What Happens
in the Paris Entry of Isabella
Rabbi Hoshiach said, “When God created Adam
the ministering angels mistook him for a divine being, and were about to say,
‘Holy! Holy! Holy!’ before him, but God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam,
so that all knew he was only a man. This
explains what is written (Isa. Ii.22), ‘Cease ye from man, whose breath is in
his nostrils; for wherein is he to be accounted of?’”
Bereshith Rabbah, chap. 8
When we turn to
the specific passages in the Chronicles,[i]
the first critical question we have to ask ourselves is whether or not
Froissart’s account of the city welcome has thematic, imagistic or performative
unity or as merely bound together by the occasion and the limited space of the
procession through the main streets of the city.[ii] He claims that he will give details of all
that he heard and saw on Sunday, the 20th day of August 1389, when
Queen Isabel formally entered Paris:
Je mis tout entretenance et puis
entendis à escripire et à registrer tout ce que je vey et oÿ dire de verité que
advenu estoit à la feste à l’entree et venue à Paris de la roine Yzabel de
France, dont l’ordonnance ainsy qu’elle fu s’ensieult. Le dimenche vingtiesme
jour du mois d’aoust qui fu en l’an de Nostre Seigneur mil .iij.c .iiij.xx et
.ix. (p. 348)
The city entry
begins with the gathering of crowds, “tant de peuple,” and it is not merely the
great numbers of people who gather together for the occasion that mark the occasion
but the variety and function of them as a whole, in different parts, and in
relation to one another that proves to be the most significant aspect of the
welcome. As we shall show, following Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power, the formation of the crowd, its density,
mobility, and shifting shape, all contribute to the festive nature of the
celebration, provide it with its ritual powers to transform time, place, and
meaning, and give to Froissart himself the insights he claims to be passing on
to his readers.
There are at
least two kinds of crowds who assemble outside Paris at the gate of Saint
Dennis to greet the new queen: one consists of the high-born and noble ladies (des haultes et des nobles dames de France),
along with their lords (des seigneurs)
who accompany the Queen, her private entourage, and all its assistants and
servants, each seated on gorgeously decorated litters. The other group of
people consists of the citizens (des bourgeois) of Paris who come outside and
arrange themselves in ranks on both sides of the road to welcome Isabella into
their town. Meanwhile, the king and his
retinue are awaiting their arrival inside the city. Ready to welcome them,
process with them as part of the integration and digestion, to make what is
foreign familiar and what is other a
part of the living, throbbing organism of the city.
The movements of
both groups, one entering the city and the other observing and accompanying
this action, are orderly and hierarchical, a display of hierarchical power,
privileges and duties. While there is
some distinction between individual nobles according to their titles, age, sex,
and temperament, on the whole they form a unified image of feudal power to
display before the city—the twelve hundred citizens, meaning the dignitaries of
the mayoral council, the leading figures of the guilds on horseback and fully
caparisoned, along with the professional and educational institutions. All
these officials are duly identified by their costumes and behavior. Later the rest of the city will both form
part of the background to the royal entry and take an active, noisy and lively
role in cheering the procession, partaking in the entertainment, and responding
to the formal speeches. The queen’s group and the bourgeois group march together
formally in procession under the gate into the city and there they pass through
the large somewhat disorganized crowd of ordinary folk that welcomes them,
observes their appearance and deportment, and enjoys the celebratory clamor. As we shall see, as he proceeds with his
description, Froissart records, he also reacts to what he saw, and he
supplements the formalities and scripted texts of the little particles of play
distributed around the streets and squares of Paris, the “accidents”, that is,
the little human touches, both the individuality of particular persons
observing and performing, but also the collective transformations going on in
this vast device or contraption of recreation—transformation and unification.
Much time is
spent by the author describing the interaction among the ladies and gentlemen
as they form themselves and their litters into an orderly procession, with some
jockeying for position. Eventually everything is arranged properly according to
hierarchical rank. However, as Froissart
indicates, as the formal parade enters the city, the large crowds of citizens
and visitors filling the streets prove difficult to negotiate.
Tant y avoit grant presse et
grant peuple sus les rues qui il sembloit que tout le monde fuist là mandez. (p. 350)
The
serjeants-at-arms have to push their way through to make space for the Queen
and the others to march and ride through the streets to see the various
entertainments put on for them. These
throngs are at once unruly stumbling blocks and necessary agents for the
fulfillment of the ritual purposes of the welcoming celebration. Everyone (including the massed bodies of the
ordinary people of Paris and non-citizen visitors from the countryside) is
squashed together, just as they are arranged in ranked orders of status and
prestige. The city is defined by its
crowded streets. The Queen becomes a
part of this crowd, although she is only passing through. Yet it is this
digestive body that makes her “one of us”.
[i] All citations to the French text are to Jean Froissart, Chroniques, eds. Peter F. Ainsworth et George T. Diller (Paris:
Librairie Générale Française, 2001), tom 2, §1-2, pp. 343-365. For the English
translation, see Geoffrey Brereton, ed. and trans., Froissart, Chronicles, rev. ed.
(Harmondsworth : Penguin Books, 1978 [1968]), “A Royal Visitation” pp.
361-372.
[ii] We also must ask whether
the welcome of the new bride-queen into the city should be viewed as a special organism, device, contraption or game to integrate her into the
conglomerate of nations (in the medieval sense) which constitute the urban
space and its inhabitants. This city of
Paris is not the capital of France in the configuration brought into being
after the French Revolution oif 1789 nor especially the even greater
centralization under the First Empire of Napoleon: but a late feudal
court-cathedral-guild-corporation centre.
It is a corporate body of
corporate bodies, a Christian body politic; and the new queen will be
digested by passing through its bowels and experiencing its limbs in the
shaping of physical space, in the performance of collective actions, in the perception
of and embodiment into classical, biblical, ecclesiastical and courtly imagery
and in a variety of discourses and poetic words. It is also in itself a device, in the sense of a vast living and mechanical, as well as
imaginary emblem, that presents, represents and forms the perfected memory of
the occasion and its function of integration or digestion. As a contraption,
the festival of welcome by processional entry into the corporate bodies of
Paris, the event is a machine for displaying the city to the new foreign-born
queen and for the royal entourage to show off the new queen-bride to the city:
it is neither a machine in the sense developed during the Industrial Revolution
of the nineteenth century nor a computerized, digital electronic computer such
as is central to our own culture, but something at once more clunky in its
awkward transformation of raw energy into productive power, at once the shaped
materials of which each part is constructed and the processes it integrates to
effect such a metamorphosis of one set of things into another unnatural thing,
as well as the human-conceived object or being and its service and meaning to
the people who own, operate and enjoy its actions. As in the antique and medieval language of
critical thought, especially about drama—in a general sense, including the
various theatricalities and entertainments that exist before and around the
later development of a professional playhouse and organized players putting on
literary-scripted performances—machinery is a figure to describe the magical,
spiritual and ecclesiastically-conceived operation of the world: the invisible
mechanism of a universe created and maintained by God and his ministering
angels, agents and servants now made more or less visible, tangible and comprehensible
in words, objects, and gestures. All of
this, too, should be viewed as a game, a game of games, as discussed by Johan Huizinga
in Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play
Element in Culture (London: Granada/Paladin, 1970; 1949. Original in German, pub oished in Switzerland
in 1944) and Roger Caillois in Les jeux
et les hommes : le masque et le vertige, ed. rev et aug. (Paris: Gallimard, 1967;1958. Trans as: Man,
Play and Games). Here game (ludus) does not stand as the opposite
of or exclude work, seriousness or sacrality, but rather represents a notion of
separate motions, articulations and embodiments of deeds, transformations and
divinizations within a special time and space, that is, within playtime and on
a playground.
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