The Saint-Napoleon: Celebrations of Sovereignty in Nineteenth-Century France

In 1852, President Louis Napoleon of France declared that August 15—Napoleon Bonaparte’s birthday—would be celebrated as France's national day. Drawing on a wealth of archival evidence, Hazareesingh vividly reconstructs the symbolic richness and political complexity of the Saint-Napoleon festivities.

Table of Contents:
Contents 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

About the Author :
Sudhir Hazareesingh is Fellow and Tutor in Politics, Balliol College, Oxford University.

Review :
Hazareesingh's feast of archival information, covering twenty-two departements and hundreds of towns and villages, shows that...Saint-Napoleon's Day was a truly national festival which reflected the vigorous political and civic life of the French provinces...The sheer weight of evidence shows...that towns and villages of France were not lifeless lumps waiting to be moulded into a nation by the capital...It may have taken extremely complicated and petty forms in the provinces, but civic behaviour was still a sign of an emerging national identity. Hazareesingh has found some splendid tales of enthusiastic meddling with the machinery of the State...Instead of illuminating a few towns and villages, celebrating them as representative examples and festooning them with generalizations, Sudhir Hazareesingh has produced a firework display that lights up a large part of the country. -- Graham Robb Times Literary Supplement 20040709 Hazareesingh, a specialist in 19th-century French political culture, examines in depth a major but relatively unknown observance: the official Saint-Napoleon celebrations held across France in the 1850s and 1860s...In this provocative study Hazareesingh demonstrates how inappropriate it is to consider the Second Empire's authoritarian nature or its efforts to dominate society without reference to its popularity and local vitality...The illustrations in this impeccably researched, constructed, and executed book enhance this intimate look at 19th-century life and nation building. -- L. A. Rollo Choice 20050101 [A] pathbreaking book. -- David A. Bell London Review of Books 20050623 Until Agulhon and Ozouf alerted them to the significance of symbols, French historians rarely gave a second glance at official reports of the annual celebrations of the "name days" of successive kings in the M series in departmental archives, assuming them to be obligatory routine official verbiage. In recent years a raft of researchers, including Sanson, Corbin and Truesdell, have plugged the gap, but rarely found much to praise in Napoleon III's synthetic secular festival. Hazareesingh has found much of merit and significance in this magisterial exploration of how 15 August was marked during the Second Empire in a representative selection of 22 departmental archives...Hazareesingh's gift for portraying particular situations and human relations with humour and understanding, and relating them to the broader scene, is superbly portrayed here. He is the master of the apt quotation...The conclusion of the book deftly and with a sure touch sets the Saint-Napoleon into the development of French culture. Both specialists and undergraduates will gain enlightenment and enjoyment from this volume. -- P. Pilbeam English Historical Review