In the United States, residents of Mobile have long been engaged in a spirited, if rather one-sided, dispute with their Gulf Coast neighbors to the west. The crux of the argument? Whether their city or New Orleans can rightfully claim to have “started” Mardi Gras. The fervor of the debate can be amusing and irritating in turn, and partisans of both tend to overlook an obvious clue in the very name of the celebration.
In 1682, the explorer Robert de La Salle navigated from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. In the process, he claimed the entire Mississippi basin for France, ruled at the time by Louis XIV. In the next decade, the Sun King’s ministers, concerned about encroachments from Spanish Florida, commissioned Pierre LeMoyne d’Iberville to locate the mouth of the great river and establish a fort. The expedition sailed from Brest in October of 1698. Five months later, d’Iberville wrote in his journal that members of his party
Came to sleep on a turn that the river makes on the west, two leagues
from the mouth on a point on the right of the river…
Their encampment has been traced to present day Plaquemines Parish. d’Iberville’s men would surely have been exhausted by the rigors of the journey. Yet they retained enough joie de vivre to make note of the date: March 2nd, 1699. Fat Tuesday. The site was christened Pointe du Mardi Gras. Arthur Hardy, a maven of all things carnivalesque, notes that the Pointe and the neighboring Bayou du Mardi Gras constitute the oldest non-indigenous place names in the whole Mississippi valley. So it was that Carnival was established in Louisiana even before Louisiana existed.
La Salle and d’Iberville were both heirs to a Carnival tradition pre-revolutionary France shared with the rest of Catholic Europe. Nicolas de Baye was a legal clerk and chronicler during the reign of King Charles VI. In a journal entry from 1411, he relates that servants in the royal household were obliged to rise especially early on the Monday before Mardi Gras, to begin preparing the next day’s “lenten feast”. History remembers the king as Charles the Mad, prone to delusions and erratic behavior. While Carnival indulgence is unlikely to have caused his insanity, it probably did little to help.
The 16th century author Francois Rabelais is best known for the comic classic Gargantua and Pantagruel. Originally published in several volumes, the novel relates the history of a gigantic monarch and his son. Rabelais’ entire masterpiece has rightly been called carnivalesque. The title characters loom enormously over the story, like floats in a delirious parade. Martial exploits are interspersed with absurd arguments, raunchy humor and scatological asides. Paeans to wine and gluttony abound as Rabelais both parodies and celebrates the wisdom of the ancients, all the while poking fun at the scholarly fads of his own day.
In his 1690 Dictionairre Universelle, Antoine de Furetriere defined Carnival as a
“Time of rejoicing lasting from Epiphany until Lent. Dances, Feasts and
marriages are mainly held at Carnival time”
As elsewhere, the festivities in France included a symbolic – and temporary – upending of the social order. Yet by the late 18th century, the annual debauch had become entwined with the sustained agitation would bring a permanent end to the Ancien Régime.
In December 1771, Chancellor Renee Nicolas de Maupeou abolished the parlements, or local appellate courts. The move was seen as an effort to bolster the despotic power of the crown. The subsequent Carnival season saw a procession of jeering revelers make their way across Paris from the Faubourg St. Antoine. After calling on the residences of senior police officials, they continued to the home of Maupeou himself. The crowd eventually dispersed, but at least one contemporary detected something more than seasonal high spirits. To Simeon-Prosper Hardy, the incident confirmed that “His Majesty’s subjects have been asked to endure too much”.
With the ascension of Louis XVI in 1774, the parlements were reinstated, but this did not assuage the growing anger of the urban poor and middle classes. In 1789, the approach of Mardi Gras brought out mobs of maskers. Grotesquely attired, devoted to “license, libertinage, and depravity” they alarmed Juigné de Wenchalles. The Archbishop of Paris, Wenchalles condemned the “profane parties” from his pulpit; outside of consecrated spaces, they were known as chienlits, or “shit a-beds”.
The anarchic vigor of the Parisian masses was crucial to the success of the French Revolution. Yet history has proven that those who seek to harness populist discontent often find themselves at odds with the desires of the people themselves. In a fascinating essay, the scholar James H. Johnson has demonstrated that the revolutionary intelligentsia generally showed a distaste for Carnival rivaling that of the hated Archbishop.
After the Tennis Court Oath and the fall of the Bastille, the lighthearted inversion of societal roles took on a deadly seriousness. To preserve their lives and fortunes, aristocratic families were known to adopt the clothing of paupers, stoking a cycle of suspicion, panic and revenge. As the Shrovetide season of 1790 got underway, local councils adopted ordinances against the sale or display of festive disguises. As one chapter of the Jacobin Club explained, “enemies of the Revolution” could exploit the cover of a mask to endanger “security and public tranquility”.
Given the real hostility of France’s nobility and the enmity of neighboring states, such measures make pragmatic sense. Yet Johnson suggests that for leaders of the new order, ideological disdain ran deeper than any transient threat. Jean-Paul Marat denounced Carnival as “a festival for slave-peoples”. The editors of Revolutions de Paris exhorted the liberated citizenry to recognize the celebration as “indecent and costly chaos…intended to plunge them further into their own filth”.
Reporting on the 1790 Carnival, the journalist Louis Marie Prudhomme contended that the people had at last sensed “the absurdity of this monstrous custom”. Polemics aside, the following year seems to have brought a recalibration of sorts. A pamphlet circulated in early 1791 expressed a desire to “merit the esteem and confidence of the French nation”, bon vivants included. The Jacobin club was to hold “a truly patriotic ball”. Masks would be permitted, with the proviso that guests’ true identities be published in advance. The gala thus preserved the form of masquerade while eliminating any frissson of mystery. Some choices seem to have anticipated the subsequent Reign of Terror. Maximilien de Robespierre came arrayed as a ghost; Doctor Guillotin, chief advocate of the execution machine which would bear his name, attended in the guise of “a seller of herbs wearing a death mask”.
The Napoleonic Wars led to the abolition of Venice’s ancient tradition of Carnevale, but by 1805 an imperial order once again allowed the wearing of masks within France. In the decades after Waterloo, the country’s government vacillated between cycles of monarchical restoration and militant republicanism. Napoleon III reigned from 1852 until 1870. The Franco-Prussian War brought about emperor’s capture in battle, a popular insurrection and the establishment of the Third Republic.
A humiliating defeat for the French, the conflict also interrupted the public observation of Mardi Gras. Claude Monet’s Carnaval, Boulevard des Capucines was painted in 1873 and depicts the first celebration after the cessation of hostilities. An impressionistic blur of golden color dominates the picture as a parade streams past throngs of black-glad bourgeois spectators. Two figures in the foreground look down from a balcony. Wearing staid top-hats, they seem almost to be of different species than the rebellious maskers of a century before.
French and German armies clashed again, in 1914 and 1939. General Charles de Gaulle was the leading figure of French resistance, and towered over the postwar era. He served as president for a decade, beginning in 1959. In May 1968, student demonstrations convulsed Paris. De Gaulle raged against the protesters by evoking the rowdies of the Old Regime: “La réforme, oui. La chienlits, non”.