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 streets—the
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 maypole—the 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 repression—or, as the instigators saw it, “reform” —extended 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 kings—perhaps less out of fondness for the festivities than hostility to the Calvinists—repeatedly 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 attack—its feasting, violence, processions, fairs, wakes, rowdy spectacle and outrageous clamour were subject to surveillance and repressive control.9 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.11 To people who had few alternative forms of distraction—no books, movies, or television—it must have seemed as if pleasure itself had been declared illegal.
Why did it happen—this 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 class—meaning 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 labor—in the burgeoning English textile industry, for example—and 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.12 From an emerging capitalist perspective—relentlessly focused on the bottom line—festivities 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.
Protestantism—especially in its ascetic, Calvinist form—played 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 nobility—not 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 ‘Merrie 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 doing—that is, working—but 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 in—to 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”14 or as a mere safety valve for discontent—in 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.16 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.”17
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 example—as 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 Hood—or at least figures representing him—began 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.21 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 period—at Romans in 1580—the 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 spontaneous—fueled by alcohol and inspired by the fleeting excitement of the occasion—we 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.”26 “It is in fact striking,” write Stallybrass and White, “how frequently violent social clashes apparently ‘coincided’ with carnival … to call it a ‘coincidence’ of social revolt and carnival is deeply misleading, for … it was only in the late 18th and early 19th centuries—and then only in certain areas—that one can reasonably talk of popular politics dissociated from the carnivalesque at all.”27
Without question, Protestantism was responsible for stiffening the spines of people like the minister’s wife mentioned above, whose response to a maypole was to reach for an ax. But it is worth noting that Protestantism did not begin as a puritanical, anticarnival movement. In fact, it is probably better to speak of two Protestant Reformations: one led by Martin Luther in the early sixteenth century, and a second, far more puritanical one, led by John Calvin a few decades later. Luther’s Reformation probably even appeared to many, at first, as a possible source of relief from the Catholic
Church’s attacks on festivities, which seem to have been mounting to a crescendo on the very eve of the Reformation.
In Florence in the 1490s, for example, the crusading monk Girolamo Savonarola raged against worldly extravagance and folly in all forms, not least of them carnival, preaching that “boys should collect alms for the respectable poor, instead of mad pranks, throwing stones and making floats [for carnival.]”28 In Germany, during the years when young Luther was quietly agonizing over his relationship to the pope and the deity, reforming priests were already inveighing against Church festivals, arguing that the attendant drinking, dancing, and gaming were “the ruin of the common people.” 29 Of particular concern to early-sixteenth-century Catholic reformers was the mockery of religious ritual common to so many festivities. The late fifteenth century had seen a growing number of mandates against such parodies, as well as against people costuming themselves for carnival as priests and nuns.30 One target for early-sixteenth-century Catholic “reform,” for example, was the Strasbourgers’ custom of Roraffe, in which a buffoon sang and clowned in the cathedral all through the Pentecost service.31
Luther did aim to abolish the “superstitious” worship of saints, which meant the end of saints’ days and the festivities that had grown up around them. But he found nothing intrinsically evil in the traditional communal pleasures, stating in a sermon:
Because it is the custom of the country, just like inviting guests, dressing up, eating, drinking, and making merry, I can’t bring myself to condemn it, unless it gets out of hand, and so causes immoralities or excess. And even though sin has taken place in this way, it’s not the fault of dancing alone. Provided they don’t jump on the tables or dance in church … But so long as it’s done decently, I respect the rites and customs of weddings … and I dance, anyway!32 Luther even introduced a powerful new experience of community solidarity and uplift into the Christian service, in the form of hymn
singing, many of the hymns being of his own composition, and to Christians accustomed to silence and passivity at the Catholic mass, this must have seemed an exceedingly lively innovation.
Like other popular insurgencies at the time, the early Protestant movement made good use of the carnival tradition. At the very beginning of the Reformation, when Luther publicly burned the papal bull condemning him, his supporters did not respond with prayer and hallelujahs; instead they paraded through the streets of Wittenberg accompanied by musicians and someone costumed as the pope, singing and laughing. The procession, the music, the mock pope—all this is traditional carnival fare; the difference being that at Wittenberg, the revelers were going well beyond parody. The historian Bob Scribner found evidence of twenty-three additional incidents in sixteenth-century Germany in which Protestants used carnivals and carnival themes to advance their cause. At scheduled carnivals throughout the century, Protestants (or perhaps I should say proto-Protestants, since the followers of Luther had not yet, in all these cases, developed an alternative Church) performed traditional carnival activities such as parodying Catholic ritual and offering lewd impersonations of monks and nuns. They also burned mock papal bulls, smashed statues, dragged paintings from churches and burned them, extorted food and drink from a monastery, even defecated on altars.
Sometimes the local secular authorities sought to control the anti-Catholic revelry, and sometimes they participated in it. Scribner describes carnival in Hildesheim in 1543, where, after the usual days and nights of dancing, iconoclasm, and reviling people dressed as the pope and other religious dignitaries and “the mayor led the entire crowd of reveling men, women and children to the cathedral. They were refused entrance to the church itself, but they led a dance through the cloisters and profaned the graves in the churchyard.” 33 If Protestantism was supposed to be dour, no one knew that in the beginning. In Luther’s Germany, Protestantism made its first appearance, in town after town, as the fulfillment of the
populist threat to the Catholic Church that had been implicit in centuries of carnival revelry.
All too soon, Luther’s Protestantism severed its connection with the tradition of carnivalesque revolt. When German peasants, inspired in part by Luther’s teachings, rebelled in 1524—sometimes using carnivalesque props like masks34—a horrified Luther called for their extermination. Similarly, Scribner reports that even where they supported the Reformation, town magistrates were alarmed by carnival-based attacks on the Catholic Church, fearing, as one official put it, that these might “go beyond mere matters of religion.”35 In Basle, the Reformation had been ushered in by a carnival rebellion on Shrove Tuesday of 1529, with demands for the democratization of the town government as well as for the reform of religious ritual. But the political demands went unmet, and, in the Protestant order that followed, carnival itself was increasingly tamed and curtailed, leading one citizen to complain in 1568 of Protestantism itself as a devilish “new popedom”: “Der tüfel het uns mit den nüwen Bapsttum beschissen!” (The devil has shat on us with a new papacy!)36
Calvin’s version of Protestantism, of course, condemned all forms of festive behavior, including leisure activities of any kind. While Luther had danced, Calvin banned dancing, along with gambling, drinking, and sports. As Michael Walzer writes, Calvinism “obviously missed by some distance any transcendence of anxiety. It offered no sense of human freedom or brotherly love … It is not even unfair to suggest that [Calvin] sought to maintain a certain fundamental anxiety.”37 To the Calvinist, who spent his or her life in a lonely internal struggle to determine whether he or she was “saved,” not only was pleasure in any form a distraction; it was the devil’s snare.
But Protestantism, whether seen as a revolt against the old order or a new form of pacification, was only one factor affecting the fate of carnival in the sixteenth century. Another was the availability of firearms. The historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie notes that
“things had changed between 1566 and 1584. The Dauphinois [people of the southeastern French province the Dauphiné] had developed a taste for arms, or at least gotten into the habit of using them after more than ten years of civil war.”38 A primitive gun, the arquebus, began to make its appearance in peasant rebellions and—what were often overlapping events—carnivals and other festivities.39 In sixteenth-century Romans, the archery contests that accompanied many festive occasions were replaced by contests with firearms; Jean Serve, the leader of the rebellion in Romans in 1580, bore the title “king of the Arquebus,” apparently because of his markmanship. 40
Throughout Europe, guns became a prominent feature of carnival: guns carried proudly by men processing through the streets, shaken at effigies of unpopular individuals, or fired in multigun salutes. For example, an English charivari or “skymmington”—a traditional festivity aimed at mocking, and sometimes threatening, some person or people—was conducted in 1618, according to a contemporary account, by “three or four hundred men, some like soldiers armed with pieces and other weapons,” and reached an ear-shattering crescendo when “the gunners shot off their pieces, pipes and horns were sounded, together with lowbells and other smaller bells which the company had amongst them.”41 To the noble listening from his manor house or the cleric hidden away in his rectory, the sound of armed revelry must have been profoundly unnerving.
The French Revolution showed, if nothing else, what guns could do for the traditional carnivalesque revolt. Common people armed themselves—in the most famous case, by storming the Bastille to seize the guns stored within it. Less often noted is that they also “armed” themselves with carnival motifs that directly expressed their revolutionary aspirations. Although traditional festivities had been largely vitiated or expunged by the Church by the end of the eighteenth century, rural people were still in the habit of announcing their political intentions by setting up a maypole. Such
maypoles served a political purpose, as a “call to riotous assembly, a sort of visual tocsin bell,” the French historian Mona Ozouf writes, and might bear slogans such as “No more rents”42 along with the traditional ribbons and flowers. The message was not lost on the feudal authorities, who often met the erection of maypoles with violence.43
Even as it was politicized, the maypole continued to play its traditional role as a signal for public festivity. There is “no doubt,” according to Ozouf, of “the privileged link between the maypole and collective joy”44—or, we might add, between collective joy and spontaneous revolution from below. In Perigord in July 1791, according to a report drawn up by local revolutionary clubs, peasants attacked weathercocks and church pews—symbols of feudal and religious authority respectively—“both with some violence and in the effusion of their joy … they set up maypoles in the public squares, surrounding them with all the destructive signs of the feudal monarchy.”45
Dancing, costuming, and other forms of festive behavior often accompanied these rural uprisings during the French Revolution, especially in parts of France that still retained some remnant of a carnival tradition. The carnival themes of mockery and inversion, which had amused and perhaps pacified the lower classes for centuries, now signified serious political intent: Pigs dressed up to resemble nobles, a monkey wearing a bishop’s miter on its head, feudal insignia pulled through the streets by goats are among the festive jokes of the French Revolution. “We see women flogging saints’ statues,” Ozouf reports. “Priests’ soutanes drop to reveal the dress of the sans-culottes; nuns dance the carmagnole. A cardinal and a whore walk on either side of the coffin of Despotism.”46 News of revolutionary victories was often greeted with firecrackers, drums, singing, and dancing in the streets. “They are like madmen who ought to be tied up, or rather like bacchantes,” the mayor of Leguillac remarked of the local revolutionaries, while the seigneur de Montbrun observed with distaste that “they danced around like Hurons and Iroquois.”47
Well before the French Revolution, the first response of nervous elites—nobles and members of the emerging urban bourgeoisie—was simply to withdraw from public festivities into parallel festivities of their own. At least into the fifteenth century, they had participated as avidly as the peasants and urban workers, and the mixing of classes no doubt enhanced the drama and excitement of the occasion. Fifteenth-century Castilian festivals, for example, brought the local nobility, including contingents of knights costumed as Moors, together with lower-class revelers: “The music of trumpets, drums, and other musical instruments and the unpredictable behavior of fools and buffoons served as counterpoint to, and inversion of, the martial splendor of the knights.”48 Nor can it be said that the upper classes always behaved in a dignified manner, perhaps especially when their identities were concealed by masks. “Any account of Carnival,” according to British medievalist Meg Twycross, “has to accommodate the facts that in Ferrara the Duke, in Rome the cardinals, and in France the King and his minions behaved in just as riotous a way as the temporarily liberated underclasses.”49
In fact the class conflicts that went on at festive occasions were sometimes initiated by the elite participants, who might ride their horses into the crowds of townspeople or harass the local women. Mostly, though, members of the elite seem to have been thoroughly welcome; in fourteenth-century Holland, for example,
a town increased its status in the eyes of neighboring towns when it succeeded in making the ruler take part in the town’s festivities. By his presence the duke revealed his power and authority. He took part in the meals and dances; he listened sympathetically to reciters and the town’s actors; he showed his generosity to all those and to the numerous minstrels and buffoons.50 To an extent the upper classes had always preferred to reserve some parts of the celebration for their own exclusive enjoyment. In
late-fifteenth-century Castile, for example, where carnival served as a site for the festive mingling of the classes, the ruling noble family and its retinue actually moved back and forth during important feasts, enjoying the ribaldry of the public celebrations and then retiring for “more courtly forms of entertainment” in their private lodgings.51 But a century later, the classes were in the process of separation. In France, Ladurie reports, the increasing use of festivities as an occasion for protest sometimes led communities to “organize two separate Carnivals, even two separate Maypoles, one for the poor and one for the rich,” so as to diminish the possibility of violence.52 In Romans, in 1580, the rich organized their own carnival, choosing as their symbols a more noble-seeming set of animals than those representing the peasants and workers; a partridge, for example, as opposed to the plebeians’ hare. But in this case, the separation was ineffective. Fighting broke out between the classes, climaxing in the slaughter of the insurgent peasants and artisans by the nobles.
From the sixteenth century on, festivities served largely to drive a wedge between the classes.j In eighteenth-century prerevolutionary Nice, rich and poor partied together on important holidays until “une certaine heure de la nuit,” when it was customary for everyone to remove their masks—at which point the rich hastily retired for the night, presumably still safely incognito.53 A more dramatic retreat took place in Germany, where, by the nineteenth century, the celebrations of local elites “increasingly took place at home or in private clubs.”54 And in eighteenth-century England, the novelist Henry Fielding observed that two entirely separate cultures had emerged.
Whilst the people of fashion seized several places to their own use, such as courts, assemblies, operas, balls, &c., the people of no fashion … have been in constant possession of all hops, fairs, revels, &c … So far from looking on each other as brethren in the Christian language, they seem scarce to regard each other as of the same species.55 At least in the earlier part of the early modern period, the private festivities of elites had often been as uninhibited as the celebrations of the poor. The historian Edward Muir reports that the wedding parties of wealthy burghers often featured “clowns, musicians, acrobats, even prostitutes … the reciting of obscene poems and the wild dancing in which the men would swing young women about so lifting their skirts (underwear had not yet been invented).”56 But by the late eighteenth century, in France, according to an anonymous bourgeois chronicler of life in Montpellier, traditional festivities were definitely déclassé, whether held indoors or out.
Such amusements have completely gone out of favor in this city and have given way to a concern for making money. Thus no more public fêtes, no more Perroquet archery contests or general merry-making. If any take place from time to time, it is only among the common people. Les hônnetes gens [the “better” class of people] do not take part.57 The historian Robert Darnton comments that the poor and working class “had all the fun,” while the elite could only “parade about solemnly in processions générales.”
Hell-raising had even gone out of wedding feasts, except in the “Third Estate” [the working class]. In the upper estates, one invited only the immediate family, not the whole neighborhood. There was no more drunkenness, no more brawling at table, no invasions from a rowdy counter-ceremony (trouble-fête) or bawdiness exploding from a charviari or cabaret.58 As another historian observes of England in the same period: “A solid barrier” had arisen “between the culture of gentility and the culture of the people.”59
There was something besides fear driving the aristocrats and the rich merchants who aped them away from the public festivities, something more like contempt. The medieval nobleman who had treated his vassals to meat and drink on holidays, who had plunged into the dancing or even stripped to his waist to wrestle with the blacksmith, was a man secure in his social function and what he believed to be his innate superiority. He was a warrior and, along with his retinue of knights, the only protection the common people had from the incursions of other predatory nobles. But as guns replaced swords and mass armies replaced bands of mounted knights, the noble was deprived of his old military role and left emasculated in more ways than one. Power became more centralized, shifting to kings, who alone had the authority to tax huge populations and thus support armies numbering in the tens of thousands—and kings did not look kindly on the exercise of violence by their subordinates, even in the relatively innocuous form of dueling. The nobleman was now required, lest he plot against the king, to take up residence at the royal court for a certain number of months per year, where he was confined, more or less, to making small talk and otherwise amusing the royals. Once a warrior, he became a courtier.
With this reduction in status came a change in the aristocratic personality, away from spontaneity and self-assertion, toward guardedness and self-restraint. The old warrior way of life, according to the chronicler of this transformation, Norbert Elias, permitted the nobleman “extraordinary freedom in living out his feelings and passions, it allow[ed] savage joys, the uninhibited satisfaction of pleasure from women, or of hatred in destroying and tormenting anything hostile.”60 In the court of his superior, the king, the noble’s swashbuckling ways would no longer do. Though seldom violent, Elias relates,
life in this circle [the court] is in no way peaceful. Very many people are continuously dependent on each other. Competition for prestige and royal favour is intense … If the sword no longer plays so great a role as the means of decision, it is replaced by intrigue, conflicts in which careers and social success are contested with words. They demand and produce other qualities than did the armed struggles that had to be fought out with weapons in one’s hand. Continuous reflection, foresight, and calculation, self-control, precise and articulate regulation of one’s own affects, knowledge of the whole terrain, human and non-human, in which one acts, become more and more indispensable preconditions of social success.61 One way of charting the personality change required by court life is through the emergence of “manners.” The old nobleman-as-warrior had no need of good manners, had such a concept even been clearly defined. Since his nobility inhered in his blood, whatever he did was by definition admirable, and late medieval guidebooks suggested that he did many things that would be judged, within a few centuries, as thoroughly disgusting. “Do not clean your teeth with your knife. Do not spit on or over the table … Do not let yourself go [fart or urinate?] at table … Do not clean your teeth with the tablecloth … Do not fall asleep at table.”62 These are, to the say the least, very minimal restrictions, suggesting a culture of far greater physical intimacy between individuals than anything we can comfortably imagine today. Medieval people ate together, “taking meat with their fingers from the same dish, wine from the same goblet,” and still needed to be reminded, in the early sixteenth century, that “it is impolite to greet someone who is urinating or defecating”—in a corridor, for example, or on the sidewalk. What medieval culture lacked, according to Elias, was “the invisible wall of affects which seems now to rise between one human body and another, repelling and separating.”63
It is in the tense, competitive setting of the early modern royal court that etiquette, in the form we know it, is forged, throwing up
a barrier between individuals and at the same time, inevitably, between the classes. Court society is the first to adopt utensils for eating, along with individual plates to eat from, and chairs, rather than benches, to sit on. In this setting, urges that a medieval noble would have indulged without thinking—to belch or scratch or reach across the table—are carefully repressed; courtiers must learn to drink more moderately, to avoid jostling and elbowing one another. And it should be emphasized that the new concern to separate eating from excreting, and one human body from another, had nothing to do with hygiene: Bathing was still an infrequent, even—if indulged in too often—eccentric, practice; the knowledge that contact with others and their excreta can spread disease was still at least two centuries away. The notion of “personal space” and the horror of other people’s bodily processes that set limits on human physical interaction in our own time arose, originally, out of social anxiety and distrust.
Courtiers have amusements too—in fact they have no other way to pass the time, since work, even of a scholarly or professional nature, is beneath them—but their amusements diverge radically, from the sixteenth century on, from those of the poor or even of aristocrats in an earlier time. Instead of the shouted boasts and jests that enlivened a medieval baron’s table, there is “conversation,” decorated with flowery circumlocutions and admired as a kind of art form. Courtiers still dance, but theirs is a new form of dancing, stately and restrained, and almost always performed indoors. Baldesar Castiglione, in his famous early-sixteenth-century advice book, councils the aspiring courtier to master the fashionable dances, but when performing a particularly challenging one in public, he should wear a mask lest he disgrace himself with a misstep.64 Even when supposedly enjoying himself, the courtier never for a moment lets down his guard.
Increasingly, the aristocracy creates its own culture, featuring innovations like “classical” music and ballet—strained and, by plebeian standards, no doubt tedious entertainments to be consumed,
ideally, in silence while sitting or standing still. By the same token, the exuberance and solidarity of traditional festivities begin to look—to the lord or lady of the court, as well as to the businessmen and professionals who aped the noble’s manners—unseemly, vulgar, perhaps even revolting. As in the class and racial prejudices of our own time, contempt mixes easily with fear: The “vulgar” carnival participant was, in the eyes of his social betters, also a violent lout. To the wealthy, carnival could only evoke what the historian Stephen J. Greenblatt describes as “the great ruling class nightmare of the Renaissance: the marauding horde, the many-headed multitude, the insatiate, giddy, and murderous crowd.”65