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

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. 2017 Republican Ritual in the Wake of Civil War, 1794-1800 51 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.

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