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Authors: Barbara Ehrenreich

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A central part of the official French Revolutionary festivals, whatever their political flavor, was the military parade, accompanied by marching music. The idea of military marches as an entertaining spectacle goes back to well before the revolution; in the late seventeenth century, Louis XIV had built military reviews and maneuvers into the rituals of his court.
32
The more democratic Swiss opened military parades to the view of the general public in the 1760s—a form of “patriotic celebration” that Rousseau had urged the French to reproduce.
33
This the revolutionaries did with enthusiasm, as we have just seen, helping develop the military procession into one of the central appurtenances of nationalism.
What made the military a potentially edifying spectacle was the highly disciplined drilling introduced more than two centuries before the revolution by the Dutch prince Maurice of Orange. There would have been little entertainment value in watching the disorderly troops of the late Middle Ages shamble through the streets,
but the drill produced men capable of marching synchronously, with great precision, with or without musical accompaniment. Marching bands transformed the military procession into a potentially exciting event for the spectators, despite their immobilization on the sides of the street or arena. In earlier times, European armies had relied on fifes and drums for musical encouragement; the full marching band was an import from the Muslim world and began to take hold in Europe only in the early eighteenth century. From Turkey, Europeans acquired the bass drum, cymbals, and tambourines, as well as visual effects supplied by the presence of black musicians dressed in silk turbans and brightly colored uniforms, adding, according to the historian Scott Myerly, “a dash of the exotic oriental to the show.”
34
If the drill created the possibility of the military as public spectacle, the Napoleonic Wars created the demand for it. Napoleon's armies carried with them the central tenet of the French Revolution: that “the people” were no longer subjects of a king but citizens of a nation. And what was a nation? Not, as Benedict Anderson convincingly argued, a population united by ties of blood, language, and common traditions, since many aspiring nations—such as Italy and Germany in the nineteenth century—lacked some or all of these sources of unity. Rather than growing “naturally” out of shared geography and genetics, the nation required effort to create. It was, and remains, a mystic
idea
of unity, an imaginary collectivity defined by certain symbols (flags, for example), monuments, shared experiences (of revolution or war, for example), even songs. As part of what we might call their “nation-building” effort, the Jacobins called on composers to come up with new forms of martial music for the patriotic festivals. Interestingly, it was not the popular, infectiously danceable, revolutionary song “Ça Ira” (“It Will Succeed”) that the French government chose as the national anthem in 1795, but “La Marseillaise,” which is suitable only for marching.
Nationalism was the feeling induced by this imagined collectivity—or, more commonly, by the symbols representing it—a
feeling so fraught with the ideas of sacrifice and spiritual transcendence that scholars have often likened it to religion. What better ritual with which to observe this new “religion” than one that could inspire, however briefly, strong feelings of bonding with one's fellow countrymen? This had been the aim, of course, of the official festivals of the French Revolution. Stripped of revolutionary paraphernalia—the recitations of patriotic oaths, the floats carrying young women representing Liberty—what remained of the revolutionary festivals was a military parade, and it was this ultimately menacing spectacle that the Napoleonic Wars popularized throughout much of Europe. As Myerly observes, in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, military spectacle became “an important entertainment genre” in England, competing with earlier, more participatory, and less martial kinds of gatherings.
35
In keeping with their new status as performers, soldiers began to dress for the part. Uniforms had been difficult to impose before the nineteenth century, if only because armies were made up largely of mercenaries, who found uniforms a serious obstacle to desertion. In the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, uniforms became almost universal, and not only because they served military functions, such as distinguishing one side from the other. In fact, the highly polished brass buttons of nineteenth-century uniforms could make a man an easy target, but this disadvantage was apparently outweighed by theatrical considerations, since a man might spend more time marching for an audience than he did in battle.
Naturally, the most brilliant men on display were the officers, with their brightly colored uniforms and extravagant headgear. In the Musée de l'Armée in Paris today, one finds scores of nineteenth-century officers' helmets and bearskins topped with feathers that could add a foot or more to a man's height. Not only were such costumes dangerously cumbersome in battle; they could occasionally disrupt the spectacles they were designed to enhance. Myerly reports that “when wearing the nearly two-foot-high regulation First Life Guards' bearskin cap with its enormous swan
feather while attending a review … [the Duke of Wellington] was literally blown off his horse by a gust of wind in front of tens of thousands of spectators and soldiers.”
36
Britain embraced the military spectacle with at least as much enthusiasm as France had. An 1811 military review at Wimbledon attracted two hundred thousand spectators to watch twenty thousand soldiers go through their paces; a royal review staged in honor of the king in 1830 drew crowds that were “immense beyond description.”
37
In addition to the deliberately staged military spectacles, even mundane tasks such as the changing of the guard attracted eager audiences. “We were all soldiers, one way or another,” an Edinburgh lawyer recalled of the wartime year 1803. “The parade and the review formed the staple of men's talk and thoughts.”
38
Women were drawn to the spectacle of the gorgeously uniformed young officers on horseback; everyone responded to the martial music, which, as one spectator noted, “cause[s] the pulse to pound and fire[s] the imagination.”
39
Even the socialist Robert Blatchford hailed the public military drills for fostering a sense of solidarity among the viewers, “a feeling of strength through unity and
esprit de
corps,
”though not without observing sourly “that in reality this sense of solidarity was directed not by its members but by the state.”
40
In superficial ways, the military spectacle can even be thought of as a kind of carnival. There were “costumes”—in the form of uniforms, which in the case of the Swiss troopers were derived from a harlequin-type carnival costume. There was “dance,” or at least musically driven motion—in the form of the march—and to this day the overlap between marching and dancing is exemplified, in the United States, by drill and drill-dance teams that perform at special events, as well as by the African American collegiate practice of “stepping.” But the military spectacle represents an oddly inverted form of carnival: While carnival aims to mock all customary kinds of social hierarchy, the military spectacle aims only to reinforce them.
As young men, both Hitler and Mussolini had been well prepared for the task of perfecting the late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century nationalist spectacle. Not only had each served in World War I and been thoroughly impressed with the galvanizing power of military spectacles and parades, they were also familiar with Le Bon's theories. Whether they had been alarmed, as dictators-to-be, by Le Bon's ideas about the madness and unpredictability of crowds, we do not know, but both happily appropriated his thoughts on “the leaders of crowds and their means of persuasion.”
41
The very irrationality of the crowd, Le Bon had asserted, rendered it putty in the hands of “the strong-willed man, who knows how to impose himself upon it.”
42
Through simple demagogic tricks—such as constant repetition of simplified ideas—the leader could mold large numbers of people to his will. Ignoring, as usual, the fact that the crowds of the French Revolution, his primary example of collective insanity, fought for their liberty, Le Bon insisted that “it is the need not of liberty but of servitude that is always predominant in the soul of crowds. They are so bent on obedience that they instinctively submit to whoever declares himself their master.”
43
This must have been excellent news for a dictator-in-training, so long as he skipped the passage where Le Bon observed that the men who seized power by manipulating what he saw as the rabble were likely to be “morbidly nervous, excitable, half-deranged persons who are bordering on madness.”
44
Actually, neither Hitler nor Mussolini achieved power through the kind of mob action that concerned Le Bon—another argument against those who see an inevitable connection between collective excitement and fascist evil. Violent “mobs” of the
menu peuple
had played a decisive role in the French Revolution. But to the extent that violence played a role in the rise of twentieth-century fascism, it was the violence exerted by organized fascist paramilitary forces—the
Freikorps
and brownshirts in Germany, the
arditi
and
black-shirted
squadristi
in Italy—who crushed the socialist opposition and intimidated the general population in their respective nations. Opposition leaders were beaten or assassinated, their offices bombed, their demonstrations attacked by organized ruffians.
For Hitler and Mussolini, mass rallies were not only a means of mobilizing the population for the war effort but a means of governing it. There was of course no semblance of democracy in totalitarian Germany or Italy; but this did not mean that either dictator could afford to completely ignore his people—as, for example, the Bourbon kings had before the revolutionary year of 1789, running France as if it were their private estate. If the French Revolution offered one great lesson to all future regimes, it was that “the people” had to be encouraged to identify with the state, even in the case of a state they had no way of influencing. The new media—radio and film—helped propagate the fascist message, but they could not give people a sense of direct and personal involvement. That was the function of the mass rallies: to create a kind of ersatz participation. Soldiers would march, demonstrating the power of the state; the dictator would speak, perhaps announcing new policies; and the assembled people would cheer, thus registering their approval without anything as cumbersome and potentially divisive as a vote.
Hence the need for regular and frequent mass rallies, scheduled according to a new calendar of nationalist holidays. No one, so far as I can tell, has totaled up the cost of these rallies, but it must have been enormous, beginning with the expense involved in giving the majority of the population a day off from work. As for their frequency, Lindholm comments that Hitler strove to “turn all of Germany into a gigantic and permanent mass meeting, awaiting his galvanizing appearance.”
45
In the same vein, a contemporary observer described Mussolini's mass rallies as “the chief industry of Fascist Italy.”
46
The piazzas of Italian towns and the central squares of German cities—once the sites of lively festivities on religious holidays—became the settings for the new nationalist spectacles,
with ancient Roman ruins (in Italy) and newly built nationalist monuments (in both countries) providing an imposing backdrop.
As in the case of the Jacobins, the Nazis and fascists frowned on alternative forms of celebration and entertainment. The Nazis famously banned swing music and fretted about what constituted a racially acceptable rhythm.
On no account will Negroid excesses in tempo (so-called hot jazz) or in solo performances (so-called breaks) be tolerated; so-called jazz compositions may contain at most 10 percent syncopation; the remainder must consist of a natural legato movement devoid of the hysterical rhythmic reverses characteristic of the music of the barbarian races and conducive to dark instincts alien to the German people (so-called riffs).
47
Traditional, Christian-based entertainments presented them with a more difficult problem, since these could be seen as a legitimate part of the Aryan heritage. A 1939 article in the Nazi party journal agonized over Christmas.
Both according to popular custom and popular view, the Christmas holiday can justifiably be seen as a festival of the homeland … But if we do this, we must realize that the Christmas holiday or Christmas festival is more than a date on the calendar suitable for cheap entertainment events. We cannot meet our goals in the style of pre-war clubs with their “variety evenings,” raffles or the ever so popular military farce. Not even if “Bananini the Magician” or “Bear Mouth the Sword Swallower” make a guest appearance.
48
While the official Nazi attitude toward traditional holidays was one of toleration, the party covertly sought to discourage them. As Michael Burleigh writes, “Feast days, pilgrimages and religious processions were [a] … flashpoint between the faithful and the Nazis, especially in Catholic regions.”
49
The Nazis would, somewhat
spitefully, schedule compulsory Hitler Youth activities on the same days as church events, or make attendance difficult by canceling round-trip train service to the site of a religious festivity.
Not having gone through the Reformation, Italy had a more robust tradition of festivities for the fascists to worry about. In 1926, Mussolini declared that “it's time to put a stop to such ceremonies, assemblies, and festivals,” citing their lack of “seriousness.” A year later, he officially banned “any ceremony, demonstration, celebration, anniversary, centenary great or small, as well as speeches of any sort,” other than his own, of course.
50
Apparently these prohibitions were not entirely effective, because in 1932 we find the Fascist party secretary Achille Starace banning “gala shows” and New Year's Eve parties, which not only lacked seriousness but snubbed the official fascist year-end date of October 29. Echoing the seventeenth-century Calvinists, he warned against participation in banquets and prohibited people's attempts to humanize the mass rallies by using them, or their aftermath, as an occasion for dancing: there would be no dancing at fascist events.
51
Some traditional rural festivals were permitted, so long as they were conducted in a somber, “healthy” fashion and “permeated with Fascist symbolism.”
52
The wine harvest celebration, for example, was to be “very similar to that of the Romans, who”—the fascist youth newspaper averred—“did not admit barbarian influences in their rituals and did not want orgiastic contamination of the joyful festival of the wine harvest.”
53
Mussolini's ostensible concern was that festivities other than official mass rallies would both take too much time and “satiate” the public.
54
And why, a good fascist might wonder, should the public require any source of collective excitement beyond what the state provided? Both Hitler and Mussolini held rather grandiose views about the psychological impact of their spectacles, which they believed to be on a par with religious epiphany. Ideally, the individual spectator should experience complete self-loss and submergence in the larger collective—the
volk
, or the nation. In Italy, the Fascist
party leadership sought to forge the masses into “an organic whole,” which, in their rhetoric, more resembled a homogeneous substance than a collection of individual people.
55
Hitler was equally explicit about the need to meld the public into a single unit, and the agreeable effect this transformation would have on the individual: “There will be no license, no free space, in which the individual belongs to himself … The day of individual happiness has passed. Can there be any greater happiness than a National Socialist meeting in which speakers and audience feel as one?”
56
But the alleged delights of the mass rallies did not mean that the spectators and marchers could be trusted to follow their impulses in the slightest degree. The rallies were heavily policed and scripted in every detail; attendance was often compulsory: “No citizen must be allowed to stay at home,” insisted a Nazi official in Northeim.
57
Hitler's biographer John Toland reports that the party members who participated in the 1934 Nuremberg rally had been “carefully selected months in advance, each had a number, a designated truck, a designated seat in the truck, and a designated cot in the vast tent city near Nuremberg. By the time the ceremonies began on Sept 4, the thousands of party members had been rehearsed to perfection.”
58
At pre-Nazi May Day celebrations, the crowds had been disorderly, “roaming around, singing or speech-making,” but at the Nazis' 1933 May Day event the working-class participants “observed exemplary shopfloor discipline, arranging themselves into teams, lines, and squares, following directions, signals, and cordons: I, II, III, IV, …”
59
In Italy, “order and punctuality dominated the events, which were structured around Mussolini's arrival and departure from the train stations.”
60
Even the clothing of spectators was specified: no “festive dress” and, for men anyway, the emblematic fascist black shirt was recommended. Furthermore, the Fascist party ruled that all ceremonies should be “marked by the greatest possible austerity and sobriety. To this end, banquets and lavish receptions are prohibited.”
61
It's not easy to gauge the subjective impact of the Nazi and Italian
fascist rallies. For one thing, memoirs are unreliable, in part because in the aftermath of fascism witnesses of the rallies were likely to downplay whatever thrills they may have experienced. But contemporary accounts from the state-dominated media are no better, since these no doubt erred in the other direction, by exaggerating the enthusiasm and size of the crowds. The newspaper
Il Popolo d'Italia,
for example, offered a typically breathless account of a fascist rally in 1932.
Squadrons of airplanes fly in ever-tighter circles overhead, as if to crown this splendid assembly.
The crowd never tires of following their maneuvers, and the thunder of their engines mixes with the peals of the fanfares and the songs of the Fascists. Meanwhile, Piazza Venezia has reached its flood point. The clamor of the music and the constant
alala
[the fascist chant, which had no meaning] deafens all. The people are carried away by the huge roar calling for the Duce …
The crowd continues to swell. The square is thronged. Fifty thousand are there waiting for Mussolini, fifty thousand shout his name …
The bands break into “Giovinezza.” The flags are raised high. Mussolini! … “Duce! Duce!” The cry is infinitely multiplied over the clanging of the music.
62
Nor can we trust the highly edited
Triumph of the Will
to provide a representative sample of images from the 1934 Nuremberg rally. Riefenstahl shows only upraised faces, smiling in exaltation—no sullen children or foot-sore spectators.
There is scattered evidence that, especially as the novelty of the rallies wore off, many of the spectators and even participants may have been dragging their feet. On the basis of her study of railroad receipts, one historian, for example, makes a case that the crowds that watched Italian fascist rallies did not assemble spontaneously but were rounded up by train and transported to the rally sites “to
give the appearance of volume.”
63
Another historian observes of the Italian scene that “the unremitting mobilization on behalf of the collective rituals could indeed give rise to feelings of satiety and impatience in some.”
64
Certainly the much-heralded 1934 “18BL” mass performance in Florence—featuring an air squadron, brigades from various branches of the military, and fifty of the new Fiat 18BL trucks—was a flop, with a contemporary reviewer fretting that its main result would be to create “a certain aversion on the part of the masses towards this sort of spectacle.”
65
Meanwhile, in Germany, at the Nazis' 1933 May Day rally,
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