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The Melodramatic Thread

Spectacle and Political Culture in Modern France

Indiana University Press

Introduction

On June 8,1794, at the height of the Terror, the leaders of France and the people of Paris celebrated a Festival of the Supreme Being in central Paris. With Jacques-Louis David as impresario, the houses of Paris were decorated with tree branches, flowers, and tricolored flags to demonstrate the productivity of the soil of France and the glory of the Republic. The Tuileries Gardens, which would be the site of the first part of the festival, featured a statue representing atheism, with the inscription "only hope of the foreigner" on it. Across the Seine, the Champs de Mars, the site of previous revolutionary festivals, had been renamed the Champs de la Réunion. In the immense field rose a high mountain that would be the focal point for the second half of the celebration.

The Festival of the Supreme Being began with a cannon salvo summoning men and women from each section of the city to the Tuileries. Mothers carrying roses symbolizing mercy, young girls with baskets filled with flowers to symbolize youth, and men and boys with tree branches to represent the masculine virtues of strength and liberty all converged on the Tuileries Gardens. They were met by members of the Convention, with Maximilien Robespierre, in his role as president of the Convention, at their head. The Conventionnels also participated in the symbolism of the festival, holding shocks of wheat, flowers, and fruits.

Robespierre welcomed the processions from around the city with a speech celebrating France's devotion to the Supreme Being, the source of all that was good, including the Republic and the liberty written in men's hearts. In spite of the ongoing war, the Terror, and the need for revolutionary vigilance, he urged his fellow citizens to give themselves over to joy on this day of festivities. This speech was followed by a performance by the Opera of Theodore Désorgues's song "Father of the Universe, Supreme Intelligence," set to music by François-Joseph Gossec. Robespierre then set fire to the statue of Atheism, which disappeared in flames to be replaced by a statue of Wisdom. Interpreting the pageant in a second speech, Robespierre described the disappearance of atheism and with it "all the crimes and unhappiness of the world." Only wisdom, he told his audience, could lead to the prosperity of empires.

After the ceremony at the Tuileries the members of the Convention marched in procession across the river to the Champs, surrounded by tricolored banners and children with flowers. A coach in the middle of this procession carried tools and goods made around the country, a plow covered with wheat and oak branches, and a printing press. These were placed next to a statue of Liberty, to indicate that liberty was necessary for the arts to flourish. Robespierre was at the head of this procession, exposing him not only to the cheers of the crowd but also to hecklers who accused him of wanting to be a god.

At the Champs de la Réunion the Conventionnels assembled at the highest point of the mountain constructed in the middle of the field, while a hymn to the Supreme Being and a symphony were performed. The groups of men and women sang while children threw their flowers into the air. Young men drew their sabers and swore to be victorious, while elderly men gave them a paternal blessing. The festival ended with another artillery salvo, representing the national vengeance, and a fraternal embrace by all of the participants and the cry of "Vive la République!" Impressed by its perception of the festival — the beauty of the weather, the decorations, the joy of the people, the unanimity of the sentiments expressed, the speeches, and "the cordiality and order" that reigned during the ceremony — Le Moniteur summarized the events as "the most beautiful festival whose memory could be perpetuated in the pomp of the Revolution."

Mona Ozouf has shown how the Festival of the Supreme Being marked clear divisions in the politics of the Republic. While endorsing equality of origins and celebrating agriculture, a "festival of dairy products, fruit and bread," it articulated support for the Republic against radicals on the left who supported the radical dechristianization that had been portrayed in the Cult and Festival of Reason the previous winter. But it was also about reconciliation and national unity. The symbolically destroyed Atheism was replaced by Wisdom. The national representatives in the Convention were prominently featured. The ceremonies were open to, and incorporated, the entire population of revolutionary Paris. The festival was therefore not only a description of the virtue of the Republic and the evil of its enemies, but also an attempt to consolidate the Revolution as part of the patrimony of France in a unified Republic of all the French. Yet, while Robespierre might urge his listeners to set aside their political concerns for a day of festival, reminders of the internal and external enemies of the Republic remained present, not only in the heckling he received but also in the need to mark the day as a hiatus in the domestic and foreign conflicts of the Republic.

At the same time as Robespierre and his allies were performing the Festival of the Supreme Being on the Champs de la Réunion, Parisian actors were performing plays for audiences in theaters in central Paris and on the Boulevard du Temple. Some of these performances were closely bound up with the events of the Revolution. Marie-Joseph Chénier's Charles IX, ou l'Ecole des rois, first performed on November 4,1789, seemed to express the goals of the first year of the Revolution for reform of the monarchical state. Jean-Louis Laya's L'Ami des lois appeared in January 1793 during the trial of Louis XVI and portrayed on stage the difficult task of reconciling Old Regime noble status with the new society created by the Revolution. In October 1793, Sylvain Maréchal's Le Jugement dernier des rois reinforced the emphasis on popular democracy and republicanism that the Terror brought to the fore. In the words of theater historian Michèle Root-Berstein, "Liberty walked among the actors on stage and exhorted the French to brave deeds and republican ideals."

But while Chénier, Laya, Maréchal, and others dramatized revolutionary conflicts, most plays performed in revolutionary Paris appeared at first sight — and to later historians — to have little to do with the Revolution. Three years before the Festival of the Supreme Being, in March 1791, one of the successors to the Comédie-Française of the Old Regime, the Théâtre de la Nation, performed a new drama by one of the most popular playwrights of the period, Monvel, entitled Les Victimes cloîtrées. The play was popular, but it made only a few overt political references. The cast of characters in the play included a heroine, Eugènie, whose virtue was threatened; an evil abbot, Père Laurent, and his henchmen; a noblewoman in the clutches of the Catholic Church, Mme de St-Alban; a distraught (and not particularly helpful) bourgeois, Dorval, who was in love with the heroine; and a collection of representatives of the forces of progress and Enlightenment, notably Mme de St-Alban's brother, M. de Francheville. In the end, Eugènie is rescued from apparent death by the not particularly honorable device of a rebellious monk reading the private correspondence of the abbot.

Monvel's play was more interesting as a diversion from the events of the Revolution than anything else, and its plot places it in a long line of French plays of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that feature imprisoned characters. But like the Festival of the Supreme Being, it described a world divided between virtue and threatening evil, a rescue not in heroic fashion, as in classical tragedy, but through questionable means, and an attempt to reconstruct a unified world that the events of the play had disrupted. And while civic ceremonies such as the Festival of the Supreme Being and stage plays such as Les Victimes cloîtrées depended to some extent on verbal articulation of their meaning through the speeches of political leaders such as Robespierre and characters such as Eugènie and Dorval, they were also representations that used different kinds of stagecraft — sets, costumes, effects such as the burning statue of Atheism — to get across their message.

There are few questions of greater importance in the early twenty-first century than those related to the development of democratic political systems, in which the exercise of power is broadly shared and limited. Political scientists recently gained interest in the process of democratization in the aftermath of dramatic changes around the world between the mid-1970s and the 1990s, a period Samuel Huntington described as the "third wave" of democratization. Following a first wave that occurred over the century between 1828 and 1926, and a second in the aftermath of World War II, the third wave began in 1974 with the Portuguese Revolution. It continued to the fall of the Eastern European Peoples' Democracies and the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1989–91, and into the 1990s. Subsequent research has speculated about the end of the third wave, about a reverse wave in which some of the new democracies would revert to authoritarian government, and about the possibility of a fourth wave.

This growing concern with democratization processes reflects on the past experiences of European countries such as France as they moved from absolute monarchies to more democratic political systems. The history of this process in modern France revolves around a handful of significant themes: the impact of the disruptions of the revolutionary upheaval of 1789 and the 1790s; the establishment after 1789 of a political regime based on popular support; the creation of links between the French nation and that regime; and the struggles that resulted from divisions about the nature of the regime, especially the direct heir of the Revolution, the Republic. The conjunction of the Festival of the Supreme Being and a popular Parisian play suggests the way in which this book seeks to contribute to our understanding of that history. Examining public ceremonies and theatrical performances in tandem leads to an explicitly interdisciplinary approach, drawing on insights from the study of political culture and the methods of cultural and literary studies to understand the meaning and power of public performance. In particular, I will suggest that both political culture and theatrical performances drew heavily on a particular form of performance, melodrama, and that this "melodramatic thread" in French political culture provided a significant model for the ways in which French men and women constructed the political life of their country.

Political scientists who have studied the process of democratization in a variety of chronological and national contexts have pointed to a number of different factors that seem to have an impact on the process either of establishment of democratic institutions or on their persistence. Often these emphasize elite behavior. Larry Diamond and Juan Linz more broadly list eleven different categories of "sources of democratic progress and failure" in their 1989 survey of democracy in Latin America. These included leadership, institutions, the strength of the state, civil society and associational life, socioeconomic development, cleavages of class and inequality, historical factors, economic policies, international factors, and political culture. Other studies have cited structural factors such as economic development, dependency and world-system role, class structure, democratic diffusion, resource distribution, and actors as the most important factors. Almost all of these explanatory or functionalist models of democratization give some place to the role of political culture. As one of the most important political scientists to focus on democratization in recent years, Larry Diamond, remarked, "few problems are riper for illumination from the political culture perspective than the sources of democratic emergence, consolidation, and persistence," and "democratic consolidation can ... only be fully understood as encompassing a shift in political culture."

It is striking, however, the extent to which different disciplines have examined political culture in different ways. Social scientists have tended to view it in terms similar to the way it was originally defined in the 1960s, as an "overarching set of social values" or "the system of empirical beliefs, expressive symbols, and values which defines the situation in which political action takes place." Many social science approaches to political culture assume it to be static, giving it an inherently conservative tone. For example, many studies of democratization in Latin America have assumed that an authoritarian political culture in the region made the development of democracies there virtually impossible. Giuseppe Di Palma's emphasis on the role of elites in presenting democracy as a viable alternative in a crisis of an authoritarian regime is one response to this. Another has been Larry Diamond's insistence that political culture could change in response to social and economic change, social and civic mobilization, institutional practice, historical experience, and international diffusion.

But scholars in other disciplines have viewed the concept of political culture differently. In a formulation that is typical of the approaches of historians and other students of cultural studies influenced by the "linguistic turn" of the 1980s, Keith Baker defined political culture as the "discourses and practices" through which individuals and groups articulate, implement, and enforce the claims they make on each other. This study seeks to bring to social scientists' concern with democratization an understanding of political culture, and ways of examining it in the past, that reflect the latter approach. In particular, I will emphasize the discursive aspects of political culture, a view that allows us to see how ceremonies and theatrical performances could contribute to the French experience with the process of democratization and create a particularly French way in which this process occurred.

To make the link between political culture and performance, we may start with one of the most influential arguments about these processes in European history, and one that has already had a significant impact on our view of the French version of this process. This came from Jürgen Habermas in a work that, while first published in German in 1962, gained influence in France and the United States only in the 1980s. In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas argued that a rational bourgeois public sphere, articulated in settings such as coffee shops and newspapers, laid the foundation for the development of nineteenth-century liberal democracies. While very limited in Habermas's original formulation, this view has been extended to take into account the obvious ceremonial aspects of those political systems. We might go further and note that if, as Gary Thurston suggests, the public sphere elaborated by Habermas describes the "thinking, discussing part of society that took literature, theater, music, and museums seriously," then the representations of the public sphere, and the theatrical performances that in France had sought since before the Revolution to "arm the people with reason" and break down cultural barriers between the elite and the people, are an important aspect of the development of a democratic civil society. Public ceremonies, in this view, have an educational effect similar to that of the coffee houses and press that Habermas emphasized, increasing the rationality of public discourse.

But if we follow this argument through several disciplinary perspectives, it becomes immediately apparent that it raises as many questions as it resolves. Including performance as a part of a democratic polity seems to assume that performance has a transparent ability to communicate understanding without distortion. In the eighteenth century, this question was at the heart of a dispute between Denis Diderot and Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the nature of representation, a dispute framed in both aesthetic and moral terms. Diderot thought that there was a clear distinction between the representation and the represented. But for Rousseau, representation needed to be as close as possible to what was being represented. This was a dispute with more far-reaching implications than the realms of painting or acting. The connection Rousseau posited between representation and reality — the "navel or spindle which connects the represented to its representation," in Frank Ankersmit's words — opened the possibility of the represented being corrupted by its representation, a possibility that Diderot's formulation did not allow. In this view, the performance or representation of public reason might be not a source of "reasoned, progressive consensus formation," as Habermas hoped, but "an occasion for the manipulation of popular opinion," the means by which individual interests, far from being banished from the public sphere, become the coin of politics, a perversion of the rational, critical operation of the public sphere.

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Excerpted from The Melodramatic Thread by James R. Lehning. Copyright © 2007 James R. Lehning. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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