History of carnivals and parades: 2,500 years of the world turned upside down

Once upon a time there was a street which, for a few days each year, belonged to no one… or rather to everyone. The servant became king there, the king ended up on the bonfire, men wore dresses and bears wore hats. For 2,500 years, under a thousand names, the peoples of Europe and beyond have gone out in masks to turn the world upside down. This is the history of carnivals and parades, from the chariots of Dionysus to the giants of street arts.

Before carnival: gods, ships and mock kings

Let us begin with a word of warning: carnival is not a Roman festival that crossed the centuries hiding behind a mask. It is a Christian invention of the Middle Ages, inseparable from Lent. But to build itself, it recycled far older gestures: the chariot that carries a god through the streets, the mock king, the master who waits on his slave, the man disguised as a beast. Historians such as Jacques Heers are wary of “pagan survivals” too neat to be true. The gestures, however, are certainly there.

The wheeled ship of Dionysus

Around 500 BC, potters in Athens painted an astonishing scene on their vases: Dionysus, god of wine, seated in a ship mounted on wheels, pulled through the city and escorted by flute-playing satyrs. It is the oldest known “parade float” in Europe. It precedes the floats of Nice and Viareggio by twenty-five centuries.

The Saturnalia: the world upside down, Roman style

In Rome, from 17 December onwards, Saturn was celebrated. During the Saturnalia, people feasted, played dice and exchanged gifts. Above all, the social order was overturned: slaves dined with their masters, and everyone put on the cap of the freedmen. A “king of the Saturnalia”, chosen by a throw of the dice, could order the guests to do any foolish thing he liked. Not everyone enjoyed the din: Pliny the Younger tells how he had a secluded room built in his villa, where he took refuge while the whole house “rang with the shouts of the festivities”.

A she-bear in a lady’s gown

In the 2nd century, the writer Apuleius described the procession that opened the sailing season in honour of Isis, the Navigium Isidis. Ahead of the priests marched a costumed troupe that looks remarkably like a carnival: a fake soldier, a fake magistrate, a fake philosopher, a man dressed as a woman… and a tame she-bear dressed as a matron, carried in a chair, followed by a monkey in a Phrygian cap and a donkey with wings glued on. It is one of the oldest costumed processions ever described in detail.

In Provence, people were already dressing up as stags

On the Kalends of January, throughout the Empire, people disguised themselves as a stag or an old woman, and men dressed as women. Bishops thundered against these practices, among them Caesarius of Arles in the 6th century. In other words, the people of Provence were already masking themselves as beasts four centuries before the word “carnival” existed.

The triumph, ancestor of the parade

When a Roman general returned victorious, he crossed the city as far as the Capitol: booty, painted pictures of the battles, captives, musicians, sometimes elephants. It is the prototype of the parade. One savoury detail: the soldiers were allowed to sing bawdy verses against their own general. Caesar himself was mocked for his amorous conquests. Laughter protected the victor from pride… and already paved the way for the satire of carnival floats.

Where does the word “carnival” come from?

The word comes to us from the Italian carnevale, itself drawn from the medieval Latin carnelevare, “to take away the meat”. Carnival is the moment when meat is removed from the table, just before Lent. French borrowed it in the 13th century, in the form quarnivalle. According to Italian philologists, its oldest known use is anything but festive: in a document from the abbey of Subiaco, in 965, carnelevare designates a rent payment date, much as one would say today “payable at Michaelmas”.

Two seductive etymologies nevertheless circulate everywhere. The first derives “carnival” from carrus navalis, the ship-chariot of Isis. It is pretty, but no Latin text uses this expression, and in Apuleius the ship of Isis is carried and then launched out to sea, not wheeled. The second, carne vale, “farewell to meat!”, is an old pun, not an etymology.

In Provence, the word is Caramantran, from “carême-entrant”, “Lent coming in”: the fat days that precede the beginning of Lent. It is also the name of the effigy that is put on trial and burned. In Portugal and Brazil, the old name for carnival, entrudo, means “entry” (into Lent).

The Middle Ages: fat against lean

To understand carnival, you have to look at the calendar. Lent is forty days of fasting before Easter: no meat, no feasting, no weddings. Just before it, larders are emptied and people let themselves go. The fat season culminates in the “fat days”, up to Shrove Tuesday, Mardi Gras. Ash Wednesday sounds the end of playtime. Since Easter changes date every year, so does carnival.

The people of the Middle Ages staged this calendar as a battle: the fight between Carnival and Lent. As early as the 13th century, a fabliau tells of the war between Charnage (meat) and Lent. In 1559, Bruegel drew his famous painting from it: Carnival, pot-bellied, astride a barrel, brandishes a spit topped with a pig’s head; Lent, thin, answers him with a baker’s peel on which two herrings do battle.

Charivaris and the Feast of Fools

The charivari is a night-time rumpus: pots and pans, horns and masks against the widower who remarries or the ill-matched couple. Around 1316, a Parisian manuscript, the Roman de Fauvel, gives the first picture of one: a masked band comes to disrupt the wedding night of Fauvel, a horse who has become king.

Much is also said about the Feast of Fools, at which young clerics elected a “bishop of fools” around 1 January. At Beauvais and Sens, a prose was even sung in honour of the donkey. Yet the image of sacrilegious orgies in the cathedrals comes mainly from its censors. The historian Max Harris has shown that it was first and foremost a joyful and authorized liturgy.

The Bal des Ardents

On 28 January 1393, in Paris, King Charles VI and five companions disguised themselves as “wild men”, covered in linen coated with pitch, for a charivari. A torch came too close: four of the dancers burned to death. The king owed his life only to the Duchess of Berry, who wrapped him in her gown. Froissart’s chronicle would make the story famous.

The trial of Caramantran

Everywhere in Europe, carnival ends badly for its king. In Provence, Caramantran, an effigy of straw and rags, is paraded through the streets and then accused of all the year’s misfortunes: the frost, the drought, the taxes, the cuckolded husbands. He has a prosecutor, he has a defence lawyer, and he is always found guilty. Then he burns. By driving out this scapegoat, the community purifies itself before Lent. The tradition is alive and well, from Sausset-les-Pins to Marseille.

In the 20th century, the Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin made carnival the symbol of the world turned upside down: popular laughter that brings down the mighty and regenerates everyone, the public square where all are equal for a time. This is true, but not always. Carnival has also served as a safety valve tolerated by those in power, and sometimes as a pretext for violence. The rest of the story shows it.

Candles, masks and the Bœuf Gras: the early modern age

Rome, the race and the candles

In 1466, Pope Paul II installed the carnival on the main street of Rome, which would earn from it its name of Corso (the race). Donkeys were raced there, old men too… and riderless horses, the barberi, until 1882. The festival also had its dark side: from 1466 to 1668, the “race of the Jews” forced the Jews of Rome to run under a hail of mockery, until Clement IX abolished it. The world turned upside down also knows how to humiliate.

On the last evening came the festival of the moccoletti: everyone held a small candle and tried to blow out their neighbour’s while cheerfully shouting “Sia ammazzato chi non porta moccolo!” (“Death to whoever carries no candle!”). Goethe made it the closing scene of his Roman Carnival (1789).

In Italy again, the commedia dell’arte, attested from the mid-16th century, supplied the whole of Europe with its masks: Harlequin, Pantalone and the Doctor.

Venice, the carnival of masks

As early as 1094, a document of Doge Vitale Falier mentions public entertainments, and in 1296 the Senate made the last day before Lent a public holiday. In Venice, carnival ran from St Stephen’s Day, 26 December, until Ash Wednesday. The mask-makers, the mascareri, had had their guild statutes since 1436. The king of masks is the bauta: a white face with a jutting chin, worn with a large black cloak and a tricorne, which allows one to drink and eat without unmasking. Women wore the moretta, a small oval of black velvet held in place by biting a button: impossible to speak without revealing oneself. People gambled masked at the Ridotto, the gaming house opened in 1638, until its closure in 1774.

On Fat Thursday, on the Piazzetta, the city’s two rival factions, the Castellani and the Nicolotti, competed by building human pyramids, the “Forces of Hercules”. From 1548, a tightrope walker even climbed a rope stretched up to the top of the campanile of St Mark’s: this was the “Flight of the Turk”. After a fatal accident in 1759, it was replaced by a wooden dove. The human flight returned only in 2001, under the name “Flight of the Angel”. Street acrobats ahead of their time! With the fall of the Republic in 1797, the carnival died out for nearly two centuries. It was reborn in 1979, thanks to the residents and the city. As for the famous plague doctor mask, it was not originally a carnival mask at all.

Romans, 1580: the carnival that turned into a massacre

In February 1580, at Romans in the Dauphiné, the carnival served as the stage for a settling of scores: behind the masks, the notables had the draper Jean Serve, known as Paumier, leader of the popular party, assassinated, and some twenty artisans were killed. The historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie drew from it a famous book, Carnival in Romans (1979).

Paris and its Bœuf Gras

In Paris, the king of carnival is… an ox. The butchers’ boys paraded a beribboned Bœuf Gras (Fat Ox), ridden by a child representing Cupid. In 1739, they even took it up to the Palais de Justice to greet the First President of the Parlement. The Revolution was suspicious of it: on 31 January 1790, Paris banned masks, for fear that royalists might be plotting beneath them. The Bœuf Gras returned in 1805, paraded almost every year until 1870, then was revived in 1896.

1873: carnival becomes a spectacle

In the 19th century, the middle classes found street carnival too violent: people pelted each other with flour, eggs and plaster pellets. The elites took it in hand and invented the modern carnival: festival committees, themed floats, a carnival sovereign, paying grandstands, posters and tourist trains. Carnival went from a festival in which one takes part to a festival that one watches.

Cologne led the way: on 10 February 1823, its brand-new committee organized the first great parade of the Rosenmontag, Rose Monday. Then came a magical year, 1873. In Nice, Andriot Saëtone founded the Comité des fêtes and launched the first corso of floats. In 1876, the first battle of flowers invaded the Promenade des Anglais, before the wealthy winter visitors. In that same year of 1873, in Viareggio, in Tuscany, a handful of young people paraded decorated carriages on Shrove Tuesday.

Viareggio was to invent the modern float. In 1925, the painter Antonio D’Arliano had the idea of pressing newspaper glued with flour paste into plaster moulds. Moulded paper is light and strong: the floats began to grow, up to some twenty metres high today. Nice, for its part, perfected the technique of carton-pâte and its famous “big heads”. To learn all about these paper giants, read our chronicle Carnival of Viareggio: the papier-mâché giants.

And confetti? Originally, in Italy, confetti were sugared almonds thrown in people’s faces, then plaster pellets that put out eyes. Around 1875, in Milan, the engineer Enrico Mangili had a stroke of genius: he collected the little discs of punched paper used as bedding on silkworm farms, and sold them. Paper confetti was born. Trieste also claims the invention, but on the strength of a testimony gathered eighty years later.

Carnivals around the world

Carnival crossed the Atlantic with the French, Spanish and Portuguese colonists. In the Americas, it mingled with African and Native American cultures and often became a festival of resistance as much as of rejoicing.

New Orleans: Mardi Gras

It is often said that the explorer Iberville celebrated the first Mardi Gras in America in 1699. In reality, he merely named a place “Pointe du Mardi Gras”, and his journal mentions no festivity. The first attested celebrations took place in Mobile, in 1703. In New Orleans, on 24 February 1857, the Mistick Krewe of Comus invented a model that would set the standard: a secret society, a themed torchlit parade, a grand ball. Rex, “king of carnival”, followed in 1872. These krewes were long reserved for white people. The African-American community answered with the Zulu krewe (1909) and the Mardi Gras Indians.

Rio: from the entrudo to the Sambódromo

In Brazil, the Portuguese entrudo was a huge battle of water and flour, banned in 1853. The Rio carnival then reinvented itself through societies, processions and blocos. In 1928 came Deixa Falar, regarded by tradition as the first samba school. On 2 March 1984, the architect Oscar Niemeyer inaugurated the Sambódromo, built in about 120 days. Beneath its stands, for the rest of the year, there were classrooms.

The first samba school contest took place on 7 February 1932, on the Praça Onze: nineteen schools paraded and Mangueira won with the sambas of Cartola. Today, the twelve elite schools each parade for 60 to 70 minutes before more than 70,000 spectators, with several thousand members, at least 200 percussionists, giant floats and dancers in feathered costumes. A jury scores them on nine criteria, from the drum section to the floats by way of the costumes. Every year, the mayor hands the keys of the city to King Momo, first crowned in 1933. And in the street, carnival belongs to the blocos: the oldest, the Cordão da Bola Preta, founded in 1918, still draws hundreds of thousands of revellers.

Trinidad and London: the carnival of freedom

In Trinidad, after the abolition of slavery (1838), the freed people took over carnival with the Canboulay, a torchlight procession. In February 1881, some 150 policemen came to confiscate drums and torches: they were routed with sticks. The ban on drums that followed would lead, in the 20th century, to the invention of the steelpan. In London, after the racist riots of 1958, the Trinidadian journalist Claudia Jones organized a first indoor “Caribbean Carnival” (1959). In August 1966, during a street party in Notting Hill, the musician Russell Henderson set off for a stroll through the streets with his steelband: the crowd followed him, and the Notting Hill Carnival was born.

Basel, Binche, Oruro: lanterns, feathers and devils

In Basel, on the Monday after Ash Wednesday, at 4 o’clock in the morning precisely, the whole city switches off its lights: this is the Morgestraich. Only the painted lanterns of the cliques shine, to the sound of fifes and drums. In Binche, in Belgium, hundreds of Gilles in clogs, bells and ostrich-feather hats dance on Shrove Tuesday, throwing oranges.

In Oruro, in Bolivia, an ancient Andean cult has merged with devotion to the Virgin of Socavón, protector of the miners. More than 28,000 dancers parade there, among them the masked devils of the Diablada.

Carnivals inscribed on the UNESCO heritage list

Some twenty carnivals and carnival traditions are inscribed on the list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity. Among them: Oruro (2001), Binche and Barranquilla (2003), the processional giants and dragons of Belgium and France (2005), Mohács (2009), the frevo of Recife (2012), Granville, the only French carnival (2016), and Basel (2017). Contrary to a widespread belief, neither Rio, nor Venice, nor Nice, nor New Orleans appears on it. And in 2019, the Aalst carnival, in Belgium, became the first element ever removed from the list, after floats judged to be antisemitic. The world turned upside down has its limits.

Giants, parades and walkabout shows

Carnival is only one of the families of processions. The history of the parade is above all the history of who has the right to occupy the street: power with its triumphs and royal entries, the sacred with its processions, the community with its giants and carnivals, commerce with its advertising parades, and finally the artists.

Royal entries and processions

From the 14th to the 17th century, when a sovereign entered a city, tableaux vivants were performed for him on raised platforms. On 22 August 1389, for the entry of Isabeau of Bavaria into Paris, a crusade was even re-enacted, with Richard the Lionheart against Saladin. Religious processions, such as Corpus Christi, instituted in 1264, soon paraded giant figures through the streets.

The giants come out into the street

In 1424, in Barcelona, the first known giant came out for the Corpus Christi procession. It was a Goliath, paid for by the city to be beaten by David. On 16 June 1530, in Douai, the basket-makers paraded a wicker giant, Gayant. A year later, the fruit-sellers demanded that a wife be found for him: Marie Cagenon joined him. Their children would arrive in 1720. Northern France today counts hundreds of giants. Together with the Tarasque of Tarascon and the Poulain of Pézenas, Gayant and the Reuze of Cassel are among the “processional giants and dragons” inscribed by UNESCO.

From tigers to balloons

On 27 November 1924, in New York, the first parade of the Macy’s department store marched tigers, bears and elephants from the zoo. The children were frightened: in 1927, the animals were replaced by giant balloons. The inflatable parade was born.

The street becomes a stage again

From the 1970s onwards, in France, artists decided that the street would be their theatre. In 1983, Michel Crespin founded Lieux publics, the first creation centre for street arts, based in Marseille since 1990 and today at the Cité des arts de la rue. He also launched the Aurillac festival in 1986, a year before Chalon dans la rue (1987). In September 1993, in Le Havre, Royal de Luxe had a giant “fall from the sky”, manipulated in full view, which told a story to an entire city for three days. In 2018, the Minotaur of La Machine, 47 tonnes and 13 metres high, drew nearly 900,000 spectators to Toulouse.

In the Tarn, the Plasticiens Volants, founded in Paris in 1976 and based since 1999 in a former tannery in Graulhet, float their immense helium-filled puppets above the crowds, manipulated from the ground with helpers recruited on the spot. They have performed in more than forty countries and for some ten years at the Nice Carnival. It is the most direct link between the carnival procession and the monumental spectacle of today. A forthcoming chronicle will give them the place they deserve.

The contemporary walkabout show, with its stilt-walkers, its acrobats, its luminous structures and its music, is the heir to this whole history: the chariot of Dionysus, the giant of Douai, the procession of the Bœuf Gras. It keeps what matters most: transforming, for the time of a passing, the space of everyone into a stage of dreams.

Why do we wear masks?

• To be all equal. Beneath the mask, no more rank or name. That is why anxious authorities ban it, as in Paris in 1790.
• To reverse the roles. Man becomes woman, master becomes servant, human becomes beast: the stag of Caesarius of Arles, the she-bear of Apuleius.
• To drive away winter and evil spirits. Bells, rattles and horned masks wake the earth, like those of the busós of Mohács, in Hungary.
• To mock. The mask licenses satire: the caricature floats of Nice, Cologne or Viareggio are its heirs.
• To remember and to resist. The Canboulay of Trinidad or the Mardi Gras Indians recall slavery and hard-won freedom.

Sources and further reading

Books

• Mikhaïl Bakhtine, L'Œuvre de François Rabelais et la culture populaire au Moyen Âge et sous la Renaissance, Gallimard, 1970.
• Daniel Fabre, Carnaval ou la fête à l'envers, Gallimard, “Découvertes” series, 1992.
• Jacques Heers, Fêtes des fous et carnavals, Fayard, 1983.
• Jacques Le Goff and Jean-Claude Schmitt (eds), Le Charivari, EHESS / Mouton, 1981.
• Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Le Carnaval de Romans, Gallimard, 1979.
• Mona Ozouf, La Fête révolutionnaire, 1789-1799, Gallimard, 1976.
• Mary Beard, The Roman Triumph, Harvard University Press, 2007.
• Max Harris, Sacred Folly: A New History of the Feast of Fools, Cornell University Press, 2011.

Online

• Dictionnaire de l'Académie française, “Carnaval”: dictionnaire-academie.fr
• Apuleius, Metamorphoses, book XI (Latin text): thelatinlibrary.com
• M. Grinberg and S. Kinser, “Les combats de Carnaval et de Carême”, Annales ESC, 1983: persee.fr
• BnF Gallica, “Le Roman de Fauvel”: gallica.bnf.fr
• EHESS, “Charivaris, antimusiques d'un rituel insaisissable”: les-reveillees.ehess.fr
• UNESCO, intangible cultural heritage (carnivals, processional giants and dragons): ich.unesco.org
• UNESCO, removal of the Aalst carnival (decision 14.COM 12): ich.unesco.org
• Festkomitee Kölner Karneval, history of the Cologne carnival: koelner-karneval.org
• 64 Parishes, “Mardi Gras in New Orleans”: 64parishes.org
• Département du Nord, “Depuis 1530, la famille Gayant veille sur les Douaisiens”: info.lenord.fr
• Cité des arts de la rue, Lieux publics: lacitedesartsdelarue.net
• Royal de Luxe, The Giant Fallen from the Sky: royal-de-luxe.com

Image credits

• Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Fight Between Carnival and Lent, 1559, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna — public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
• Andrea Mantegna, The Triumphs of Caesar (IX), c. 1484–1492, Royal Collection — public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
• Charivari, Roman de Fauvel, c. 1317–1321, BnF, ms. français 146 — public domain, source Gallica.
• The Bal des Ardents, Froissart, Chronicles, c. 1470, British Library (Harley 4380) — public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
• Ippolito Caffi, The Festival of the Moccoletti, 1852 — public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
• Hippolyte Blancard, float of the Bœuf Gras, 1896, Musée Carnavalet — Paris Musées, CC0.
• Simon Meister, Rosenmontag auf dem Neumarkt, Cologne, 1836 — public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
• Jules Chéret, poster for the Fêtes de Nice 1907, BnF — public domain, source Gallica.
• Mardi Gras parade, New Orleans, 1890, Rijksmuseum — CC0.
• Diablada dancer, Oruro, 1970, Organization of American States — CC0, via the Library of Congress.
• E. Wallet, Fête communale de Douai: Gayant et sa famille, BnF — public domain, source Gallica.
• Theseus Painter, Attic skyphos, c. 500 BC, Athens — photo ArchaiOptix, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons.
• Antoine-François Callet, Winter, or the Saturnalia, 1783, Musée du Louvre — public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
• Fresco from Herculaneum, Isiac rite, 1st century, Naples — public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
• Romance of Alexander, Jehan de Grise and workshop, 1338–1344, Bodleian Library, MS. Bodl. 264, fol. 21v — public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
• Pieter Bruegel the Elder, detail “Lady Lent”, 1559, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna — public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
• Pieter van der Heyden after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Feast of Fools, c. 1570, BnF — public domain, source Gallica.
• Anton Elfinger (drawing) and Johann Wenzel Zinke (engraving), Das Begräbniß des Faschings, Wiener Theaterzeitung, 1843 — public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
• Le Monde renversé (The World Turned Upside Down), Dembour et Gangel, Metz, 19th century, Musée Carnavalet — Paris Musées, CC0.
• Johannes Lingelbach, Carnival in Rome, c. 1650, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna — public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
• Jacques Callot, Balli di Sfessania, frontispiece, c. 1622, Metropolitan Museum of Art — CC0.
• Charles Nanteuil, La Descente de la Courtille, 1842, Musée Carnavalet — Paris Musées, public domain.
• Agence Rol, Nice carnival, 11 February 1912, BnF — public domain, source Gallica.
• Agence Rol, Mardi Gras, Paris, 20 February 1912, BnF — public domain, source Gallica.
• Augustus Earle, Games during the carnival at Rio de Janeiro, c. 1822, National Library of Australia — public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
• Hieronymus Hess, Morgestraich, 1843 — public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
• Attributed to Philippe de Mazerolles, Froissart’s Chronicles, c. 1470, British Library, Harley MS 4379 — public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
• Anonymous photographer, Sylvain Dornon, late 19th century — public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
• James Ensor, The Intrigue, 1890, KMSKA, Antwerp — CC0.
• Gabriel Bella, Festa del giovedì grasso in Piazzetta, c. 1779–1792, Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice — public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
• Parade at the Sambódromo, 2015 — photo Tata Barreto / Agência Brasil, CC BY 3.0 BR, Wikimedia Commons.
• Estácio de Sá school, 2016 — photo Tomaz Silva / Agência Brasil, CC BY 3.0 BR, Wikimedia Commons.
• Vila Isabel school, 2016 — photo Tomaz Silva / Agência Brasil, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons.
• Agence Rol, Binche carnival, 1926, BnF — public domain, source Gallica.
• The “mouth” float of the Cirkul’R company — photo Nawatography.
• Perle, a creation by the Plasticiens Volants, Helsinki, 2009 — photo Miemo Penttinen, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons.