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

and a level, a symbol of equality, hung from the ribbon. Having passed through the symbolic gateway,
the festival participants witnessed an elaborate altar to the patrie. Here the President of the National
Convention, the envoys from the 86 departments, and ordinary Parisians declared their allegiance to the
Constitution of 1793, without knowing that it would never actually be put into effect, suspended in
favor the governance of the Terror.
The festival ended with a memorial to those who had died defending Revolutionary France
against foreign powers that is sometimes called the sixth station, in a circular building with an open top
decorated with a ring of stars. In his final speech, Hérault de Séchelles insisted that the dead heroes had
paved the way for the new constitution, and there fellow citizens would carry on their work.
The picture of the Revolution presented at the Festival of Unity and Indivisibility, which had
cost 1,200,000 livres to create, in many ways did not match up with the reality of the Revolution. In the
summer of 1793, when David was planning the festival, parts of southern France were still under
Federalist control, and in western France the revolutionary army was facing several frustrating defeats.
On 11 August, Robespierre gave a speech admitting that the French army was facing reversals and its
enemies had become more audacious.
In her celebrated monograph Festivals and the French Revolution, Mona Ozouf analyzes the
ways arbitrary choice of place (for example, the women of the October days never actually crossed the
Boulevard Poissonnière), the allegorical character of the arrangements, and the absence of detail about
the events the festival was supposed to represent detached it from the actual chronology and geography
of the revolution. Though the festival organizers evidently took a great interest using the space of Paris
to represent the history of the Revolution, they made idiosyncratic choices in their representations.
Their selection of spaces were not equivalent to the historical events they represented. Ozouf notes that
the procession started at the Bastille, because it was the “obligatory” starting point, but the events of
July 14, 1789 were not discussed, making the location more symbolic than an actual representation of a
historical event. Thus Ozouf calls the opening ceremony of the festival a “dateless baptism of the