The Mardi Gras Massacre of 1580: A Mini-Essay

     On February 16, 1580, the annual Mardi Gras festivities in Romans-sur-Isère, France, took a turn for the worst. For decades, excessive taxation, inflation, plague, and increased religious conflict between Catholicism and Protestantism began to burden the province of Dauphiné, with the disgruntled middle and lower classes questioning the nobility’s immunity to these mounting plights.[1] On February 3, the customary activities of Saint Blaise’s Day were observed as normal: the wealthy elected Judge Antoine Guérin as the king of the noble kingdom and the lower classes elected Jean Serve-Paumier, a textile-worker and former soldier whose outspoken opinions vocalized many of their sentiments, as king of the peasant kingdom.[2] As tradition maintained, the pre-Lenten revelry involved a mock battle between the kingdoms, with the peasants revolting against the nobles and taking charge of the city before being eventually defeated.[3] While the costume-clad members of the peasant kingdom danced their mimed uprising in the streets, a real rebellion brewed between Guérin and Serve-Paumier. At the height of the celebration on February 16, a fight broke out between Serve-Paumier and a mob hired by Guérin. The skirmish turned bloody, Serve-Paumier was killed, and the peasant militia was chased into the countryside, where they retreated to the valley of the Isère and, on March 26, were trapped and massacred by royal forces.[4] Those who managed to escape the genocide were incarcerated and, under Judge Guérin’s orders, executed, thus ending the revolt and squelching the lower classes’ dissidence.[5] Yet, as Liewain Scott Van Doren highlights, the incident in Romans was not an isolated affair. Throughout the latter portion of the sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth century, political and religious tensions, coupled with peasant fury, intensified into revolts in several cities along the Rhône, including Grenoble, Montélimar, Valence, and Vienne.[6] All of this, Julia Briggs attests, culminated into the infamous Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572, which the English playwright Christopher Marlowe parodied in his play Massacre at Paris (1593).[7]

Works Referenced

Breaugh, Martin. The Plebeian Experience: A Discontinuous History of Political Freedom. Trans. Lazer Lederhendler. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013.

Briggs, Julia. “The Rights of Violence: Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris.” Christopher Marlowe. Ed. Richard Wilson. London: Routledge, 1999. 215-234.

Holt, Mack. The French Wars of Religion, 1562-1629. 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel. Carnival in Romans. Trans. Mary Feeney. New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1979.

Scott Van Doren, Liewain. “Revolt and Reaction in the City of Romans, Dauphiné; 1579-1580.” The Sixteenth Century Journal 5.1 (1974): 71-100.
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[1] Breaugh, 20.
[2] Le Roy Ladurie, 176-177.
[3] Holt, 116.
[4] Holt, 116-117.
[5] Holt, 117.
[6] Scott Van Doren, 71.
[7] Briggs, 215.