The French Revolution and its spectacles

Abstract

Revolutionary festivities and cultural disruption During the French Revolution of 1789 a deep change in the representation of social communication and interaction took place. The spectrum of the new sociability reached from refashioning the national costume that replaced the old dress codes of the guild and social hierarchies to the republican, informal way of addressing each other, from imitating Roman slave haircuts to rituals of fraternisation, from frugal banquets in the open to name-giving ceremonies of newborn babies (Brutus was one of the preferred choices), from the revolutionary catechism that spread ancient Roman models of virtue to the introduction of a new, republican calendar. All these measures were intended to mark a break not only with the Ancien Regime before 1789 but with history as it had been known. The French Revolution understood itself as a “regeneration”, a return to a social order that was close to nature. A stable political order was the goal and certainly not a permanent revolution. But the Revolution, particularly after the execution of the king, had become a threatening crisis. To the horror of many politicians, post-revolutionary France proved extremely mobile and unsettled. The movement cultures and body performances of this time can be seen as an attempt to contain the “too much” of social movement by controlling the individual body within the mass. Hence the painter David and the choreographer Gardel saw themselves confronted with the problem of convincing passionate crowds to move within ordered forms, to make a moving, yet manageable, organised, yet innocuous, collective body out of an unruly mass that threatened to explode at any moment.