Why the French Love a Parade

The traditional July 14 military extravaganza along the Champs-Élysées, orchestrated to project a united and confident nation on France’s national day, arrives not a moment too soon for France. For one day, the nation can forget its economic and political woes, kick back and watch the passing parade.

Of course, that the pride of place is given not to huge balloons shaped like Mickey and SpongeBob, but instead missile carriers and tanks, reminds us that here, too, the so-called French exception is truly exceptional.

It so happens that Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the thinker some still hold responsible for the Revolution, loved parades. Just as they are the authentic expression of a free citizenry, Rousseau insisted, they are the only “entertainments which republics need.” It was just one year after the taking of the Bastille, in fact, that Rousseau’s ideal was nearly realized.

In order to mark the seismic events for which they were the authors, Parisians planned a Festival of Federation. All of France — the thousands of “federated” communes forming this new nation — was invited to the capital in order to participate in the celebration. The festivities were a kind of mass choreography seeking to impose a sense of fraternity on a nation of nearly 30 million individuals who found themselves, quite suddenly, free and equal.

Most historians agree this act of federation was not just immensely popular, but also spontaneous. An entire people set out on the spur of the moment for Paris. Once there, they took on the task of creating the stage for the festivities: Re-enacting Rousseau’s republican daydream, the public — men and women, wealthy and poor, urban and rural — took up picks, shovels and wheelbarrows and built an amphitheater on the field between the Seine and École Militaire known as the Champ de Mars.

It was the Age of Reason’s Woodstock — even with the presence of the National Guard, the citizen militia born in the creative chaos of 1789. Sporting their blue, white and red cockades, Guard detachments from across France came to affirm their region’s attachment to the Revolution. For the French nation in 1790, the Guard was no less the authentic representative of the popular will than, say, Jimi Hendrix (wearing red, white and blue) riffing on the Star-Spangled Banner was the authentic expression of Woodstock Nation.

While the Guard’s role in the festival partly explains the military’s presence in today’s parade, there’s another source. With the advent of Napoleonic and Restoration France, July 14 became the date whose historical significance dared not be spoken. It was the fledging Third Republic, born in the rubble of defeat left by the Franco-Prussian War, which resurrected the parade in 1880.

The French Left even more than the Right insisted on the military’s role in the festivities. Though this strikes many foreign observers as odd, the reason was quite simple: The army symbolized a nation not just revived, but (unlike its Prussian foe) also republicanized, the eager inheritor of the revolutionary nation at arms.

Fast forward another century (and two more republics) to the present day: The French, regardless of their political affiliation, remain attached to the défilé militaire. Two years ago, the Green Party candidate for the presidency, Eva Joly, suggested that the soldiers and machinery be replaced by a “citizens’ parade.” Politicians and pundits across the political spectrum immediately, vociferously, and perhaps even spontaneously protested so loudly that Joly beat a rapid and ignominious retreat.

No one has voiced the slightest doubt about this year’s parade — despite (or perhaps because of) France’s dismal economy and the Socialist government’s equally dismal polling numbers. But what if we were to analyze this year’s parade as we would a literary text?

Paris itself certainly invites such readings: For example, the Right follows one particular itinerary in its protest demonstrations (along the boulevards of the bourgeois and conservative of western Paris), while the Left begins and ends its marches at revolutionary sites in the eastern, working class half. But the July 14 parade traverses the heart of Paris, from the Arc de Triomphe and along the Champs-Elysées to the Place de la Concorde, bringing together, if only symbolically, the city’s (and nation’s) ideological opponents.

In some ways, this year’s text will be an abridged version. With the government’s cuts in the military budget, fewer planes and vehicles will be on parade, saving many thousands of euros in fuel costs. But hay will be as plentiful as ever: The Republican Guard, leading the parade resplendent on their mounts, has not been touched.

It is after the horses trot by that the text becomes intriguing. This year’s parade includes a number of foreign guests. Croatian soldiers will be in attendance, marking their nation’s admission into the European Union. More significant, however, are the presence of some 60 soldiers from Mali and a unified Franco-German brigade.

The two detachments are in fact attached by certain geopolitical realities. Mali has come to Paris because Paris first went to Mali. The French military action earlier this year, named Operation Serval, which shattered an invasion by Islamic rebel forces, was as popular with the Malians as the French. France’s ability to play, even now, a role on the world stage by defeating an Islamist movement linked to terrorism carried more than a whiff of revolutionary and republican idealism.

At the same time, France realized that it could no longer afford, either in logistical or economic terms, undertakings like Operation Serval. It required the assistance of allies — assistance that, at best, was grudging on Germany’s part. For Serval, all that Chancellor Angela Merkel managed to pony up was a couple of transport planes. No doubt President François Hollande had this in mind when, soon after, he called for a truly effective “Europe de la défense.”

Little has happened since his public call and the presence of the Franco-German brigade in Sunday’s parade can be dismissed as little more than theater. But as the first Festival of Federation reminds us, theater can move not just audiences, but nations.

Robert Zaretsky is a professor of French history at the University of Houston Honors College, in Texas.

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