Laura Mason examines the shifting fortunes of singing as a political
gesture to highlight the importance of popular culture to revolutionary
politics. Arguing that scholars have overstated the uniformity of
revolutionary political culture, Mason uses songwriting and singing
practices to reveal its diverse nature. Song performances in the
streets, theaters, and clubs of Paris showed how popular culture was
invested with new political meaning after 1789, becoming one of the most
important means for engaging in revolutionary debate.Throughout the
1790s, French citizens came to recognize the importance of anthems for
promoting their interpretations of revolutionary events, and for
championing their aspirations for the Revolution. By opening new arenas
of cultural activity and demolishing Old Regime aesthetic hierarchies,
revolutionaries permitted a larger and infinitely more diverse
population to participate in cultural production and exchange, Mason
contends. The resulting activism helps explain the urgency with which
successive governments sought to impose an official political culture on
a heterogeneous and mobilized population. After 1793, song culture was
gradually depoliticized as popular classes retreated from public arenas,
middle brow culture turned to the strictly entertaining, and official
culture became increasingly rigid. At the same time, however, singing
practices were invented which formed the foundation for new, activist
singing practices in the next century. The legacy of the Revolution,
according to Mason, was to bestow new respectability on popular singing,
reshaping it from an essentially conservative means of complaint to an
instrument of social and political resistance.
