ABSTRACT
Robespierre’s amazing Festival of the Supreme Being proved with panache that there was a new order of things to go with the new calendar, with its revised months and ten-day weeks. The French revolutionaries after 1789 needed festivals and displays to maintain morale in the face of inflation and military threats, and laid on patriotic alternatives to the great public occasions of the ancien regime. When Napoleon seized power, he also proved a master of ceremony and display, the high point being his coronation, where he took the crown from the captive Pope and put it on his own head. Triumphal arches, buildings adorned with his monogram, splendid uniforms for the Imperial Guard, and ermine for himself brought legitimacy to this upstart from Corsica, who like the hero of a fairy tale had conquered continental Europe, and married a princess.1 Science was still in 1789 itself an upstart, better-established in France with its paid Academicians than elsewhere, but marginal in the old world ruled by churches and kings, where it was essentially an interest for gentlemen with as yet little practical outcome.
