Revolution Festival
The revolutionary festivals of the French Revolution , as public- patriotic ceremonies, together with the revolutionary cults , formed a civil-religious ensemble that was to take the place of Christianity and especially Catholicism in the socio-political center. The revolutionary festivals took place with varying frequency and popularity, the Quatorze Juillet still exists today.
Public ceremonies intended for the general public were already part of the Ancien Régime ; In addition to the extraordinary occasions celebrated with fireworks and mass meals, such as births in the royal family, the church processions were already predetermined with 52 Sundays and 32 religious holidays. During the revolution, the strengthening of the class society through festivals and rites was replaced by that of the national community and the new values.
The new cultural practice initially consisted of spontaneous gestures of togetherness across social boundaries, such as brother kissing, or affirmation of attitudes such as oaths and chants. It arose from the spirit of optimism and the desire for a fédération (federation) of all French, which had captured the revolutionaries and, among them, the newly formed National Guards in particular . To control the popular movement, the government decided to hold a fête de la fédération ( federation festival ) on July 14, 1790 , on the first anniversary of the storm on the Bastille. The Paris federation festival with its tens of thousands of spectators and participants was not only imitated in the federation celebrations of the province, it became the model for later revolutionary festivals. Military and civil parades, acting, hymns, oaths, speeches and, in the early days, church blessings were essential. (On the feast of the Federation, a high mass was celebrated by Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand , Bishop of Autun.)
The de-Christianization of 1793 and 1794 brought about the disappearance of Christian content. The substitution of traditional religious festival culture was particularly pronounced in the "Festival of Reason" on November 10, 1793 and in the "Festival of the Supreme Being" on June 8, 1794, based on the example of which countless parades and ceremonies were held in the province. The traditional church element was completely absent here. The “Feast of the Unity and Indivisibility of the Republic” on August 10, 1793 was the first without the participation of the clergy; the very symbolic official celebrations were supposed to take the place of Christian processions and rites and to meet the spiritual needs of the population as civil-religious substitutes , while at the same time they served as a platform for the dissemination and consolidation of revolutionary ideas.
The festivals that were introduced with the new revolutionary calendar of 1793 were closely related to the revolutionary festivals . Caused by the rise of the cult of reason , the National Convention passed a law on November 23, 1793 that the festival of reason should be celebrated on every décadi (tenth day) of the new calendar. Together with the introduction of the cult of the Supreme Being in 1794, Maximilien de Robespierre had the respective festival of a décadi redefined.For example, the human race, the French people, the martyrs of freedom, the republic, the love of the country, the hatred of tyrants and the Traitors, love, conjugal fidelity, the future, the glory of immortality, stoicism. The five (in leap years six) transition days at the end of the year ( called sansculottids ) were also dedicated to important values for the citizen : virtue, spirit, work, opinion, income, revolution. The calendar reform meant a complete break with the Christian festivals and thus a completely new course of the year.
The revolutionary festival culture reached its climax during the Jacobin reign of terror (La Grande Terreur), the subsequent Directoire continued this and celebrated military successes during the coalition wars and key dates of the revolution - July 14th ( storming the Bastille ), August 10th ( Storming the Tuileries ), 9. Thermidor (fall of Robespierre); But there was growing weariness at the events, which in any case seemed less and less opportune to the subsequent forms of government ( consulate and empire ) , which were concerned with an authoritarian order , and which were abolished. The Quatorze Juillet alone, which commemorates both the storming of the Bastille in 1789 and the federation festival in 1790, is still celebrated today as a French national holiday.