Download Jacques-Louis David and the Festival of Unity

Jacques-Louis David and the Festival of Unity and Indivisibility
Ellen Atkinson, translator
From May 29 to June 2, 1793, members of the Paris sections took to the streets demanding the
proscription of Girondin deputies to the National Convention. Displaying their enthusiasm for the
revolution, on May 30 they also demanded a festival to commemorate the anniversary of August 10,
1792, the day the monarchy was overthrown following the storming of the Tuileries Palace. The
National Convention approved the request for a festival the very next day, and gave the painter
Jacques-Louis David the task of envisioning and planning the festival. On July 11, he gave a report to
the convention detailing the procession of the festival in five elaborate stations, which included many
of the details found in the play The Meeting of August 10th, including the troop of blind people, the
abandoned infants and their nurses from the house of found children, and the rural family who arrive in
a plough pulled by the sons. In introductory remarks of his presentation, David described the purpose
of his festival: “Magnanimous and generous people; people truly worthy of liberty: the French people, I
offer you as a spectacle to the eyes of the Eternal. In you alone, he will recognize his work; he will
again see free men and brothers, as they were when they left his divine hands.” 1
This play, written in Year II (1793-1794) of the French Revolution is presumably based on the
Festival of Unity and Indivisibility of August 10, 1793. The events and dialog of the play closely match
accounts of the Festival.
David intended for French citizens to rise before dawn on the morning of August 10 to meet at
the first station, the place of the Bastille, so that “the touching scene of their meeting will be lit by the
first rays of the sun; this beneficial star whose light is spread over all the universe, will be for them the
symbol of verity, at whom they will address praise and hymns.” The site the Bastille was planted with
1 Daniel Wildenstein and Guy Wildenstein, Documents complémentaires au catalogue de l'oeuvre de Louis David, (Paris:
Foundation Wildenstein, 1973), 53.
trees and shrubs for the occasion to signify the victory of nature. A fountain of a female representation
of Nature, modeled after an Egyptian goddess, who issued water from her breasts, was constructed. The
ceremony began with a cantata whose text was based upon “The Profession of Faith of a Savoyard
Vicar,” the last section of Rousseau’s Émile. Then the president of the National Convention, Marie-Jean
Hérault de Séchelles, took a cup of water from the fountain’s breasts, ceremonially poured some of it
on the ground, and then drank the remainder. The oldest of the representatives of the 86 departments of
France present at the festival drank first after the president, and claimed that fountain’s water
regenerated him. Then the remaining envoys were called to drink in alphabetical order.
The second station took place on the Boulevard Poissonnière and commemorated the women of
October 5 and 6, 1789, who brought the King from Versailles to Paris. A triumphal arch had been
constructed for the occasion, which a certain reporter claimed was greater than similar structures of
antiquity. The president of the Convention presented the women representing these heroines of the
revolution, riding astride cannon, with laurels. In Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution,
Simon Schama points out that “The disturbingly potent image of belligerent poissardes astride their
cannon has been carefully neutralized in conformity with the standard Rousseauean-Jacobin doctrine
on the wife-mother role for women Patriots.” 2 The real women who marched on Versailles were
replaced with “prettified actresses” who were told that their role was to breed and to nurse heroes to
defend liberty. The president of the Convention proclaimed that the laurels presented to the women
were “the emblem of courage and victory,” and said to the women that “you will transmit it to your
children.” 3 Curiously, none of this republican motherhood rhetoric made it into Bouquier and Moline's
literary account of this station of the festival.
The third station took place at the Place de la Révolution where Louis XVI had been executed
earlier that year. Where a statue of the fallen monarch had once stood, there was now a statue
2
Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1990), 749.
3 Quoted in James A. Leith, Space and Revolution: Projects for Monuments, Squares, and Public Buildings in France,
1789-1799 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991), 132.
representing liberty. Liberty, wearing a Phrygian cap, sat on a throne surrounded by “trees of the
people” decorated with smaller Phrygian caps, tricolor ribbons, garlands, poetry and pictures of
revolutionary events. At the statue’s feet, Parisians deposited attributes of royalty (most of which were
props), such as scepters, crowns and a bust of Louis XVI. Shortly after the pile was torched, three
thousand white doves were released, each wearing a tricolor ribbon reading, symbolizing France’s
liberation from monarchy and republican freedom. Reportedly two of the birds chose to nest in the lap
of the statue.
At the fourth station stood a giant statue of the French People, represented by Hercules, about to
smite the hydra of Federalism with a club in one hand, and gathering a fasces representing the unity of
the departments in the other. David later proposed to the National Convention that this Hercules figure
should appear on the national seal. The statue, designed by the sculptor Denis-Antoine Chaudet was
somewhat of a premature celebration, because by the time of the festival the federalist revolt had not
been completely suppressed. Centered in Caen, Lyon, Marseille, and Bordeaux, the Federalist Revolt
was the result of local authorities defying National Convention due to their opposition to the
proscription of Girondin deputies and the influence the Paris Commune and other radical clubs had on
the Convention. Federalism has tended to be characterized as a manifestation of animosity between
Paris and provinces, a reaction to Jacobin centralization, although in The Jacobin Republic under Fire:
The Federalist Revolt in the French Revolution, Paul Hanson argues that the various local Federalist
groups had a uniform agenda, a “federalist program” that was concerned about the nature of exercising
sovereignty, and called for “a republic of laws, founded on respect for property and for duly constituted
authority.” 4
To reach the final station, the procession entered the Champ-de-Mars through a special
entrance. A large tricolor ribbon was suspended between two poles representing Liberty and Equality,
4 Paul R. Hanson, The Jacobin Republic under Fire: The Federalist Revolt in the French Revolution (University Park,
Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 120.
and a level, a symbol of equality, hung from the ribbon. Having passed through the symbolic gateway,
the festival participants witnessed an elaborate altar to the patrie. Here the President of the National
Convention, the envoys from the 86 departments, and ordinary Parisians declared their allegiance to the
Constitution of 1793, without knowing that it would never actually be put into effect, suspended in
favor the governance of the Terror.
The festival ended with a memorial to those who had died defending Revolutionary France
against foreign powers that is sometimes called the sixth station, in a circular building with an open top
decorated with a ring of stars. In his final speech, Hérault de Séchelles insisted that the dead heroes had
paved the way for the new constitution, and there fellow citizens would carry on their work.
The picture of the Revolution presented at the Festival of Unity and Indivisibility, which had
cost 1,200,000 livres to create, in many ways did not match up with the reality of the Revolution. In the
summer of 1793, when David was planning the festival, parts of southern France were still under
Federalist control, and in western France the revolutionary army was facing several frustrating defeats.
On 11 August, Robespierre gave a speech admitting that the French army was facing reversals and its
enemies had become more audacious.
In her celebrated monograph Festivals and the French Revolution, Mona Ozouf analyzes the
ways arbitrary choice of place (for example, the women of the October days never actually crossed the
Boulevard Poissonnière), the allegorical character of the arrangements, and the absence of detail about
the events the festival was supposed to represent detached it from the actual chronology and geography
of the revolution. Though the festival organizers evidently took a great interest using the space of Paris
to represent the history of the Revolution, they made idiosyncratic choices in their representations.
Their selection of spaces were not equivalent to the historical events they represented. Ozouf notes that
the procession started at the Bastille, because it was the “obligatory” starting point, but the events of
July 14, 1789 were not discussed, making the location more symbolic than an actual representation of a
historical event. Thus Ozouf calls the opening ceremony of the festival a “dateless baptism of the
revolution.” 5
An even odder choice was commemorating the women of October 5 and 6 at the Poissonière
Crossroads, where they never actually appeared. Newspaper accounts of the time show complaints
from those who thought the monument to them should be moved to a different location. Continuing the
theme of historical disconnectedness, the inscription speech given by Hérault was vague on details. The
fact that August 10 was commemorated at the site of Louis XVI’s death, instead of at Tuileries, shows
how the two events were retrospectively united in the revolutionary mind.
Ozouf claims that because of the wide gap between the festival’s images and reality, and its
triumphal celebration of victory over federalism, “It had nothing to say about dangers, ignored outcasts
and victims, was silent on violence.” 6 Mary Ashburn Miller, the author of A Natural History of
Revolution: Violence and Nature in the French Revolutionary Imagination, 1789-1794, disagrees with
Ozouf’s assessment that the festival was devoid of violence. She argues that
each of the stations commemorated events that either were violent or carried undertones of
violence. Far from silencing the violence of its most significant moments, the festival instead
naturalized the events as mere steps in the ‘regeneration,’ sprung from Nature herself. David
and his backers on the Committee of Public Safety were presenting the history of their
revolution to the Parisian public as a story of natural history. 7
The festival contained plenty of natural images and metaphors. The fact that the Bastille station was
dedicated to a representation of Nature rather than a symbol of the events that took place there is
significant. The triumphal arch at the Boulevard Poissonnière bore an inscription praising the people,
5
Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution [La fête révolutionnaire 1789-1799], trans. Alan Sheridan
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1991), 155.
6 Ozouf, Festivals, 84.
7 Mary Ashburn Miller, A Natural History of Revolution: Violence and Nature in the French Revolutionary Imagination,
1789-1794 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), 2.
which it described as torrents. David’s statue of Hercules at the fourth station contrasted the French
people, atop a emerging from its miry swamp,” who “with one hand pushing apart the reeds, tries with
the other to untie a portion of [the fasces]; the French people catches sight of it, takes a club, hits it, and
makes it return to its stagnant water, to never appear again.” 8
David’s report to the convention stipulated that after the last station a “frugal banquet” would be
held and “finally, there will be constructed a vast theater where the principle events of our revolution
will be represented in pantomime.” 9 This theater was never constructed, but the Festival of Unity and
Indivisibility provided material for numerous topical plays, including this one. The Meeting of August
10th is part of a larger revival of theater. Compared to a handful of plays written before the Revolution,
between 1789 and 1799, more than 1,500 plays, many of them topical, were written. Between 1792 and
1794 alone, over 750 were staged. We do not know how popular this particular play was among such
competition, or how it was received. In contrast with the Festival of Unity and Indivisibility, the
Convention declared that the Festival of the Supreme Being was unrepresentable, and therefore it was
illegal to reenacted it, and playwrights were asked not to represent it on stage. Why was this play,
written by Gabriel Bouquier, a member of the National Convention, and others like it, evidently
approved of, but representations of the Festival of the Supreme Being were not?
8 Wildenstein and Wildenstein, Documents, 54.
9 Ibid., 54.
Sources for Further Reading
Brown, Frederick. Theater and Revolution: The Culture of the French Stage. New York: Viking Press,
1980.
Hanson, Paul R. The Jacobin Republic under Fire: The Federalist Revolt in the French Revolution.
University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003.
Hunt, Lynn. Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1984.
Leith, James A. Space and Revolution: Projects for Monuments, Squares, and Public Buildings in
France, 1789-1799. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991.
Miller, Mary Ashburn. A Natural History of Revolution: Violence and Nature in the French
Revolutionary Imagination, 1789-1794. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011.
Ozouf, Mona. Festivals and the French Revolution [La fête révolutionnaire 1789-1799] . Translated by
Alan Sheridan. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1991.
Roberts, Warren. Jacques-Louis David and Jean-Louis Prieur, Revolutionary Artists: The Public, the
Populace, and Images of the French Revolution. Albany: State University of New York Press,
2000.
Schama, Simon. Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1990.
Wildenstein, Daniel and Guy Wildenstein. Documents complémentaires au catalogue de l’oeuvre de
Louis David. Paris: Foundation Wildenstein, 1973.