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

which it described as torrents. David’s statue of Hercules at the fourth station contrasted the French
people, atop a emerging from its miry swamp,” who “with one hand pushing apart the reeds, tries with
the other to untie a portion of [the fasces]; the French people catches sight of it, takes a club, hits it, and
makes it return to its stagnant water, to never appear again.” 8
David’s report to the convention stipulated that after the last station a “frugal banquet” would be
held and “finally, there will be constructed a vast theater where the principle events of our revolution
will be represented in pantomime.” 9 This theater was never constructed, but the Festival of Unity and
Indivisibility provided material for numerous topical plays, including this one. The Meeting of August
10 th is part of a larger revival of theater. Compared to a handful of plays written before the Revolution,
between 1789 and 1799, more than 1,500 plays, many of them topical, were written. Between 1792 and
1794 alone, over 750 were staged. We do not know how popular this particular play was among such
competition, or how it was received. In contrast with the Festival of Unity and Indivisibility, the
Convention declared that the Festival of the Supreme Being was unrepresentable, and therefore it was
illegal to reenacted it, and playwrights were asked not to represent it on stage. Why was this play,
written by Gabriel Bouquier, a member of the National Convention, and others like it, evidently
approved of, but representations of the Festival of the Supreme Being were not?
8 Wildenstein and Wildenstein, Documents, 54.
9 Ibid., 54.