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.
Dangerous Dances
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 ci
ty 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
Protestants and Guns
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 festiv
e 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
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