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
The Withdrawal of the Upper Class
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
6
A Note on Puritanism and Military Reform
Almost two hundred years after the Protestant Reformation in Europe, something strikingly similar occurred in a very different setting. A Muslim scholar, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, launched a crusade to reform and purify Arabian Islam, which had been corrupted, in his view, by such practices as the veneration of saints and shrines and ecstatic forms of worship involving dancing, singing, and chanting. Wahhab went about axing holy trees (much as English puritans had attacked maypoles), smashing shrines, and attempting to crush traditional ecstatic rituals. His view of religious practice was every bit as austere as John Calvin’s: There were to be no decorations or music in the mosques, no route to salvation except through prayer and obedience to religious teaching, in the Islamic case, sharia law. And like Calvin, Wahhab and his follower
s aimed at the establishment of a theocratic state with strict control over individual behavior—no hashish, for example, no “sexual perversions” or female immodesty—a goal still pursued by his ideological descendants, the militant Islamists of our own time.
The parallel between the Protestant Reformation and the Wahhabi movement within Islam has been noted before. Samuel P. Huntington, for example, writes that “both are reactions to the stagnation and corruption of existing institutions; advocate a return to a purer and more demanding form of their religion; preach work, order, and discipline.”1 In the Islamic world, the role of Catholicism was played by Sufism—a current of Islam dating from the eighth or ninth century and offering a richly diverse, in some ways even florid, set of spiritual possibilities. Like Catholicism, Sufism had its intellectuals, mystics, and poets; like Catholicism, it was open to a proliferation of saints and popular festivities, some of which may have originated in pagan practices. In both the Islamic and Christian cases, the “reformers” claimed to be returning to the foundations of their religion—stripping away the gaudy excrescences, the sensory delights, the carnivals and color, and arresting the slide toward polytheism as represented by the veneration of saints. The idea, in both cases, was to achieve a “purified” form of religion focused on the struggle for holiness within the individual soul.
What is baffling about this parallel is the apparent lack of any parallel conditions within the societies involved. The Protestant Reformation took place in a Europe already possessed of large cities and teetering on the verge of the industrial revolution. Wahhabism, in contrast, found its first converts in the central part of the Arabian Peninsula, a place still occupied by tribal nomads based around oasis settlements. Capitalism and industrialism, for all their alleged role in the Protestant Reformation, were at best distant rumors in the tiny town of Ad Dir’iyyah, where Wahhab made his base. And while sixteenth-century Europe was beginning to expand into Africa, Asia, and the Americas, eighteenth-century Arabia was a backwater within the Ottoman Empire, which was itself already in decline. Anyone looking for a “materialist” explanation of both Islamic and Protestant puritanism—that is, one based on concrete economic circumstances—can only throw up her hands in despair.
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