Addressing La Ville des Dieux: Entry Ceremonies and Urban Audiences in Seventeenth-Century Dijon

This article re-examines the early modern entrée, a ceremony staged by towns to welcome monarchs and princes. In contrast with the usual interpretation of entrées as "state ceremonials" that articulated the relationship between prince and city, I argue that entrées were also local political rituals used by municipal elites to negotiate their complex and unstable relationships with the city's middling and popular classes. Through an analysis of two entrées into seventeenth-century Dijon, this article shows how the notables of Dijon's city government used entrées to reinforce vertical ties with artisans, shopkeepers, wine-growers and others whose participation in the civic militia and acceptance of the status-quo were indispensable to preserving order. It examines not only the language and symbolism of the entries themselves but also the roles different social groups played in the ceremonies and the local contexts in which they were staged. The article also analyzes how the entrées' messages were reinforced in patois street plays of Dijon's carnivalesque mère folle troupe. These plays, written and staged by many of the same notables responsible for the entries, translated the ceremonies' classical humanist imagery into terms accessible to the broader populace and reaffirmed the latter's place in the larger urban community.