Jacques-Louis David and the Festival of Unity ... - Xavier University

trees and shrubs for the occasion to signify the victory of nature. A fountain of a female representation
of Nature, modeled after an Egyptian goddess, who issued water from her breasts, was constructed. The
ceremony began with a cantata whose text was based upon “The Profession of Faith of a Savoyard
Vicar,” the last section of Rousseau’s Émile. Then the president of the National Convention, Marie-Jean
Hérault de Séchelles, took a cup of water from the fountain’s breasts, ceremonially poured some of it
on the ground, and then drank the remainder. The oldest of the representatives of the 86 departments of
France present at the festival drank first after the president, and claimed that fountain’s water
regenerated him. Then the remaining envoys were called to drink in alphabetical order.
The second station took place on the Boulevard Poissonnière and commemorated the women of
October 5 and 6, 1789, who brought the King from Versailles to Paris. A triumphal arch had been
constructed for the occasion, which a certain reporter claimed was greater than similar structures of
antiquity. The president of the Convention presented the women representing these heroines of the
revolution, riding astride cannon, with laurels. In Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution,
Simon Schama points out that “The disturbingly potent image of belligerent poissardes astride their
cannon has been carefully neutralized in conformity with the standard Rousseauean-Jacobin doctrine
on the wife-mother role for women Patriots.” 2 The real women who marched on Versailles were
replaced with “prettified actresses” who were told that their role was to breed and to nurse heroes to
defend liberty. The president of the Convention proclaimed that the laurels presented to the women
were “the emblem of courage and victory,” and said to the women that “you will transmit it to your
children.” 3 Curiously, none of this republican motherhood rhetoric made it into Bouquier and Moline's
literary account of this station of the festival.
The third station took place at the Place de la Révolution where Louis XVI had been executed
earlier that year. Where a statue of the fallen monarch had once stood, there was now a statue
2 Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1990), 749.
3 Quoted in James A. Leith, Space and Revolution: Projects for Monuments, Squares, and Public Buildings in France,
1789-1799 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991), 132.