1960 Nobel Speech by St.-John Perse

                                                'a world to be born under your footsteps'

                                               

On behalf of Poetry I have accepted the honor which has been paid to Her, an honor which I shall now hasten to restore to Her.

Poetry rarely receives public homage. The gulf between poetic creation and the activities of a society subjected to material bondage grows ever wider. This estrangement, which the poet must accept though it is none of his doing, would be the fate of the scientist as well, were it not that science has practical applications.

But it is the disinterested mind of the scientist no less than that of the poet which we are gathered here to honor. Here, at least, it is forbidden  to regard them as sworn enemies. Both put the same question to the same abyss: they differ only in their methods of investigation.

When we consider the drama of modern science as it discovers its rational limits in pure mathematics; when, in physics, we see two great sovereign doctrines laid down, on the General Theory of Relativity, the other the Quantum Theory  of uncertainty and indeterminism which would set a limit to the exactitude even of physical measurements; when we have heard the greatest scientific discoverer of this century, the founder of modern cosmology, the architect of the greatest intellectual synthesis in terms of mathematical equations, invoking  intuition to come to the rescue of reason, asserting that “imagination is the real soil of all fruitful scientific ideas,” and even going so far as to claim for the scientist the benefit of an authentic ‘artistic vision’ – then, have we not the right to consider the instrument of poetry as legitimate as that of logic?

Indeed ,in its beginnings every creative act of the spirit is ‘poetic’ in the proper sense of the word. In giving equal value to sensory and mental forms, the same activity serves, initially, the enterprises of scientist and poet alike. Which has travelled, which will travel, a longer way –discursive thinking  or poetic ellipsis? From the primal abyss where two blind figures, blind from birth, are groping, one equipped with all the apparatus of science, the other assisted only by the flashes of intuition – which comes to the surface sooner and the more highly charged with a brief phosphorescence? How  we answer this question is of no importance. All that matters is the mystery in which they both share. The high spiritual adventure of poetry need yield nothing in drama to the new vistas of modern science. Astronomers may have faced with panic the idea of an expanding universe: is not a similar expansion taking place in the moral infinite of that other universe, the universe of man? As far as the frontiers of science extend and along their whole stretched arch, we can still hear the  hounds  of the poet in full cry. For, if poetry is not itself, as some have claimed, ‘absolute reality,’ it is poetry which shows the strongest passion for and the keenest appreciation of it, to that extreme limit of complicity where reality seems to shape itself within the poem.

By means of analogical and symbolic thinking, by means of the far-reaching light of the mediating image and its play of correspondences, by way of a thousand chains of reactions and unusual associations, by virtue also of a language through which is transmitted the supreme rhythm of Being, the poet clothes himself in a transcendental reality to which the scientist cannot aspire. Are there, in man, any more striking dialectics, and which could bind him more? When the philosophers abandon the metaphysical threshold, it falls to the poet to take upon himself the role of the metaphysician: at such times it is poetry, not philosophy, that is the true “Daughter of Wonder,” to use the phrase of that ancient philosopher who mistrusted her most.

Poetry is not only a way of knowledge; it is even more away of life –of life in its totality. A poet already dwelt within the cave man: a poet will be dwelling still within the man of the atomic age; for poetry is a fundamental part of man. Out of the poetic need, which is one of the spirit, all religions have been born, and by poetic grace the divine spark is kept eternally alight within the human flint. When mythologies founder, it is in poetry that the divine finds its refuge, perhaps its relay stage. As, in the antique procession, the Bearers of bread were succeeded by the Bearers of torches, so now, in the social order and the immediacies of life it is the poetic image which rekindles the high passion of mankind in its quest for light.

What a proud privilege is ours! To march forward, bearing the burden of eternity, to march forward, bearing the burden of humanity, and led by a vision of a new humanism: of authentic universality, of psychic integrity! .  . .Faithful to its task, which is nothing less than to fathom the human mystery, modern poetry is pursuing an enterprise which is concerned with man in the plenitude of his being. In such a poetry there is no place for anything Pythian, or for anything purely aesthetic. It does not raise cultured pearls, does not traffic in fakes or emblems, nor would it be content to be a mere feast of music. It is intimately related to beauty, supreme alliance, but beauty is neither its goal nor its sole food. Refusing to divorce art from life or love from knowledge, it is action, it is passion, it is power, a perpetual renewal that extends its boundaries. Love is its vital flame, independence is its law, and its domain is everywhere, an anticipation. It never wishes to be absence, nor refusal.

However, it begs no favors of the times. Dedicated to its goal and free from all ideology, it knows itself to be the equal of life, which needs no justification. In one embrace, as in one great living strophe, it gathers to its present all the past and the future, the human and the superhuman, the planetary space and total space. Its alleged obscurity is due, not to its own nature, which is to enlighten, but to the darkness which it explores, and must explore: the dark of the soul herself and the dark of the mystery which envelops human existence. It allows itself no obscurity in its terms, and these are no less rigorous than those of science.

So, by his absolute adhesion to what exists, the poet keeps us in touch with the permanence and unity of Being. And his message is one of optimism. To him, one law of harmony governs the whole world of things. Nothing can occur there by which its nature is incommensurable with man. The worst catastrophes of history are but seasonal rhythms in a vaster cycle of repetitions and renewals. The Furies who cross the stage, torches high, do but throw light upon one moment in the immense plot as it unfolds itself trough time. Growing civilizations do not perish from the pangs of one autumn; they merely shed their leaves. Inertia is the only mortal danger. Poet is he who breaks for us the bonds of habit.

In this way, in spite of himself, the poet also  is tied to historical events. Nothing in the drama of his times is alien to him. May he inspire in all of us a pride in being alive in this, so vital, age. For the hour is great and new for us to seize. And to whom indeed should we surrender the honor in our time? .  .  .

“Fear not”,” says History ,taking off her mask of violence and raising her hand in the conciliatory gesture of the Asiatic Divinity at the climax of Her dance of destruction. “Fear not, neither doubt – for doubt is impotent and fear servile. Listen, rather, to the rhythm that I, the renewer of all things, impose upon the great theme which mankind is forever engaged in composing. It is not true that life can abjure life: nothing that lives is born of nothingness, or to nothingness is wed. But nothing, either, can preserve its form and measure against  the ceaseless flux of Being. The tragedy is not in the metamorphosis as such. The real drama of this century lies in the growing estrangement between the temporal; and the un-temporal man. Is man, enlightened on one side, to sink into darkness on the other? A forced growth in a community without communion, what would that be but a false maturity? .  .  .  “

It is for the poet, in his wholeness, to be witness to the twofold vocation of man: to hold up before the spirit a mirror more sensitive to his spiritual possibilities; to evoke, in our own country, a vision of the human condition more worthy of man as he was created; to connect ever more closely the collective soul to the currents of spiritual energy in the world. In these days of nuclear energy, can the earthenware lamp of the poet still suffice? Yes, if its clay remind us of our own.

And it is enough for the poet to be the guilty  conscience of his time.
           

Bread Recipe

 

Rustic Italian Bread Recipe

[Any combination of flours can be used]

¼ teaspoon yeast

2 cups flour

1 cup water

Mix ¼ teaspoon of yeast into to 2 cups of all purpose flour, add 1 cup and maybe a little more of water, stir with  a spoon until ingredients are thoroughly incorporated, cover and let stand for 12 to 24 hrs.

[for the sourdough version: dissolve sourdough starter in one cup of water, add 2 cups of all purpose flour, mix, cover and stand. My sourdough starter is coarse rye flour. I usually add ¼ cup additional rye, ½ whole wheat and 1 ¼ all purpose]

                          .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .

1 teaspoon yeast [1/8^th  to  ¼  teaspoon for the sourdough version]

3 cups flour

1 ½ cup water

The next day, mix 1 teaspoon of yeast and 2 teaspoons of fine salt into 3 cups of whole wheat flour [or any other combination of flours. For a traditional Italian loaf use 3 cups of all purpose flour.] Add 1 ½ cups water. Mix with a dough hook for about 4 minutes. Let stand for ½ to 1 hour.

Final Mix

Combine the two doughs kneading thoroughly either by hand (10-15 minutes) or using a mixer with a dough hook  for 8 minutes until smooth. In the mixer the dough should not stick to the bowl except on the bottom. It’s a fairly wet dough. You might want lightly dust your hands with flour,  moisten your hands with  a bit of oil or water to handle dough.  Remove from the bowl, fold several times, form into a ball, place it in an oiled bowl, cover, and let stand in a warm place  for 1 hour.

[ 76 degrees F. is a good setting if you have a bread proofer. You can use an oven  by firing it up for just  a minute, then turning on the light inside. Warm works quicker, cool works slower but develops a better flavor, so proofing time varies. The dough will flatten out in the bowl and then start to rise, it doesn’t need to double before the next step but should clearly be ‘on the move’.]

Folding

Remove from the bowl, fold several times, form into a ball, put back into the bowl, cover, let stand 30 minutes

Repeat fold, let stand another 30 minutes.

SHAPE INTO LOAVES 

[ see YouTube for shaping techniques e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGb-hwg2OaU   

This recipe will make two traditional Italian loaves, two small or one long pan loaf. For the traditional Italian loaves you should use a couche, see YouTube e.g.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZAwSV1VakA

Cover the the loaves with oiled plastic and let rise for 1 ½ hours.

Preheat oven to 450 F. Put a pan in the bottom oven.

Score  top of loaf, place in oven, pour a full cup of water into the pan for steam. Close the oven, wait 1 minute, set oven  temperature to 425 F. Bake 20 minutes, rotate the pan, reduce temperature to 375 F, bake 15 minutes more. Check internal temperature with an instant-read thermometer, 200 degrees F is done. Let cool before slicing. Traditional Italian loaves  can be warmed in the oven before serving in just a few minutes at 350 F.

 

Hadiths for Losers by Michael Muhammad Knight

Abu Hurayra narrated:
It was said, “O Messenger of God, from

what is our Lord?
He said, “From water not of earth, nor

of the heavens. He created a horse and made it

run. It sweated, and he created himself

from that sweat.”

“There is something powerful in being wrong, in losing, in failing,” writers J. Halberstam in The Queer Art of Failure, “ and all our failures combined might just be enough, if we practice them well, to bring down the winner.” In The Queer God, theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid describes the relocation of God in marginalized and transgressive identities (such as “God the Whore” and “Sodomite God’) as “a project doomed to failure,” but goes on to say that “we should feel ourselves free to fail.” In Queer Phenomenology, Sarah Ahmad asks, “So what does it mean to say that an object fails to do the work for which it was intended? . .  .  . A hammer might be broken and not enable me to do one thing, but it could still let me do something else.” So I wonder about the hadiths that have failed, and the chance that some of these seemingly broken or dysfunctional tools can be picked up for a different kind  task.

The story of Allah’s self-creation with horse sweat does not bear the endorsement of any hadith master; you’re not going to find it in the collections of Bukhari or Muslim, nor the rest of the broader Six Books canon, or even respected collections by lesser luminaries. It certainly did not show up in the Intro to Islam pamphlets and books that I encountered as a young convert. By all accounts, the narration is not to be treated as a source for any recognizably Islamic conception of God. The horse-sweat tradition represents an undesirable extreme, for which it has been rejected, reviled, and offered up as an example of dangerous content beyond the limits of acceptable, appropriate Islam. It stands forever outside. The hadith’s transmitters have been marked as heretics, poor scholars, liars, and self-serving charlatans. The weight of “orthodox” Muslim intellectual tradition, an immeasurable mountain of books, has fallen upon this narration of divine horse sweat with all of its weight, its force of truth, to crush the hadith and its claims.

With its advocates long gone, the horse-sweat hadith appears as the kind of failed tradition that we learn about only from its opponents, but the hadith’s condemnation is also where it gets interesting. The horse-sweat hadith and its implications about God might strike us as a radially unthinkable image of Islamic tradition, but it could not have been unthinkable (or undesirable) for every Muslin ever. Otherwise, the hadith would not have existed, let alone circulated enough to become known and merit refutation. To achieve the dissemination that could threaten responsible scholars, this hadith of God’s self-creation had to make sense to someone. While it’s not likely that the  Muhammad ever said these words. There were nonetheless Muslims who regarded the hadith as compatible with Muhammad’s message. Though the voices are lost to us – we have only the condemnations of the individuals named as the hadith’s original reporters and the master critics’ suspicion s of their motive – some people apparently believed this hadith to be true, or that it could be true, and these people apparently understood themselves to be Muslims.

What was Islam at the time when this idea of God could flow between teachers and students? Where were Islam’s limits in a world in which such hadiths pose a potential threat? What possibilities existed then that we can’t have today? Finally, how did unacceptable hadiths lose? Was it simply by being “wrong”? I am interested in the Muslims who first spread this hadith, the Muslims who believed in its content, and the space they occupied.

Sunni Islam has been called a “cult of authenticity” for the rigorous methodologies through which premodern scholars evaluated alleged statements by Muhammad, vetting transmissions and their transmitters in vast archives of commentary and critique. It has even been argued that these methodologies led to the creation of Sunni Islam as a thinkable concept. The hadith traditions emerged as a process of power, in which a sectarian movement, popularly called the Hadith Folk, circled the wagons around its master scholars and made claims for its methodological supremacy. The Hadith Folk produced compilations of Muhammad’s reported words and deeds as proof of their exclusive authority over his legacy. This coterie of elite proto-Sunni scholars, which pre-existed Sunnism, eventually won its fight and secured authorization to brand itself as the center of Sunni tradition, succeeding to such a degree that its text are now regarded as simply Sunni texts.

Yet the cult of authenticity, defined by its obsessive redrawing of borders between truth and forgery – borders over which it claims exclusive domain to construct and police by its own rules – also becomes a cult of inauthenticity. The making of ‘mainstream’ Islam spent a great deal of time thinking about Islam’s edges and fringes, and where that line of demarcation existed, just as an obsession with personal hygiene feeds an obsession with whatever undermines it: the dirt under your fingernails, flakes of dead skin, traces of sweat, snot, blood, pus, piss, and shit. A clean canon  could be achieved only by identifying and eliminating pollutants. This restless vigilance against the inauthentic produced its own anti-canon; just as the Hadith Folk scholars produced collections of Muhammad’s reported sayings and actions that were supported by the strongest evidence, they also gave attention to accounts that they condemned as weakly evidenced or outright forgeries. The scholars’ massive biographical dictionaries, cataloguing thousands of traditionists whom they privileged as trustworthy reporters of Muhammad’s words, were mirrored by compendiums of transmitters whom they deemed unreliable: reporters blacklisted as forgetful and lazy scholars, greedy scholars or hire, sectarian ideologues, unacceptable heretics, immoral and impious people, and simple poseurs looking for attention. The traditionists efforts at purifying the canon by exposing unreliable reports and reporters ironically meant that they also immortalized the dirt, producing and preserving an whole archive of the material they sought to erase. Thanks to their work, my bookshelves are now lined with excluded voices and rejected possibilities, defeated visions of Islam.

Hadith scholars regarded the horse-sweat tradition as mustahil, a textual artifact so bizarre and absurd that one could reject its content even without going through the usual process of vetting its transmitters. Nonetheless, they discussed the reporters out of loyalty to method and form. Ibn al-Jawezi (1126-1200) traces the narration to  Muhammad ibn Shuja al- Balkhi, an alleged anthropomorphist and ‘zealot’ who falsely attributed his forged hadiths to trustworthy sources; al-Balkhi in turn reported that he had heard from Hibban ibn Hilal Abu Habib al-Bahili, a Basran scholatr who had given up hadith studies out of frustration at the sloppiness of other Basran scholars; al –Bahili’s reported source was Hammad ibn Salama, a controversial Basran transmitter who was included in Muslim’s Sahih but avoided by Bukhari. The hadith is finally traced to a traditionist named Abu al-Muhazzim, who claimed to have reported it on the authority of Ab Hurayra, a Companion of the Prophet.

Experts in the classical method of transmitter-based hadith criticism – ilm aljiddam, literally the ‘science of men’- universally reviled Abvu al-Muhazzim with their professional terms of exclusion and marginalization, marking him as  da’if (weak), da’if jiddan (extremely weak), matruk (abandoned) , and la shay’in (nothing). In Ibn Sa’d’s Tabaqat, Abu al-Muhazzom’s disqualification comes at the hands of his own student, Shu’bash bin al-Hajjaj. Shu’bah pronounced Abu al-Muhazzinm aeal transmitter and charged that he saw him in the mosque at Thabiitb al-Banani, ‘lying on the ground’ ( mutruhan, which brings the additional qualification of being thrown down or dumped) and offering to report seventy hadiths for a fals, a copper coin valued at nine thousandth of a dinar. Modern Orientalist scholars also wrote him off: Ignatz Goldziher called Abu al-Muhazzim a ‘hadith beggar’, repeating Shu’bah’s charge that he peddled prophetic reports from the mosque floor. If you are willing to commodify and sell hadiths, it’s in your interest to offer rare hadiths that no one heard elsewhere, which in turn means that it’s best for business to simply invent them.

By all scholarly assessments, Abu al-Muhazzim was a loser. J Halberstam writers, ‘All losers are heirs of those who have lost before them.’ In many Muslim contexts, I am also a loser; I tend to associate with the wrong groups and cite the wrong sources. For quite a few Muslims, my name is dirt. Some of the most significant lineages that I have constructed for myself end up performing the opposite function that we usually ask from lineages; they serve only to disqualify me and delegitimize my opinions. This might lead me to a weird sense of kinship with Abu al-Muhazzim, the hadith hustler selling forgeries.

If we focus on its transmissions by problematic losers, the horse-sweat tradition also exposes vulnerable points in the hadith edifice that could shock the whole system. Despite al-Muhazzim’s poor reputation, he does show up in a few chains within the Six Books canon. Abu al-Muhazzim taught students who went on to become scholars of higher rank than himself. In theses teacher-student relationships, Abu al-Muhazzim represents a crack in the structure, a point of leakage between the inside and outside. Buhari does not use Abu al Muhazzims transmissions, but Tirmidhi, Abu Dawud and Ibn Maja cite him in hadiths on topics such as the sale of dogs and permissibility of eating locusts. In the Qur’an commentary of Ibn Kathir, a medieval scholar favored in modern Sunni revivalist circles, Abu al-Muhazzinm contributes to our understanding of the 113^th sura’s third verse. Citing Abu al Muhazzim, who in turn cites Abu Hurayra, Ibn Kathir tells us that Qur’an’s mention of ‘the evil night when it comes’ refers to a star. Abu al-Muhazzim might have been a loser, but the walls and barriers that keep losers out of the tradition remain significantly porous.

Sunnis were not the only Muslims with an intellectual tradition that could be called a cult of authenticity; other Muslim communities share this investment in finding authenticity and properly documenting the unacceptable. Mention the horse-sweat hadith appears in the Bab al Shayton (‘Gate of the Devil’), a tenth-century Isma’ili heresiography dedicated to cataloguing various groups that the compile condemns as standing beyond the pale of Islam. The text offers an entry on a group known as the Minhaliyya, so named for their leader, al-Minhal; Maymun al-‘Ijli, who apparently taught that God possessed attributes of lengthy, breadth, and width, as well as the abklity to change his form. The Minhaliyya reportedly articulated their opposition from a certain understanding of God’s absolute power. Nothing is more powerful than God; therefore, no being can possess a power that God lacks; this means that if the tradition portrays angels and evils as capable of changing their forms, God must also have this ability. The Minhaliyya then employ this theological point to argue that God can (and does) materialize with the form of humans, animals, plants, jinns, angels, and essentially any being or solid object.

The critical problem with cases such as Abu al-Muhazzim and the Minhaliyya remains that they do not get to speak for themselves; we learn about them from ‘orthodox’ scholars for whom they exist only as objects of suspicion and scorn. Relying on these polemical sources would be comparable to learning about Muslims today exclusively from Fox News. We should thus exercise caution when presuming knowledge of the Minhaliyya’s theology or the intentions of hadith scholars who transmitted the horse-sweat tradition. We can’t presume, as Ibn al Jawzi had, that reporters fabricated bizarre hadiths and forged their sources as part of a sectarian conspiracy to discredit hadith science.

In the archives of forgotten and failed masters, we also find Muhammad al-Zawawi, a fifteenth century North African visionary who kept an extensive diary of more than one hundred dream encounters with the Prophet. He did not win the status that his dream records claimed for him, but the diary survives. In one dream, Muhammad carries al-Zawawi like an infant, first holding al-Zawawi over his shoulder as though the Prophet would burp him. Then the Prophet cradles al- Zawawi and places his nipple in al  Zawawi’s mouth, nursing him. This was the nipple that felt the cold of God’s own hand; it’s notably the left nipple, closer to the prophetic heart that received knowledge through divine touch. The narrative echoes milk imagery found elsewhere, such as the hadiths found in Shi’i sources of Muhammad’s uncle Abu Talib breastfeeding Muhammad when he was a toddler and of Husayn receiving milk through his grandfather’s thumb . The flow  of milk from Muhammad’s body into his grandson and al-Zawawi, beyond its loaded symbolism for al-Zawawi as a mystic heir to the Prophet’s knowledge, gives us an imaginary of the Prophet that perhaps we had not expected: Muhammad as wet nurse or even mother. I also want Muhammad’s milk. If this dream from six centuries ago becomes a resource for me, and Muhammad becomes my mother, does something change in my Islam? What I really mean to ask: with a new way to think about the Prophet, does something change in me? Maybe, or maybe not. The rejected library is a place for experiments.

As an introduction to Mohammad, what potential value can we find in a hadith that Muslim intellectual tradition and its mighty scholars, Sunni and Shi’i alike, uniformly rejected as a flagrant forgery and betrayal of all comprehensibly Islamic ideas about God? Not all hadiths rejected by scholars as inauthentic will offer tools to liberation: we should be thankful that premodern scholars denounced  false hadiths such as “A Black man lives only for his stomach and his genitals’ and ‘The intellect of women is in their vaginas.’ Power isn’t always on the wrong side, and sometimes we’ll find useful resources in the ‘official’ Muhammad of canonical texts and establishment scholars. But perhaps it’s worth remembering that beyond the limits of mainline scholarship, another Muhammad waits. The horse-sweat hadith reminds us that the Muhammad whom we pursue remains a contested terrain, a battlefield, and a burial ground where we encounter the winners of intellectual power struggles. We should remember that the losers are there too, their graves often unmarked but their bodies still fertilizing the soil.

Revolt in Romans by Le Roy Ladurie

The 1579-1580 episode in Romans is a nearly perfect example of class struggle. A few others, most of which are not so clear cut, are to be found among various urban uprisings that occurred in the Provencal or Franco-Provencal speaking areas, in Aquitaine and other provinces from, from 1579 to 1720. Through their confraternities, craftsmen initially( in the preceding decade) took the side of the elite merchants and traders, jurists and town-dwelling landowners (against the tax exempt nobility). In Romans and a few other cases like Arles and Aix, there was also some group participation on the part of town-dwelling peasants. And what about the marginal elements, drifters, beggars, or lumpenproletariat? In Romans they accounted for a small percentage of the population, but played no part in the popular movement – although that was not always true of such revolts. Also missing were the lower-class women, a group which played a large and active role in the starvation riots of the next few centuries. A substantial number of Romans’ patrician ladies did figure in the elitist Carnival, but only as sex objects, admitting, admired, and desired.

Rene Pillorget’s study of Provence has statistically demonstrated that clashes between the upper and lower sections of an urban community are one of the more frequent forms of collective action. By 1579 Romans shared this common feature. What is more, the grievances formulated in the town’s protests are standard. Like the Florence Ciompi of 1378, Romans craftsmen took a lively interest in taxes and indirect levies, especially the municipal ones, and corporate debts, all instrumental in their oppression. There were no demands for wage increases per se, however; Pillorget, Castan, and Berce have shown that this holds true for all of the French Midi from 1570 to 1789. The Lyon’s printers’ strike in the sixteenth century was an isolated example, typical of a new and dynamic profession; it was many years before it found any imitators. In addition, the specific or cultural gravity of the journeymen, the craftsman groups wage-earning workers, seems to have been slight in comparison to that of the self-employed master craftsmen, who were in fact small businessmen. In the context of the craftsmen as a group, a wage protest would have been devoid of meaning, although strikes against indirect taxes were liberally indulged in, especially by master craftsmen.

If we look at the protestors’ demand for local power, we find a few concrete results. The neighborhood captains were removed sand replaced in a manner more to the people’s liking. The drapers, the butcher the shoemaker and other leaders of the urban league (against noble tax exemptions) regularly took part in town council meetings, of both the restricted and general councils. They had been admitted as “extraordinary-supernumerary” members after the February-March 1579 incidents (the league’s suppression of the outlaw Laprade), and there they remained until Mardi Gras 1580, the day of their death, flight, or arrest. Even so, the majority of Romans’ council members were guardians of the ultimately triumphant ancient regime “system”( enjoying similar tax exemptions as nobility or the prospect for such). Nor did the craftsmen infiltrate that to quartet, the consuls, or unseat Guerin from his judgeship-for-life. The Fronde-related Ormee protest in Bourdeaux in 1649, also involving many craftsmen, was more successful, taking over every important municipal function.

Finally, Roman’s urban micro-revolution approaches the British historian E.P. Thompson’s analysis of the origin of popular movements. He discusses a plebeian group of self-employed craftsmen and shopkeepers in England up to and including the 18^th century. Journeymen and wage-earning workers played only a minor role within this group. Naturally an industrial, manufacturing town like Romans had a more important craftsman/ plebeian group than did Arles, a farming center where the main participants in the revolt were day laborers, peasants, and brawling nobles. Roman’s plebeians demanded a revision of the municipal norms relative to taxes, debts, and the composition of the town council. They wanted a return to more equitable norms, and they wanted the traditional community values upheld; the elite, and especially the judge, had violated them. Yet the Romans’s common folk did not come close to proposing new, egalitarian values. These were already in an embryonic state of development, but the ideologue formulating them was Jean de Bourg, the leader of Vienne’s bourgeoisie, not a craftsman. In fact, no one before Jean-Jacques Rousseau clearly defined the ideas of individual liberty and popular sovereignty; the philosopher courageously defended the common people of Geneva against that town’s lesser council, typically coopted and oligarchic. By 1600, however, Dauphine had already made certain efforts in that direction.

As for sovereignty, Romans was far less bold than Auriol, a Provence market village where in 1599, well before Rousseau, the common people requested that their councils be elected by popular vote. His would have meant a return to a custom and a town democracy that may have existed in the Middle Ages. It would have meant abolishing the principle of cooptation [that is, ‘to elect into a body by the votes of the existing members’], an almost universal practice in southern France of the late 16^th century. It would have meant an end to the growth of the local oligarchy, a consequence of Renaissance expansion and the increasing power of the crown bureaucracy.

But Auriol was only a large village, mainly rural, not a real town like Romans, where the principle of cooptation was barely challenged. The town’s elite had been schooled in French, even Latin, and securely lorded it over the common people, who spoke an Occitan patois, with often no French at all. Roman’s protestors only minimally and temporarily encroached upon the near-stranglehold that the elite had had on municipal power since 1542.

Yet the protestors represented a potential danger to this elite, which partially explains the violence of the final counteroffensive. It was feared that Paumier would bring his peasant allies into town to attack the rich. Guerin’s subsequent repressive measures allayed such fears. They had not been unfounded: during a heated urban revolt in Aix in 1630, peasants from the surrounding villages invaded the town, mercilessly pillaging the homes of a few detested members of the town oligarchy.

Another obsession fueling Guerin’s deadly revenge on the protestors: he accused them of wanting to divide up the rich man’s properties, then their women, considered younger and more attractive than the poor man’s wives. His sexual fantasy was perhaps based on fact – gang rape was common in Renaissance streets and town hall registers. [*] As for the protestors’ wanting to divide up property, it was probably a libelous representation of Paumier and Robert-Brunat’s real intentions. As protest leaders go, they were reasonable men. It is likely, however, that Guerin’s charge corresponded to some of the less cool-headed rebels’ vague yet plasusible motivations and objectives. We encounter a trend towards divisions of property in Provence around 1609, in Rouergue about 1627, possibly in Vivarais in 1679. Such protests proclaimed their desire ‘to put all the rich in caves . . .divide up their property . . .The time has come for the earthen pot to break the brazen pot . . .’ Articulating such fantasies, however, was a far cry from carrying them out, and at least under the ancient regime, it never came to that. In Romans, as elsewhere, it was still only a nebulous vision, shared by a very few. Only the revolt of Munzer’s apocalyptic religious fanatics in 1535 went so far as to act on such impulses.

Romans’ common people did not, then, justify their grievances with apocalyptic reasoning, nor Protestant, biblical, or millenarian reasoning, as did the 16^th century Anabaptists in Germany, the disciples of Thomas Munzer in 1524, or the Englishman Winstanley in 1650. Admittedly, urban craftsmen in lower Daupine were avid supporters of the Huguenot Reformation during the 1550s and 1560s, but almost all of them broke away after 1570. The Massacre of St. Bartholomew upset them, especially in Romans, where Guerin had Huguenot leaders stifled or eliminated; the survivors preferred to head for Geneva. And then the high-handedness of the nobles or the power-hungry or both, like Lesdiguieres, who made Dauphine’s Protestant movement into their own private affair, distressed many ordinary people. The extraordinarily interesting thing about the uprising was not a Protestant ideology – this was nonexistent or inactive as far as Roans was concerned – but its rich use of symbolic and folk codes underlying and justifying the hostilities, on both sides…

All things duly considered, the Dauphine phenomena in 15790-1580 is a sort of open-air museum of every form of social organization: “abstract collectives,” leagues, ruling and cooperative groups, associations, corporate groups- discovered between 1880 and 1930 by German jurists and sociologists. Their research is infinitely more varied than our contemporaries believe; we too often reduce this great tradition of scholarship to Marx and Weber alone. We cannot see the forest for those two tall trees. . .

The Carnival in Romans made ready use of the reynages (festively constituted mock realms of  affectively differentiated and adversary groups). It was rooted in the parish and confraternity-related culture of the time. The notables and other leaders, great or small, plebeian or rich, wanted to epater les bourgois (to unsettle people). They pursued certain finalities, in some cases conservative or radical ones; they attained their goal by donating a modest sum of money or quantity of wax and becoming king for a few days during Carnival, Easter, or summer festivities, Catholic culture under the ancien regime was an admirable blend of sacred and profane, religious and burlesque. In the reynage it a created a social tool, allowing the lower classes to express themselves, their mockery, and sometimes their grievances. Plebeian political tendencies that were repressed during the rest of the year came to light during the festivities. A dangerous group subconscious found temporary outward structuring in the solemn and formalized institutions of the reynage. Here, we might say, Durkheim and Freud join hands: the reynage was a synthesis of the primitive and the civilized feast.

[*] Guerin’s account of the fateful evening before the day of Mardi Gras declared it was the sight of the patricians’ Carnival Queen- attired like a life size relic, so sumptuously dressed that she was all a glitter, at the end of their procession that sparked the  a ‘premature’ attack by Paumier’s group.- those men had suddenly realized the possibilities offered by the situation to pillage and plunder upper-class ladies. This frightened the women already in the ballroom and spread panic. This, in turn, caused the patrician’s defense, then punitive, retaliation. They decided to put a stop to things once and for all.

Was the judge completely in error in alleging that feminine panic primed the fighting? On the contrary, there was probably some truth in what he wrote. The young men of the lower classes in southern French towns were no angels (‘young’ meaning anywhere from the ages of sixteen to thirty-six). In various articles, Jacques Rossiaud has described the bands of young males, journeymen and apprentices, that wandered the darkened streets of the small cities in the lower Rhone basin; they literally ‘chased skirts’ and practiced gang rape. There were a great many of these juvenile delinquents, representing a large share of their age groups. They fell heir to the tradition –however diluted- of the 14^th century’s raging charivaris; whenever there was a wedding, young and violent practical jokers broke into the church, ‘smashed crucifixes, insulted the priest, beat the newlyweds,’ then looted the couple’s new home. Sometimes the dragged the young couple down to the river for a dunking or took them to the local brothel as a finale to their nuptial festivities. Such brutish behavior, tamed but not really eliminated with the passage of time, did not mean the lower classes were entirely unromantic. Nonetheless, their good conduct did not even approach the more polished, tender, and ritualized courtly behavior that flourished among the young patricians of both sexes –members of the (mock) abbey of Maugouvert, the bourgeois milieu of Romans, Lyons, and elsewhere.. These institutions buzzed with sweet nothings, and the woman, lady, damsel, or ‘novice’ in the ‘abbey’ was an object of adoration rather than humiliation.

Enlightened attitudes toward women came and went, but the lower classes maintained the medieval tradition of male chauvinism and brutality toward the second sex. There is some excuse for them; the urban world they lived ibn was an frustrating one. Many young women married men twice their age, and were off limits to younger men. One might raise the objection that the frustrated young men could always  have satisfied their instincts, for lack of a better solution, in various houses of prostitution: public brothels officially established by the town, or privately owned baths that had “beds everywhere, bathing facilities nowhere to be seen,” where plump girls boldly frolicked; there were also ‘small private bordellos kept by madams, “ or finally, the girls who were in business for themselves. However, these were but poor remedies at best and were challenged by an as yet quiescent puritanism, for in the late 16^th century the Reformation and Counterreformation threatened the very existence of prostitution. Brothels were often shut down; then young plebeians’ aggressive instincts shifted toward the rich man’s wives or daughters, particularly when Carnival permitted an outburst of sexual joy or madness, culminating in Mardi Gras.

This outburst is what the young ‘abbey’s’ tried as best they could to discipline, to channel into courtly behavior, the feminine reign of pseudo-kingdoms, and also into flirtation paving the way to marriage  (the object of the Mardi Gras ball). Despite such control valves, lapses were always a possibility, especially during periods of popular revolt. If there was a panic among the patrician ladies at the Partridge ball and the damsels in the queen’s entourage in the street, it was not entirely feigned, nor was it unjustified; the Capon men probably planned to take a few liberties- fondling, pinching, and so forth – perhaps eve rape some women. The women’s panic was not, however, what produced the patrician’s conspiracy; Guerin had arranged that well in advance of lundi gras  (knives, swords and pikes had been sharpen, blunderbusses primed). But it did hasten the execution of the plans, which had  probably been set for later, say Mardi Gras at six in the morning, if we assume that Guerin’s report attributes the judge’s own intentions to his adversaries, the members of the Capon Kingdom.