Festivals in Modern France: The Experience of the Third Republic

Abstract

What can we learn about modern France from studying its national fetes? A variety of answers has been proposed. To an ardent republican historian early in this century, the celebrations of the Third Republic were evidence of the regime's popularity and greatness, high achievements serving art and the people. To Georges Pillement in a more recent history, Paris galas showed us the colourful ebullient face of a happier civilization now regretfully past, except perhaps for some last gasps among counterculture youth with festive dress and behaviour.1 Other views may emerge when historians, following the lead of anthropologists and political scientists, look more closely into the ceremonial parts of festival for myths or ideologies, promoted by government and to varying degrees shared by the people. This approach, applied to modern France, would result in an ethnography of the Republic to complement Maurice Agulhon's sketched 'archaeology of the Republic', his excellent essay on symbolic statues. Recent work in this vein by George Mosse and Rosemonde Sanson has already yielded important new understandings of political festivals in the nineteenth century. In Germany, Mosse argues, new public festivals served to involve the people in a new mass democratic politics, linking citizens to their governments through ritual and symbol more than through a real sharing of power. In late nineteenth-century France, Sanson has

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