REVOLUTION CELEBATIONS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 1 May 1939, Page 6

REVOLUTION CELEBATIONS

MAGNIFICENT COMMEMORATIONS IN FRANCE. NATIONAL AND REGIONAL FESTIVITIES. The most spectacular festivities seen for many years on the Continent will take place this year in France, as revealed by further details made public of the commemorative celebrations of the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the French Revolution. Five national celebrations will take place, besides a large number of regional festivities. The first of the five national celebrations will be the commemoration of the opening of the States General at Versailles on May 5, 1789, when delegates came from all parts of France to considei - means for avoiding national bankruptcy. On June 23 a ceremony will be held in Paris commemorating the principal events of the summer of 1789. On this occasion the work of emancipation accomplish* ed by the French Revolution will be recalled, and the statute of the Rights of Man will be broadcast throughout the whole of France.

The third celebration will take place on France’s national holiday, July 14. It will commemorate not only the fall of the Bastille, but the festival of the Champ de Mars of July 14, 1790, when the oath of national unity was sworn on an altar before thousands of spectators. This commemorative celebration will be held on the very spot where the oath was sworn. The fourth National celebration will be held on September 20 and will be a military commemoration on the battlefield of Valmy where the soldiers of the young Republic defeated the trained troops of the German and Austrian coalition, in 1792. The fifth natonal ceremony will take the form of a procession of “Homage to the Republic,” on September 21, in which thousands of citizens will join in a national march past with Dalou’s statue on the Place de la Nation, as the saluting point. In addition, Paris will stage a day and night of festivities to commemorate the adoption of the tricolour as the national flag and the Marseillaise as the national anthem. From March until September other ceremonies will be taking place all over France, and in the smallest rural commune the year 1789, one of the most important not only in the history of France but in the whole world, will be celebrated by some official ceremony. Committees have already been formed to organise local programmes and the keynote of these celebrations will be much more civilian than military, emphasising the place of the citizen in the State, and youth will take an important part in the festivities. Exhibitions of souvenirs of the Revolution will be organised in the principal towns of France. In Paris, the Musee Carnavalet. a museum devoted to the history of the capital, will hold a special exhibition of its precious documents and souvenirs of the French Revolution, and will at the same time exhibit a large number of historical relics of the period loaned by private collectors. The Marseillaise, France’s national anthem, will be celebrated by a reconstitution at Strassburg, where it will be sung by a well-known male opera singer accompanied only by a piano, in the very room and under the conditions in which it was first sung by its composer Rouget de Lisle. Wireless will carry the voice of the singer to every part of France and the world.