Identities in Transition

The Enkidu Summer Conference 2007

June 1 - 5, 2007

Mexico City

in:

Performing God and the State: The Formulation a National Identity During the French Revolution

Tara M. Good

Department for Performance Studies

New York University, New York

Events of the French Revolution enacted a radical alteration in the French national identity. Based on the liberal maxims of the Enlightenment cognitive signifiers emerged that redefined the French subjectivity and established a new form of nationhood, a liberal democracy. The First Republic was established by Robespierre in Rousseau’s vision of sanctity of natural rights. Sanctifying natural rights required a de-correlation of God and King, in the Roman Catholic model, to a naturalization of God in society. Rituals, such as the Festival of the Supreme Being and its opposite, the guillotine, encoded Rousseau/Robespierre political theology in the social body, collapsing signifiers differentiating the individual, the social, and the divine. The Cult of the Supreme Being, among other social rituals, functioned to authenticate the republican ideal of communal sovereignty from which French secularism emerged as a political theology.

This article begins with the political theology of the Ancien Régime to identify the religious component of the monarchal structure. The process of de-Christianization under Robespierre is then evaluated in terms of archiving specific political goals based on Enlightenment philosophy. Performative embodiment as a tool of social construction, as seen in mytho-mimesis and sensationalist psychology, demonstrates the practical role religiosity in the democratic political construction. The performance of punishment is evaluated as a performance intended to reinforce the sanctity of the state and the social body. A historical analysis of the role of affective theatricality during French Revolution informs contemporary scholarship into the nature of secularism and modernity as a political theology.

About Tara M. Good

Tara M. Good is a Master’s Candidate in the Department of Performance Studies, New York University, New York. She received her undergraduate degree from Fordham University, New York, in Performance and International/Inter-cultural Studies. She has studied with the following theater companies: The Moscow Art Theater (Moscow, Russia) The Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards (Pontedera, Italy) and Yuyachkani (Lima, Peru). Research interests include transnationalism, ritual, religious syncretism, identity formation and the performance of religiosity as cultural agency. She is looking forward to presenting “The Syncretism of the Lord of the Miracles. Cultural Transmission and Identity Formation” as part of the annual American Comparative Literature Association Conference in Puebla, Mexico in April 2007.