Festivals and the French Revolution—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 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. Mona Ozouf shows us that they were much more than bizarre marginalia to the revolutionary process. Festivals offer critical insights into the meaning of the French Revolution; they show a society in the process of creating itself anew.

Historians have recognized the importance of the revolutionary festival as a symbol of the Revolution. But they have differed widely in their interpretations of what that symbol meant and have considered the festivals as diverse as the rival political groups that conceived and organized them. Against this older vision, Ozouf argues for the fundamental coherence and profound unity of the festival as both event and register of reference and attitude. By comparing the most ideologically opposed festivals (those of Reason and the Supreme Being, for instance), she shows that they clearly share a common aim, which finds expression in a mutual ceremonial and symbolic vocabulary. Through a brilliant discussion of the construction, ordering, and conduct of the festival Ozouf demonstrates how the continuity of the images, allegories, ceremonials, and explicit functions can be seen as the Revolution’s own commentary on itself.

A second and important aim of this book is to show that this system of festivals, often seen as destructive, was an immensely creative force. The festival was the mirror in which the Revolution chose to see itself and the pedagogical tool by which it hoped to educate future generations, Far from being a failure, it embodied, socialized, and made sacred a new set of values based on the family, the nation, and mankind—the values of a modern, secular, liberal world.

• Contents 
• Foreword
• Hunt, Lynn
• The Republican Calendar
• Brief Chronology of the French Revolution
• Introduction
• I 
• The History of the Revolutionary Festival
• The Revolution as Festival
• History of the Festivals, History of the Sects
• Boredom and Disgust
• II 
• The Festival of the Federation: Model and Reality
• Riot and Festival: The “Wild” Federations
• The Federative Festivals
• The Paris Federation
• A New Festival?
• The Festival of All the French?
• III 
• The Festival above the Parties: 1792
• The Norm and the Exception
• Two Antagonistic Festivals?
• The Unity of Tragedy
• IV 
• Mockery and Revolution: 1793–1794
• The “Other” Festival
• Where, When, with Whom?
• Reasonable Reason
• Violence and the Festival
• V 
• Return to the Enlightenment: 1794–1799
• The “Happy Nation”
• The System of Brumaire, Year IV
• VI 
• The Festival and Space
• Space without Qualities
• The Symbolic Mapping-Out
• The Renovation of a Ceremonial Space: The Example of Caen
• The Resistance of Paris
• The Space-Time of the Revolution
• VII 
• The Festival and Time
• Beginning
• Dividing Up
• Commemorating
• Ending
• VIII 
• The Future of the Festival: Festival and Pedagogy
• “The Schools of the Mature Man”
• The Power of Images
• The Correct Use of Images
• Nothing Goes without Saying
• IX 
• Popular Life and the Revolutionary Festival
• A Shameful Ethnology
• History of a Failure
• Revolutionary Symbolism and Peasant Tradition
• The Mai sauvage
• A Pedagogical Tree
• From the Maypole to the Tree
• A Break
• X 
• The Revolutionary Festival: A Transfer of Sacrality
• Horror vacui
• The Meaning of a Few Borrowings
• The Meaning of Purging
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index