In mid-November, Fox News asked Republican Senator Roger Marshall about the composition of the future Trump administration. Marshall replied with a smile, "Trump was elected to turn [Washington] upside down."
He couldn't have put it better, literally or figuratively. Donald Trump and his most fervent supporters' uninhibited rhetoric echos the carnivalesque rites and traditions that modern-day historians like Natalie Zemon Davis and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie have unearthed from French archives over the past 50 years. These rites of reversal help us to better decipher the US's current political life. Beyond the striking similarities between this past and our present, one major difference foreshadows what awaits us.
In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the life of Europeans was punctuated by a series of festivals, including Carnival, around seasons or the community's needs. The Christmas season, for example, was a time for family feasting but also for celebrating the Feast of Fools. On this occasion, the man leading the liturgical service wasn't a high dignitary of the Church, but a young cleric who was appointed as the head of a clergy who did and said the most grotesque things. "They danced in the choir disguised as women, sang obscene songs, used fetid leather ton incense old shoes, jumped and ran around the church, gesticulated and made indecent remarks," protested the University of Paris' Faculty of Theology in the early 15th century.
Safety valve
Other forms of entertainment were organized in Paris and elsewhere in France by informal groups, trade guilds, or associations known as "sociétés joyeuses" [merry societies] or "sociétés des sots" [societies of fools]. Zemon Davis, who called them "abbayes de Maugouvert [abbeys of bad government]," noticed the existence in Rouen of one such merry brotherhood: The Abbaye des conards [Abbey of morons].
Its president was surrounded by dignitaries whose names included the prince de Mal-Espargne [prince of Poor-Savings], the cardinal de Maucomble [cardinal of Bad Addict], the évêque de Plattebourse [bishop of Flatbollock], the duc de Frappecul [duke of Slaparse] and the grand patriarch des Verollez [grand patriarch of the syphilis-infected]. This abbey, like others like it, dispensed a buffoonish parody of justice and minted dummy money, which it distributed to the town's inhabitants.
You have 62.54% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.