THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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needs’, writes Jean­Richard Bloch about a kind of civilization which has even spread its veneer over Paris, ‘one only needs to stroll through our parks and gardens and
over the boulevards of our cities on holidays to encounter these pitiful bourgeois families in thousands of examples, who, dusty and bored, drive a few idle, sullen,
hypocritical children before them.’ The memory of the Sunday misery which Seurat painted in his promenade piece ‘La Grande Jatte’ (cf. Vol. II, p. 814) also belongs
here, and the comparison of these incurable groups of strollers, indeed of the whole watery­desperate promenading with God in France.* How juicily even the old
kermis pictures of the Dutch emerge in this contrast, and all the wishful dreams attached to church festivals and carnivals as well, in which Sunday afternoon, instead of
being the best time for suicide, could give room for collective enjoyment of life, after all the workday misery. The workday was even more arduous than today, but an
unoppressed capacity for joy gained shape on feast­days, that which can be won and filled only communally. We only have to read the description of the Saint Roch
festival in Bingen, in Goethe's journey ‘On the Rhine, Main and Neckar in 1814 and 1815’, this splendid health and contentment, to see masterly joy in the most faithful
mirror. The public festival here certainly released wishful dreams of festivity, but they lacked the play­acting and also melancholy­sentimental element which
characterized the festive utopias of the leisure­class, despite the greatest radiance and pre­appearance. This means that public festivals stand in contrast to deprivation,
but feasts of our lords to boredom. And the latter cannot be combatted with relaxation but again only with effort; hence Heine's paradox of the ‘brave comrade in arms
of a dolce far niente’. Conversely, public festivals display no artificiality, not even when, as is often and particularly the case in Italy, they have modified the forms of the
governing Baroque. While pastorality and the posed Arcadian element are clearly lacking here, and an element of naivety and antiquity, a bit of the final procession of
Dionysus is added instead. Dionysus is a releasing god, thus his public festival has now proved to be fit for a re­functioning, for one which is by no means clerical any
more. This holiday world celebrates joys for which in fact there becomes real occasion only later, i.e. liberation of the people is anticipated. Hence the easy transition
from the dance around the linden tree to that around the liberty tree of the French Revolution, hence the always latent element from the end
* Bloch has in mind the idiom ‘To live like God in France’ which is equivalent to the English ‘To live like a king’.