Bonapartist memory and republican nation-building: revisiting the civic festivities of the Second Empire

This article, based on extensive archive research, sets out to explore continuities between Bonapartism and republicanism, continuities which can be traced through the organisation of civic festivities in 19th-century France. Like the revolutionary regimes which preceded it, and the Third Republic which followed, the Bonapartist governments of the First and, especially, the Second Empire attached a great importance to these forms of political ceremonial, which sought to mobilise French citizens around key political and civic themes in order to forge a new sense of collective identity.