Dance / War / Politics. Valentine de Saint-Point’s ‘Feminine Action’ confronts the world’s critical hotspots and the history of civilisations

Dance must no longer be just the sensually
human plastic rhythm of music;
it must be created, cerebrally directed.

Valentine de Saint-Point. ‘La danse ne doit plus être seulement le rythme plastique sensuellement humain de la musique, elle doit être créée, dirigée cérébralement.’ Lines from a manuscript letter signed and inscribed by her ‘To Mr. Paul Thézard, homage in sympathetic fraternity’, Paris, 1914. Adrien Sina Collection

FEMININE PSYCHOLOGY OF WAR AND DESIRE

Valentine de Saint-Point (1875, Lyon, France – 1953, Cairo, Egypt) was a dancer, writer, poet, and artist of French aristocratic descent. Her ancestry dated back to the knights of the Order of Saint Louis, whom she brought back to life in her Poémes d’Orgueil(Poems of Pride) from 1908. In this quest for roots, challenging the Wagnerian appropriation of Celtic myths, she empowers her poetic and performative actions with the relocation of the Nibelungs in the French Kingdom of Burgundy, her native land. She proudly evokes Chriemhilde, Clothilde (474–545), Princess of Burgundy and first Queen of Franks, and Brunhilde (534–613), Queen of Burgundy and Austrasia. The component ‘hilde’ of these feminine warrior figures derives etymologically from ‘hildr’, which means battle, strife or even fierce anger. In her Manifeste de la Femme Futuriste (Manifesto of the Futurist Woman, 1912), she recalls that woman warriors ‘fight more ferociously than men’, referring to Erinyes – goddesses of vengeance in ancient Greek religion and mythology – to Amazons, Semiramis, Joan of Arc, Jeanne Hachette, Judith, Charlotte de Corday, or to queens and empresses associated with destructive loves, Cleopatra and Messalina.

Une femme et le désir (A Woman and Desire), signed and inscribed to the poet Pierre Leca. Paris: Vanier-Messein, 1910. Adrien Sina Collection

Her three-part novel Trilogie de l’amour et de la mort (Trilogy of Love and Death), written from 1906 to 1909, and the subsequent book Une femme et le désir (A Woman and Desire) of 1910 are explorations of the psychology of feminine desire, a concept relegated to the confines of pathology and hysteria by Jean-Martin Charcot and Sigmund Freud at that time. In this sense, she paved the path for further studies of feminine desire and sexuality by Anna Freud, Freud’s daughter, and Marie Bonaparte, Freud’s French aristocrat friend and translator who saved the life of the Jewish psychoanalyst threatened by the Nazis, organising his escape from France, acquiring the mansion for his exile in London which is now the Freud Museum, with his consulting room and archives.

Valentine de Saint-Point. Ombre (Shadow), lost portrait by Alfons Mucha, Paris, 1904. Photogravure published in Le Miroir, no. 7, Paris, 11 January 1914. Adrien Sina Collection

In theatre, Valentine de Saint-Point reinvented the modern woman in her trilogy Théâtre de la Femme (The Theatre of Woman) from 1909. Her tragedy L’Âme Impériale ou L’Agonie de Messaline (The Imperial Soul or the Agony of Messalina), written and performed in 1907, published in 1929, is a reflection on the political sexualisation of female power. In her Discours sur la Tragédie et le Vers Tragique (Discourse on Tragedy and Tragic Verse), 1929, she wrote:

The principal figure: Messalina, stylised, is depicted as an Empress-Bacchante in whose soul collides the radiant pride of ownership – all that the double power, individual and social can give, and in contrast, the revolted and desperate humility that cannot find self-forgetfulness – based, if only temporarily, on love or the embrace. Messalina evokes the soul of the decadent Empire through the mad individualism of Emperors, where in the orgy, splendours seek to wake senses jaded by drunkenness and the abuse of power. Messalina, Empress-Bacchante, is more than an individual, an eternal state of mind because, double and one, as the Empress and Bacchante join in a dominant psychic value, she represents domination and its consequences: the pain of proud dominion that forever isolates the individual. Messalina is the soul of an era. She is the imperial soul who dies of exaltation amidst a more or less mastered revolt of the people. 

Valentine de Saint-Point. ‘Feminine Action’ within the Futurist Movement Direction. Back of her ‘Manifeste futuriste de la Luxure’, 1913. Composition published on the back of major manifestos from the early period of Futurism between 1912 and 1913. The Executive was divided into five sections, including Poetry, Painting, Music, and Sculpture. These disciplines were represented only by male artists such as F. T. Marinetti, Paolo Buzzi, Luigi Russolo, Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini and Francesco Balilla Pratella. The end of this list highlights in bold a new discipline on its own line: Action Féminine, represented by the only woman of the Movement, ‘the poetess Valentine de Saint-Point’. Adrien Sina Collection

Valentine de Saint-Point. Manifeste de la femme futuriste (Manifesto of the Futurist Woman). Paris, 25 March 1912, first edition. Direction du mouvement futuriste, Corso Venezia 61, Milan. Adrien Sina Collection

Valentine de Saint-Point. Manifeste futuriste de la Luxure (Futurist Manifesto of Lust). Paris, 11 January 1913, first edition. Direction du mouvement futuriste, Corso Venezia 61, Milan. Adrien Sina Collection

THE ART OF FLESH, LUST & POLITICS ‘FEMININE ACTION’ WITHIN THE FUTURIST MOVEMENT DIRECTION

Valentine de Saint-Point was the first – and only – woman to serve on the Executive Board of Futurism during its foundational years. While her male counterparts took charge of traditional artistic disciplines such as poetry, painting, and sculpture, between 1912 and 1914, she carved out an entirely new trajectory within the avant-garde: a domain she defined as Action Féminine(‘Feminine Action’), represented solely by ‘the poetess Valentine de Saint-Point’. Distinct from the feminist activism of her time, which she considered limited in scope, Action Féminine allowed her to engage in creative experimentation that transcended the ideological constraints of early twentieth- century feminism.

Through its performative, carnal, and political dimensions, Feminine Action introduced radical new perspectives into the field of artistic research. Inverting centuries of aesthetic hierarchy that privileged the works of ‘Spirit’ and ‘Mind’, Valentine de Saint-Point elevated ‘Flesh’ and ‘Lust’ as equally valid and vital creative forces – anticipating the integration of eroticism and sexuality as central components of the artistic process, a decade before the rise of Surrealism. Her vision now resonates more clearly within the expanded field of contemporary art and its ongoing interrogation of embodied knowledge. In her Manifeste Futuriste de la Luxure (Futurist Manifesto of Lust, 1913), she wrote:

Lust, conceived beyond moral preconceptions and as an essential element of the dynamism of life, is a force. Lust is not a sin. Like pride, lust is a virtue that urges one on – an epicentre at which energies are resourced. Lust is the expression of a being projected beyond itself. Lust is the carnal quest for the unknown. Lust is the act of creation and creation as such. Flesh creates as spirit creates. Within the scope of the Universe, their creation is equal. One is not superior to the other, and spiritual creation is not independent from carnal creation. We must face lust with awareness. We must make of lust what a refined and intelligent person makes of himself and of his own life – we must make lust into a work of art.

Valentine de Saint-Point in her studio in Paris, 19 Avenue de Tourville. Photo: Meurisse Press Agency, 1914. Image courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris

POPPIES OF BLOOD & GEOMETRIC DANCES OF WAR & LOVE

Valentine de Saint-Point foreshadowed the disillusionment that would mark many intellectuals engaged in the First World War. Her poem traces the shift from a heroic conception of war to the brutal reality of bloodshed and horror. FT Marinetti’s point of view in Guerra, sola igiene del mondo (War, the Only Hygiene of the World), 1909, was radical, yet trapped in the stubborn affirmation of a univocal thought: ‘We, instead, affirm that one of Futurism’s absolute principles is the continuous development and unending progress, both bodily and intellectual, of man. We think that the hypothesis of a friendly merging of peoples is an outmoded idea, or one that can be bettered, and we acknowledge only one form of hygiene for the world: war.’

In her La Guerre – Poéme Héroique (The War – Heroic Poem, 1911), published in 1912, Valentine de Saint-Point maintains a plurality of points of view; she does not assert a univocal position, she considers reality from its multiple facets, keeping their contradictions. She interweaves the voices of soldiers, mothers, the crowd, and the poet – voices that clash, echo, and ultimately converge. She is always drawn to the idea of being the synthesised voice of a people, explores the psychology of a nation marching toward war: that moment of dazzle and blindness, the seduction of ideals leading inexorably to self-sacrifice under history’s unflinching gaze.

Valentine de Saint-Point’s Manifesto of the Futurist Woman, 1912, was structured as a critical response to point nine of FT Marinetti’s Founding Manifesto of Futurism, 1909: ‘We will glorify war – the world’s only hygiene – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.’ Two approaches to tangible realities would thus oppose each other throughout their artistic lives. She left the Futurist movement in 1914, and this political divergence led Marinetti to Fascism and glorification of War, while she dedicated all her life to a subtle geopolitical understanding of the world, to ethics, justice and anticolonialism.

Valentine de Saint-Point. Ideaist figure from Les Pavots de Sang (Poppies of Blood), part of her Dances of War, 1913. Valentine de Saint-Point’s dance notation of her geometrical movements on the ground, published in Montjoie !, directed by Ricciotto Canudo, no. 1-2, Paris, January- February 1914, p.4. Adrien Sina Collection

In his Futurist Manifesto L’Art des Bruits (The Art of Noise, 1913), extended to L’Arte dei Rumori (The Art of Rumors, 1916), Luigi Russolo wrote: ‘We must not forget the absolutely new sounds of modern warfare’. It was much earlier that Valentine de Saint-Point anticipated these thoughts in L’Orbe Pâle (The Pale Orb, 1910). She describes her fascination for the sound waves and the nocturnal noise of military manoeuvres in the harbour of Toulon:

Now, once again, the thunder of cannons erupts. After three days of peace, it is still war here. The Invisible Squadron is present through the formidable sound waves that reach me. They do not yet penetrate the solitary house to shatter the silence, but they rumble like a threat. Everything else remains still – except the distant storm, the storm of sounds unleashed by the monsters leaning heavily on the sea. There, they linger, obscure, as the rising moon slowly reflects its pale glow upon them… The noise of the earth matches the noise of the waves. Only my waiting is silent. The torpedo boats, like busy ants at full speed, with great noise, furrow the sea, tracing a marvellous path of foam that sirens would have longed to follow.

Valentine de Saint-Point. Metachoric figure, part of her Dances of War, 1913. Drawing by Gino Baldo published in Montjoie !, no. 1-2, Paris, January-February 1914, p. 16. Adrien Sina Collection

Valentine de Saint-Point. La Guerre, Poème Héroïque (War, Heroic Poem), Paris: Figuière, 1912, 45p. Limited edition, one of seven copies on Imperial Japanese paper. Adrien Sina Collection

Valentine de Saint-Point’s esoteric, abstract dances integrated colour, light, vibration, and the energetic flow of astral bodies, reflecting the influence of Futurism and Rayonnism. Her Métachorie – a precursor to multimedia performance art – was a form of abstract, ‘ideaist’ dance rooted in her poetry. In an unpublished manuscript (in my collection), she boldly calligraphed with a quill: ‘Dance must no longer be just the sensually human plastic rhythm of music; it must be created, cerebrally directed. Modern dance must express an idea.’ With these terms, she liberated dance from its traditional role of interpreting music, astonishing audiences at the Théâtre L’Opéra-Comique on the Champs-Élysées in Paris and the New York Opera House in 1913 and 1917 – heralding a modern, atonal receptivity.

She performed beneath projections of luminous geometric symbols and esoteric motifs. In line with the ideas articulated in her poems – often transposed into geometric forms – the stage was saturated with symbolic light and colour. Each performance concluded with a downward movement inspired by the structured poses of a secretive, eroticised form of yoga known only to Theosophist circles. These secrets she once shared with Auguste Rodin during his quest for unseen and unprecedented body gestures.

In 1914, the journal Montjoie!, edited by her companion Ricciotto Canudo, dedicated an issue to contemporary dance, introduced by Auguste Rodin. Valentine de Saint-Point took centre stage, sparking theoretical debate. She contributed her own drawings, and her dances were sketched by American Synchromist Morgan Russell, Futurists Gerda Wegener and Gino Baldo, esoteric artist Vivian Postel du Mas, Surrealist Valentine Hugo, and Sergei Diaghilev’s designer Léon Bakst.

In a 1916 interview with American journalist and writer Djuna Barnes in New York, she spoke of her vision for a temple of Métachorie, imagining it as a space for reconciliation between the elite and the people. This idea evolved into the founding of the Collége des Élites in 1923 – an institution aimed at uniting the elites of East and West.

In 1917, Valentine de Saint-Point reached an apotheosis of her artistic vision at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York with the presentation of her Festival de la Métachorie: Poémes-Drames-Idéistes (Metachory Festival: Ideaist Poems and Dramas),first staged in Paris in 1913. The music was specially composed for her by Claude Debussy, Roland Manuel, Rudyard Chenneviére, Erik Satie, and the Futurist maestro Francesco Balilla Pratella. In his memoirs, Pratella notes that he composed La Guerra at the request of FT Marinetti, on behalf of Valentine de Saint-Point. The score was completed on 22 March 1913. Additional scores for her Poems of War – including I. My Ancestors, II. The Poppies of Blood, and III. The War (1. The Departure, 2. The Battle, 3. Homage to the Dead, 4. The Victory) – were composed by Maurice Droeghmans.

Valentine de Saint-Point’s sketch for her Metachoric poem, part of her Dances of War, 1913, published in Montjoie !, no. 1-2, Paris, January-February 1914, p. 20. Adrien Sina Collection

Valentine de Saint-Point. Woodcut of a Metachoric figure from Les Pavots de Sang (Poppies of Blood), part of her Dances of War, 1913. Adrien Sina Collection

Valentine de Saint-Point. Metachoric figure, Love II. Attractions, 1913. Drawing by Morgan Russell published in Montjoie !, no. 1-2, Paris, January-February 1914, p. 13. Adrien Sina Collection

An article on 4 February 1917 in The New York Times, titled ‘Why New York Must Become the New Paris,’ described her performances:

Mme. de Saint-Point is the founder of a movement to which she has given the name La Métachorie. This is a combination of Greek words meaning ‘beyond the dance.’ The Metachory, as it may be called, involves poetry, painting, drama, music, dance – indeed, all forms of creative art. In her dances, the purpose is not to express emotions but to convey ideas. The idea is usually conveyed through a poem written by herself, which is read aloud before the dance. This idea is then transcribed into a geometric figure, which forms the structure of the choreography. She follows the lines of this figure precisely as she dances. For instance, in her extraordinary poem ‘Love,’ the corresponding geometric plan guides her to move back and forth between two poles – one a circle representing ecstatic love, the other a point symbolising liberty: the freedom to act according to one’s own mind and body. The dancer’s movement enacts the struggle between the immense pull of love and the equally immense desire for freedom. In the end, liberty prevails – for in Madame de Saint-Point’s philosophy, one must free oneself from the trammels of conventional love to fulfil one’s highest destiny.

Then there is the dance and poem ‘Poppies of Blood.’ A war poem, it expresses the image of countless young men dying and fertilising the earth with their blood. A translation of the poem appears on this page, alongside the geometric figure that underpins the dance. This figure traces the outline of a vast poppy, with smaller poppies nested within it. Madame de Saint-Point follows these contours with her body. The common European poppy, blood-red, symbolises blood as no other flower can. Her dance embodies the idea of youthful blood soaking into and nourishing the soil.

Valentine de Saint-Point. Programme of her Festival de la Métachorie — Poèmes-Drames-Idéistes (Festival of Metachory — Ideaist-Poems-Dramas) at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, 3 April 1917 at 8:30 p.m. Hand-designed by Vivian Postel du Mas. The cover includes the Metachoric figure My Ancestors, part of her Dances of War, 1913. Adrien Sina Collection

Valentine de Saint-Point. Individualism and Fraternity, La Revue de l’Époque (Review of the Times), no. 31, January 1923. Literary director: Marcello Fabri. Paris: J. Povolozky & Co., pp. 192-197. Adrien Sina Collection

Valentine de Saint-Point. La Vérité sur la Syrie par un Témoin (The Truth about Syria by a Witness), Paris: Cahiers de France, 1929. Signed and inscribed: ‘To His Excellency Hassan Nachat Pasha, in memory of, in cordial homage. V. de Saint-Point. Cairo VI-XXIX. Book that seeks cordial understanding between the East and the West.’ Hassan Nachat Pasha was deputy-head of the Royal Cabinet of Fouad I, King of Egypt, in 1922, and Egyptian ambassador to London around 1941. Adrien Sina Collection

INDIVIDUALISM AND FRATERNITY

After returning to Paris from New York – and more than a year before her departure and eventual settlement in Egypt – Valentine de Saint-Point published an article in the January 1923 issue of La Revue de l’Époque titled ‘Individualism and Fraternity.’ This text offers a crucial key to the coherence of her entire body of thought:

These two terms, individualism and fraternity, seem irreconcilable. It is, in fact, quite obvious that an individualist is incapable of practicing fraternity, since the qualities of an individualist and those of an altruist inevitably oppose each other. One is egocentric, the other an eccentric; one gathers everything that exists in the universe to bring it to themself, to dominate it by their law, to exploit it for their own benefit. Everything, beings and things, must serve to exalt their individuality and, consequently, be sacrificed for them. The eccentric, on the contrary, draws from themself, from their inner or outer powers, all that they can and generously offers it to others. It is themself that they sacrifice on the altar of their cult of fraternity.

The first cannot love people fraternally, since everyone else is perceived as an obstacle, a rival, an adversary. Whatever they do, as soon as the latter is no longer a humble admirer who sows praises under the steps of the individualist, they take a little of their sunshine, of their radiance. Faced with the obstacle, they must be the stronger; the rival must be crushed. As soon as there is struggle, there is hatred, however attenuated it may be, and where there is hatred or even competition, there can be no pure love.

The altruist, on the other hand, has renounced themself and everything that could serve them, they have limited their needs to their means, they care neither for fortune, nor for honours, nor for glory. They have, in general, had the experiences that cured them of their legitimate curiosity and, with an effort, they have voluntarily finished divesting themself of their very self.

Lady Hester Stanhope in Eastern dress in her residence at Djihun, in the heart of Druze territory, Syria, by Robert Jacob Hamerton, 1830s. Frontispiece of Frank Hamel’s Lady Hester Lucy Stanhope: a new light on her life and love affairs, London – New York: Cassell & Company, Ltd., 1913. Adrien Sina Collection The Druze Rebellion, part of the broader Great Syrian Revolt (1925–1927), was a nationalist uprising against the French Mandate authorities who governed Syria following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Although Syria was not a French colony, it was administered under a League of Nations Mandate with the stated goal of preparing the region for self-governance. The revolt was eventually crushed by the French military, which carried out widespread reprisals, including aerial bombings of civilian areas and acts widely condemned as war crimes. According to her private manuscript correspondence with Jacques Reboul — first revealed in Feminine Futures — Valentine de Saint-Point was on the cusp of organising peace talks between the rebels — especially the Druze commanders — and French authorities just before the major bombings began.

Enriched by all that they have acquired and all that they have renounced, they have only one goal, one tendency, one duty, one need: to be generous, to give.

Valentine de Saint-Point continues:
The individualist takes, the altruist gives. These two states seem diametrically opposed.
Yet this opposition is merely superficial. While one cannot be both individualist and altruist at the same time, one can be both — successively.
Individualism and altruism are two successive stages in a human hierarchy verified in every being.

A child, for example, is naturally self-centred — it demands everything from the stronger adults around it and has nothing to give in return. In this period of radical transformation, ‘Individualism and Fraternity’ expands the ideas she first explored in her 1912 Manifesto of the Futurist Woman, seeking the vital necessity of balancing masculine and feminine forces within civilisations, in order to avoid historical swings between extremes of aggressivity or passivity:

It is the same way with any collectivity and any moment in humanity, just as it is with individuals. The fecund periods, when the most heroes and geniuses come forth from the terrain of culture in all its ebullience, are rich in masculinity and femininity. Those periods that had only wars, with few outstanding heroes because an epic breath raised them all, were exclusively virile periods; those that denied the heroic instinct and turning towards the past, annihilated themselves in dreams of peace, were periods in which femininity was dominant.

Smoke rises over Damascus after October 1925 bombing of the city. Photograph by Luigi Stironi. Adrien Sina Collection

Her 1923 text extends that reasoning toward the sociopolitical sphere, proposing a subtle equilibrium between individualism and fraternity – between selfishness and generosity:

If a person can only be individualist and altruist successively, then society must be both simultaneously. That is, it must be composed of altruists and individualists, ordered hierarchically. It is precisely because we lack altruists – and above all, a hierarchical order – that we have arrived at a state of anarchy across all domains. This situation cannot endure without producing the worst catastrophes, followed by our decline. Individualism reigns – and has reigned for far too long. This trajectory, developing century by century, has resulted in the monstrosity of a society in which all authority is now entrusted to individualists.

After a series of unfinished political undertakings – including The Future Arab-Latin Mediterranean Civilisation, a visionary precursor to what would later become the Union for the Mediterranean – Valentine de Saint-Point left for Egypt permanently in December 1924. Her departure followed closely on the deaths of both her mother and her companion Ricciotto Canudo.

The Battle of Rashayya Citadel, French soldiers standing in front of corpses. From 20 to 24 November 1925, the Druze rebels, led by Zayd al-Atrash, who had retreated to the region after the recapture of Damascus. 3,000 Druze fighters would face the 4th squadron of the 1st Foreign Cavalry Regiment of the French Foreign Legion, consisting of around a hundred men and commanded by Captain Landriau. The objective of the rebel operation was to create a bridge between the Lebanese and Syrian Druze regions, thereby cutting the French Army’s communications between the coast and the inland. Adrien Sina Collection

Egypt, notably, was also the birthplace of Marinetti, and his close friend Nelson Morpurgo – himself born in Cairo – was then overseeing the Futurist movement there. But for Valentine, this journey was not merely geographical or ideological. It bore a deeper ethical and political intention, intimately linked to her lineage – specifically her spiritual and intellectual filiation with Alphonse de Lamartine, who had made a similar journey to what was then known in Europe as the Orient nearly a century earlier.

For Lamartine, the voyage had been marked by profound personal grief – his only daughter, Julia, died there at the age of twelve – but also by poetic vision and political fascination. He was particularly captivated by Lady Hester Stanhope, the English aristocrat and adventurer who ruled like a modern-day Circe from her palace in Djihun, in the heart of Druze territory. It was precisely to this geopolitical region – the Druze Mountains of Syria and Greater Lebanon – that Valentine de Saint-Point would later devote immense effort. She opposed with clarity and conviction the massacres and atrocities committed by France in the region – a territory that, though not a formal colony or protectorate, had been placed under French mandate by the League of Nations, with the explicit purpose of protecting its population, not perpetrating violence and destruction.

The Battle of Homs. Druze horsemen slain in an engagement with the French forces, photograph taken by a sous-officier of the Foreign Legion, October 9, 1925. Adrien Sina Collection

A text of hers from much earlier, published in La Nouvelle Revue in 1905 and titled Lamartine Inconnu (Lamartine Unknown), now reads as uncannily premonitory. In hindsight, it reveals a subtle identification of her own worldview with that of Lamartine – himself both poet and statesman, a leading figure of the 1848 Revolution, founder of the French Republic, and Minister of Foreign Affairs. His life as a diplomat in the Middle East had been driven by a vision of intercultural respect and the peaceful resolution of imperial conflict – an ethos Valentine would later attempt to actualise in her own century.

She wrote:

No destiny is more charged with sadness and beauty than that of those who, amid the complex and tumultuous life of nations, appear as a synthesis of collective will and effort. Their fate is always marked by that blend of grace and disgrace that history reserves for tribunes – whether intellectuals, men of genius who capture the obscure tendencies of a generation in a single masterpiece, or political tribunes who momentarily embody an entire people. Those who, through some rare complexity of their being, are both – artist and politician – double both the joy and the bitterness of their lives. In the East, amid a divine landscape, the spectacle of peoples – either barbarous or slumbering within the crystallised dogmas of ancient civilisations – awakened in him the instincts of a leader. These would lead him, in turn, to the intoxication of supreme power and the sorrow of all disillusionment.
–Valentine de Saint-Point, Lamartine Inconnu – Lettres inédites
(Lamartine Unknown – Unpublished Letters), La Nouvelle Revue, 1905

THE FAILURE OF WESTERN CIVILISATION

In 1921, Valentine de Saint-Point attended the World Congress of the Theosophical Society held in Paris at Square Rapp. Chaired by Annie Besant and attended by 1,200 delegates representing thirty-two national branches, the Congress centred on the theme ‘The Mission of the Theosophical Society to the World’.

In 1924, Valentine de Saint-Point relocated to Cairo with Vivian Postel du Mas and Jeanne Canudo, continuing to advocate theosophical ideals. There, she founded and directed Le Phoenix – Revue de la Renaissance Orientale (Review of the Oriental Renaissance), a geopolitical journal dedicated to fostering fraternity between East and West through cultural renewal and a vocal denunciation of colonial injustice and violence. Published from November 1925 to June 1927, Le Phoenix addressed the most volatile regions – from the Middle East to Asia – and served as a platform for critical discourse. In the June 1926 issue, Annie Besant lent her voice in support of Valentine’s fervent call for India’s liberation from British colonial rule.

Valentine de Saint-Point’s political activism targeted not only Western colonial domination and its rampant excesses but also combated local obscurantism and religious fundamentalism. She dedicated the latter half of her life to ethical commitments, operating from Egypt to promote cultural reconciliation between East and West and to advance justice and peace. La Vérité sur la Syrie par un Témoin (The Truth about Syria by a Witness), published by Cahiers de France in Paris in 1929, was a milestone in her political and geopolitical achievements.

Valentine de Saint-Point. La faillite de la Civilisation Occidentale (‘The Failure of Western Civilisation’), lecture delivered at the Oriental League in Cairo on Friday, 13 November 1925, and published in Le Phoenix – Revue de la Renaissance Orientale (Review of the Oriental Renaissance she founded and directed from November 1925 to June 1927), no. 2, Cairo, December 1925, pp. 21-34. Adrien Sina Collection

Her lecture, ‘The Failure of Western Civilisation’, delivered at the Oriental League in Cairo on Friday, 13 November 1925, and published in Le Phoenix in December 1925, states:

My Brothers of the East, I do not come before you to put Western civilisation on trial. That trial has been ongoing for half a century. The indictment has been issued many times by thinkers from many lands – not only from the East but also from the West. Today, defenders and critics of Western civilisation clash across all levels of social life and every domain of knowledge. Passion fuels the debate, which often spills from words into the carnage of battlefields.

As for me, I stand among the accusers of Western civilisation. This is nothing new. Yet each day, new charges add weight to my indictment – charges grounded in facts, not rhetoric: bodies, fires, destruction both spontaneous and systematic, tears, hatred, and blood. For this reason, I cannot promise to remain detached or impassive today in this role of accuser, as one might when seeking Justice.

Generally, I remain calm – and perhaps I might have succeeded, even after the ‘slaughter of Damascus,’ if I were Eastern. But destiny made me Western, and thus, in solidarity with the guilty, I bear the weight of the accused’s misdeeds, the responsibility for the crimes of the West. I am a child forced to accuse his own Mother. There is no more terrible role. How could I fulfil it, as my human duty demands, if I did not draw strength from the indignation, from the revolt awakened within me by the consequences of Western Force – the bloody results of the immense effort and pride of Western civilisation?

My brothers of the East, true Brotherhood must first reign among the nations of the sun. Do not expect it first from the West. In the sinister glow of the fires of Damascus, illuminating the blood of victims strewn in the streets of the Holy City, this truth – already visible to me – became unmistakably clear. Before the collapsed or burned monuments where the great history of Damascus was written, before lives cut short, intellectuals crushed behind prison walls where their oppressors threw them, before women, the elderly, dying children, raped young girls, and so much undeserved suffering; before the martyred innocence, trampled laws, and all the iniquities of recent weeks – my last hopes for the West vanished forever.

No one can escape the inexorable law of actions and reactions. From the hotbed of hatred ignited there – and on which the gaze of all Islam is fixed – can only spring more rays of hatred, refracted in too many still-obscure consciences. Amid the hellish roar of the destructive storm unleashed on Damascus, the holy city, and the ruin of France’s prestige there, the death knell of Western civilisation has sounded. Faced with this failure, I repeat: more imperative and sacred duties call to the Orient. The fragmented Orient can do nothing for itself; the united Orient can do everything. My friends, my brothers, to achieve unity – that is the secret of the Orient’s rebirth. Before, when I still held illusions about the West, I preached Eastern unity as a necessity for World Civilisation. From now on, I preach Eastern unity for the liberation of the Orient. Time is pressing, believe me. Expect nothing from your Western rulers. Unite all the countries of the Middle East, deliberately divided by European powers to pit consciences against interests and more easily dominate the world.

Valentine de Saint-Point amidst her roof-garden in Cairo, 1943. Private photograph by Martin Lings who worked for the Secret Services of Her Majesty the Queen of England, a spy of the British Empire having Valentine de Saint-Point under his surveillance same way as the French Diplomacy had Valentine’s anticolonialist activities under report However, Lings became fascinated by Valentine de Saint-Point, they began a friendship and had long conversations about politics, Sufism and the Middle East. Image courtesy of Nancy G. Moore archive

This stance coincided with the 1925 publication in Paris of Les Appels de l’Orient (Calls from the Orient), where writers, artists, and intellectuals began a more or less organised critique of colonialism. In contrast, Valentine de Saint-Point was already active on the battlefields of Greater Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria – including Aleppo, Damascus, and the Djebel el-Druze – not only through words but also through her connections with intellectuals involved in the resistance.

It is precisely this lack of knowledge of her acts that has led historians to underestimate her Egyptian period. This is why my research and undertaking Feminine Futures presented an analysis spanning more than one hundred pages of previously unknown and unpublished political correspondence – most notably letters addressed to her friend Jacques Reboul between 1926 and 1933 – alongside over one hundred seventy pages of her unexplored correspondence and reports from the Diplomatic Archives of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Valentine de Saint-Point promoted synarchy, a political system envisioned by the Marquis Saint-Yves d’Alveydre that integrates traditional elites into the power structure, a model more suited to the turbulent Middle East regions than Western systems. Her influential work was cut short in 1933 under French and British diplomatic pressure. Her concept of ‘Feminine Action’ must thus be understood as the unifying thread in her quest for a total work of art – anticipating, before Joseph Beuys, the intertwining of art, life, culture, civilisation, and politics, where the artist’s sensibility resonates deeply with the world’s tragedies.

Endnotes