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This barely surviving plane tree was probably planted in the tiny village of Tamniès, north of Sarlat [in Dordogne], to mark the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. It grows in front of the parish church, from where it was photographed. It is now probably the only living ‘liberty tree’ from that point of the Revolution.

Liberty or Death: The French Revolution (Peter McPhee)

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Erection of a liberty tree (Etienne Béricourt)

Circa 1793, Musée Carnavalet.

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Liberty trees (E. Liris)

It was in 1792 that the Legislative Assembly « formalised » the planting of liberty trees, but, drawing inspiration from an account of the Moniteur, the Abbé Grégoire declared that the first tree was planted by Norbert Pressac, a cleric from Saint-Gaudens in Poitou, in May 1790. Does one have to link the planting of liberty trees to the popular tradition of the arbres de mai? The reports of M.J. Godard and L. Robin attributed to the planting of maypoles, which were erected rather than planted, an insurrectional intention: Being « [s]igns of disobedience to the laws », they sometimes arose « in the form of gallows » and of the threat of death ; nonetheless, the dictionary of Achard only reported this « liberating » May tradition in certain communes, and the liberty tree presented a veritable specificity. Being a living tree instead of being dead wood or a pole, the plantation of a tree obeyed to a kind of ceremony that was codified by François de Neufchateau, a ritual excluding any kind of violence: « I recommend you ... the touching ceremony which has to accompany the planting of Liberty trees ». The population « of both sexes is reunited », the tree is chosen, replanted with care, monitored, cosseted (one used the informal tutoiement), decorated with cockades and ribbons, initially blessed by the constitutional clergy. Planted on squares or crossroads, it became a place of « fraternal » gathering, and being the centre of a circle formed by the audience, it evoked equality. Rapidly, the planting of a tree became a sign of political adherence, whereas the mutilation or felling of a tree constituted a distinctive and punished counter-revolutionary act. The tree, pertaining to nature which was more or less sanctified in a pre-Romantic tone, came across as a very rich symbol within which one could easily identify, it was one of the revolutionary symbols which held the value of an archetype and which endured beyond the revolutionary decade. The tree, which was reborn each year, embodied a message which aimed to reunite individuals in order to make a community out of them. On the semiotic level, the tree corresponded to the opposition between the ideal of a linear time, the one of tyranny which led to death, and of a cyclic and repetitive time which is supposed to lead to immortality and to incarnate liberty.

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