Table Of ContentFestivals and the French Revolution
F E S T I 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 révolutionnaire, 1789-1799,
© 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 Congress Catnioging-in-Pnblication Data
Ozouf, Mona.
Festivals and the French Revolution.
Translation of: La fête révolutionnaire, 1789-1799.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. France— Social life and customs— 1789-1815.
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
Designed by Gwen Frankfeldt
Contents
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 Revolution as Festival 15
History of the Festivals, History of the Sects 21
Boredom and Disgust 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
Ill • The Festival above the Parties: 1792 61
The Norm and the Exception 62
Two Antagonistic Festivals? 66
The Unity of Tragedy 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” no
The System of Brumaire, Year IV 118
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 139
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 203
Nothing Goes without Saying 212
IX • Popular Life and the Revolutionary Festival 217
A Shameful Ethnology 218
History of a Failure 223
Revolutionary Symbolism and Peasant Tradition 232
The Mai sauvage 233
A Pedagogical Tree 243
From the Maypole to the Tree 230
A Break 236
Contents vii
X • The Revolutionary Festival: A Transfer of Sacrality 262
Horror vacui 267
The Meaning of a Few Borrowings 271
The Meaning of Purging 278
Abbreviations 284
Notes 285
Bibliography 349
Index 371
Foreword
by Lynn Hunt
«
*7
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 festivals of the French Rev
olution from 1789 to 1799. 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 festivals, 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
festivals were more than bizarre marginalia to the Revolutionary process.
The festivals 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 festivals are revealed to
be the most fascinating example of the working of Revolutionary culture.
Historians of the French Revolution have been incorporating Mona
Ozoufs 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 for understanding the revolutionary
process in general. Mona Ozouf has been in the forefront of this resur
gence, along with François Furet, her colleague at the Ecole des Hautes
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 focusing
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-à-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 festivals 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, for
example, used the celebrations of Reason to fortify 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 festivals
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 festive 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 fes
tivals of 1793 and 1794, which often included violent satires of Catholi
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 festivals, 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 festivals were
designed to recast space and time. The revolutionaries sought to efface
the spatial reminders of the Catholic religion and of monarchical and
feudal 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 festivals 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 festive space was always large and open: festival organizers pre
ferred large, open fields or squares, where equality could be conveyed by
horizontality and freedom by the lack of boundaries. Closed and vertical
