Laughing Matters: Farce and the Making of Absolutism in France (review)

According to the influential model of Norbert Elias, it was the royal state that ultimately clamped down on popular culture in seventeenth-century France as a part of the rise of absolutism. And although Elias never explicitly discussed the kind of bawdy entertainment and political satire performed both on the stage that makes up the raw source material for Sara Beam's Laughing Matters, it is nevertheless true that a number of historians—and Peter Burke and Robert Muchembled were among the earliest—have followed Elias's lead in arguing for a concerted effort by church and state to repress and ultimately efface much of popular culture and behavior over the course of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. To recount Peter Burke's memorable metaphor, it was a victory of Lent over Carnival. Sara Beam convincingly undercuts this argument in her analysis of farcical performances in early modern France. Her argument is that the tradition of public farce and satire on stage was suppressed not by the royal court in the late seventeenth century as the supporters of the Elias model claim, but by local municipal officials in cities and towns both in the capital and the provinces over the course of the French Wars of Religion in the sixteenth century. Thus, her book sets out to revise the traditional narratives of the history of farce as well as the rise of absolutism.

Beam's focus is primarily the plays and farces performed by university students and the less exalted members of the law courts such as clerks, ushers, and notaries, collectively referred to as the basoche. These farcical performances were largely comedies and evoked great laughter. At the same time, many might also contain biting political satire and explicit criticism of the political order. Beam has made good use of the municipal records as well as the registers of Parlement in five principal cities—Paris, Rouen, Dijon, Bordeaux, and Toulouse—to create a very interesting and nuanced picture of the history of these performances over the course of the sixteenth and early seventeenth century. Before 1560 these farces and satires were openly tolerated by local authorities, which is not surprising given that those groups actually writing and performing the plays, such as the Conards in Rouen and the Mère Folle in Dijon, were composed overwhelmingly of lawyers who served in the Hôtels de Ville or in the Parlements of these cities. Once the Wars of Religion broke out in 1562, however, Beam shows convincingly that these performances were systematically censored and in many cases shut own altogether, not by the crown, but by municipal officials and local magistrates who feared the bawdy farce might exacerbate the popular violence of the religious wars. The real turning point was the wars of the Catholic League after 1588. Whether it was the militant penitential preachers urging the people in Paris to turn against the bawdy farces on the stage, or the Abbey of the Conards being suppressed in Rouen along with its royalist governor, the sieur de Carrouges, the magistrates of the Parlements in these Leaguer cities broke the back of the tradition of farcical political satire and humor. The Jesuits, meanwhile, continued this opposition to the scandalous and risqué farce-playing tradition in France after they were officially recognized by Henry IV in the early seventeenth century. With the demise of these amateur associations, according to Beam, "farce was transformed from an integral element of festive life into an exclusively commercial form of entertainment, and its role in civic culture was changed for good." (141) All of this is expertly analyzed and convincingly argued. Moreover, an added bonus is an understanding of absolutism that gets away from the now outdated view that is was primarily a historical process of royal power suppressing local privileges. Beam is surely right that much of what historians now call the absolutist state was as much the result of local officials...