New Addition: 'Charivari' Issue w/1834 Carnival Crowd Scene

Le Charivari (The Hullabaloo). Year 3, No. 50 (Wednesday, Feb. 19, 1834) Paris. Paperback Quarto, 4 pp.

This issue of Charivari is graced with an engraving of a scene from the Paris Carnival, which was wrapping up at the time of of publication. The Carnival played an important social role for the Romanticist subculture, and was one of the key points at which it intersected most thoroughly with popular culture; indeed, the very title of the journal, "charivari," referred to the "hullabaloo" or racket of the Carnival, at which social hierarchies and mores were ritually suspended and inverted in semi-anarchic celebrations of dionysian frenzy and excess.

The Romanticist avant-garde transposed the subversive playfulness of the Costume Ball onto all of social life, and attended all kinds of social events, and sometimes simply strolled the street, dressed as their favourite literary or historical characters and types, anticipating today's Cosplay. They were also heavily involved with the dance-hall culture for which the Paris Carnival was the major annual event; after the Frenetic Romanticist musician Philippe 'Napoléon' Musard was put in charge of the event in 1832, it became the scene of several collective interventions by avant-garde coalitions of Romanticists, bohemians and dandies, which descended into near-riots. An intervention led by the more radical members of the dandyist Jockey Club invaded the ball en masse, broke up the dance currently in progress, and danced the Can-can for the first time outside the working-class music halls; the following day, they smuggled in a nude "Salome," causing a riot in which police were fought off by the crowd of dancers while the culprits escaped. Around the same time, an anonymous, masked cohort of Romanticists made another violent intervention, storming the dance floor to dance the "Infernal Galop," an avant-garde dance invented by Musard that resembled a modern circle-pit: dancers rushed in a ring at top speed, trampling those who fell, firing pistols in time with the music.

 COSTUMES / MUSIC / DANCE / INTERVENTIONS AT PARIS CARNIVAL