political activist, she wrote the pamphlet “The Declaration of the Rights of Woman” in 1791, listing 17 essential ways women should be considered equal under the law, including marriage where women had a right to property. Olympe de Gouges had been married young, unhappily, and was widowed by age 19, so she had a definite point of view on the matter. She left her provincial home for Paris and got several of her plays staged by the Comédie Française. As a social nonconformist and advocate for liberty, you’d think she’d be on the side of the French Revolution. But she opposed capital punishment and wrote against the tyrannical excesses of Revolutionary Tribunal. Thus, she fell under its wrath and was the only woman executed for her political writings during the French Revolution. Commemorate her with a miniseries now!

Toussaint L’Ouverture (May 20, 1743 – April 7, 1803)

Born into slavery, Toussaint L’Ouverture became a brilliant general and the most prominent leader of the Haitian Revolution. He joined the abolitionist cause around 1791, fighting against the French in the colony of Saint-Domingue, and his work influenced the abolition of slaver in all French colonies in 1794. L’Ouverture then aligned with the French forces to expel the Spanish from the colony. He was promoted to general and his two sons were sent to France for their education — or possibly as political hostages. Toussaint L’Ouverture maneuvered a series of negotiations with the French commissioners, as well as signing trade agreements with Britain and the fledgling United States. He battled internal forces during the civil war known as the War of Knives from 1799-1800. Napoleon’s rise to power complicated Saint-Domingue’s constitutional status, and the arrival of Napoleon’s troops lead to L’Ouverture’s arrest and death in prison. There’s apparently been one French miniseries about his story, and that’s it! There’s so much to tell in his complicated and ultimately heroic life that we should have a bunch of big-budget films to choose from.

Robert Smalls (April 5, 1839 – February 23, 1915)

Here’s an amazing story you probably haven’t heard about that would make for an exciting movie: during the American Civil War, an enslaved man commanders a Confederate transport ship to free himself, the ship’s crew, and their families. That’s what Robert Smalls did on May 13, 1862, taking the CSS Planter from Charleston harbor and piloting it to the Hilton Head area, delivering the ship to Union hands. Smalls’ courage was just the example President Lincoln needed to admit Black soldiers to the Union Army. After the war, Smalls became a successful businessman, forming a railroad and publishing a newspaper. In 1874, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from South Carolina’s 7th district. Apparently Amazon Studios has expressed some interest in making a film about Robert Smalls’ Civil War daring, and hopefully this will make it to the screen.

Amelio Robles Ávila (November 3, 1889 – December 9, 1984)

Sometimes categorized as one of the many soldaderas — female soldiers and camp-followers — of the Mexican Revolution, Robles joined the army as a man and demanded to be treated as a man. He was one of several soldiers who had been assigned female at birth, but Amelio Robles Ávila is perhaps the best known and most successful. Before the war, he was already a skilled rider and marksman, and his talents helped him become a colonel under Emiliano Zapata. After winning several battles, Robles joined the army of Alvaro Obregón, who would later become President of Mexico. After the Revolution in the 1930s, Robles married a woman, Angela Torres, and they adopted a daughter. Mexico officially recognized him as a Veteran of the Mexican Revolution and awarded Robles medals as Honorary Legionnaire of the Mexican Army and the Mérito Revolutionario. Talk about a fascinating LGBTQ Latinx biopic his story would make!

Alexandra Kollontai (March 1872 – March 9, 1952)

Stories about the Russian Revolution are overwhelmingly male, other than the female royals to be murdered. Alexandra Kollontai was a Marxist who early on realized that the revolution was rife with misogyny and even the limited women’s suffrage movement in Russia was only concerned with the bourgeois. Though her own background was comfortably middle-class, Kollontai saw that working women were ignored by the Tsarists and Bolsheviks alike. In her autobiography, she wrote that as a young woman, the “happy life of a housewife and spouse became for me a cage.” Her first writings challenged to revolutionaries to build a viable women workers movement, and in 1917, she became the first female member of the Soviet government. In this position, she tried to nationalize maternity and infant care and challenged marriage laws. While her radical goals eventually got her exiled to ambassador positions in the 1920s and she was silent during Stalin’s regime, her early work and seminal writings have been influential to later feminists. So how about a little frock flick action?

What revolutionary figures do you want to see in movies & TV?