Relics of a revolution

I am in a Paris museum looking at thick bronze plates full of crushed parchment. The bronze is an engraved “Declaration Of The Rights of Man And Of The Citizen” from 1789 and the paper, a copy of the 1791 new French constitution. They had been placed on top of each other, according to the museum label, and “broken by the national pile driver on May 5th 1793.” Two idealistic texts smashed by a machine essential for creating the foundations of new buildings and bridges; it’s an apt image of how revolutions break societies, and go on to break them again and again into new pieces and forms.

It was four years after the storming of the Bastille that the new revolutionary government really established the framework for the Republic. The crushed 1791 Constitution was one of 250 objects in an exhibition about Paris in 1793-4 at the Carnavalet Museum.

Far from the simplistic tearing up of the old and bringing in of the new, the exhibition revealed a year that was marked by a new utopian confidence, but also by the start of the Reign of Terror. As crowds of visitors elsewhere in Paris thronged to marvel at the restored Notre Dame Cathedral, I gazed at one of the 28 original statues of kings that once adorned its façade. All 28 were removed and many mutilated as part of the cleansing of monarchical symbols after the Revolution.

It wasn’t all destruction, of course. Creating a Republican culture from scratch was exciting. The new France replaced up to 800 different sets of weights and measures, with a clear metric and decimal system which has endured and been taken up around the world. But there was also a new decimal calendar with a 10-hour day, 10-day weeks, and months named things like Thermidor and Germinal which didn’t.

There is something both joyous about remaking a whole nation’s image of itself, and occasionally ludicrous. Considering how much was destroyed by revolutionary fervour, the exhibition showed that a surprising amount of ephemera has survived. A citizen’s worn, faded Phrygian cap; residency permits given to tradespeople as they moved to Paris to start a new life; new alphabet books and curriculum texts created as a national education system was launched for the first time.

I was struck by how much paper art survives, notably a huge number of illustrations by the artist Jacques-Louis David, who was tasked with designing classical-inspired costumes of state for the new elected deputies, and noble dress for citizens themselves, featuring tricoloured fringed sashes. He designed a new Feast of the Supreme Being, first celebrated on 8 June in 1794, with a grand bonfire and elaborate costumes, offering a new civil religion with a “natural” god.

David is better known, of course, for his dramatic painting of the death of his friend, the revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat, stabbed in his bath in 1793 by the female assassin Charlotte Corday. Already the revolution was turning on itself, and the speed of its fragmentation offers some surprising parallels with today’s unhinged political fury, violent protest and polarisation.

Rival factional leaders attacked each other by printed poster, the way that the likes of Elon Musk, celebrities and party leaders do today in the “public square” of social media platforms. Wealthy or influential prisoners would find a way to get hundreds printed and posted around the city. Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, the aristocratic author of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, penned one in August 1793 “To his fellow citizens” answering each accusation laid against him one by one. He was facing the guillotine, but such was the impact of his arguments that he was released the day after the posters went up.

As the violence of the republicans increased, conspiracy theories flourished, just as they do today. One was that the government had set up tanneries to make human leather to bind books of the Constitution with the skin of executed enemies. And yes, posters went up around Paris making the accusation, followed by posters denying it.

A guillotine blade is one of the most disturbing relics on display, a reminder of the estimated 30-50,000 people killed during the Reign of Terror. But as the curators point out: what survives “bears the many marks of silence, erasure and reconstruction that the struggle for memory has produced over time.” As we grapple with an increasingly volatile world now, it is no bad thing to re-examine such relics.

This article is from New Humanist’s Spring 2025 issue. Subscribe now.