Episode 22: Revolutionary Culture and Festivals

Living the French Revolution and Age of Napoleon

Dr Suzanne M Desan

Film Review

In republican France, revolutionaries seeking to eliminate the Church’s despotic control set out to create a new French culture based on Enlightenment values and beliefs. They began by creating a new calendar, declaring Sept 22, 1792 (the day the National Convention declared the Republic) the first day of Year 1. Deputies also voted to replace weeks with ten-day segments called decades and to rename months based on seasons and natural phenomena.*

This new culture also replaced saints’ days with days celebrating nature and agriculture, secular festivals, and civic banquets and dances to celebrate army volunteers marching off to war. Although abolishing Sundays alienated much of France’s working class, the new calendar lasted until 1805.

The National Convention also introduced (our current) metric system of measurement, as well a replacing titles such as Madame (“my lady”) and and Monsieur (“my lord”) with citizen and citizeness, as well as abolishing the use of “vous” for the singular “tu.”** They simultaneously encouraged a change in the way the middle classes dressed, adopting the long pants of the san culotte, in place of knee britches and silk stockings. Villages replaced their mardi gras queens with “liberty” queens and repurposed ol religious status by decorating them with tunics, long skirst and revolutionary banners and sashes.

The new icon of the simple peasant woman Marianne came to represent the new French Republic in paintings and on coins and stamps.

Desan also describes de-Christianization campaign the Jacobins started in the provinces, where, along with national guards, they drove off priests (or pressured them to marry) and burned churches. In Paris, they organized a Festival of Reason in Notre Dame. In response, 20,000 priests resigned or went into exile. Non-juring priests (those who refused to swear allegiance to the revolution) remaining France organized counterrevolutionary armies to fight off the citizen soldiers.

The Convention let the communes (aka city councils) decide the fate of individual churches in most of France. In some places they burned them down, ripped down and burned paintings and melted down silver chalices for ammunition. In others they became store houses and stables.