Pierre Antoine Demachy, The Festival of the Supreme Being (1794): The festival in Paris, which took place on the Champs de Mars, was organized by the artist Jacques-Louis David with Maximilien Robepsierre playing the starring role. The Cult of the Supreme Being was many things: an attempt to fill the void left behind by the Catholic Church; a vehicle by which to educate the people in virtue; and an obstacle to the advance of atheism.
Reading
For today, please read Hunt and Censer, pp. 117-121, Decrees Establishing the French Era and the New Calendar (1793) (Canvas) and the excerpt from Jacques René Hébert, Le Père Duchesne (1793) (Canvas).
What We are Doing Today
Today, we will look at cultural aspects of the French Revolution. Why? See below.
Different Scholarly Views of the French Revolution
Traditionally, historians have described the French Revolution as primarily a political event. If politics has to do with governance and the distribution of power, then such an interpretation is not far-fetched. We have already seen how in July 1789, the Estates General, acting in the name of the people, declared itself a National Assembly, eventually succeeded in wresting a good chunk of authority away from Louis XVI, and created a constitutional monarchy. We have also witnessed the events of August and September 1792 (which the textbook describes as a “second revolution”) in which the monarchy was destroyed and a democratic republic declared; the people’s victory, it seemed, was complete and total.
Yet political changes of this sort often have important ramifications for other areas too. In studying the origins of the French Revolution, we saw that many factors contributed to its outbreak—not just political ones. Marxist historians, who dominated the field until the 1960s and 1970s, tended to stress the revolution’s social origins and consequences. The big names in this case were George Lefebvre (1874-1959) and Albert Soboul (1914-1982). In other words, the revolution started as a class war between commoners on the one hand (an alliance of lower and middle classes) and the aristocracy on the other. The ensuing conflict between the national legislatures and the people (e.g. the Paris sections, the peasants, and others) was interpreted by these Marxist scholars as a class struggle between the bourgeoisie (the middle class that owned capital) and the proletariat (workers who had to sell their labor for wages).
This social interpretation of the revolution often dwelled on important economic changes associated with the revolution. The abolition of internal customs barriers and the passage of Le Chapelier Law (which abolished guilds, trade unions, and the right to strike) were interpreted as class legislation that favored the bourgeoisie. In this telling of the revolution, classes acted according to their material interests, and the revolution marked the passage from a feudal economic regime to a capitalist one. According to this Marxist perspective, the Terror, which witnessed legislation like the Law of the Maximum (which sought to put ceilings on prices on necessary goods and prevent hoarding) was a period when the lower classes had obtained the upper hand.
While this Marxist view of the revolution, which emphasizes socio-economic forces and class conflict, has largely been discredited, no one can deny that there was an important social component to the revolution. One way of looking at the revolution that arose in the aftermath of the Marxist interpretation’s collapse was the cultural vantage point. This thesis dwelled on the cultural origins of the French Revolution (I think here of François Furet’s The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution which was published in 1991) or stressed the degree to which one could understand the revolution through its culture. And it is to culture that we shall turn today.
This image of “Fructidor” appears to come from a calendar dating to the early imperial period. Fructidor was the name of a month in the French revolutionary calendar which ran from August 18/19 to September 16/17. The names of the revolutionary months came from a variety of sources but mainly concerned the seasons. Fructidor came from the Latin fructus which means fruit—because fruit ripened during this time of year. Fructidor here bears some resemblance to Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit. In the revolutionary calendar, all the months were personified by women. Why do you think such was the case?
What is Culture?
Most of us understand that politics is about power, that society is a group that we live in (split into various sub-groups, such as classes), and that the economy is associated with the buying and selling of goods and services. And if we stopped to think about it, we’d probably realize that each of these categories (politics, society, and economy) bleed into each other. Culture, however, is notoriously difficult to describe. Just about everybody in the humanities is familiar with the phrase, “Defining culture is like nailing jello to a wall” (although I have no idea who came up with this statement).
But we can try. Clifford Geertz (1926-2006), a prominent American anthropologist, produced a highly influential definition of culture that was widely used in the humanities. He claimed culture was “a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life.” Considering this definition, it’s not surprising that Geertz believed that culture was about semiotics which is concerned with communication. We will have more to say about the consequences of this definition in class.
Pere Duchesne (1790): In this issue of the newspaper which was popular among sans-culottes in Paris, Jacques-René Hébert took aim at Louis XVI for his delay in approving the Civil Constitution of the clergy (the issue is entitled “The great anger of Pere Duchesne on the refusal of the king to approve the decree on the Civil Constitution of the Clergy). Note the saltiness of the language. The caption for the image reads: “I am the real father Duchesne, f***.” And the first line of the essay: “What, then, f***!”
Potential Quiz Questions
1) What were the main initiatives of the French Republic that appear in the section of the textbook entitled “Cultural Revolution”?
2) According to the Decree Establishing the French Era (1793), how were the year, the month, and the day to be divided? What principle do you think explained this division of time?
3) According to the excerpt from Père Duchesne, why was it so much better to be a sans-culotte than an aristocrat or counterrevolutionary?
4) What explains Jacques-René Hébert’s tone and language in the essay from Père Duchesne? The dude is dropping f-bombs left and right. Why do you think he wrote as he did?
History 114: The French Revolution and Napoleon 