"LA DÉCENTE" WAS A WILD CORTEGE THAT SWEPT DOWN FROM BELLEVILLE TO PARIS'S CITY HALL ON ASH WEDNESDAYS
AT DAWN
(FROM THE 1820'S TO THE EARLY 1860'S)
That is, from underclass outskirts to the heart of the bourgeois town, in defiance of Church demand for penance.
Plan of 1756 / zoom (please scroll down)
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| Descente de La Courtille by Charles Nanteuil, 1842 / zoom |
The Carnavalet Museum has not exhibited the work since the renovation that focusses on elites.
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At its origin were custom duties on wares coming into town, collected from a new city wall. Taverns that sold untaxed wine sprang up outside the its gates.
L'octroi [toll gate] de Belleville by J.-L.-G.-B. Palaiseau, toward 1790, zoom
Le Cabaret Ramponeau en Bas Courtille vers 1761, anonymous / zoom
The tavern where wine was cheapest
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They brought a counter-culture. The cancan was part of it.
- Called the "La dance des barrières,"* the cancan is the only French dance that women lead. Its exuberant sexuality and steps that taunt authority made it forbidden in Paris: For an example of its provocation, please click and scroll down.
*Barrières: toll gates- A best-selling novel of 1848 reveals its transgressive nature:
Les Mystères de Paris by Eugène Sue, 1848
Dancers warm up before going to a southern barrière (near today's Saint-Jacques métro) to watch two women be guillotined. When the "cannibals" rush off to the execution, the hero, a prince on horseback, breaks up their crowd.
The "Descent from la Courtille"* was another mocking challenge.
*Courtille: a small court in front of a farm, the original name of the Belleville crossroads.
- After carousing in the taverns all night, the costumed and drunk residents would march down the hill to Paris. Slumming party-goers would join the cortège, or rent windows to watch it pass.
La Bibliothèque historique de Paris,
Facebook, with no more information
The procession reveals class hostility long before conflict breaks out:
- Lent, the six weeks before celebrating Christ's Resurrection at Easter, is for Catholics a time of fasting and abstinence. It begins on with a priest drawing a cross with ashes on the foreheads of the faithful as a sign of penitence, on Ash Wednesday.
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| Strasbourg, 2014 / zoom |
- Mardi Gras ("Fat Tuesday") takes place just before Ash Wednesday. The license tolerated then contrasts with the austerity to come.
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| New Orleans, 2011 / zoom |
By deliberately holding the cortège not during Mardi Gras but in the first hours of Ash Wednesday, La Descente provoked the Church, ally of the elite. In 1860 the State moved the city limits to the distant fortifications. That brought the turbulent outskirts under its control, letting the police arrest rebels who took refuge there.
Adapted from Fortifications of Paris and its Environs, 1841, zoom
The Good Town of Paris and its New Children by Charles Vernier, 1850 /
zoom
The benevolent Government scrubs La Villette (whose residents had particularly resisted the take-over) while Belleville wipes his nose with his hand and Bercy, where wine was stored, drinks straight from the bottle.
Only the well-dressed girl behaves properly. But she is from Batignolles, in the prosperous west.
Moving the toll barriers ended the taverns and so La Descente.
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Industrialisation would have stopped it in any case
because it gave the poor less leisure and less pay,
but pushing back the toll gates hastened its demise.
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