Historians of other countries have also examined public ceremonies as a way of understanding political culture. A series of studies of English ceremonies suggested the importance of events such as royal coronations in creating English national identity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.35 American historians have shown how festivals, especially those celebrating the events and ideals of the Revolution in France, were used in the American debate over the nature of the American republic and the legacy of the American Revolution. These celebrations also provided opportunities for groups such as women, the poor, and African Americans to find a public place denied them in celebrations such as the 4th of July or Washington’s Birthday.36 Celebrations in the early Republic were also, as one Jeffersonian orator said in 1806, “so many engines, made subservient to electioneering purposes.”37 In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries parades and other public performances were an integral part of an increasingly democratic American politics.38
Russian historians have also described the use of a number of cultural forms, including poster art, spectacles, and theater, to rally support to the New Regime in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917.39 Spectacular public festivals in the Bolshevik regime offered an “aesthetic equivalent to the revolution in politics,” a parallel that Lenin himself noted. Influenced by popular carnival theater, the organizers of public festivals in Russia broke down the separation between theatrical performances intended for elite groups and those with a more popular audience.40 These performances also marked the moment of Revolutionary origin. A dramatization of The Storming of the Winter Palace presented on its third anniversary on November 7, 1920, on the site of the original event, Palace Square in Petrograd, utilized festival and theatrics to perform a foundational myth for the Soviet regime. Reflecting Rousseau’s fears of distortion and Debord’s insistence that performances turned appearance into reality, the performance suspended historical recollections of the event, and instead created a new version, “history the way it should have been.” In a staging similar to avant-garde theater, the spectators in Petrograd in 1920 were placed in the middle of the action. The actor playing Alexander Kerensky contributed to this effect by stepping across the proscenium to ride in a car across the square to the entrance of the palace. The play could be performed only on the site of Palace Square and the Winter Palace, which reprised their roles as sets for the revolutionary drama. As James von Geldern notes, this is not theater as ritual, but a theatricalization of life itself,41 similar to what Debord called “the society of spectacle.”
Other scholars have more directly linked public ceremonies to concerns about the effects of modern consumer culture. Maurice Samuels’s analysis of early-nineteenth-century French novels and theater, for example, emphasizes the commodification of spectacle and the “obsession” with the recent past that marked early-nineteenth-century French culture. For Samuels, this is a way in which French culture dealt with the aftermath of the French Revolution of 1789 and its subsequent events.42 The cultural historian Vanessa Schwartz argues “that a culture that became ‘more literate’ also became more visual as word and image generated the spectacular realities” of the late nineteenth century.43 Schwartz links this to Charles Baudelaire’s flâneur, in which “the spectator assumes the position of being able to be part of the spectacle and yet command it at the same time.” The effect of this, she says, was “the collective participation in a culture in which representations proliferated to such an extent that they became interchangeable with reality.”44
While Schwartz describes a position of power for the flâneur, the strongest theme in these varied approaches has been an emphasis on ceremonies and spectacles as instruments of social control, a way in which a dominant state, or consumer capitalism, consolidates support. In the end, then, this emphasizes the mystification of an externalized “reality” about the exercise of power through the use of symbols. But this (Durkheimian or Marxian) approach too narrowly construes the relationship between symbol and politics by creating an artificial distinction between the domains of symbol and politics. The anthropologist Victor Turner argued a generation ago that “every type of cultural performance, including ritual, ceremony, carnival, theater, and poetry, is explanation and explication of life itself.”45 For Turner these performances are metacommentaries, stories a group tells about itself, “an interpretive reenactment of its experience,”46 a means by which both actors and spectators reevaluate the social order, and are transformed in the process.47 At about the same time, Clifford Geertz wrote about the “theater state” of nineteenth-century Bali, emphasizing the “expressive nature of the Balinese state,” and its use of spectacle and ceremony in the dramatization of public issues. The state, in Geertz’s reading of Bali, “was a device for the enactment of mass ritual.” And while he contrasted the “theater state” in Bali, in which ceremonies were the central function of the state, with Western states, in which, he claimed, such ceremonies are peripheral to the exercise of power, he in the end suggested that an emphasis on politics as a “domain of social action” misunderstands the role of ideas. These last are not, he argues, “unobservable mental stuff. They are envehicled meanings” that must be interpreted. “The real,” he concludes, “is as imagined as the imaginary,” and the performances of the state were “neither illusions nor lies, neither sleight of hand nor make-believe. They were what there was.”48 More recently, and more relevant to our concern with democratization, Laurence Whitehead has suggested the use of a dramatic metaphor as a heuristic device for the study of democratic transitions, even while suggesting the importance of theatrical techniques for the success of leaders in the process. Theater thus was no longer a metaphor for Whitehead, but rather a fundamental part of the process of democratic transition as it was led by men such as Nelson Mandela, Václav Havel, and Boris Yeltsin.49
While the concerns of Rousseau and Diderot continue to pervade discussions about theatricality and performance in political culture, the insights of Turner, Geertz, and Whitehead suggest that representations of power actively participate in the creation of meanings about the state, the nation, and the use of power. A modern French political culture influenced by forms of public performance must have had strong implications for the creation of French political institutions and practices and for the twists and turns of that creative process, the narrative of French history that we know. But few sources speak to audience reactions to performances: Victor Hugo’s description of the return of Napoleon’s body in 1840, or Maurice Barrès’s description of the funeral of Hugo in 1885, are famous not only because of the literary renown of their authors, but because they are almost unique as first-person accounts of these huge public events.50
The methods of literary analysis and cultural studies provide an alternative to relying on such anecdotal accounts. Historians, especially French historians, have long recognized the important role that literary figures played in political life, and there have been several recent efforts at increasing the links between historical and literary studies. These have most often emphasized the political roles of literary figures, intellectuals, and performers, as well as the impact of literary forms such as drama or the novel on public opinion.51 Lynn Hunt moved away from this approach in her reading of the “family romance” of the French Revolution, emphasizing the way in which the French “collective political unconscious … was structured by narratives of family relations,” and Judith Walkowitz similarly linked narratives of sexual danger to popular culture in late Victorian England.52 The methodological assumption of this book extends this approach chronologically to emphasize the importance not just of the role of literary figures and institutions acting in their sphere, but also of the circulation of forms of performance and spectacle in the political culture of modern France. By paying attention to the form of public ceremonies and consciously viewing them as theatrical, I suggest, we can understand better their place in French culture and their ability to resonate with the people of France. Literary critics may focus on texts such as poems or novels. But their methods lead us to think more carefully about the ways in which particular