It is striking, however, the extent to which different disciplines have examined political culture in different ways. Social scientists have tended to view it in terms similar to the way it was originally defined in the 1960s, as an “over-arching set of social values” or “the system of empirical beliefs, expressive symbols, and values which defines the situation in which political action takes place.”18 Many social science approaches to political culture assume it to be static, giving it an inherently conservative tone. For example, many studies of democratization in Latin America have assumed that an authoritarian political culture in the region made the development of democracies there virtually impossible. Giuseppe Di Palma’s emphasis on the role of elites in presenting democracy as a viable alternative in a crisis of an authoritarian regime is one response to this.19 Another has been Larry Diamond’s insistence that political culture could change in response to social and economic change, social and civic mobilization, institutional practice, historical experience, and international diffusion.20
But scholars in other disciplines have viewed the concept of political culture differently. In a formulation that is typical of the approaches of historians and other students of cultural studies influenced by the “linguistic turn” of the 1980s, Keith Baker defined political culture as the “discourses and practices” through which individuals and groups articulate, implement, and enforce the claims they make on each other.21 This study seeks to bring to social scientists’ concern with democratization an understanding of political culture, and ways of examining it in the past, that reflect the latter approach. In particular, I will emphasize the discursive aspects of political culture, a view that allows us to see how ceremonies and theatrical performances could contribute to the French experience with the process of democratization and create a particularly French way in which this process occurred.
To make the link between political culture and performance, we may start with one of the most influential arguments about these processes in European history, and one that has already had a significant impact on our view of the French version of this process. This came from Jürgen Habermas in a work that, while first published in German in 1962, gained influence in France and the United States only in the 1980s. In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas argued that a rational bourgeois public sphere, articulated in settings such as coffee shops and newspapers, laid the foundation for the development of nineteenth-century liberal democracies.22 While very limited in Habermas’s original formulation, this view has been extended to take into account the obvious ceremonial aspects of those political systems.23 We might go further and note that if, as Gary Thurston suggests, the public sphere elaborated by Habermas describes the “thinking, discussing part of society that took literature, theater, music, and museums seriously,” then the representations of the public sphere, and the theatrical performances that in France had sought since before the Revolution to “arm the people with reason” and break down cultural barriers between the elite and the people, are an important aspect of the development of a democratic civil society.24 Public ceremonies, in this view, have an educational effect similar to that of the coffee houses and press that Habermas emphasized, increasing the rationality of public discourse.
But if we follow this argument through several disciplinary perspectives, it becomes immediately apparent that it raises as many questions as it resolves. Including performance as a part of a democratic polity seems to assume that performance has a transparent ability to communicate understanding without distortion. In the eighteenth century, this question was at the heart of a dispute between Denis Diderot and Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the nature of representation, a dispute framed in both aesthetic and moral terms. Diderot thought that there was a clear distinction between the representation and the represented. But for Rousseau, representation needed to be as close as possible to what was being represented. This was a dispute with more far-reaching implications than the realms of painting or acting. The connection Rousseau posited between representation and reality—the “navel or spindle which connects the represented to its representation,” in Frank Ankersmit’s words—opened the possibility of the represented being corrupted by its representation, a possibility that Diderot’s formulation did not allow.25 In this view, the performance or representation of public reason might be not a source of “reasoned, progressive consensus formation,” as Habermas hoped, but “an occasion for the manipulation of popular opinion,” the means by which individual interests, far from being banished from the public sphere, become the coin of politics, a perversion of the rational, critical operation of the public sphere.26
The potential for deception and perversion of political democracy through theatrical methods has hung over the efforts to create such political systems, ironically reversing the optimism of Diderot and the pessimism of Rousseau. In recent years complete separation of representations from any underlying reality, such as Diderot optimistically posited, has been suggested as the most important danger to democracy. This was the argument Guy Debord made about the postwar society of France, a society that he called in 1967 La Société du Spectacle. Debord emphasized the way in which spectacles of all kinds worked to justify the existing system of economic, social, and political relations and the alienation that they generated for the individual. They turned all life into appearance rather than reality, a “material reconstruction of religious illusion.”27 With the spectacular reconstructing reality as it speaks of it, reality is completely foreign to the integrated spectacular.28
The broad brush strokes of Habermas and Debord inevitably leave scholars in disciplines with more empirical methodologies somewhat unconvinced. The art historians Michael Fried and Thomas Crow have explored aspects of visual culture in eighteenth-century France and related these aesthetic developments to the limited public culture of the late Old Regime and the Revolution.29 Other art historians have claimed that the nineteenth century increased the significance of these visual aspects of French culture. In his study of the relationship between Impressionism and modernism, T. J. Clark closely connects visuality and modernism, arguing that “the circumstances of modernism were not modern, and only became so by being given the forms called ‘spectacle.’” Late-nineteenth-century Paris was distinguished for Clark by the “sheer density of signals conveyed and understood, and the highly coded nature of the conveyance.” In this formulation, it is not just that Paris was the location for public ceremonies and theatrical performances. It is also the ways in which these ceremonies and performances involved “contact and transaction, contests of nuance and misreading.”30 There is a history interwoven with this view, in which the narrative describes the intensification of the symbolic aspect of Parisian culture. This history was punctuated by a nineteenth-century form of viewing, the flâneur. This (male) strolling bourgeois figure who used the modern city as the object of his explorations was complemented by a feminine form of viewing in the increasingly commodified world of department stores.31
Paralleling the concerns of historians of art and capitalist consumption are descriptions of the many public ceremonies, mass public meetings, parades, and party rallies of popular nineteenth-century politics as a part of the public sphere and as a way of creating support for the state that organized the events. Mona Ozouf’s study of Revolutionary festivals was a landmark work not only for inventorying the important ceremonies of the Revolution but also for suggesting their contribution to the creation of an inclusive Revolutionary movement and their expression of the ideals of the Revolution. Avner Ben-Amos has written a history of republican funerals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, carrying Ozouf’s thesis about the consolidating effects of such public ceremonies forward in time. Matthew Truesdell