Festivals and the French Revolution •

• • Festivals and the French Revolution F·E·S·T·[·V·A·L·S and the French Revolution Mona Ozouf Translated by Alan Sheridan Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 1988 Copyright © 1988 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 I First published as La fite revolutionnaire, [789-[799, © Editions Gallimard, 1976 This book is printed on acid-free paper, and its binding materials have been chosen for strength and durability. The publication of this volume was assisted by a grant from the French Ministry of Culture. Library of Congrers Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ozouf, Mona. Festivals and the French Revolution. Translation of: La fete revolutionnaire, 1789-1799. Bibliography: p. Includes index. I. France-Social life and customs-1789-18 I 5 . 2. France-History-Revolution, 1789-1799. 3. Festivals-France-History-18th century. I. Title. DC159·09613 1988 944.04 87-14958 ISBN 0- 674-29883-7 Derigned by Gwen Frankfeldt COlltents Foreword by Lynn Hunt IX The Republican Calendar XIV Brief Chronology of the French Revolution xv Introduction I I • The History of the Revolutionary Festival 13 The Revolutipn as Festival 15 History of the Festivals, History of the Sects 2 I Boredom and Qisgust 27 II • The Festival of the Federation: Model and Reality 33 Riot and Festival: The "Wild" Federations 37 The Federative Festivals 39 The Paris Federation 42 A New Festival? 49 The Festival of All the French? 54 III • The Festival above the Parties: l792 6 I The Norm and the Exception 62 Tw o Antagonistic Festivals? 66 The Unity of Tr agedy 79 VI Contents IV • Mockery and Revolution: 1793-1794 83 The "Other" Festival 84 Where, When, with Whom ? 91 Reasonable Reason 97 Violence and the Festival 102 V • Return to the Enlightenment: 1794-1799 106 The "Happy Nation" 110 The System of Brumaire, Ye ar IV I 18 VI • The Festival and Space 126 Space without Qualities 127 The Symbolic Mapping-Out 132 The Renovation of a Ceremonial Space: The Example of Caen 137 The Resistance of Paris 147 The Space-Time of the Revolution 152 VII • The Festival and Time 158 Beginning 159 Dividing Up 161 Commemorating 166 Ending 186 VIII • The Future of the Festival: Festival and Pedagogy 197 "The Schools of the Mature Man" 198 The Power of Images 203 The Correct Use of Images 205 Nothing Goes without Saying 212 IX • Popular Life and the Revolutionary Festival 2 17 A Shameful Ethnology 2 18 History of a Failure 223 Revolutionary Symbolism and Peasant Tr adition 232 The Maisauvage 233 A Pedagogical Tr ee 243 From the Maypole to the Tr ee 250 A Break 256 Contents Vll x . The Revolutionary Festival: A Transfer of Sacrality 262 Horror vacui 267 The Meaning of a Few Borrowings 27 I The Meaning of Purging 278 Abbreviations 284 Notes 285 Bibliography 349 Index 37 I Foreword by Lynn Hunt In Festivals and the French Revolution Mona Ozouf has written one of those rare works of scholarly history that opens up new ways of thinking about the meaning of culture and revolution in general. At first glance, the topic might seem a clearly delimited one: the fe stivals of the French Rev olution from 1789 to I799. The subject conjures up visions of goddesses of Liberty, strange celebrations of Reason, and the oddly pretentious Cult of the Supreme Being. Every history of the period includes some mention of these fe stivals, although most historians have been content either to ridicule them as ineffectual or to bemoan them as repugnant examples of a sterile official culture. In these pages the reader will discover that the fe stivals were more than bizarre marginalia to the Revolutionary process. The fe stivals offer critical insights into the meaning of the French Revo lution; they show a society in the process of creating itself anew. Under the scrutiny of a keenly perceptive historian, the fe stivals are revealed to be the most fascinating example of the working of Revolutionary culture. Historians of the French Revolution have been incorporating Mona Ozouf's insights into their work for some time. Now, thanks to this ex cellent translation by Alan Sheridan, a much broader English-speaking public will be able to appreciate the significance of her book. In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in the French Revolution, and studies of it have become models fo r understanding the revolutionary process in general. Mona Ozouf has been in the fo refront of this resur gence, along with Fran�ois Furet, her colleague at the Ecole des Haures Etudes in Paris, and Maurice Agulhon of the University of Paris. Ozouf, Furet in Interpreting the French Revolution, and Agulhon in Marianne into Battle: Republican Imagery and Symbolism in France, 1789-1800, have drawn our attention away from fruitless debates about the Marxist inter- x Foreword pretation of the French Revolution toward a new consideration of the role and significance of revolutionary political culture. Rather than fo cusing on the part played by different social classes or trying to trace economic trends, they have shown the importance of symbols, language, and ritual in inventing and transmitting a tradition of revolutionary action. Mona Ozouf does not ignore the long and venerable tradition of Revo lutionary historiography; she situates herself carefully vis-a.-vis it by show ing how an understanding of the festivals can change our thinking about the Revolution. She argues against the view long held by most historians that the fe stivals were simply another instrument of political struggle, more spectacular than speeches in the Convention or votes in the Jacobin Club but essentially the same in intent. In this view, the radicals, fo r example, used the celebrations of Reason to fo rtify their position, and then Robespierre created the Cult of the Supreme Being in order to defeat the radicals. While the author recognizes the differences between fe stivals and demonstrates their connections to unfolding events, her main interest is in their common characteristics, or what she calls their "identical con ceptualization." She traces the similarities through the many stages in Revolutionary fe stive life: first the "wild" festivals of 1789 and 1790, which were often not very different from riots; then the grandiose and moving festivals of Federation in July 1790; the subsequent official con flicts over which events to celebrate; the alternative, locally inspired fe s tivals of 1793 and 1794, which often included violent satires of CathoI i cism, the rich, and figures of political authority; and finally the official systems of festivals designed to keep unruly elements under control. By taking the larger view of the fe stivals, Ozouf is able to develop the links between them and more general structures of culture. In two path breaking pieces (Chapters VI and VII), she shows how the fe stivals were designed to recast space and time. The revolutionaries sought to efface the spatial reminders of the Catholic religion and of monarchical and fe udal authority. Festival itineraries carefully avoided the religious proces sional routes of the past or showed off new symbolic representations that purposely overshadowed those reminders. Some fe stivals included the ceremonial burning of royalist and Catholic symbols; in these, the sym bols of the new world would emerge out of the ashes of the old. Revolu tionary fe stive space was always large and open: fe stival organizers pre fe rred large, open fields or squares, where equality could be conveyed by horizontality and freedom by the lack of boundaries. Closed and vertical Foreword Xl spaces were associated with hierarchy and lack of freedom, and they were avoided as much as possible. The planners of the fe stivals were even more preoccupied with time. Catholic fe ast days were abolished, and new Revolutionary ones were in stituted. In 1793, the entire calendar was redrawn. "Decades" of ten days replaced the weeks, and the new names given to the months and days recalled nature and reason while replacing the names associated with the Christian calendar. The Revolutionary festivals were essential to this new sense of time, because they both gave shape to the yearly cycle and estab lished the history of the Revolution itself. Whenever the regime changed, the fe stival calendar had to be rearranged. New fe stivals were created to celebrate each major alteration, and objectional reminders fr om the pre ceding regime were eliminated. The fe stivals can be understood, then, as the Revolution's own history in the making. The concern with space and time fo llowed from the Revolutionary de sire to fo rm a new community based on new values. This is, no doubt, the book's most important and fruitful insight, for it restores to the Rev olution the emphasis on creativity and inventiveness that has long been fo rgotten in the standard histories. As the author concludes, the fe stivals inaugurated a new era because they made sacred the values of a modern, secular, liberal world. In more concrete terms, this meant that the nation required new categories of social definition, the old categories having dis appeared with the abolition of Old Regime corporations and titles of no bility. Processions based on rank and precedence therefore had to give way to processions grouped more neutrally by fu nction and age. For the most part, however, the festivals emphasized consensus and oneness rather than distinctions within the community. The emphasis on the drive toward unanimity and the recasting of the categories of social experience make the fe stivals seem very much like a new secular religion.

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