The prototype for the fascist rallies of the twentieth century was, ironically enough, forged in the French Revolution, though in a kind of event unnoted by Le Bon. He fantasized and obsessed about the spontaneous actions of crowds but paid no attention to the well-organized, and for the most part quite staid, mass patriotic spectacles staged by whatever faction held power or was intent on capturing it. At least in the case of the French Revolution, there is little danger of confusing the officially staged spectacles with more spontaneous types of festivities. The official “festivals of the revolution,” as these patriotic spectacles were called, did not build on or reinforce either traditional, carnivalesque festivities or the excitement of crowds in the streets. They were designed in no small part, in fact, to counter and replace such livelier forms of festivity.
And within the revolution itself, there was a great deal of festive crowd behavior to counter. Nineteenth-century historiansâof whatever political sympathiesâinvariably commented on the revolution's “maenadic” or “Saturnalian” qualities. Here, in the years from 1789 to about 1794, the European lower-class tradition of festive uprisings reached a historic climax: People deployed traditional festive occasions and symbols, like the maypole, to advance the revolutionary cause. Or they used political uprisings as occasions for festive behavior: dancing the carmagnole in the streets, singing revolutionary songs, feasting, and drinking. Even the carnival tradition of costuming makes an appearance, with citizens wearing the tricolor badge of revolution or affecting the simple garments of the lower classes. The largely female crowd that marched on Versailles in 1789, which, legend has it, had been summoned by a little girl beating a drum, turned the return trip into a traveling celebration:
“The fishwives seated on the cannon, others wearing grenadiers' caps; wine barrels next to powder kegs; green branches attached to butts of rifles; joy, shouting, clamor, gaiety, ⦠noise, the image of the ancient Saturnalia, nothing could describe this convoy.”
18
Power, during the years of the revolution, was a slippery thing, and whichever group grasped for or briefly held it faced a vexing problem: how to harness the collective energy of ordinary people without letting that energy turn against the group itself. The more or less spontaneous actions of
le menu peuple
(the simple people) had toppled the king and brought the National Assembly to power, but there was always the danger, especially in times of great hunger, that the same sorts of spontaneous actions would be used against the National Assembly or factions within it. Decades earlier, Rousseau had suggested public festivals as a means of unifying people, and revolutionary intellectuals were well aware of the need for something to replace the discredited rituals of the royalty and the Catholic Church. The idea behind the revolutionary festivals, insofar as they lend themselves to generalization, was that instead of running and marching in the streets, people would stand on the sidewalks and watch the officially selected groups march by: battalions of old men and little boys, elaborately painted floats, columns of soldiers. Instead of entertaining themselves by dancing, drinking, and flirting, people would listen to speeches and perhaps recite the Declaration of the Rights of Man in chorus. Instead of wildness and spontaneity, there would be serenity and order.
We can discern something of the intentions of the men who designed the official revolutionary festivities from their attitude toward traditional festivities, such as carnival, and this was an attitude of relentless hostility. In part, the intellectual leaders of the revolution, the men who populated the National Assembly, were repelled by the “traditional” per se, along with any reminder of the old regime. They abolished the traditional Church calendar, replacing it with a series of months of their own inventionâPrairial, Thermidor, and so onâand a ten-day week culminating in a kind of Sunday
called Décadi. To the revolutionary authorities, carnival was “that season that the peculiar prejudices of the ancien regime once devoted to noisy pleasures,” an event fraught with superstition, and a breeding ground for “religious tricksters.”
19
All of this had to be swept away to make room for the revolutionary program of rationality and unwavering virtue.
But it was not only the urge to modernize, or the fear of further political upheaval, that inspired hostility to traditional festivities. The revolutionary leadership represented a different social class than the
menu
peuple
and carried within it an elitist disdain for the amusements of the masses. Among the Jacobins, for example, whose coming to power brought the revolution to a hideously bloody climax, one finds lawyers and journalists drawn from the emerging educated middle classâa very different kind of people than the workers and peasants who provided the revolution with muscle: “The middle-class Jacobins preached the virtues of monogamous marriage and deplored libertine manners, drinking, gambling and prostitution. By contrast, the
menu peuple
found enjoyment in cheap wineshops, and gambling filled their hours with a modicum of relief from their monotonous jobs.”
20
Like the Calvinists in Protestant parts of Europe, the Jacobins saw traditional festivities as “barbarous” and a waste of time that could be devoted to labor. To them, as the historian Mona Ozouf writes: “The popular [traditional] festival meant the senseless din of coal shovels and pans; crowds obstructing the streets and public squares; barbarous âsports' like shooting birds or tearing a goose limb from limb; the veiled threat of masks; the disgusting spectacle of people fighting over loaves of bread or sausages. In short, popular excitement disconcerted, or worse âoffended,' reason.”
21
The Jacobin leader Louis de Saint-Just, whom the historian Christopher Hibbert describes as “a hard, unsmiling, remorseless, dislikeable, clever young man,”
22
saw nothing to do but “put an end to all this orgiastic filth.”
23
Short of applying the guillotineâas they did with so many
other problems they facedâthe Jacobins did their utmost to eliminate what they saw as wasteful, undignified, and atavistic festivities. Having thrown out the familiar calendar of saints' days, Easter, Christmas, and so on, they proceeded to ban cross-dressing-an age-old feature of carnivalâand discouraged the use of maypoles even for revolutionary purposes. They sent special commissioners out to the provinces to investigate traditional festivities; the same commissioners were charged with the task of setting up official festivals in their
départements.
But these efforts failed to reform popular tastes. Ozouf cites a contemporary observer to the effect that “the organizers of the [official] festivals were always in search of a public, whereas each year, in the name of Saint John, Saint Martin, or Saint Benedict, the people required no summons to converge in large numbers”
24
for their usual dancing, drinking, and costuming. To explain their failure, the commissioners recalled the prior failure of the Church to curb traditional festivities: “Even the terrifying eloquence of the preachers had been unable to shake the reign of carnival.”
25
This is a surprising admission, considering how much the Jacobins hated the Church. At least on the issue of festivities, the revolutionary commissioners were acknowledging that they were on the same side as puritanical Counter-Reformation Catholicism. The Jacobins may have been “revolutionaries” in a conventional political sense, but when it came to the life of the senses and the possibility of disorderly collective pleasure, they were part of the long tradition of repression from on high. The historian Madelyn Gutwirth likens them to the Theban king who crushes the Maenads in Euripides' play: “The Revolutionaries ⦠garbed in their tunics of moral virtue, bear a startling resemblance to the censorious Pentheus.”
26
But if the underlying aim of the official revolutionary festivals was repressive, this does not mean that they were homogeneous and uniformly boring. They were, in fact, incredibly diverse, offeringâaside from patriotism and appeals to unityâno single
unifying political or philosophical theme, but rather a plethora of themes representing a changing lineup of factions. Conservatives staged festivals stressing law and order; atheists carried off the “Festival of Reason”; the Jacobins' highly didactic fetes were designed to encourage civic virtue. As public entertainment, these festivals ranged from the stiff and tedious to what seems, at least in one case, to have been a truly thrilling event. This was the festival in 1790 commemorating the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789âthe first “Festival of Federation”âwhich, more than any of the succeeding festivals, grew out of popular demand.
The revolutionary authorities acceded to the idea of a celebration commemorating the fall of the Bastille only reluctantly, fearing that mass gatherings could lead to unpredictable outbreaks of violence. “When you undertake to run a revolution,” Mirabeau warned his fellow revolutionary leaders, “the difficulty is not to make it go; it is to hold it in check.”
27
Hence the Festival of Federation was designed to “seal” the revolution and mark the end of disorderly mass participation. For the main celebration in Paris, the planners rejected all proposals they found unseemly or potentially disruptiveâsuch as female participation in the official eventsâand sought to confine the festival to a long, entirely military parade.
But the event spilled over the confines imposed by the officials. Thousands made the pilgrimage to Paris, where people of all classesâfrom bourgeois ladies in silks to common laborersâworked together to prepare the Champs de Mars for the celebration. This was, according to the nineteenth-century British historian Thomas Carlyle, “a true brethren's work; all distinctions confounded, abolished,”
28
and the same spirit of harmonious enthusiasm prevailed throughout the nation. In Paris, people not only attended the official parade on July 14âwhich at two hours in duration dismayed even the revolutionary firebrand Camille Desmoulinsâbut staged their own carnivalesque parties, parodies, and dances in the days that followed. The nineteenth-century historian Jules Michelet described the events in the town of Saint-Andéol.
[The people] rushed into each other's arms, and joining hands, an immense farandole [a kind of dance], comprising everybody, without exception, spread throughout the town, into the fields, across the mountains of Ardèche, and towards the meadows of the Rhone; the wine flowed in the streets, tables were spread, provisions placed in common, and all the people are together in the evening, solemnising this love-feast, and praising God.
29
Michelet has been accused of romanticizing the revolution, but he was probably right that, for at least a few days of festivity in the summer of 1790, “no one was a mere spectator; all were actors.”
30
With the shared wine and food, the dancing that wound through whole cities and out into the fields, this has to have been one of the great moments, in all of human history, to have been alive.
At the stiffer end of the festive spectrum was the 1794 Festival of the Supreme Being, instigated by the Jacobin leader Maximilien Robespierre to counter the prior and, he felt, overly atheistic Festival of Reason. There was a long procession, led by the gorgeously dressed Robespierreâno proletarian sans culotte-style trousers for himâand including battalions of children and mothers with babies at their breasts and, in some cities, members of various trades marching with their tools in hand. There were instructive
tableaux vivants,
depicting, among other things, the ideal French family. There was some singing of patriotic songs, an artillery salute, and a total of three lengthy speeches by Robespierre, which provoked a certain amount of grumbling and guffawing from the crowd. In all of this, Ozouf emphasizes, there was no room for individual creativity: “Every attempt was made to regulate it [the festival] down to the smallest detail ⦠Instructions were issued on how the little girls' hair was to be arranged, what bouquets of flowers were to be given to them, where the rosette was to be tied.”
31
The festivals of the French Revolution, with their varying and often conflicting political messages, are probably best understood as a medium, rather than as events adding up to a single propaganda
campaign. There was of course no television at the end of the eighteenth century, no radio, and only a nascent newspaper industry (although printed speeches circulated widely). To reach large numbers of people with any kind of message, it made sense to gather them in outdoor venues and address them with speeches, selected symbols (for example, a pretty girl representing Liberty or the Goddess of Reason), and interludes of uplifting orchestral music. Here, in the French Revolution, the elements of all succeeding nationalist rallies and spectacles were assembledâthe parade or procession, the music, the speechesâand these have survived the emergence of powerful electronic media, becoming in fact the occasional content of such media. A fascist rally in Rome or Nuremberg, the British queen's jubilee celebration in 2002, a small-town American Fourth of July celebrationâall owe their basic form to the official festivals of the French Revolution.