Localizing the Liberty Tree: Republican Ritual in the Wake of Civil War, 1794-1800

Edward J. Woell, Western Illinois University

On 9 February 1798 a spectacle interrupted the tedium of Chemiré-sur- Sarthe and Daumeray, two villages in the department of the Maine-et-Loire. In the afternoon local officials met at the two sites to see a small army detachment replant liberty trees. Aside from noting that they were provided by a benefactor from Angers and taken from a nearby national forest, a written report about the rituals offered no description of the trees themselves. Nor was there any indication of how many of the locals looked on. The rites were only said to have taken place “amid universal acclamations,” that “citizens at this ceremony let testimonials of their civic allegiance burst forth, and that this feast occurred in the most orderly manner.”1 About seven months later, on 8 September, a village in the department of the Rhône about five hundred kilometers away from Chemiré and Daumeray enacted the exact same rite. While local officials in Rochetaillée-sur-Saône likewise provided an account of what happened, theirs was much more ornate. It began with leaders proceeding to the site while “accompanied by a crowd of farmers and a group of musicians.” Officials then recounted that “we found a liberty tree, a young oak with long roots and green and vigorous branches, which in several centuries will be the symbol of the republic’s duration.” They also noted that “the farmers fought over the honor of carefully placing the roots of the young tree in a spot gently prepared some days earlier.” As the tree was raised, the report went on, “a crowd of spectators eagerly proclaimed ‘long live liberty’ and ‘may the republic live forever.’” With the replanting completed “a large number of inhabitants brought wine for the workers to drink and then decided to join in, using the establishment of freedom as an excuse.” Thereafter the crowd partook in the farandole: a traditional dance hailed as a “symbol of joy.” The celebration was said to persist into the evening and even the next day, though local officials added that “the dances and other amusements that took place on this festival’s occasion were accompanied by the most perfect harmony.”2 At first glance it would seem that the Rhône’s republicans showed much care for liberty trees, just as the opposite appears likely for their colleagues in the Maine-et-Loire. If placed within each of their departmental contexts, however, these two accounts can be seen for what both truly were—notable anomalies. As this paper shows, the inverse tendency mostly prevailed; the Maine-et-Loire’s republicans were more dedicated to upholding and maintaining liberty trees than those in the Rhône. Introducing this inquiry with two misleading examples may strike some as ill advised, but doing so highlights a liability in the current historiography of French political culture from 1794 to 1800 that this paper seeks

1 Morannes Canton Report, 21 Pluviôse VI [9 February 1798], Les archives départementales de Maine-et-Loire (hereafter referred to as “ADML”), 1 L 411. 2 Rochetaillée Report, 23 Fructidor VI [9 September, 1798], Les archives départementales du Rhône (hereafter referred to as “ADR”), 1 L 451. 50 Woell

to redress: the danger of being led astray by a lack of local context and regionally informed analysis.3 Based on the premise that understanding the French Revolution’s political rites and symbols requires a grasp of the immediate contexts in which they were observed, this paper argues for a heterogeneous French republican culture and provides evidence of it in local responses to national mandates about liberty trees within two departments. Three parts will comprise the case. First, bureaucratic correspondence about liberty trees will confirm a chasm in political culture that parted republicans in the Rhône from those of the Maine-et-Loire. Second, the political context for each department and how the two varied will shed light on what stood behind this divide. And third, in keeping with recent historiography, these findings will be connected not only to a global republican movement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but also to our own republics of today. Despite its ultimate reach, this argument relies on a microhistorical frame shaped by the paper’s singular subject, as well as acute geographical and chronological constraints. The two departments in question were chosen because they shared the common fate of civil war—though even in this they stood distinct. Whereas the Maine-et-Loire’s strife arose from two strands of popular counterrevolution (the Vendéen insurgency from 1793 to 1796 and the Chouannerie from 1794 to 18004), the Rhône saw a so-called Federalist revolt in 1793 featuring an inter-republican divide in Lyon.5 The paper’s limited chronology is mostly owed to when the largest share of records about liberty trees in the two departments’ archives were produced: the six years between Robespierre’s fall in 1794 and Napoleon’s consolidation of power in 1800. Between 1794 and 1800, the central government remained authoritative in shaping, standardizing, and monitoring the nation’s political festivals. In late 1796, for example, legislators in Paris simplified the festival calendar by designating ten national observances. Five were “commemorative” festivals marking key revolutionary events—those of 21 January, 14 July, 27 July, 10 August, and 22 September—while the other five were “moral” festivals held on the tenth day of a revolutionary month and dedicated respectively to the youth, the elderly, spouses, thanksgiving, and agriculture.6 National authorities also upheld the central role played by liberty trees in festivals, in part by maintaining a preference for celebrating rites in outdoor settings.7 By 1792 French officials had already planted

3 See, for example, Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1998); Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), especially Chapter 2; James Livesey, Making Democracy in the French Revolution (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2001); and Andrew Jainchill, Reimagining Politics after the Terror: The Republican Origins of French Liberalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008). 4 For the War of Vendée in the Maine-et-Loire, see Claude Petitfrère, Les Vendéens d’Anjou (1793): Analyse des structures militaires, sociales et mentales (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale, 1981); Petitfrère, Les bleus d’Anjou (1789-1792) (Paris: CTHS, 1985). See also Jean- Clément Martin, “The Vendée, Chouannerie, and the State, 1791-99,” in A Companion to the French Revolution, ed. Peter McPhee (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2013), 246-259. 5 For the Lyon revolt, see W. D. Edmonds, Jacobinism and the Revolt of Lyon 1789-1793 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990) and Michel Biard, 1793, le siège de Lyon: entre mythes et réalités (Clermont-Ferrand: Lemme, 2013). For a national perspective, see Paul R. Hanson, The Jacobin Republic Under Fire: The Federalist Revolts in the French Revolution (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003). 6 Ozouf, 119-120; Livesey, 199-222; Jainchill, 87-88. 7 Ozouf, 126-136.

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sixty thousand liberty trees, paving the way for their future use by republicans from 1794 to 1800. One mark of the liberty tree’s ongoing role in ritual was how the symbol remained contested among partisans. Sustained republican reverence for these trees was precisely why revolutionary opponents continued to vandalize or destroy them.8 Understanding how these national trends apply to a locality requires a return to the Rhône for a more detailed analysis of the replanting at Rochetaillée. One striking detail about this rite is how it occurred almost eight months after the national mandate was issued. The law in question, that of 24 Nivôse VI (13 January 1798), required dead or damaged liberty trees to be replaced with new ones within seventeen days of when the law was first promulgated. 9 The timing of Rochetaillée’s replanting, however, proposes that officials in the Rhône failed to consider this mandate a priority. Some correspondence written almost a year after the law’s passage confirms the disregard. In a letter from early January of 1799 sent to all of the department’s cantons, officials in Lyon tacitly admitted that they were not sure the law was being fully observed within their jurisdiction.10 The replanting of a liberty tree in 1798 often stemmed from an attack on the previous one. In the Rhône’s case, many recorded attacks took place in the late winter of 1795 in or near the canton of Saint-Symphorien-sur-Coise, where officials in the municipalities of Larajasse, Duerne, Pomeys, Coise, Chazelles-sur- Lyon [Loire], and even the cantonal seat reported that their liberty trees had been cut in two, sawed off, or knocked down.11 The timing and nature of the attacks imply an indirect connection to the White Terror enveloping much of southern France at the time.12 Even so, local officials blamed a small group of artisans for the vandalism and held that a downturn in the economy made credulous citizens indifferent to such assaults. After investigating the sabotage, for instance, a national police agent informed Saint-Symphorien’s Revolutionary Committee of “complaints about the high price of grain” and that when people refused to pay it, “farmers would sell it on the black market.” He then asked the Committee if it could “authorize the release of fifty quintals of grain in favor of the indigent” within its canton. The Committee itself concluded that tanners, hat makers, and shoemakers making their tour in the canton were the culprits since they were known for “their counter-revolutionary remarks” and for a “fermentation” that made these attacks more likely.13 The drawback to this explanation, however, was that these lowly artisans were not the “usual suspects” whom republicans often

8 Hunt, 59. 9 Law of 24 Nivose VI [13 January 1798], ADR, 1 L 451. 10 Rhône Departmental Circular Letter, 16 Nivôse VII [5 January 1799], ADR, 1 L 438. The circular stated that if there were liberty trees that needed to be replaced, local officials were to do so at the next festival, which suggests that departmental officials were little aware of the status of many liberty trees within the Rhône. While inclement conditions might explain official reluctance in the Rhône to plant a liberty tree in late January or February, these factors fail to account for delaying the ceremony until the late summer. 11 Local officials from the canton of Saint-Symphorien-sur-Coise wrote reports on these attacks between 14 and 26 Pluviôse III [2 and 14 February 1795] in ADR, 1 L 209. 12 Stephen Clay, “The White Terror: Factions, Reactions, and the Politics of Vengeance,” in McPhee, 359-377. Louis Trenard found that there were attacks on liberty trees in Oullins, Saint-Genis-Laval, and Brignais, albeit in the spring of 1795. See Trenard, La révolution française dans la région Rhône-Alpes (Paris: Perrin, 1992), 622. 13 Symphorien-sur-Coise [Saint-Symphorien-sur-Coise] Canton Report, 14 Pluviôse III [2 February 1795], ADR, 1 L 209. This particular report is the earliest and perhaps the most helpful because it reflects initial local reaction to the attacks before a top-down republican narrative was imposed on municipal officials.

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accused of political sabotage. Missing from these initial reports on attacks, in other words, was any mention of a plot or a conspiracy involving royalist aristocrats, Catholic fanatics, or France’s foreign enemies.14 The sparse evidence of conspiratorial thinking hints that the ideological framework relied on by most French republicans was less prevalent in the Rhône. A dearth of ideological fervor likely informed local republican dispositions toward both liberty trees and political ritual as a whole. One incident in 1797 makes this clear. On 16 November the Interior Minister, François Sebastien Letourneux, wrote to admonish the Rhône’s officials for their supervisory neglect. Letourneux had received a report from a commissioner in the canton of Sainte-Colombe contending that administrators there declined to celebrate any of the national festivals. The Minister insisted that the Rhône’s officials promptly remove the cantonal administrators and replace them with “sincere friends of the Republic.”15 More broadly, Letourneux’s letter signals that tepid enthusiasm for political symbols and rites in the Rhône extended beyond officials in Lyon; it was probably even more prevalent among rural republicans like those in Sainte-Colombe. But in this respect the canton of Sainte-Colombe was not alone. Another cantonal commissioner—this one from Neuville-sur-Saône—wrote to his departmental superior in 1797 to report that while local officials there had invited their citizens to celebrate the festival of 10 August, “the circumstances of the time forced each one to attend to his harvest and this is the sole cause for why the festival’s ceremony was not celebrated.” He promised that in the future these officials would “neglect nothing to prove how attached they are to the laws of the government and will always make it their duty to give unequivocal proof,” thereby indicating that local republicans saw festivals as mostly a matter of legal obligation and administrative obedience.16 The correspondence from Neuville may have gone beyond an inquiry about the liberty tree, but interestingly Neuville was the seat of Rochetaillée’s canton, in turn prompting a key question: why did so many show up for a tree replanting in a village on 8 September 1798, whereas no one could come to a festival in a larger community just a short distance away on 10 August 1797? One possibility is that depictions in the report notwithstanding, those who came to Rochetaillée in 1798 had little interest in what the liberty tree was said to represent. The rite may largely have been a chance for locals to gather together, dance, and drink wine “using the establishment of liberty as an excuse,” as officials admitted. Such citizens may have also responded more favorably to the

14 For more on how local officials viewed conspiracy, see Jill Maciak Walshaw, “Conspiracy in the Village? French Revolutionary Authorities and the Search for ‘Subverters of Public Opinion’ in the Rural Southwest,” in Conspiracy in the French Revolution, eds. Peter Campbell, Thomas Kaiser, and Marissa Linton (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 106-126. The lack of reliable records for taking the 1791 Ecclesiastical Oath in Saint- Symphorien-sur-Coise’s canton precludes determining how vexing refractory priests and their supporters had been for local administrations. See Timothy Tackett, Religion, Revolution, and Regional Culture: The Ecclesiastical Oath of 1791 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 352. 15 Interior Minister to Rhône Departmental Directory, 26 Brumaire VI [16 November 1797], ADR, 1 L 435. For more on the roles of departmental and cantonal commissioners of executive power, see Isser Woloch, The New Regime: Transformations of the French Civil Order, 1789-1820 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994), 53-54; 114-119. 16 Neuville-sur-Saône Cantonal Commissioner to Departmental Commissioner, 3 Fructidor V [20 August 1797], ADR, 1 L 435.

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tree planting because it echoed the age-old rites of the mai sauvage or maypole.17 Even without the harvest, Neuville’s ceremony may have fallen flat because it offered little of what locals wanted or expected from their festivals. In closely analyzing the report about replanting liberty trees in the Maine- et-Loire’s two villages of Chemiré and Daumeray on that February day in 1798, we may better realize why this rite’s timing mattered. Cantonal officials at Morannes—the small town spanning these two villages—had not only closely read the law of 24 Nivôse VI but quickly acted on it. Four days before the rites at the two villages, these officials had replanted a liberty tree in their own town.18 Although few citizens likely attended the replanting in the two villages, one reason for this may be that the scruples of Morannes’ republicans would not allow the rites to become an “excuse” for gossip, dancing, and drinking. The rapid response to the replanting law at Morannes, in any case, was not unusual within the department. Two other municipalities (Savennières and Andard) replanted their liberty trees even before it was done in Morannes’ canton.19 Republicans in at least one other canton of the Maine-et-Loire also adhered closely to the law, but in this case departmental officials learned of it because of what followed. On 21 February a cantonal officer from the village of La Poitevinière reported to superiors in Angers that as a result of closely carrying out the mandate, the newly planted liberty tree “had been cut in half with a saw,” which he nonetheless promised to replace promptly.20 While archival records about these attacks appear incomplete in both departments, the extant evidence indicates more attacks in the Maine-et-Loire than in the Rhône, not at all a surprise given how overt counterrevolution unfolded in the former.21 Attacks in the Maine-et-Loire were also distinctive in how they took place throughout the revolutionary decade—not in one brief spasm, as was the case in the Rhône. Some of the Maine-et-Loire’s liberty trees were already under threat as early as mid-1792, when a National Guard commander from Le May-sur-Èvre reported that threats made to the village’s liberty tree prompted him to assign a sentinel to guard it.22 Seven years later, in November of 1799, a justice-of-the-peace from Baugé reported that his town had been invaded by Chouans, who had taken axes to not only two liberty trees but a fraternity tree as well.23 A closer look at the 1798 attack at La Poitevinière finds that while the author could not identify the vandal, he was certain of those most responsible for the crime:

17 Ozouf, 233-256. 18 Morannes Municipal Report, 20 Pluviôse VI [8 February 1798], ADML, 1 L 411. This report offers another rationale for why the planting rites were probably circumscribed at Chemiré and Daumeray; a more elaborate, regulated, and well attended ceremony had already occurred in the nearby cantonal seat. 19 Andard Report, 10 Pluviôse VI [29 January 1798]; Savennières Report, 10 Pluviôse VI, ADML, 1 L 411. 20 La Poitivinière Report, 3 Ventôse VI [21 February 1798], ADML, 1 L 411. 21 Michel Duval, “Les arbres de la liberté en Bretagne sous la Révolution (1792-1799),” in Les résistances à la Révolution: Actes du Collôque de Rennes (1985), eds. François Lebrun and Roger Dupuy (Paris: Editions Imago: 1987), 55-67. 22 Le-May-sur-Èvre Report, 26 June 1792, ADML, 1 L 361. To illustrate the collective value placed on liberty trees, Ozouf points to a 1792 planting in the Maine-et-Loire’s village of Chemillé, where some citizens complained to departmental authorities when not invited to the ceremony. See Ozouf, 254-255. 23 Baugé Justice-of-the-Peace Report, 22 Brumaire VIII [13 November 1799], ADML, 14 L 5.

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. . . maliciousness is at its height, the intrigue of refractory priests and nobles puts everything in play in order to effect some uprising. These priests in hiding make use of their devotees, who are multiplying and assist in hiding them. . . . The priest gathers the people nightly and if found there he preaches and says mass; this is happening in all my neighboring cantons as well as in mine. The result of these nightly meetings is that people become callous and regard all government laws with indifference and contempt.24 The claim about the presence of clandestine refractory priests in the Maine-et- Loire largely rings true. Yet the writing reflects broader conspiratorial thought alleging that since locals were incapable of conceiving of these attacks, a refractory priest was behind them.25 Whether this conspiracy theory was prevalent among republicans at the replanting rites in Chemiré and Daumeray is impossible to say, of course, in light of their short report. A small detail from that brief account, however, merits more scrutiny: the engagement of troops from the regular army. Other festival reports in the Maine-et-Loire show that military culture at this kind of ceremony was the ritualistic norm there—and by contrast, much less prevalent in the Rhône. Accounts from Saumur, for example, show that at each procession’s head were found members of “the National Guard both inactive and active under arms,” and two artillery salvos would mark the start of the festival while one more would kick off its procession. Saumur’s officials also used the Festival of Youth on 27 April 1796 to induct seventy-two young men who had reached the age of sixteen over the preceding year into the local National Guard. About two months later at the Festival of Victories, the rite included proclamation of the names of all soldiers from Saumur’s canton who had died or been wounded in defending the nation—most of them during the War of Vendée.26 That the Maine-et-Loire’s republicans relied on the military in their ritual does not mean, though, that they had any easier time than officials in the Rhône in getting fellow citizens to partake in the festival. For the 1796 Festival for Spouses in Saumur, for instance, officials admitted that “the number of citizens who attended this festival was not nearly as great as it could be,” despite their promotion of the event through putting up posters. They also confessed that the festival was “contradicted by efforts made by ministers of the Catholic faith to maintain their feasts and Sundays, which have been abandoned for some time, but which they have succeeded in re-establishing.”27 Similarly, a report on the 14 July 1800 Festival in Ponts-de-Cé revealed that only thirty citizens in a community of four thousand came to the rite. After the ceremony some officials sought to determine the reason by walking through town, whereupon they saw that “the shops were almost all open, carts were circulating in the streets, women were at

24 La Poitivinière Report, 3 Ventose VI [21 February 1798], ADML, 1 L 411. 25 This conspiracy theory was similar to one held by republicans whose colleagues were killed in the massacres at Machecoul (Loire-Atlantique) in 1793. In Machecoul’s case a refractory priest, the abbé François Priour, was alleged to have directly ordered and participated in the killings. See Edward J. Woell, Small-Town Martyrs and Murderers: Religious Revolution and Counterrevolution in Western France, 1774-1914 (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2006), 145-186. 26 Saumur Extra-Muros Reports on the 21 January Festival, 2 Pluviôse VI [21 January 1798] and 2 Pluviôse V [21 January 1797], ADML, 1 L 413; Saumur Intra-Muros Report on the Festival of Youth, 10 Germinal IV [30 March 1796], ADML, 1 L 417; Saumur Extra-Muros Report on the Festival of Victories, 10 Prairial IV [29 May 1796], ADML, 1 L 419. 27 Saumur Report on the Festival of Spouses, 10 Floréal IV [29 April 1796], ADML, 1 L 418.

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their windows, with their work, the men, even during our passage, did not stop working.”28 The report’s author blamed some of his fellow administrators and other hypocritical republicans, rhetorically asking them, “When will you open your eyes to such disorder? Did it not result from having ignored its cause?” He also observed that over the prior three months civic spirit in Ponts-de-Cé had been “utterly annihilated.”29 The expressed dread attests to local republicans not only taking their rites seriously but also accepting the central government’s view that festivals were essential to the nation’s edification and moral well-being. The remarks explain, moreover, why festival reports from the Maine-et-Loire are long and rich in detail, and thus why the short account from Chemiré and Daumeray looks contextually out of place. Collating this evidence with that from the department of the Rhône raises an obvious question: why did republicans in the Maine-et-Loire care more for liberty trees than their colleagues in the Rhône? In both cases, traumatic civil war and its aftermath in 1793 and 1794 loomed large. Along these lines we must recognize that while the 1793 revolt in the Rhône was mostly confined to Lyon, the subsequent repression emanating from the National Convention affected much of the department, thereby leaving many republicans there disheartened with authority in Paris.30 When radical administrators of the Rhône were purged after Robespierre’s fall, moreover, those taking their place often had the same background and status as leaders of the 1793 revolt. As Louis Trenard put it, local officials in the Rhône remained skeptics of centralized authority in Paris because they deemed it “guilty of having wanted to make an example of the Lyonnais.”31 Civil war in the Maine-et-Loire, on the other hand, unleashed a different dynamic. Unlike the revolt in the Rhône, much of the Maine-et-Loire was touched by either the Vendéen insurgency or the Chouannerie; even republican strongholds unscathed by violence saw the loss of area soldiers. Often outnumbered by rebels and their rural sympathizers, local republicans depended on the support from authorities in Paris. The militarization of the Maine-et-Loire, evident in and through its rites, cemented the alliance between republicans in the department and those in the central government.32 Nevertheless, the ritualistic zeal of republicans in the Maine-et-Loire was owed to another element as well. Even before the Vendée and Chouannerie started, counterrevolutionary partisans already had their own repertoire of rites and symbols: what here might be called “counter-ritual.” As Timothy Tackett found, priests in the western Maine-et- Loire—the same zone where counterrevolution later grew rife—soundly rejected the Ecclesiastical Oath of 1791 and were persecuted for doing so.33 When the refractory clergy was ordered out of France in the fall of 1792, many of these priests in the west stayed behind, successfully hid among their faithful, and

28 Ponts Libre [Ponts-de-Cé] Report on the 14 July Festival, 25 Messidor VIII [14 July 1800], ADML, 1 L 423. 29 Saumur Report on the Festival of Liberty, 9 Thermidor IV [27 July 1796], ADML 1 L 422. 30 Edmonds, 263-271. 31 Ibid., 282-304. The quote from Trenard appears on page 304. 32 Howard G. Brown, Ending the French Revolution: Violence, Justice, and Repression from the Terror to Napoleon (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), 209-211, 229-232, 246, 258-266, 403n21; Martin, “The Vendée, Chouannerie, and the State,” 252-255. Note how Martin cautions against conflating the two forms of counterrevolution in the west. 33 Tackett, Religion, Revolution, and Regional Culture, 274-275, 339. The Mauges roughly corresponds to the Cholet District in the Maine-et-Loire, which had an oath-taking rate of only five percent.

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maintained their ministry. Renegade clerics holding clandestine masses at night and administering other sacraments in rural enclaves were not, therefore, figments of the republican imagination.34 Faced with this counter-ritual, local republicans tenaciously adhered to state mandates about national rites and symbols. Rituals and counter-rituals performed in villages like Chemiré, Daumeray, and Rochetaillée may seem trifling, but they too were part of a global republican movement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Accordingly, three analytical points about these local rites have implications for similar republican revolutions that unfolded elsewhere. First, we should recognize that variations in political culture developed between these two departments not in spite of administrative centralization, but because of it. Montagnard intervention in the Rhône, taking the form of severe reprisal, soured local republicans on subsequent ideological dictates from Paris, including those about symbol and ritual. At the same time, however, a similar intervention in the Maine-et-Loire fostered close collaboration between local republicans and those at the national level—though simultaneously driving a deeper wedge between the department’s partisans. These contrary dynamics imply a corollary to Pierre Serna’s astute observation that “every revolution is a war of independence” and a “‘decolonization’ in progress.”35 As true as this may be, the beleaguered republicans in the Maine-et-Loire saw their fight as a “war of dependence” if not a “recolonization in progress,” as evidenced by their deference to centralized authority. A second point is that both departments demonstrate how revolution and its opposition became, to use Jean-Clément Martin’s apt phrase, “the gear wheels of history.”36 Like two such wheels, revolution and its inverse force induced one another, causing one wheel to move in the opposite direction of the other. Although a scholar like Wim Klooster has recognized the integral role of political polarities in each revolutionary context of the Atlantic, how much of this momentum hinged on ritual and counter-ritual has eluded many specialists.37 Finally, we should also realize that in the context of political upheaval, rituals and symbols did not merely represent a battlefield for hearts and minds; rituals and symbols were the battlefield. To this end, scholars might want to take more notice of the direct political impact of these rites and symbols amid the larger developing dialectic.38

34 Marie-Paule Biron, Les messes clandestines pendant la Révolution (Paris: Nouvelles editions Latine, 1989). See also Patricia Lusson-Houdemon, “La vie sacramentelle des fidèles dans l’Ouest à travers les registres clandestins,” in Pratiques religieuses, mentalités et spiritualités dans l’Europe révolutionnaire (1770-1820), ed. Bernard Plongeron (Turnhout: Brepols, 1988), 216-230; Woell, 175-176. The best known refractory priest who hid in the Mauges of the Maine-et-Loire between 1792 and 1798 was the abbé Yves-Michel Marchais, whose clandestine ministry was the subject of François Lebrun’s Parole de Dieu et Révolution: Les sermons d’un curé Angevin avant et pendant la guerre de Vendée (Toulouse: Privat, 1979). 35 Pierre Serna, “Every Revolution Is a War of Independence,” in The French Revolution in Global Perspective, eds. Suzanne Desan, Lynn Hunt, and William Max Nelson (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013), 165-182. 36 Jean-Clément Martin, Révolution and Contre-révolution en France de 1789 à 1995: Les rouages de l’histoire (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 1996), 7-15. 37 Wim Klooster, Revolutions in the Atlantic World: A Comparative History (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 2, 162-165. 38 For more on the relationship between ritual and politics, see David Kertzer, Ritual, Politics and Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988); Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe, 2nd. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 252-302.

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This dialectical dynamic continues today because as Serna also keenly observed, revolutions never end.39 Their symbolism, as a result, lives on in new forms as well: whether it is a march in Charlottesville, Virginia or American football players kneeling during the national anthem. Such current political culture may appear a world away from France’s revolutionary festivals, in part because recent historiography has cast the latter as naively utopian and vain attempts to “reconstruct unity,” establish “an eternal society,” and “transfer sacrality.”40 But in light of how some democratic norms now hang by a thread, scholars may detect a more pragmatic motive when viewing the ritualistic persistence of these republicans in its local context. Though supporters of France’s first republic often disagreed about symbols and rites, most nonetheless recognized the crucial role of this culture in the republican experiment. The claim that an African-American President or a women’s march in Washington, D.C. is an unhelpful phantasm—a “mere symbol” of multicultural democracy, but little more—looks dubious in light of this republican past.41 Such a history reveals not just the fragility of democratic government but also what preserved it: a political passion that symbols and rites kept afire.

39 Serna, “Every Revolution,” 182. 40 Ozouf, 278-282. 41 Note Ta-Nehisi Coates’ response to the claim that Barack Obama’s presidency was only symbolic in We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy (London: One World, 2017), xvi.

Journal of the Western Society for French History