Popular Justice and Informal Politics: The Charivari in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century France

Xabier Itçaina (1)

1 CED - Centre Émile Durkheim

This chapter explores festive politics and the use of charivari and carnivalesque repertoires in modern France. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries charivari practices proved exceptionally enduring. They were used in a wide variety of contexts and by actors of different social backgrounds and political inclinations: rural labourers protesting against the infringement of communal norms in the mid-nineteenth century, middle-class republicans in their opposition to the 1830 July Monarchy, and French Communists in the inter-war period. As Itçaina shows in the second part of his chapter, in the period after 1945 the charivari survived at the territorial and cultural margins of France, particularly in the French Basque Country on the Spanish border. Since the 1970s Basque nationalists have used daytime charivari parades as a form of street theatre which enables the expression of political issues (including local scandals, fiscal pressure, and protection of the Basque language and heritage) while affirming a proactive Basque identity.

Mots clés: Land taxation; Religious struggle; protestation; Ritual execution; Interwar period; Basque country

Domaines: Science politique

Xabier Itçaina. Popular Justice and Informal Politics: The Charivari in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century France. Ilaria Favretto; Xabier Itçaina (dir.). Protest, Popular Culture and Tradition in Modern and Contemporary Western Europe, Palgrave Macmillan, pp.185-207, 2017, Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements, 978-1-137-50736-5. ⟨10.1057/978-1-137-50737-2_9⟩. ⟨halshs-01548154⟩