Killing Carnival: Reformation and Repression
At some point, in town after town throughout the northern Christian world, the music stops. Carnival costumes are put away or sold; dramas that once engaged a town's entire population are canceled; festive rituals are forgotten or preserved only in tame and truncated form. The ecstatic possibility, which had first been driven from the sacred precincts of the church, was now harried from the streets and public squares.
The suppression of traditional festivities, occurring largely in the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, took many forms. Sometimes it came swiftly and absolutely, when, for example, a town council suddenly broke with tradition by refusing to grant a permit for the celebrations or a church denied the use of its churchyard. Or the change might come slowly, with authorities first limiting festivities to Sundays, then, in a classic catch-22, prohibiting all recreations and sports on the Sabbath. In other places the festivities were attacked in a piecemeal fashion: Some German towns banned masking in the late fifteenth century;
1
in midsixteenth-century Béarn, the queen issued ordinances outlawing singing and feasting.
2
Dancing, masking, reveling in the streetsâthe
ingredients of carnival, or festivities in general, could be outlawed one by one.
Church and state might act separately or together in suppressing festivities; in one French diocese, the local monsignor, finding himself “surrounded by dancers, cat-called by masked men,” obtained from the king six sealed letters prohibiting the revelry.
3
In sixteenth-century Lyon, local church authorities disbanded the confraternities traditionally responsible for organizing festivities, replacing them with pious groups dedicated to organizing prayer vigils.
4
Often the attempts at suppression were more farcical than solemn. In one late-seventeenth-century English parish, a preacher denounced a newly erected maypoleâthe traditional signal for revelry. His wife went further and cut it down at night. Some youths put up another one, but as local authorities smugly observed, it was “an ugly thing ⦠rough and crooked.”
5
Other enemies of carnival were at first even less successful. “I could not suppress these Bacchanals,” wrote the Reverend John William de la Flechere of the Shropshire Wakes, “the impotent dyke I opposed only made the torrent swell and foam.”
6
The wave of repressionâor, as the instigators saw it, “reform” âextended from Scotland south to parts of Italy and eastward to Russia and Ukraine, sweeping through both town and countryside. It targeted not only the traditional festivities held on saints' days and the holy periods surrounding Christmas, Lent, and Easter, but almost every possible occasion for revelry and play. Traveling troupes of actors and musicians began to find themselves unwelcome in the towns, driven off or bribed by local authorities to go away. Church ales, festivities that had been used to raise money for English parishes, were denounced and often banned outright, along with the numerous fairs that served as festive gatherings as well as sites for commerce. Sports of every kind came under attack: bull running, bear baiting, boxing, wrestling, football. A 1608 order prohibiting football in Manchester speaks, for example, of the harm done by a “company of lewd and disordered persons usinge that
unlawfulle exercise of playing with a footbale in ye streets.”
7
The crackdown even extended to informal, small-scale fun, as in the English town of Westbury-on-Severn, where a group of young people who fell to “dancing, quaffing and rioting” on their way home from church found themselves facing charges for drunkenness, fornication, and various forms of impiety.
8
There were all sorts of regional and temporal variations on the theme of repression. The Catholic south of Europe held on to its festivities more tightly than the north, though these were often reduced to mere processions of holy images and relics through the streets. In Germany, Protestantism rode in, as we shall see, on a wave of carnivalesque revolts, only to take a hard stance against public festivity or disorder in any form. England seesawed between repression and permissiveness for decades, with the Calvinists vigorously banning festivities and the Stuart kingsâperhaps less out of fondness for the festivities than hostility to the Calvinistsârepeatedly seeking to restore them. But everywhere the general drift led inexorably away from the medieval tradition of carnival. As Peter Stallybrass and Allon White summarize the change:
In the long-term history from the 17th to the 20th century ⦠there were literally thousands of acts of legislation introduced which attempted to eliminate carnival and popular festivity from European life ⦠Everywhere, against the periodic revival of local festivity and occasional reversals, a fundamental ritual order of western culture came under attackâits feasting, violence, processions, fairs, wakes, rowdy spectacle and outrageous clamour were subject to surveillance and repressive control.
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The loss, to ordinary people, of so many recreations and festivities is incalculable; and we, who live in a culture almost devoid of opportunities either to “lose ourselves” in communal festivities or to distinguish ourselves in any arena outside of work, are in no position to fathom it. One young Frenchman told his reforming priest
that he “could not promise to renounce dancing and abstain from the festivals ⦠It would be impossible not to mingle and rejoice with his friends and relations.”
10
A Buckinghamshire resident described the emptying of the common after the suppression of Sunday recreations as a depressing loss. While formerly the common “presented a lively and pleasing aspect, dotted with parties of cheerful lookers-on,” it was now “left lonely and empty of loungers,” leaving the men and boys with nothing to do but hang out in the pubs and drink.
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To people who had few alternative forms of distractionâno books, movies, or televisionâit must have seemed as if pleasure itself had been declared illegal.
Why did it happenâthis wave of repression, this apparent self-punishment undertaken by a huge swath of the world's population? If anything would have mystified the “converted Hottentot” whom nineteenth-century preachers liked to invoke in their diatribes against carnival, it would not be the persistence of a few festivities, kept alive largely as tourist attractions, but the disappearance, over the centuries, of so many more. The explanation offered by Max Weber in the late nineteenth century and richly expanded on by the social historians E. P. Thompson and Christopher Hill in the late twentieth is that the repression of festivities was, in a sense, a by-product of the emergence of capitalism. The middle classes had to learn to calculate, save, and “defer gratification”; the lower classes had to be transformed into a disciplined, factory-ready, working classâmeaning far fewer holidays and the new necessity of showing up for work sober and on time, six days a week. Peasants had worked hard too, of course, but in seasonally determined bursts; the new industrialism required ceaseless labor, all year round.
There was money to be made from reliable, well-regulated, human laborâin the burgeoning English textile industry, for exampleâand to the men who stood to make it, the old recreations and pastimes represented the waste of a valuable resource. In France, economic concerns drove the administration of Louis XIV
to reduce the number of saints' days from several hundred a year to ninety-two. In late-seventeenth-century England, an economist put forth the alarming estimate that each holiday cost the nation fifty thousand pounds, largely in lost labor time.
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From an emerging capitalist perspectiveârelentlessly focused on the bottom lineâfestivities had no redeeming qualities. They were just another bad habit the lower classes would have to be weaned from, like the English workers' observance of “St. Monday” as a day to continue, or recuperate from, the weekend's fun.
Protestantismâespecially in its ascetic, Calvinist formâplayed a major role in convincing large numbers of people not only that unremitting, disciplined labor was good for their souls, but that festivities were positively sinful, along with mere idleness. In part, its appeal was probably similar to that of much evangelical Christianity today; it offered people the self-discipline demanded by a harsher economic order: Curb your drinking, learn to rise before the sun, work until dark, and be grateful for whatever you're paid. In addition, ambitious middle-class people were increasingly repelled by the profligacy of the Catholic Church and the old feudal nobilityânot only the lavish cathedrals and wealthy monasteries but the seasonal round of festive blowouts. Protestantism, serving as the ideological handmaiden of the new capitalism, “descended like a frost on the life of âMerrie Old England,'” as Weber put it, destroying in its icy grip the usual Christmas festivities, the maypole, the games, and all traditional forms of group pleasure.
13
But this account downplays the importance of festivities as a point of contention in their own right, quite apart from their perceived economic effects. Without question, industrial capitalism and Protestantism played a central role in motivating the destruction of carnival and other festivities. There was another factor, though, usually neglected in the economic-based accounts: To elites, the problem with festivities lay not only in what people were
not
doingâthat is, workingâbut in what they
were
doing, that is, in the nature of the revelry itself. In the sixteenth century, European
authorities (secular and ecclesiastical, Catholic as well as Protestant) were coming to fear and disdain the public festivities that they themselves had once played starring roles inâto see them as vulgar and, more important, dangerous.
We saw in the previous chapter how medieval carnivals mocked the authorities with “rituals of inversion” that might feature a king of fools, obscene parodies of the mass, or dancers costumed as priests and nuns. To historians, such rude mockery highlights the political ambiguity of carnival: Did it serve as a “fundamental challenge to the status quo”
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or as a mere safety valve for discontentâin Terry Eagleton's words, “a contained popular blow-off as disturbing and relatively ineffectual as a revolutionary work of art?”
15
Supporters of the “safety-valve” interpretation often quote a circular letter promulgated by the Paris School of Theology in 1444, arguing that festivities are necessary
so that foolishness, which is our second nature and seems to be inherent in man, might freely spend itself at least once a year. Wine barrels burst if from time to time we do not open them and let in some air. All of us men are barrels poorly put together, which would burst from the wine of wisdom, if this wine remains in a state of constant fermentation of piousness and fear of God. We must give it air in order not to let it Spoil.
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Similar sentiments can be found throughout the history of European carnival and carnival-like festivities. A writer in an English magazine opined in 1738 that “dancing on the Green at Wakes and merry Tides should not only be indulg'd but incourag'd: and little Prizes being allotted for the Maids who excel in a Jig or Hornpipe, would make them return to their daily Labour with a light Heart and grateful Obedience to their Superiors.”
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There is probably no general and universal answer, though, to the question of whether carnival functioned as a school for revolution or as a means of social control. We do not know how the people themselves construed their festive mockeries of kings and priests, for exampleâas good-natured mischief or as a kind of threat. But it is safe to say that carnival increasingly gains a political edge, in the modern sense,
after
the Middle Ages, from the sixteenth century on, in what is known today as the early modern period. It is then that large numbers of people begin to use the masks and noises of their traditional festivities as a cover for armed rebellion, and to see, perhaps for the first time, the possibility of inverting hierarchy on a permanent basis, and not just for a few festive hours. In the French antitax revolt of 1548, for example, the rebellious peasant militias “were recruited on the basis of parishes from the
monstres,
or feast-day processions.”
18
At the St. Blaise's Day festivity in 1579 in Romans, also in France, the lower-class people chose as their “carnival king” one of their actual political leaders. “They elected a chief not so much for the occasion,” a conservative contemporary reported in alarm, “ ⦠as to embrace a cause which they called the rest and relief of the people.”
19
It may also be relevant that in early-sixteenth-century England, the legendary outlaw philanthropist Robin Hoodâor at least figures representing himâbegan to play a starring role as lord of misrule in annual summer festivities.
20
The great social disruptions of the sixteenth century added to the danger of traditional festivities. The population was rising throughout Europe, forcing individuals off the land and into fast-growing, chaotic cities. For the fortunate, this was the Renaissance, a time when the artist, scholar, craftsperson, or adventurer could make his (or, very rarely, her) own way in the world, unconstrained by feudal obligations. But for every Erasmus or da Vinci, there were thousands of uprooted peasants for whom the relative freedom of the sixteenth century meant only vagrancy and destitution in a world where prices were rising and wages falling. Newly displaced
people wandered in bands throughout the countryside, begging and stealing; they dispersed into the cities, where they formed a new urban underclass of prostitutes, laborers, and criminals. Imagine the violence that might have ensued if the London of 1600, with its approximately 250,000 disparate and often desperate residents, declared a several-day-long, citywide carnival, in which pickpockets and wealthy merchants were to revel together in the streets.
From the sixteenth century on, the carnivalistic assault on authority seems to become less metaphorical and more physically menacing to the elites. In Udine, Italy, the pre-Lent carnival of 1511 turned into a riot that ended with the sacking and looting of more than twenty palaces and the murder of fifty nobles and their retainers.
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Two years later, hundreds of peasants seized the occasion of some June festivities to march on the city of Berne and sack it.
22
During the Shrove Tuesday celebration in 1529, gangs of armed men overran the city of Basle.
23
In the most thoroughly documented carnival uprising of the periodâat Romans in 1580âthe insurgents announced their intentions by dancing aggressively with swords, brooms, and flails used for threshing wheat. “They held street dances through the town,” a local notable, who was himself a target of the insurgency, wrote, “ ⦠and all these dances were to no other end than to announce that they wanted to kill everything.”
24
To what extent these carnival uprisings were spontaneousâfueled by alcohol and inspired by the fleeting excitement of the occasionâwe cannot know, but some, like the revolt at Romans, were certainly planned in advance. Anyone with a mind for rebellion could see the advantages of the carnival setting, with its routine disorder, masks to conceal the perpetrators' faces, and enough beer or wine to confound the local constabulary. And if there was no convenient holiday in the offing, people again and again dressed up their rebellions in the trappings of carnival: masks, even full costumes, and almost always the music of bells, bagpipes, drums. It is no coincidence that the confraternities and “youth abbeys”
responsible for organizing festivals in parts of rural France became bastions of sedition, or that peasant militias in the antitax revolt of 1548 were drawn from the groups of men who organized feast-day processions.
Similarly, the maypole, around which so many traditional French and English festivities revolved, became a signal of defiance and a call to action. Well into the eighteenth century, the political aspirations of the common people were expressed, as E. P. Thompson writes of England, in “a language of ribbons, of bonfires, of oaths and the refusal of oaths, of toasts, of seditious riddles and ancient prophecies, of oak leaves and of maypoles, of ballads with a political
double-entendre,
even of airs whistled in the streets.”
25
In England, even football could provide an excuse for assembling and a cover for violence; in 1740, “a Mach of Futtball was Cried [announced] at Ketring of five Hundred Men of a side, but the design was to Pull Down Lady Betey Jesmaine's Mills.”
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“It is in fact striking,” write Stallybrass and White, “how frequently violent social clashes apparently âcoincided' with carnival ⦠to call it a âcoincidence' of social revolt and carnival is deeply misleading, for ⦠it was only in the late 18th and early 19th centuriesâand then only in certain areasâthat one can reasonably talk of popular politics
dissociated
from the carnivalesque at all.”
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