Festivals

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FESTIVALS

Mack P. Holt

Festival, feast, fête—these are all words that derive from the Latin festum, meaning a celebration or an occasion for celebration, such as a holiday (or holy day). Thus, the history of festivals in the modern West is necessarily linked to eating and drinking, Christianity, work and leisure, and the history of rituals generally. Moreover, the history of festivals in the West from the Renaissance to the present is distinctly diverse. A cornucopia of local, regional, national, and some nearly universal festivals have existed all over Europe since the high Middle Ages. They range in scope from festivals marking rites of passage—births and marriages, for example—to feasts denoting a specific time of the calendar year—the harvest in early autumn and new millennium celebrations being obvious examples—to religious feasts such as Carnival and Easter (with Lent in between), to nationalist festivals—Bastille Day in France being the best known. The experience of European festivals is so diverse that no short summary can possibly be complete. What follows is less a comprehensive survey of European festivals from the Renaissance to the present than an essay that attempts to sketch out some of the major types of festivals and assess how they have changed over time. The principal claim made is that the functions of these festivals evolved and changed between 1500 and 2000. In the late Middle Ages most festivals served many purposes, but one thing they all shared was the ability to build and cement an idea of community. Many, in fact, delineated the boundaries of the community itself: between the sacred and the profane, between insider and outsider, or just between the orthodox and the unorthodox. Even though definitions of community, the sacred, insiderness, and orthodoxy have changed over the centuries, some of these functions have remained. What changed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, was that participation in these festivals evolved from a largely collective and social experience to one much more individual and commercial. That is not to argue that a utopian "world we have lost" has been replaced by less satisfying modern commercialism. Nor is it suggested that community and capitalism are mutually exclusive. Changes over time do help us better understand ourselves, however, as a closer look at several specific examples of these changes will make clear.

CARNIVAL

The word carnival comes from carne, meaning flesh. And as the etymology of this word in most Latin-based languages indicates, this means animal flesh, or meat, as well as human flesh. Thus Carnival has always been associated with the consumption of flesh as well as the carnal sins of the flesh—gluttony and lechery—two of the seven deadly sins for Christians in the late Middle Ages. It may seem a genuine irony, then, that Carnival's entire raison d'être was its link to Lent and the feast day of Easter itself, that link being the purification and satisfaction of sin through the sacrament of penance. Usually in the form of a three- to six-day period of feasting culminating in Shrove Tuesday (Mardi Gras, Fastnacht, and so on), Carnival preceded the beginning of Lent in the liturgical calendar, which always falls on Ash Wednesday. Thus Carnival was a festival of the flesh that marked the transition from a carnal period of behavior to a penitential regime of abstinence from flesh altogether during Lent—both from meat and from sex, even between husbands and wives. The Lenten season lasted from Ash Wednesday until Easter Sunday, the single most important feast day on the liturgical calendar, where the consumption of flesh was resumed once again, traditionally in the form of the paschal lamb. Carnival was the first half of an inseparable duality, of which the other half was Lent. Carnival was a period of feasting, meaning shops were supposed to be closed, with leisure replacing work, while Lent was a period of fasting and purification. The whole was designed as a means of preparing the sinner, via confession and penance on the one hand and abstinence of flesh on the other, for the holiest feast of all, the consumption of Christ's own flesh in the sacrament of the Eucharist on Easter Sunday.

But why did clerical and political authorities condone such explicit gluttony and lechery during Carnival? How could such deadly sins be a precursor to, much less a vital part of, preparation for the sacred experience of the mass? The answer does not lie in the "safety-valve theory" proposed by some social anthropologists, whereby ecclesiastical and secular authorities allowed the masses to let off a little steam for a few days once a year to keep the lid on the boiling cauldron of social tensions that were inevitable in a hierarchical society. By letting the laity turn their world upside down during Carnival, so the theory goes—allowing gender roles, social roles, and even political roles to be reversed, with men dressing as women and peasants dressing as kings—the world would remain more or less right side up the rest of the liturgical year. While this argument may doubtless contain an element of truth, it does not explain why premodern authorities seemed to condone, or at least turn a blind eye to, behavior and comportment that would have profaned the sacred any other time of the year. A much better explanation is depicted in Pieter Brueghel's painting The Fight between Carnival and Lent. On the left side a fat and corpulent peasant is mounted astride a beer barrel, with a roasting spit for a lance on which a pig's head is skewered. On the ground beside him are playing cards, dice, and other things associated with gambling, while his assistants offer him jugs of wine, beer steins, and a grill for roasting meat. This "carnal knight" is engaged in battle with his opposite, an emaciated cleric sitting in a chair pulled by two women. His lance is a long oven paddle on which are two fish, the only allowable flesh during Lent. Beside him are the loaves, pancakes, and pretzels that made up the rest of the Lenten diet. The point of this image is not just that Carnival and Lent were polar opposites and in competition with each other, but that they were engaged in as part of a common process of penitential satisfaction of sin. The object of the feasting of Carnival was to emphasize and bring to light the entire corpus of sin from the previous year, so that it could then be eviscerated and ultimately confessed and satisfied during Lent itself. This dialectical relationship between carnival and Lent was perhaps best depicted in Rabelais's fictitious king of the Carnival, Quaresmeprenant, whose very name indicates the symbiotic relationship between the two (carême-prenant is the French name for this pre-Lenten period). Rabelais's writings are full of references to Carnival, and many writers, above all Mikhail Bakhtin, have been misled into believing that Carnival's origins lay rooted in folklore and popular culture instead of in the penitential season of Lent.

This was a festival of carnality. It was usually symbolized by some kind of stock carnival figure or effigy, traditionally the figure of a fat man, which was paraded around during a feast and ceremoniously burned at the end of it. Gluttony was the order of the day, and lots of meat, especially from fat animals such as pigs or boars, was consumed with relish, washed down by large quantities of beer in northern Europe and wine in the south. There was also a considerable amount of sexual display and insult involved. Brothels, protected and even run by local officials in many municipalities throughout Europe before the Reformation, were obviously in much demand during Carnival. And overtly sexual symbols and metaphors were explicitly displayed in many of the festivities, from the huge, fat sausage that was carried through the streets in Königsberg and the even more graphic phallus that was paraded through the streets of Naples, to the more common sexual icons of cocks and bears. For this short period sexual propriety seemed to be suspended, as passions that were supposed to be tightly reined during the rest of the year became unbridled.

Carnival was also a period when other passions were unleashed: insult, envy, and anger among them. Fistfights were common everywhere and even ritualized in some places, such as Venice, where young men carried out their territorial and familial struggles under the guise of ritual. That violence might be the natural by-product of a world turned upside down should not be too surprising, and its ubiquity is yet another strike against the safety-valve theory. If women were temporarily allowed to fulfill the roles of men—to be "on top," to use Natalie Davis's wonderful phrase—or if peasants were allowed to play the role of kings, this might help eliminate enough steam in the social boiler to keep the entire structure from exploding. On the other hand, turning the world upside down might, by allowing violence and displaying alternatives, threaten the very social order the process was supposed to protect. The riot and massacre that broke out in the French town of Romans in Dauphiné during Carnival in 1580 may be the best known, thanks to Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, but there were plenty of other such violent incidents that grew out of Carnival in Naples, Switzerland, Corsica, and elsewhere to suggest that this was far from an isolated episode. It is thus largely irrelevant to argue whether the function of Carnival was to reinforce the social order (the safety-valve theory) or to undermine it: it could do both.

The chronology and geography of Carnival are also instructive. Despite the claims of many scholars, Carnival does not appear to be an ancient pagan rite that was appropriated by Christianity for its own purposes (as was the case with so many Christian rituals). In fact, there is little evidence of Carnival anywhere in Europe before the twelfth century. So it appears to be entirely a medieval and Christian phenomenon. Nor was Carnival practiced uniformly throughout Europe. Most of the features described above were largely restricted to southern Europe: almost the entire Mediterranean region including Spain, Italy, and the islands, as well as most of France, Austria, Switzerland, and much of Germany. In northwestern Europe—Brittany and other parts of northern France, the British Isles, most of the Low Countries, parts of northern Germany, and all of Scandinavia—the festivities of Carnival were limited to little more than the ritual eating of pancakes on Shrove Tuesday. There might have been regular Shrove Tuesday football match accompanied by some Morris dancers and other festivities here and there, but in essence, the carnality was largely missing. So how is the geography of Carnival to be explained?

John Bossy is surely right to stress that the answer lies in Carnival's foundation in and links to the sacrament of penance. The Roman liturgy of the sacrament was a largely collective and entirely public affair. Christians were required to confess their sins, as well as satisfy them before God through an act of penance, before they could participate in the Eucharist on Easter Sunday. The confession was a public one, as the sinner openly confessed his sins to the priest and to God; although he or she was not specifically addressing the other parishioners present, they obviously were able to hear what was going on. Then the priest would place his hands on the head of the penitent as a public sign of reconciliation to God and his neighbor. The act of penance to be performed afterward varied widely, but it was also intended as a public sign of contrition and reconciliation. This often took the form of public penitential processions, as large numbers of penitents collectively sought to expiate their sins through the ritual of parading through the streets of their town or village. In short, in the Roman liturgy penance was a social sacrament whose function was not only preparation for the Eucharist, but also the reconciliation of everyone in the community to each other as well as to God. It is evident, however, that the Roman liturgy's hold on the laity was not so secure the farther one ventured from Rome. Indeed, by the high Middle Ages it had already disappeared in many parts of northern Europe, and in others it had never been established at all, as local liturgies were introduced from the beginning. In most of northern Europe confession and penance had never been so public and collective as in the south. Given the communal and collective nature of Carnival itself, it is not a surprise that it tended not to catch on in most of northern Europe. Carnival was hardly resistant to exportation to foreign cultures, however, as its adoption by many Jews and Orthodox Christians makes clear. Nevertheless, it does appear that the geography of Carnival is tied to the history of penance.

Reform attacks on Carnival. That geography was seriously threatened, however, by the reformations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Protestant as well as Catholic. Luther, Calvin, and most other Protestant reformers, by accepting Erasmus's revised translation of Matthew 4:17, rejected penance as a sacrament altogether, and it is thus no surprise that the carnality of Carnival became a prime target of their anti-Catholic attacks. Perhaps more surprising is how quickly many Catholic reformers also came to attack Carnival. Again, the link with the sacrament of penance is instructive, as both Protestant and Catholic reformers alike sought to transform a collective and social ritual into an individual and private practice. The innovator on the Catholic side was Carlo Borromeo, archbishop of Milan. Borromeo's bright idea was the invention of the confessional box in 1565, which quickly put to rest the social aspects of the sacrament. With confessions no longer made in public, and with a barrier between priest and penitent to prevent the laying on of hands, the function of reconciliation to the community soon took a backseat to reconciliation with God. And with the sacrament of penance shorn of its communal and public face, there was not much point left in celebrating Carnival, especially as it invoked so many sins of the flesh.

The Catholic Church's rejection of Carnival was just one thread in a much broader tapestry of social and moral reform that arose out of the Catholic Reformation in general and the Council of Trent in particular. Like the much vaunted "reformation of manners" so associated with the Puritans and other Protestants, Catholic post-Tridentine piety had as its ultimate goal the reestablishment of the kingdom of Christ on earth through a stricter policing of moral discipline. Although Calvin's Geneva may be more closely associated with moral discipline in the public eye than Counter-Reformation Catholicism, it is nevertheless true that Borromeo's program in Milan was just as great a source of Reformation discipline as anything conjured up by the Protestants. Indeed, this was one of the principal goals shared by all reformers, Protestants and Catholics alike, which, despite their theological differences, made them allies in a war against the common enemy of carnality. And when both churches as well as the state nearly everywhere in Europe began to mount serious anti-Carnival campaigns, it is no surprise that in the long run they were successful. By the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, in fact, Carnival was just a shadow of its former medieval self in the cities and urban areas, even in southern Europe. Although resistance was far stronger in the rural countryside, where the reach of church and state was less secure, it is nevertheless clear that the Protestant and Catholic Reformations had a significant impact on the practice of Carnival by 1700. Although the festival continued to exist, it was largely shorn of much of its carnal and virtually all its penitential functions.

By the late eighteenth century in Paris, for example, the rituals were already becoming more commercialized. For the elite, more conscious than ever of distinguishing themselves from the masses, there were a number of privately organized masked balls and banquets, above all the famous ball held every year at the Paris Opera. For the popular classes, there were also more restrained public masked balls, and food and drink tended to be available in great quantities outside the city walls, where taxes were lower. There were also processions of artisans' guilds, the most prominent of which was that of the butchers, who paraded a fat ox—le boeuf gras—through the streets of Paris nearly every year until 1870, the only interruption being the years of the Revolution (1790–1800). Although this is clearly evidence that flesh had not disappeared entirely from Carnival, brothels and other overt signs of sexuality were largely absent. Moreover, during the years of the Second Empire (1851–1869) Napoleon III clamped down on the celebrations even further by attempting to curtail street masking. The masked balls declined as a result, including the Opera ball, and as the suburbs were brought into the city limits, even the excesses of food and drink were no longer available. In the years after 1870 Carnival became less a social and even more a commercial enterprise. In Paris, as in many other European cities, large department stores and other commercial institutions tried to revive the festival. About all that they could sustain, however, were a few parades, as popular participation declined precipitously. By 1900 little remained of Mardi Gras in Paris except for a parade and a few neighborhood balls. The day of Mardi Gras itself was no longer either a feast day recognized by the church or a holiday recognized by the state. What had once been perhaps the single most anticipated festival in the entire calendar, with members of all social classes looking forward to its excesses, had become by the twentieth century just another workday.

To suggest that Carnival had disappeared from Europe completely is not entirely true, however, as it was revived in the New World in the late nineteenth century at the very moment it was waning in the Old. This epilogue demonstrates that Carnival could survive in the twentieth century only as a commercial venture. Both the American and Brazilian reincarnations of the festival—in New Orleans and Rio de Janeiro respectively—depend on tourism to survive, and both show how far individualism and commercialism have replaced community as the focus. In New Orleans it was local social clubs, known as krewes, that in the 1870s created Mardi Gras by holding their own balls and parading through the French Quarter on Shrove Tuesday. While many of these clubs remain exclusive and parochial even at the beginning of the twenty-first century (the anti-Black and anti-Semitic elements of some of these clubs is well known), some such as the Rex krewe started selling tickets to tourists and other outsiders as early as 1872. Already by 1900 more than 100,000 tourists were flocking to New Orleans every February. The Hermes and Bacchus krewes, founded in 1937 and 1969 respectively, were devoted to tourism from the beginning and now work with the New Orleans Chamber of Commerce, bringing in nearly half a million visitors at Carnival time. The city's own tourist bureau estimates that by the 1970s the two weeks leading up to Mardi Gras generated more than fifty million dollars annually in tourist revenues, roughly 10 percent of all revenues brought into the city by visitors each year. And if added to that are another twenty-five million dollars each year in locally generated revenue in preparation for the event, it is clear that the city of New Orleans, as well as the state of Louisiana, has come to rely on the celebration of Carnival in its own form of Mardi Gras as a major source of revenue. To be sure, this modern form of American Carnival may contain many more carnal elements—prostitutes and le boeuf gras are still very visible in New Orleans—and rites of inversion than its European counterparts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but it is now entirely a commercial spectacle. And the carnality is for sale year-round in New Orleans, not just during Mardi Gras.

The Brazilian Carnival in Rio de Janeiro has its own narrative, but one that moves in a similar direction. It too was transformed into a commercial enterprise via tourism, and as with Mardi Gras in New Orleans, Carnival in Rio began and is still structured around social clubs that hold balls and parades. Unlike the krewes in New Orleans, however, the samba schools in Brazil are less exclusive and less exclusively upper and middle class. Whereas in New Orleans the black population was traditionally excluded from Mardi Gras and forced to hold its own parades in the black quarters of the city, in Rio there has always been a more inclusive and communal atmosphere at Carnival. Nevertheless, the parades of the samba schools, like the parades of the krewes in New Orleans, have now become dominated by commercialism, each vying to outspend and outdo the others. As in New Orleans, the tourist industry is what drives as well as funds most of this activity in Rio. The major difference in Rio is its geography. Being in the southern hemisphere means that Carnival in Rio contains none of the elements associated with the end of winter and beginning of spring as in Europe; it is the end of the summer in Brazil, and the beach in Rio has proven to be just as commercially viable a site for Carnival as Bourbon Street in New Orleans. And for its participants in both hemispheres today, any association with penitence and preparation for Lent has long since disappeared; Carnival is now in the business of entertainment.

NEW YEAR

Celebrating the end of one year and the beginning of another, unlike Carnival, goes back to the pre-Christian era of the earliest societies. What constituted a year, however, varied widely from one society to the next, though most did eventually coalesce around a model that fit into the changing seasons of the harvest year. It was the Romans who first moved the West onto an exclusively solar calendar. The early Roman calendars were lunar calendars, basing the length of the year (354 days) on the cycles of the moon. In 46 b.c.e. Julius Caesar mandated that the Romans switch to a solar calendar of 365¼ days, with an extra day added every fourth year. The Romans marked the end of one year at the end of December and the beginning of another starting in January with a special festival and celebration.

When Christianity finally became the official Roman religion after the conversion of Constantine in the early fourth century, the Church did not entirely replace the Julian calendar with a new one of its own. Instead, it appropriated the old calendar and many of its festivals, replacing Roman festivals with Christian festivals. The Church did alter the numbering of the years—making the year one that of the year of the birth of Christ, as opposed to the year of the founding of the Roman Republic—and also altered the beginning of the year, changing it from January 1 to Easter Sunday. The celebration of the new year was transformed in the early fourth century at the Council of Nicaea in 325, when Easter itself was fixed to the cycle of the moon: the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox (that is, no earlier than March 22 and no later than April 25). Thus, from 325 the festival celebrating the New Year was the same day as the festival celebrating the birth of Christ. And because the preceding evening was still during Lent—a fast day instead of a feast day—New Year's Eve clearly did not mean much to premodern sensibilities.

The impetus for a more secular celebration of the New Year came in the sixteenth century, and as with Carnival, the Protestant and Catholic Reformations played a role. First, several states—France, for example, in 1564—decided unilaterally to switch the beginning of the year back to the Roman date of January 1. This had less to do with any desire to secularize New Year celebrations than the fact that with New Year's Day not being fixed, virtually every year had a different number of days, which was already causing problems in contracts, leases, and rents that normally lasted for the duration of a calendar year. It was the shift away from the Lenten season that ultimately provided New Year celebrations with a more secular focus. Although the modern idea of champagne and New Year's Eve parties is a much more recent invention—champagne did not even exist until the late seventeenth century, when it was allegedly invented accidentally by a French monk, Dom Pérignon—it was not too much of a leap for Europeans in the eighteenth century to revive the older Roman pagan rituals of feasting to celebrate the New Year, usually on New Year's Day itself. There were few public rituals or celebrations of note until much later, but Europeans everywhere generally celebrated the New Year with family and friends, exchanging greetings and wishes of good fortune and prosperity for the coming year. Good luck rituals varied from one part of Europe to the next. In Austria and Hungary, for example, pigs were believed to bring good fortune and live pigs were often let loose in the streets of Vienna and Budapest. In other places the eating of certain foods at the New Year was believed to bring good luck throughout the rest of the year—from special New Year's cakes, ales, or other delicacies, to more traditional meats, fish, and vegetables. The emphasis everywhere was on sharing food, drink, and greetings and good wishes with family and friends.

The New Year's Eve gatherings we know today are much more modern. New Year's Day was St. Sylvester's Day in the Roman church (and St. Basil's Day in the Orthodox church in much of eastern Europe) and a special mass or celebration marking the eve of St. Sylvester still survives in many places. For most, however, the idea of gathering in public crowds for a collective and entirely secular celebration of the New Year—whether in Trafalgar Square in London, the Champs Élysées in Paris, the Ringstrasse in Vienna, the Puerta del Sol in Madrid, or St. Mark's Square in Venice—did not really begin until the end of the nineteenth century. This escalated in special years marking the end of centuries, and New Year's Eve in 1899 saw a significant increase in the festivities. With the end of the millennium in 1999, commercialism came to dominate the celebrations, as every hotel, restaurant, resort, and tourist attraction competed with one another for the vast sums that were shelled out by a population with more money to spend on entertainment. While pedants pointed out that the real millennium would not begin until 1 January 2001, it was nevertheless clear that Europeans could accept the cultural construction of their calendar. What mattered most was that the festivities still had meaning for many that were bound up in building communities of friends and family. The survival of such traditional practices as Hogmanay in Scotland—gifts for small children—or the same country's celebration of the first guest to cross the hearth after the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve with a convivial drink, for example, demonstrate how many rituals have survived the advent of commercialism.

Indeed, some of the commercial practices associated with contemporary celebrations of the New Year are not only based on much older and more traditional practices, but have sustained them and guaranteed their survival. The sending of special New Year's greeting cards, ubiquitous nearly everywhere in Europe apart from the British Isles (and the United States), where greeting cards are sent to friends and family at Christmas, is one such example. Obviously, it was not until the greeting card industry arose in the late nineteenth century that specially printed greeting cards emerged as a means of wishing someone a prosperous New Year. These cards became immediately popular. The custom was based, however, on the much older custom of exchanging greetings and wishes of prosperity in person or via a handwritten note or letter. And while many Europeans today might question whether a printed greeting card at New Year is as personal or as meaningful an expression as a handwritten note, it is nevertheless true that these cards continue to maintain ties of community and sociability in their own way. The same can be said of many of the other ways contemporary Europeans celebrate the New Year. Even though wine merchants might make up to a quarter of their annual profits from champagne sales at New Year, and while hoteliers and restaurateurs may do likewise, it seems clear that these annual celebration—even the overly hyped millennium celebrations of 31 December 1999—are almost never just individualist expressions of conspicuous consumption. They are almost always observed collectively with friends and family, and even the most commercially explicit of them usually take note of the actual passing of the old year and the beginning of the new year at midnight. And it is this passing of the year, the continual and perpetual clicking over of the calendar, however the calendar year is measured, that ties us to all our ancestors and renders us human. In this sense, the celebrations of the New Year have always been festivals of life and the continuity of humanity: ringing out the old and ringing in the new.

BASTILLE DAY: JULY 14

Festivals marking nationalist holidays are a relatively recent phenomenon. Until there were nation-states, as opposed to dynastic states, fully supported by the nationalist movements of the nineteenth century, there were no holidays invoking the beginning or creation of a particular nation. One of the first of these new nation-states was France, which was transformed by the French Revolution of 1789–1799 from a dynastic monarchy to a republic. But which particular event of this transformation should be celebrated as the national holiday? The storming of the Bastille (14 July 1789)? The Tennis Court Oath (20 June 1789)? The renunciation of privileges by the nobility and clergy (4 August 1789)? The opening of the first representative assembly (1 October 1791)? The overthrow of the monarchy (10 August 1792)? The beheading of Louis XVI (21 January 1793)? In fact, it was not until nearly a century later, in 1880, that 14 July, was decreed to be the national holiday of France: the date of the capture by a Paris crowd of the Bastille, an old fortress used as a municipal jail that held only a handful of insignificant prisoners. The choice of date itself was a highly politicized one in 1880, as politicians of the Third Republic from both the left and the right sought to use the national holiday as a symbol to confirm their own narratives of the Revolution itself. July 14 was a compromise that privileged neither the Orleanists and Bonapartists on the right nor the militant radicals and heirs of the Jacobins on the left. In 1880 and for a good time thereafter, the national holiday of France and the ways it was celebrated were fraught with political baggage that truly imbued it with a sense of the tensions inherent in the construction of a nation.

The first such celebration of Bastille Day, as it is now commonly known, occurred during the Revolution itself, and indeed, as Mona Ozouf has amply demonstrated, it was part of the Revolution. Kings had used rituals and festivals for political purposes for centuries, usually in an attempt to reinforce their power and authority, so it was only natural that the revolutionaries should do the same. The Festival of Federation in Paris on 14 July 1790 looked back not so much to the humble events of the year before, but ahead to the revolution still to come. It embodied an exhilarating sense of newness and beginning, at the same time functioning as a means of forging a new community of citizens. The long military parade of troops, including retired veterans as well as young children, formed a major part of the festivities and is still part of Bastille Day rituals. The revolutionaries also took an oath of allegiance and then celebrated with a special meal together to cement their ties of community. What is particularly striking about this commemoration of the events of one year earlier is that it was duplicated in thousands of small towns and villages all over France, with explicit efforts to time the parades, oaths, and celebratory dinners in the provinces to occur simultaneously with their counterparts in the capital. Again, the emphasis was on the togetherness, unity, and cohesion of the body social. The seizure of the Bastille the year before was seen as a sharp break with the past, a watershed that marked a new future of French men and women as citizens rather than royal subjects. And even if the Revolution as it unfolded could not ultimately deliver all that was promised and implied in the Festival of Federation in July 1790, it marked the beginning of a long series of festivals that ultimately came to shape the revolutionary regime: the Festival of Reason (10 November 1793), the Festival of the Supreme Being (8 June 1794), the Festival of Victories (29 May 1796), and the Festival of Liberty (29 July 1798) being only the best known. Like the revolutionary calendar invented by the revolutionaries to replace the Gregorian calendar—renaming the months after the seasons and renumbering the years with the revolutionary Year I marking the abolition of the monarchy and declaration of France as a republic by the Convention in September 1792—the festivals of the French Revolution played a vital political and social role in cementing the break with the Old Regime's values of hierarchy and distinction and helping to forge a new sense of nation around the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity. That it took nearly a century to create a national holiday out of Bastille Day only indicates the ambiguities and tensions that remained within the new republic in France as well as the political struggles over how the history of the revolution would be told.

The political battles before 1880, however, were only a foretaste of what was to come. For about a decade thereafter the supporters of the new national holiday continued to use it to forge a sense of nation for the many rural provinces that had remained largely untouched by either industrialization or the republican state. Those on the left also used the national holiday as a means of fighting some of their own political battles, especially the creation of secular public schools, which had political and religious as well as educational implications, since the Catholic Church had been a staunch opponent of the Revolution since 1789, as well as an outspoken critic of the Third Republic in France. For those on the right the celebration of the new national holiday after 1880 was something entirely different. For them 14 July 1789 was just the prelude to the Terror, and the Revolution as a whole was seen as something destructive that broke down the proper and divinely ordained political and social order of the Old Regime. They mounted a frenzied but ultimately unsuccessful effort to establish 28 June 1689 (the date when a seventeenth-century nun had a vision of the Sacred Heart) as a replacement for 14 July 1789. For many Catholics 1889 marked not the centennial of the detested Revolution, but the bicentennial of the miracle of 1689.

The centennial celebrations of 14 July 1889, however, proved to be a total defeat for the right. The government of the French Third Republic mounted the Universal Exposition in Paris to mark the hundredth anniversary of Bastille Day. And they commissioned a new Paris landmark to replace that symbol of the Old Regime, the Bastille, which had long since been torn down. Although it was immediately denounced by many on the right as modernism gone amok, the Eiffel Tower stood in the minds of its creators as a stark contrast with the former Bastille: one a symbol of the medieval world of superstition and despotism, the other a modern symbol of reason and progress. The events of 14 July 1889 mirrored those of 14 July 1790 all across France: military parades, special meals, followed by public dances and balls in village and town squares throughout the republic. It was clear that the national holiday quickly had become not only public, but also a popular holiday. As long as a republican government remained in power—and the Third Republic lasted until it was replaced in 1940 by the Vichy regime—this would remain the case. While extremists on both sides of the political spectrum would continue to propagate criticisms of the government through attacks on Bastille Day and even some demonstrations against the festivities on 14 July, these never amounted to much.

Celebrations were interrupted during World War II, and the first celebration of Bastille Day in six years on 14 July 1945 was very poignant. On the one hand, it was a celebration of freedom and liberty from occupation, with all parties more or less able to celebrate French liberty. On the other hand, it marked a political struggle between the supporters of General Charles de Gaulle, who had led the Free French government in exile during the war, and the communists and socialists. De Gaulle wanted 14 July to commemorate more a national than a republican holiday, reflecting a mythical and almost eternal France fighting against oppression, symbolized by Joan of Arc, Henry IV, Napoleon, Clemenceau, and de Gaulle himself. And while he managed to dominate electoral politics in France for more than two decades after the war, de Gaulle ultimately lost out in his effort to transform the national holiday into something else. The festivities of 1945 repeated all the rituals as they had been before the war, and there were no monuments to Joan of Arc or Napoleon, a sign that France had returned to normalcy despite nearly six years of foreign occupation.

The old political struggles between left and right were not totally eliminated, however, as the bicentennial of the French Revolution in July 1989 made clear. The political tensions were exacerbated by the fact that the new president of the republic, the socialist François Mitterand, had just soundly defeated one of the leaders of the right, Jacques Chirac, the mayor of Paris. As the celebrations of the bicentennial were destined to focus on Paris, despite the traditional provincial celebrations, the battleground loomed large as both Mitterand and Chirac sought to outdo—and outspend—each other on a commercial celebration of the bicentennial. What worked against and ultimately overshadowed this political rivalry between left and right was the crushing of the Chinese student demonstrations in Tiananmen Square by the Chinese government in May 1989. The events in China had a dramatic effect on the celebrations in Paris two months later. First, Chirac's effort to bring some attention to the city of Paris (that is, to his own municipal government in the capital) and to take away some of the attention inevitably showered on the federal government and President Mitterand fell completely flat. Although he was a solid republican, unlike some on the far right, Chirac's idea was to mark the hundredth anniversary of the Eiffel Tower in June rather than to commemorate the Revolution itself. The resulting spectacle and light show, in which no expense was spared, was both a critical and popular failure. The aging rock stars hired to evoke a sense of Parisian destiny—Johnny Halliday and Stevie Wonder among them—did not help matters. For his part, President Mitterand felt obliged to invite some of the Chinese students to participate in the grand parade scheduled to march down the Champs Élysées in Paris on the evening of July 14, and they completely stole the show. In the end, it did not matter, as the Chinese student presence only reinforced the notion that the French Revolution was a universal revolution, fought for all humanity rather than just for France. The millions of francs spent on the events were of course another sign that commercialism had played a big role, as was the case in most modern festivals. But despite all that, a sense of French nation was spelled out in stark relief by the festivities of July 1989, a nation to which both Chirac and Mitterand, as well as their respective supporters, could claim to belong. If anything, the nation had grown to be too inclusive for a few. The National Front Party used the celebrations to demonstrate against the foreigners living in France, and on the morning of 14 July the citizens of Dijon in Burgundy, a region dominated by the right, woke up to find storefronts and shop windows littered with the graffiti "Bisangtennaire," an allusion to the bloody violence of the Revolution that was being celebrated throughout France. For most French men and women, however, their national holiday has remained much more a holiday than a paean to the nation.

CONCLUSION

There is no question that the festival tradition declined in Europe; the forces of industrialization, in particular, added to earlier reform attacks. In early modern Europe (depending on the religion prevalent in an area) festival days could total eighty or more per year, although specific calendars varied from locality to locality. Reform attacks dented the tradition, although even Protestant Britain saw efforts at revival as late as the eighteenth century. With nineteenth-century industrialization, employers and public authorities attempted to institute further discipline. Festivals cost working time, they assembled potentially menacing crowds, and they inspired a spontaneity that was itself suspect. Urbanization reduced community familiarity, another pillar in the festival tradition. Many festivals shrank in importance, and in the long run the rise of private leisure, including vacations, replaced some of their functions. Important festivals remained, however, including new ones associated with political identity. In Eastern Europe, these included great twentieth-century communist innovations such as May Day. In western Europe, changes in the character of festivals particularly highlighted the growth of commercialization.

Some festivals naturally illustrate the transition from a ritual of sacred community to secularism and commercialism better than others. Perhaps the best example of all is Christmas, the Christian festival celebrating the birth of Christ. Protestants and Catholics alike in the sixteenth century had railed against the pagan practices that had become part of the Christmas celebrations since the Middle Ages: Yule logs, evergreen trees decorated with candles, and decking the halls with holly and ivy had always been part of the ancient festival of light at the celebration marking the winter solstice. Even the date of Christmas was chosen to coincide with these pagan rituals, as no one knew the actual date of Christ's birth. Puritans in seventeenth-century England had attempted to outlaw all such pagan practices during their brief moment in power in the 1650s—to no avail. The fact is that Christmas was never a major Christian holiday before the nineteenth century and had always been far overshadowed by Easter. In the nineteenth century in Great Britain a fortuitous series of events not only resurrected the celebration of Christmas, but proceeded to turn it into the commercial excess it has now become. A combination of attempts by several large London department stores to stir up sales in the bleakness of mid-winter, combined with the commercial and popular success of Charles Dickens's novel A Christmas Carol, resulted in a series of new rituals that were cloaked in the guise of Christian celebration, but that were above all else a bastion of conspicuous consumption. The invention of Santa Claus, or Father Christmas as he is called in some countries, shows how a relatively obscure medieval Christian saint could be transformed into a jolly old man in a red suit who brought presents to all young children on Christmas Eve (Santa Claus being the Germanic form of Saint Nicolas). Prior to this Victorian invention in nineteenth-century England, the practice of exchanging gifts and greeting cards was not generally associated with Christmas at all. And by 1900 a cohort of commercial institutions proudly displaying their own Santa Clauses helped to fuel the market for gift giving that only exacerbated this transition further. By the end of the twentieth century Christmas had become a season rather than a single day of festivities. And with up to a third of all retail sales for the year coming in the Christmas season, it was primarily a season of shopping. Despite the best efforts of Christian churches everywhere across Europe to stem the tide, it was already a battle lost.

Other festivals, such as the Feast of St. John (24 June), have achieved more mixed results. Just as Christmas was assigned a day on the Christian calendar to coincide with the pagan celebration of the winter solstice, the Feast of St. John the Baptist was assigned to coincide with the summer solstice, or midsummer's eve, celebrations. Bonfires have been lit on the eve of St. John's Day since the Middle Ages in towns and villages across Europe. And while modern fireworks have replaced the bonfires in many places, the rituals of these festivities follow a traditional and well-worn path. To be sure, the bonfires are no longer believed to be purifying agents that function to ward off evil spirits as they did in their ancient beginnings, but neither do they have much explicit connection with the Feast of St. John the Baptist. Although no one could claim that this festival has become commercialized, it is now just entertainment and has been shorn of its religious roots.

There are a host of other festivals that could be cited to demonstrate how the ways that Europeans have celebrated important events with feasts and other celebrations have changed over time since the Renaissance. What seems clear, however, is that rituals of feasting and the celebration of holidays of some kind are as much a part of human society as any other aspect of life. That the events that Europeans celebrate and how they have chosen to celebrate them have changed over the last five centuries is hardly a revelation. What is significant is that festivals continue to matter in a variety of ways. That the control of Carnival or of Bastille Day, for example, has been so hotly contested only underscores the continued significance of these rituals. And that many of them have become commercialized almost to excess does not alter the fact that they still function in a variety of ways to delineate boundaries of the community and to promote a sense of connection to the human past. In an information age of the instant and immediate, this matters. Moreover, while contemporary festivals may seem more oriented toward commercial entertainment and leisure than those in the premodern world, they nevertheless maintain the capacity to tell us much about who we are and how the world we live in got to be the way it is.

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