A small number of the feasts are feasts of societal convenience that do not call for any particular public ceremonies. More numerous are the “national” holidays, whether they have been qualified as such by the legislator or whether the adjective “national” appears only in the circulars relating to their organization or in the reports describing them; this last case being the most frequent, it seems prudent to speak of  holidays “of a national character”, or of “civic holidays”, as Sudhir Hazareesingh did for August 15th. These holidays correspond to the days during which the nation celebrates the feast of the sovereign or the anniversary of a founding event of the regime or commemorates its glorious dead. Their celebration includes civil, military and religious ceremonies, whose respective importance varies according to the joyous or funereal status of the feast, the nature of the regime and the political context. Finally, the 1st of May, a social but also political holiday, closes the list of civic holidays Tourist attractions in Spain .

Some of these celebrations, long gone, had a brief existence, less than twenty years and even less than five years for the celebrations of the Second Republic, while the celebrations celebrated today all have several decades of existence. November 11 and especially July 14 are distinguished by their longevity, which also prevents us from offering a detailed chronological treatment.

From 1806 to 1870, with the exception of the two years 1848-1849, the French celebrated the feast of the reigning sovereign – or of the President of the Republic in 1852 –, which conferred on each regime a form of carnal existence embodied in the person royal, imperial or presidential and “over-embodied” by its painted or sculpted representations…

The concordat was broken unilaterally in 1905 by the State, which henceforth declared itself “secular”. Note that the secularism of the state is understood differently today, namely only as a strictly neutral way of situating religion in the public space  [4]

[4]

Quite recently, the controversial notion of “secularism…. It would have been possible on the part of the government to abolish Christian holidays or at least to give them another status. It did not happen. It was then that a situation began that lasts until today. The Christian holidays retained in the concordat thus remained holidays and non-working days  [