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Space and Time in the Festivals of the French Revolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Mona Ozouf
Mona Ozouf
Affiliation:
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
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Extract

The study of festivals has only recently caught the attention of historians, who have traditionally shown themselves more concerned with the labours and afflictions of men than with their pleasures and diversions. If from this time onward, festivals become an object of historical enquiry, it will be perhaps because industrial society no longer has festivals—or at least that it has the festival only as pageant in which the passive community of onlookers has been substituted for the active community of celebrants—and because our interest in the festival increases to the extent that we lose it. However, we should also mention the historian's debt to the double stimuli of folklore and of ethnology. From folklorists and ethnologists historians have learned to concern themselves with the armature given to human experience by ritualization, even if anonymous, even if destitute of an explicit system of regulation or of a conscious cohesiveness.

Type
Ceremonial Space
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 17 , Issue 3 , July 1975 , pp. 372 - 384
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1975

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References

1 This festival, celebrated in Paris on the anniversary of the taking of the Bastille, has exerted a particular attraction on historians: it symbolizes the moment when the Revolution had not yet become conscious of its contradictions. A new festival, for a new Revolution: in this parallel resides the fascination of the ‘Fédération’.

2 The Festival of the Supreme Being is the first (and the last) attempt which realizes the philosophy expressed in the famous discourse that Robespierre delivered on the ‘Relationship of religious and moral ideas to republican principles and to national festivals’. This discourse was followed by a project for the systematic organization of republican festivals, one of which was the ‘Festival of the Supreme Being and of Nature’, celebrated on 20 Prairial. The drama of Thermidor, that followed shortly after, retrospectively throws a hardly engaging light on this festival, a circumstance that explains why it is seen, in traditional historiography, as having prompted a staged enthusiasm; it was an artificial and stiff festival, if we are to believe these historians.

3 This is the case for the Festival of the I Vendémiaire (Festival of the Foundation of the Republic). The Directory, which had these festivals celebrated regularly over the entire national territory, transformed them into gymnastic competitions and into exhibitions of remarkable works.

4 Aulard, A., Le Cube de la Raison et de l'Etre Suprême. Paris, 1892.Google Scholar

5 Jaurès, J., Histoire Socialiste. Paris, 1901–1908.Google Scholar

6 Mathiez, A., Les Origines des Cultes Révolutionnaires. Paris, 1904.Google Scholar

7 It is in terms of utility that the organizers of revolutionary festivals put them into operation. It is in terms of utility that historians, in turn, interpret them. Our thesis consists in affirming that utility does not suffice to exhaust the sense of the festival.

8 Cf. Annales E.S.C., Septembre–Octobre 1971: ‘Le Cortège et la Ville: les Itinéraires parisiens des Fêtes Révolutionnaires.’

9 At least it is felt as such by contemporaries, for whom the Champ de Mars is without question exterior to Paris. Stanislas de Girardin, who reports on the Festival of the Fédération in his Memoirs, writes that, the festival once finished, he ‘returned to Paris’.

10 Blanc, L., Histoire de la Révolution. Paris, 1847–1862.Google Scholar

11 Hemsterhuis, , Œuvres Philosophiques. 1792.Google Scholar

12 The anniversary of January 21 became a national festival on 18 Floréal, Year II, following Robespierre's discourse on festivals. Even before this official consecration, popular initiative, on the preceding January 21, had coerced an improvised celebration. After the fall of Robespierre, the Thermidorian Convention became interested in this festival, tainted by its Montagnard origins, only two weeks before the second anniversary. The Committee on Public Instruction hastily worked up a decree. It is this decree of Nivose, Year HI, taken up again and completed 24 Nivose, Year IV, that gave the festival its definite physiognomy.

13 Dowd, D. L., Pageant-Master of the Republic: Jacques-Louis David and the French Revolution. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1948.Google Scholar