Revolutionary France publicly celebrated such a multiplicity of things, in such differing ways, that it is perhaps more accurate to talk, not about fêtes révolutionnaires, but fêtes de la Révolution française. Similarly, though it is unwise to generalize about these complex phenomena, it is probably helpful to distinguish between early and later fêtes. The early fêtes (1789-91) tended to reflect local habits and to be a happy mixture of old (religious) and new (civic) elements: the former (Mass; Te Deum; sermons) betokened continuity, a keeping of faith with an avowable past, while the latter expressed gratitude and support for political regeneration. They were uniformly fervent affairs. With their classical décor, pealing bells, patriotic songs, stirring speeches, fraternal embraces, and solemn oath-taking, their military formations, flags, drums, bugles, clarion calls, and cannonades, they constantly appealed to the senses and the emotions.
These early fêtes (given the preponderance of the military elements) seemed to gravitate increasingly around, even be initiated by, the Garde Nationale. Its presence seems to have been organizationally decisive: all the later fêtes (1792-4)—almost always decided on by, and decreed from, Paris—adopted the same symmetrical, tightly controlled, highly organized approach. The Revolutionaries were passionately interested in the civic education of the citizen and sought to entrust this undertaking to the theatre, to the popular societies and, not least, to the fêtes. The festivals devised by the technocrats and the doctrinaire Revolutionaries were, therefore, not an end in themselves, but an enabling mechanism towards the ultimate implementation of great political designs: the Republic started to commemorate dates of Revolutionary history or to celebrate new divinities, new martyrs, new guiding principles. Such new fêtes (their rationale is conveniently summarized by Robespierre in his Rapport sur les rapports …) imposed in turn new dogmas ( Déclaration des droits de l'homme, the Constitution, etc.), new ceremonial or ritual practices, and created a symbolism surrounded by mystical veneration (e.g. the Tricolor, the Tree of Liberty). The intention, irrespective of fête, was to engineer an exhilarating, sacralizing contact with political rightness, to foster selfless devotion to the res publica, and therewith to create a rampart against the possible decadence and decay of the Revolution itself.
These attempts to create and to perpetuate a sacred sense of communal purpose should have been successful. All the lessons of antiquity, the insights of Rousseau and the philosophes theoretically favoured the Republican innovators. Their highly stylized, austere, regimented fêtes served gradually, however, to alienate all save the fanatically committed. The break with time-honoured local preferences was too great and too rapid. Though still part of Republican ritual down to 1799, the fête révolutionnaire was in reality moribund by mid-1794.
[John Renwick]
Bibliography
- M. Ozouf, La Fête révolutionnaire (1976)
- Les Fêtes de la Révolution, Colloque de Clermont-Ferrand, 1974 (1977)
