To understand why symbolism was so important to both sides of the revolutionary dialectic in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries one must start with Mona Ozouf’s masterful study, Festivals of the French Revolution. These festivals, an exercise in well-planned spontaneity, attempted to capture both the passions of the pre-Revolutionary festivals and the utopian and logical principles of the Enlightenment to celebrate any number of things related to the French Revolution. From top to bottom, the revolutionary festival (and here Ozouf is inclined to see their thematic similarities from 1789-1799) was to be the reflection of the ideal principles of the revolution by forming a celebratory mirror as well as an attempt to create the new secular religion that worshiped the nation.
But festivals were more than just a celebration of the revolution. They were above all an attempt to conquer public space and time through a complete reinvention of traditional columns of life in France. While some historians prefer reinvention, Ozouf uses the word “purge” to describe the revolutionary festivals’ ability to banish from public eye such emblems and practices of older institutions such as the statues and confined spaces of the monarchical regime, the traditional calendar, and the symbols, rituals and holidays of the Catholic Church. Ozouf is describing here the first and possibly the most powerful attempt of revolutionaries or counterrevolutionaries to control the collective memory of the inhabitants of France through an inventive if not forced policy of elimination of vestiges of the old regime.
Symbolism occupies a unique position in Ozouf’s narrative. Festivals reinvented the rituals and traditions through a variety of mechanisms, including inventions and concepts founded upon the principles of Enlightenment rationality, songs, slogans, and certainly the civic oath. However, the reinterpretation of traditional symbols, moreover symbols that would be immediately recognizable to the ordinary citizen, was central to these civic celebrations. Thus the Liberty Tree and the Maypole were based upon older peasant symbols, the tri-coleur was the compromise between Parisian and Royalist colors, and the Gallic Cock a play on the weathercocks of the seigneurs. Ozouf suggests two prototypes for the symbol of Liberty: the antique goddess and the Virgin Mary. Her representations are varied, but nonetheless would be familiar to any Catholic. She cites the example of a statue of the Virgin being transformed in a festival to a Liberty statue; the Virgin Mary literally became the female goddess Liberty representing the French Republic. In light of Third Republic tendencies to place the Virgin and Marianne in opposition to one another, this compromise seems singularly fascinating.
Having established Ozouf’s supposition that symbols can dominate space and manipulate memory by replacing that of the older regime, the moment seems opportune to examine Maurice Agulhon’s oeuvre, Marianne into Battle, 1789-1880. Agulhon’s study traces the evolution of the allegory of Liberty from its inception to its triumph as Marianne after the first insecure years of the Third Republic in both its concrete and idealized forms. Agulhon wishes to look at these representations, the locations of Liberty and what they mean for the political and intellectual history of the time; there is no overarching thesis here, because representations were so variable.
Agulhon begins by highlighting the insecure nature of the early Liberty; drawn from antiquity and represented most often with a Phrygian cap and a pike to stress the antique origins of the goddess of Liberty, she actually received substantially variable treatment depending upon the artist or the commissioner and their own variable views on the new republic (pg. 1-16). Liberty was always accompanied with different revolutionary symbols for the purposes of illustrating the variable political statement they were willing to make. These adornments included the aforementioned Phrygian cap and pike, but also the fleur-de-lys, the red cockade, the tri-coleur, a lion head or a club. During the Revolution, Liberty was but one in a series of republican personifications. Her strongest competitor, the representation of the people of France in the form of Hercules, represented the embodiment of the strength of the French people (pg. 13-15). The allegory of Liberty as a goddess would return in greater numbers during political crises and the subsequent revolutions in 1830, 1848 and 1870 for the political and emotional power she could have upon the people.
Why was Liberty a woman? Lynn Hunt provides an overview in Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution that is drawn mainly from Agulhon’s various writings. Liberty represented the virtues of the Republic, “transcendence of localism, superstition, and particularity in the name of a more disciplined and universalistic worship.” The image of a goddess to represent virtues and principles of government is an old tradition. The image of a woman in a red bonnet or Phrygian cap provided a clear contrast with the crown. Liberty was semantically close to the Virgin Mary. The image of a woman provided distance between the pure virtues of republicanism and the excesses of those charged to carry out the revolution. Hunt continues this last argument in the Family Romance of the French Revolution when she stresses women’s disenfranchisement from politics; women could be the upholders of virtue (ironic given her description of the Bad Mother) without being political actors. In the end, Hunt concludes that the choice of the female allegory is “overdetermined.”
Hunt misreads the importance of parallel religious iconography and counterrevolution to Agulhon’s narrative. The female Liberty did not take hold as the official symbol of the Republic until 1792, when in August and September the Revolution had to mobilize against its enemies abroad and against dangerous elements of counterrevolution at home. This came at the time of increasing insurrections in Paris and the provinces and military defeat at the hands of the Prussians at Verdun. Abbé Grégoire submitted a report that recommended the female Liberty should be depicted on the official seal as a way of reversing the influence of Catholicism through republican education (pg. 16). Subsequent depictions of Liberty in the nineteenth century, especially during the July Monarchy, borrowed heavily from images of the Virgin Mary (p.58). Agulhon provides this explanation:
The Catholic Church had left the imprint of its rituals and settings on the general culture. These had almost always been appropriated by the Counter-Revolution and thus the Church involuntarily encouraged the Revolution to forge equivalent psychological weapons for itself. The words goddess, rite, cult flowed easily from the pen and entered Revolutionary language in the form of approximative metaphors even before they were taken over by the counter-religion which eventually developed (99).
The importance of counterrevolutionary pressures upon the development and proliferation of Marianne in the nineteenth century are evident. Although Napoleon arguably completed some of Liberty’s triumphs, he was also concerned with cementing his own legitimacy and enforcing the protection of the Catholic Church. Liberty paid the price. Sheryl Kroen demonstrates how the Restoration Monarchy was greatly concerned with enforcing oubli through the systematic destruction of revolutionary and imperial symbolism, and the July Monarchy would only tolerate Liberty in regions thought to be too legitimist (certainly not in Paris). After the brief Second Republic, Napoleon III took to suppressing republican imagery, and forced Marianne underground. Marianne, having recently been re-given her name (evidence suggests that Marianne was used as early as 1792, but it did not enter the popular consciousness until the second half of the nineteenth century) as a derisory term by counterrevolutionaries in Languedoc, emerged as inseparable from the Republic in public consciousness. The experience as an underground symbol of opposition and the explosion of Mariannes during the Paris Commune paved the way for her proliferation during the Third Republic.
What is striking about Agulhon’s narrative is the importance placed upon symbolism and space both by proponents of Marianne and her opponents. In one sense, the frantic building of statues, the dissemination of paintings and prints, and the frequency of live allegories testify the importance of spatial domination in official politics. On the other hand, the vigor with which post-republican regimes took to purging public spaces of Marianne images is shocking. Sheryl Kroen explores how important spatial hegemony is to the dynamism of politics.
In her book Politics and Theater, Kroen’s aims are threefold. First, she attempts to restore agency and dynamism to the political culture of the Restoration regime, which had been sorely lacking; second, she stresses the importance of the theatrical nature of politics under the restoration, with particular emphasis on the metaphor of the play Tartuffe; third, she shows how expiation and the forced policy of oubli was the most important political theme of the period, but it was far from homogenous. Kroen is able to expose a major fault line between the Monarchy and the Catholic Church, problematizing the singularity of the revolutionary dialectic.
The restored Monarchy and supporters of the Catholic Church were the two strongest agents in the counterrevolutionary reaction, but they did not operate in tandem. The Bourbons struck an offensive tone with respect to purging the nation of the revolutionary legacy, but Kroen highlights their crisis of legitimacy in the wake of twenty-five years of turmoil as obstacles to their consolidation of power. Kroen stresses the tensions between the overzealous Catholic Church and the Monarchy, whose program was equally directed at bringing clerics under their control. The clergy wanted to remember (expiation); the monarchy to forget (oubli). Kroen’s analysis highlights the discord between counterrevolutionary factions; indeed, the counterrevolution was not a unitary doctrine drawn from multiple sources of political thought as described by Massimo Boffa in the Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution. It was not a “counterrevolution,” it was a “counter-revolution,” or systematic repudiation of the principles of 1789 through the contrary policies of expiation and oubli. It was carried out by righteous destruction of the revolutionary legacy.
The counter-revolution was righteous because expiation was carried out with such vigor by supporters of the “new Catholicism,” which was strongly evangelical at the grassroots and supportive of the monarchy as the position of leadership for all Christians of the nation:
Expiation required remembering the sins of the past in detail because without remembering there could be no repentance and, therefore, no salvation. What this translated into in practice was a religious revival in which missionaries traveled around France doing everything they could to remind the population of the revolutionary interlude...raised the specter of the Enlightenment...reopened old controversies: between constitutional and refractory priests and their congregations, between acquirers of biens nationaux...between supporters of the Revolution...and royalists...erecting mission crosses where a cross had been violently attacked during the Revolution...reconsecrating the landscape to Christ and their King.
While Kroen’s subject in the first part of her book is the unmaking of the revolutionary legacy through expiation and oubli, the second part of her book focuses on the agency of the dispossessed in preserving that legacy. Although denied participation in the political process, French citizens reacted through clandestine politics on the one hand, and public visual and ritual display and resistance on the other. Her thesis is much the same as that of Maurice Agulhon on the subject of Marianne in the Second Empire: when driven underground, the revolution consolidated and legitimizes. The reaction against the worst abuses of the Catholic Church during the Restoration fomented popular anticlericalism and the politics of ritual resistance that lead to national revolution in July of 1830, as opposed to a strictly Parisian revolution. Tartuffe was the greatest symbol of this ritual resistance, and has its parallels in the staging of politics as theater. Kroen does not deal explicitly with Liberty as allegory.
The strength of Kroen’s work is most definitely the care with which she constructs and nuances the revolutionary dialectic not strictly on the political level, but on the symbolic level. Kroen’s work is the only work under review here in which we get a palpable sense of the opposition between revolutionary symbol and counterrevolutionary symbol, not just symbols as representative of the revolutionary dialectic. Raymond Jonas’ work does not explore this phenomenon and is consequently not as compelling in the history of the revolutionary dialectic.
Whenever Marianne went into battle, the Sacred Heart met her. That is the proposition used by Raymond Jonas to demonstrate the importance of the Sacred Heart as a symbol of defense against the godless Revolution. Essentially, Jonas traces the lineage of the Cult of the Sacred Heart from its virtual inception (the Cult of the Sacred Heart existed before the visions of Marguerite-Marie Alacoq, but negligibly in numbers) where it became inextricably linked to the triumph of the French nation as favored by God, through its use as a protective emblem against the Marseille plague of 1720-1721 and to its inception as an emblem of counterrevolution in the Vendée. Jonas’ account of the counterrevolution essentially follows the argument of Timothy Tackett in Religion, Revolution and Regional Culture in Eighteenth Century France in seeing the Civil Constitution of the Clergy as the most important issue leading to conflict against the French Revolution, while ignoring the social and economic factors such as urbanization, peasant-bourgeois relations, and systems of landowning that may have exacerbated its effect. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy was more of a wedge issue or a referendum on the progress of the revolution not just among clerics, but one among the people that set social forces in motion either for or against the French Revolution. Jonas gives far too little agency to the peasantry in making their own decisions, and far too much in the ability of the clergy to coerce parishioners.
Jonas shows how refractory priests used their opposition to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and the appropriation of church property to speak out in divine terms against revolutionary excesses, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, Enlightenment rationality and anticlericalism, which were seen to be an affront on the social and cultural hegemony of the Catholic Church (62, 75). Whereas revolutionaries spoke of the ignorance and fanaticism of Catholic values, the Catholic Church countered by singling out liberty, equality and Voltaire as the most dangerous of evils and supported the supposition that the Revolution was divine retribution for a France that had sinned. Redemption and salvation required expiation (67-75). At the urging of refractory priests, pilgrimages to sites like Lourdes increased dramatically, demonstrating the popular anxiety over the fate of France in the face of popular and often violent anti-clericalism (76-83).
The Sacred Heart was adopted as a protective emblem against revolutionary evil partly as a result of its perceived successes in the Marseille epidemic, and partly as a result of rumors surrounding the royal family and their own private devotion to the Sacred Heart (Marie Antoinette possessed an emblem, and it was rumored Louis XVI consecrated France to the Sacred Heart) (86-100). The unity of the Catholic Church and the Monarchy in their devotion to the Sacred Heart compelled Vendéens to use it as a symbolic emblem in their revolt against the revolutionary government. The Vendée war looked as much like a war of religion as it did a war about politics to Jonas (100-111). The Machecoul Massacres brought secular revolutionary symbols back to the Vendée, and presumably, along with the confrontation against the pro-revolutionary National Guard, this is where Jonas sees the first meeting of Marianne and the Sacred Heart in battle (113-115).
Jonas agrees with Sheryl Kroen concerning the Restoration. The cult of the Sacred Heart was transformed into a symbol of Christian missionary activity that placed a heavy stress upon expiation. The themes of revolutionary discord, reconciliation through Christian renewal, restored moral order of the church and a public consecration to the Sacred Heart appeared among its partisans. The new Bourbon regime was too moderate to consider public consecration to a symbol that carried so much counterrevolutionary baggage. Its detractors protested by creating a Cult of the Sacred Heart of Marat (Jonas Chapter V).
Jonas skips ahead forty years in history and returns to the theme of the Sacred Heart before its hour of national triumph. Catholic memory of 1870 and 1871 took place within the confines of the Sacred Heart as a vehicle to imagine divine judgment and condemnation for France’s sinful past (148). The defeat at the hand of the Prussians supported the degeneration theory. The Paris Commune’s killing of clerics and references to Jacobinism confirmed the connection between the two revolutions. The fallout from the struggle to defend the Vatican against a secular revolution further antagonized Catholics against the secular revolution. The responses are well-known; Vendéens moved to defend the Vatican adorned with Sacred Heart emblems, others marched into a suicide charge against the Prussians north of Paris, while Alexander Legentil and Hubert Rohault de Fleury vowed to build a monument to the Sacred Heart that was to make amends for the rupture brought by the French Revolution (150-176).
The fall of the Paris Commune paved the way for national expiation in the form of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart on the Butte de Montmartre. Jonas credits the success of the Sacred Heart motif to its proponents through their mass marketing techniques. Before the Basilica of the Sacred Heart invaded Parisian space, the emblem of the Sacred Heart had invaded French space in the form of thousands of pin-sized emblems. The importance of visibility of the Sacred Heart ultimately culminated in placing the Basilica where it could be visible to anyone in Paris.
Robert Nelson is blogger-in-chief at History News, Notes and Arguments. Find us on Google+ or on Facebook.
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