Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy

  But it was not only the urge to modernize, or the fear of further political upheaval, that inspired hostility to traditional festivities. The revolutionary leadership represented a different social class than the menu peuple and carried within it an elitist disdain for the amusements of the masses. Among the Jacobins, for example, whose coming to power brought the revolution to a hideously bloody climax, one finds lawyers and journalists drawn from the emerging educated middle class—a very different kind of people than the workers and peasants who provided the revolution with muscle: “The middle-class Jacobins preached the virtues of monogamous marriage and deplored libertine manners, drinking, gambling and prostitution. By contrast, the menu peuple found enjoyment in cheap wineshops, and gambling filled their hours with a modicum of relief from their monotonous jobs.”20 Like the Calvinists in Protestant parts of Europe, the Jacobins saw traditional festivities as “barbarous” and a waste of time that could be devoted to labor. To them, as the historian Mona Ozouf writes: “The popular [traditional] festival meant the senseless din of coal shovels and pans; crowds obstructing the streets and public squares; barbarous ‘sports’ like shooting birds or tearing a goose limb from limb; the veiled threat of masks; the disgusting spectacle of people fighting over loaves of bread or sausages. In short, popular excitement disconcerted, or worse ‘offended,’ reason.”21 The Jacobin leader Louis de Saint-Just, whom the historian Christopher Hibbert describes as “a hard, unsmiling, remorseless, dislikeable, clever young man,”22 saw nothing to do but “put an end to all this orgiastic filth.”23

  Short of applying the guillotine—as they did with so many other problems they faced—the Jacobins did their utmost to eliminate what they saw as wasteful, undignified, and atavistic festivities. Having thrown out the familiar calendar of saints’ days, Easter, Christmas, and so on, they proceeded to ban cross-dressing-an age-old feature of carnival—and discouraged the use of maypoles even for revolutionary purposes. They sent special commissioners out to the provinces to investigate traditional festivities; the same commissioners were charged with the task of setting up official festivals in their départements. But these efforts failed to reform popular tastes. Ozouf cites a contemporary observer to the effect that “the organizers of the [official] festivals were always in search of a public, whereas each year, in the name of Saint John, Saint Martin, or Saint Benedict, the people required no summons to converge in large numbers”24 for their usual dancing, drinking, and costuming. To explain their failure, the commissioners recalled the prior failure of the Church to curb traditional festivities: “Even the terrifying eloquence of the preachers had been unable to shake the reign of carnival.”25

  This is a surprising admission, considering how much the Jacobins hated the Church. At least on the issue of festivities, the revolutionary commissioners were acknowledging that they were on the same side as puritanical Counter-Reformation Catholicism. The Jacobins may have been “revolutionaries” in a conventional political sense, but when it came to the life of the senses and the possibility of disorderly collective pleasure, they were part of the long tradition of repression from on high. The historian Madelyn Gutwirth likens them to the Theban king who crushes the Maenads in Euripides’ play: “The Revolutionaries … garbed in their tunics of moral virtue, bear a startling resemblance to the censorious Pentheus.”26

  But if the underlying aim of the official revolutionary festivals was repressive, this does not mean that they were homogeneous and uniformly boring. They were, in fact, incredibly diverse, offering—aside from patriotism and appeals to unity—no single unifying political or philosophical theme, but rather a plethora of themes representing a changing lineup of factions. Conservatives staged festivals stressing law and order; atheists carried off the “Festival of Reason”; the Jacobins’ highly didactic fetes were designed to encourage civic virtue. As public entertainment, these festivals ranged from the stiff and tedious to what seems, at least in one case, to have been a truly thrilling event. This was the festival in 1790 commemorating the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789—the first “Festival of Federation”—which, more than any of the succeeding festivals, grew out of popular demand.

  The revolutionary authorities acceded to the idea of a celebration commemorating the fall of the Bastille only reluctantly, fearing that mass gatherings could lead to unpredictable outbreaks of violence. “When you undertake to run a revolution,” Mirabeau warned his fellow revolutionary leaders, “the difficulty is not to make it go; it is to hold it in check.”27 Hence the Festival of Federation was designed to “seal” the revolution and mark the end of disorderly mass participation. For the main celebration in Paris, the planners rejected all proposals they found unseemly or potentially disruptive—such as female participation in the official events—and sought to confine the festival to a long, entirely military parade.

  But the event spilled over the confines imposed by the officials. Thousands made the pilgrimage to Paris, where people of all classes—from bourgeois ladies in silks to common laborers—worked together to prepare the Champs de Mars for the celebration. This was, according to the nineteenth-century British historian Thomas Carlyle, “a true brethren’s work; all distinctions confounded, abolished,” 28 and the same spirit of harmonious enthusiasm prevailed throughout the nation. In Paris, people not only attended the official parade on July 14—which at two hours in duration dismayed even the revolutionary firebrand Camille Desmoulins—but staged their own carnivalesque parties, parodies, and dances in the days that followed. The nineteenth-century historian Jules Michelet described the events in the town of Saint-Andéol.

  [The people] rushed into each other’s arms, and joining hands, an immense farandole [a kind of dance], comprising everybody, without exception, spread throughout the town, into the fields, across the mountains of Ardèche, and towards the meadows of the Rhone; the wine flowed in the streets, tables were spread, provisions placed in common, and all the people are together in the evening, solemnising this love-feast, and praising God.29

  Michelet has been accused of romanticizing the revolution, but he was probably right that, for at least a few days of festivity in the summer of 1790, “no one was a mere spectator; all were actors.”30 With the shared wine and food, the dancing that wound through whole cities and out into the fields, this has to have been one of the great moments, in all of human history, to have been alive.

  At the stiffer end of the festive spectrum was the 1794 Festival of the Supreme Being, instigated by the Jacobin leader Maximilien Robespierre to counter the prior and, he felt, overly atheistic Festival of Reason. There was a long procession, led by the gorgeously dressed Robespierre—no proletarian sans culotte-style trousers for him—and including battalions of children and mothers with babies at their breasts and, in some cities, members of various trades marching with their tools in hand. There were instructive tableaux vivants, depicting, among other things, the ideal French family. There was some singing of patriotic songs, an artillery salute, and a total of three lengthy speeches by Robespierre, which provoked a certain amount of grumbling and guffawing from the crowd. In all of this, Ozouf emphasizes, there was no room for individual creativity: “Every attempt was made to regulate it [the festival] down to the smallest detail … Instructions were issued on how the little girls’ hair was to be arranged, what bouquets of flowers were to be given to them, where the rosette was to be tied.”31

  The festivals of the French Revolution, with their varying and often conflicting political messages, are probably best understood as a medium, rather than as events adding up to a single propaganda campaign. There was of course no television at the end of the eighteenth century, no radio, and only a nascent newspaper industry (although printed speeches circulated widely). To reach large numbers of people with any kind of message, it made sense to gather them in outdoor venues and address them with speeches, selected symbols (for example, a pretty girl representing Liberty or the Goddess of Reason), and interludes of uplifting orche
stral music. Here, in the French Revolution, the elements of all succeeding nationalist rallies and spectacles were assembled—the parade or procession, the music, the speeches—and these have survived the emergence of powerful electronic media, becoming in fact the occasional content of such media. A fascist rally in Rome or Nuremberg, the British queen’s jubilee celebration in 2002, a small-town American Fourth of July celebration—all owe their basic form to the official festivals of the French Revolution.

  The Military as Entertainment

  A central part of the official French Revolutionary festivals, whatever their political flavor, was the military parade, accompanied by marching music. The idea of military marches as an entertaining spectacle goes back to well before the revolution; in the late seventeenth century, Louis XIV had built military reviews and maneuvers into the rituals of his court.32 The more democratic Swiss opened military parades to the view of the general public in the 1760s—a form of “patriotic celebration” that Rousseau had urged the French to reproduce.33 This the revolutionaries did with enthusiasm, as we have just seen, helping develop the military procession into one of the central appurtenances of nationalism.

  What made the military a potentially edifying spectacle was the highly disciplined drilling introduced more than two centuries before the revolution by the Dutch prince Maurice of Orange. There would have been little entertainment value in watching the disorderly troops of the late Middle Ages shamble through the streets, but the drill produced men capable of marching synchronously, with great precision, with or without musical accompaniment. Marching bands transformed the military procession into a potentially exciting event for the spectators, despite their immobilization on the sides of the street or arena. In earlier times, European armies had relied on fifes and drums for musical encouragement; the full marching band was an import from the Muslim world and began to take hold in Europe only in the early eighteenth century. From Turkey, Europeans acquired the bass drum, cymbals, and tambourines, as well as visual effects supplied by the presence of black musicians dressed in silk turbans and brightly colored uniforms, adding, according to the historian Scott Myerly, “a dash of the exotic oriental to the show.”34

  If the drill created the possibility of the military as public spectacle, the Napoleonic Wars created the demand for it. Napoleon’s armies carried with them the central tenet of the French Revolution: that “the people” were no longer subjects of a king but citizens of a nation. And what was a nation? Not, as Benedict Anderson convincingly argued, a population united by ties of blood, language, and common traditions, since many aspiring nations—such as Italy and Germany in the nineteenth century—lacked some or all of these sources of unity. Rather than growing “naturally” out of shared geography and genetics, the nation required effort to create. It was, and remains, a mystic idea of unity, an imaginary collectivity defined by certain symbols (flags, for example), monuments, shared experiences (of revolution or war, for example), even songs. As part of what we might call their “nation-building” effort, the Jacobins called on composers to come up with new forms of martial music for the patriotic festivals. Interestingly, it was not the popular, infectiously danceable, revolutionary song “Ça Ira” (“It Will Succeed”) that the French government chose as the national anthem in 1795, but “La Marseillaise,” which is suitable only for marching.

  Nationalism was the feeling induced by this imagined collectivity—or, more commonly, by the symbols representing it—a feeling so fraught with the ideas of sacrifice and spiritual transcendence that scholars have often likened it to religion. What better ritual with which to observe this new “religion” than one that could inspire, however briefly, strong feelings of bonding with one’s fellow countrymen? This had been the aim, of course, of the official festivals of the French Revolution. Stripped of revolutionary paraphernalia—the recitations of patriotic oaths, the floats carrying young women representing Liberty—what remained of the revolutionary festivals was a military parade, and it was this ultimately menacing spectacle that the Napoleonic Wars popularized throughout much of Europe. As Myerly observes, in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, military spectacle became “an important entertainment genre” in England, competing with earlier, more participatory, and less martial kinds of gatherings.35

  In keeping with their new status as performers, soldiers began to dress for the part. Uniforms had been difficult to impose before the nineteenth century, if only because armies were made up largely of mercenaries, who found uniforms a serious obstacle to desertion. In the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, uniforms became almost universal, and not only because they served military functions, such as distinguishing one side from the other. In fact, the highly polished brass buttons of nineteenth-century uniforms could make a man an easy target, but this disadvantage was apparently outweighed by theatrical considerations, since a man might spend more time marching for an audience than he did in battle.

  Naturally, the most brilliant men on display were the officers, with their brightly colored uniforms and extravagant headgear. In the Musée de l’Armée in Paris today, one finds scores of nineteenth-century officers’ helmets and bearskins topped with feathers that could add a foot or more to a man’s height. Not only were such costumes dangerously cumbersome in battle; they could occasionally disrupt the spectacles they were designed to enhance. Myerly reports that “when wearing the nearly two-foot-high regulation First Life Guards’ bearskin cap with its enormous swan feather while attending a review … [the Duke of Wellington] was literally blown off his horse by a gust of wind in front of tens of thousands of spectators and soldiers.”36

  Britain embraced the military spectacle with at least as much enthusiasm as France had. An 1811 military review at Wimbledon attracted two hundred thousand spectators to watch twenty thousand soldiers go through their paces; a royal review staged in honor of the king in 1830 drew crowds that were “immense beyond description.” 37 In addition to the deliberately staged military spectacles, even mundane tasks such as the changing of the guard attracted eager audiences. “We were all soldiers, one way or another,” an Edinburgh lawyer recalled of the wartime year 1803. “The parade and the review formed the staple of men’s talk and thoughts.”38 Women were drawn to the spectacle of the gorgeously uniformed young officers on horseback; everyone responded to the martial music, which, as one spectator noted, “cause[s] the pulse to pound and fire[s] the imagination.”39 Even the socialist Robert Blatchford hailed the public military drills for fostering a sense of solidarity among the viewers, “a feeling of strength through unity and esprit de corps,”though not without observing sourly “that in reality this sense of solidarity was directed not by its members but by the state.”40

  In superficial ways, the military spectacle can even be thought of as a kind of carnival. There were “costumes”—in the form of uniforms, which in the case of the Swiss troopers were derived from a harlequin-type carnival costume. There was “dance,” or at least musically driven motion—in the form of the march—and to this day the overlap between marching and dancing is exemplified, in the United States, by drill and drill-dance teams that perform at special events, as well as by the African American collegiate practice of “stepping.” But the military spectacle represents an oddly inverted form of carnival: While carnival aims to mock all customary kinds of social hierarchy, the military spectacle aims only to reinforce them.

  Governance by Spectacle

  As young men, both Hitler and Mussolini had been well prepared for the task of perfecting the late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century nationalist spectacle. Not only had each served in World War I and been thoroughly impressed with the galvanizing power of military spectacles and parades, they were also familiar with Le Bon’s theories. Whether they had been alarmed, as dictators-to-be, by Le Bon’s ideas about the madness and unpredictability of crowds, we do not know, but both happily appropriated his thoughts on “the leaders of crowds and their means of persuasion.”41 The very irrationality of the cr
owd, Le Bon had asserted, rendered it putty in the hands of “the strong-willed man, who knows how to impose himself upon it.”42Through simple demagogic tricks—such as constant repetition of simplified ideas—the leader could mold large numbers of people to his will. Ignoring, as usual, the fact that the crowds of the French Revolution, his primary example of collective insanity, fought for their liberty, Le Bon insisted that “it is the need not of liberty but of servitude that is always predominant in the soul of crowds. They are so bent on obedience that they instinctively submit to whoever declares himself their master.”43 This must have been excellent news for a dictator-in-training, so long as he skipped the passage where Le Bon observed that the men who seized power by manipulating what he saw as the rabble were likely to be “morbidly nervous, excitable, half-deranged persons who are bordering on madness.”44

  Actually, neither Hitler nor Mussolini achieved power through the kind of mob action that concerned Le Bon—another argument against those who see an inevitable connection between collective excitement and fascist evil. Violent “mobs” of the menu peuple had played a decisive role in the French Revolution. But to the extent that violence played a role in the rise of twentieth-century fascism, it was the violence exerted by organized fascist paramilitary forces—the Freikorps and brownshirts in Germany, the arditi and black-shirted squadristi in Italy—who crushed the socialist opposition and intimidated the general population in their respective nations. Opposition leaders were beaten or assassinated, their offices bombed, their demonstrations attacked by organized ruffians.