Provincial France celebrated its rite in open countryside, but Paris had to find the appropriate place inside the city. The vast Champ de Mars was chosen, and an invisible architect shaped it sufficiently to give it the ceremonial hallmarks of the Holy Place: no longer a formless expanse, but a valley excavated by thousands of hands between two hills. “By day, by night, men of all classes, of all ages, even children, everyone, citizens, soldiers, abbés, monks, actors, Sisters of Charity, smart ladies, fruit sellers, all holding a mattock, pushing a wheelbarrow or a cart.¹⁶⁶ Children went ahead of them, lighting the way; strolling orchestras cheered the workers: they themselves, leveling the ground, sang that leveling song: ‘Ah! Ça ira! Ça ira! Ça ira! Celui qui s’élève on l’abaissera’ (‘Ah! It’ll be fine! It’ll be fine! It’ll be fine! He who thinks himself high shall be brought down’).” Excavation work was also the society event of the week: the Duchesse de Luynes had a splendid mahogany wheelbarrow made, with which she moved gravel and soil as her contribution to the enterprise.

On the day of the Celebration, amid squalls of rain and wind, brought by the “Good Lord,” who (they said) is “an aristocrat,” a hundred and sixty thousand people (or two hundred and fifty thousand? or four hundred thousand?) looked down from the artificial hills of the Champ de Mars at the great central valley, where a large pyramid stood: the Altar to the Fatherland. According to one witness: “This altar was an immense construction, one hundred feet high; it rested on four buttresses that occupied the angles of its vast square and supported tripods of colossal proportion.¹⁶⁷ These buttresses were joined together by flights of steps which were so wide that a whole battalion could climb each one. Rising from the platform to which they led was a pyramid-shaped rampart with a great number of steps, crowned by the Altar of the Fatherland, shaded by a palm tree.”

A few weeks before the Fête de la Fédération, a wealthy Prussian nobleman, Jean-Baptiste de Cloots, arrived at the door of the Salle du Manège at the head of a delegation calling itself the “Embassy of the Human Race.” In the same way that Rousseau’s elusive “general will” would be palpably manifest among the mattocks and wheelbarrows of the Champ de Mars, likewise Humanity, this figure of more or less eighteenth-century invention, was now sending her representatives out to reconnoiter. “Who are you?” they were asked. “We come from Europe, we come from Asia, we come from America. We are Humanity!” Georges Avenel, the inspired nineteenth-century biographer of Cloots, describes this arrival with all the thrill of a race at the Vél’ d’Hiv’: “The excitement increases; there is general elation.¹⁶⁸ Now it’s the turn of the human race! From the nation to the human race there is barely an inch. Yes, for sure, the human race itself is at the gate. It is waiting. Make way! Everyone feels it, they long for it. It’s about to arrive, it’s arriving!” At last they appeared at the Assembly, thirty-six of them. There was Pio, a Neapolitan; Don Pablo Olivares, a Spanish victim of the Inquisition; the baron von Trenck, who had been shackled to sixty-eight pounds of chains in a Prussian jail; there were Dutch and English patriots, a Turk, an Arab, and a Chaldean who had just been hired as extras at the opera house; others included an interpreter in Oriental languages at the Collège de France and various out-of-work servants. That evening, urged along by the excitement stirred by the “Embassy of the Human Race,” the Assembly voted to abolish hereditary titles, with the consequent Fall of Names. Cloots’s embassy, dispatched from the Realm of Operetta to announce the imminent infiltration of its subjects into Europe, gave the final impetus to the decapitation of those noble titles with whose aroma operetta would be spiced.