A year after the famous storming of the Bastille on July 4, 1789, the French were sure that the Revolution had come to a peaceful and successful end with only loose ends to be tied.  In celebration of this supposed victory and the one-year anniversary of the new Republic, the French organized the First Festival of the Federation for July 14, 1790, to take place on the Champ de Mars (current location of the Eiffel Tower).  The preparations for the festival have been ingrained in the master narrative of France: people from all walks of life coming together to prepare the festival grounds, spontaneously singing the current informal anthem of the Revolution, "Ça ira."  

Other than song, what did these preparations sound like?  Images of the Revolution offer a way into its sound world.  Take, for example, this image from the Stanford University French Revolution digital archive of preparations for the first Festival of the Federation.    

Listen closely.  In the upper left-hand corner a man saws a piece of wood.  To the right, on the top of a ladder, a man hammers wood onto the stage roof.  In fact, four other men hammer nails into wood throughout the image.  We can image the grunts and heavy breathing of those lifting, carrying, and hoisting wood around the elevated platform.  In the middle, two men in green and yellow porting a wooden beam seem to be chatting while working.  Men dig with metal shovels and hoist the soil onto wheelbarrows.  The thud of a shovel into earth.  The forced breathing of a man lifting heavy shovel-fulls.  Even women and monks push wheelbarrows of dirt to create the mountain on which the festivities will take place, so all can see.  A man in red in the middle seems to shout a direction to another man pushing a wheelbarrow toward the right of the frame.  To the right of these men, a group seems to shout disapproval at a couple passionately kissing on top of a wheelbarrow.  Is the couple on the bottom right of the frame dancing a contredanse to "Ça ira"?  It seems the red-dressed woman carted in another wheelbarrow might be wielding complaints at the young man who brought her along to the festival preparations.

The sound of (dis)organized work among social classes.