Death Masque

By Mayo Mohs

CARNIVAL IN ROMANS

by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie

Braziller; 426 pages; $20

French Historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie managed a singular coup last year. His book Montaillou, a painstakingly detailed account of life in a small French town in the Pyrenees at the beginning of the 14th century, became a surprise bestseller. But then, Montaillou was a singular town. The curious beliefs, the robust lives and the sexual proclivities of its townspeople, revealed through the testimony in their subsequent heresy trials, afforded an intriguing peephole into another time.

In Carnival in Romans Le Roy Ladurie provides a new aperture--and another compelling view. The place is the small city of Romans in southeastern France. The year is 1580. France is still recovering from the widespread slaughter of the Huguenots in the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of 1572; skirmishes still go on between Catholic and Huguenot. Town and countryside are periodically ravaged by roving bands of brigand soldiers. Class bitterness over increasingly burdensome taxes breaks out in tax strikes, urban unrest and peasant revolt. It all coils up toward Mardi Gras, culminating in a bloody midnight clash.

This is, as Le Roy Ladurie senses, the stuff of old drama with modern resonances. Yet Carnival in Romans is no mere clone of Montaillou: it is a more demanding work--a long day's journey into light. In that sense it is a braver book. The author dares, for example, to spend the entire second chapter talking about taxes. He cannot do otherwise. If sex and its avoidance preoccupied Montaillou, taxes and their avoidance seem to have preoccupied Romans and the countryside around it.

There was good reason for concern. The small rural landowner was being squeezed dry. More and more parvenu nobles, exempt from taxes, were buying country property; the mounting costs of a burgeoning bureaucracy thus fell on fewer and fewer Frenchmen. Petitions for nobles and clergy to share in the tax load went unheard.

The townspeople of Romans resented the same fiscal injustice, but theirs was a more complicated grievance. Taxes went into the pockets of corrupt administrators and stayed there. Instead of paying their bills, these unscrupulous city fathers ran up an enormous municipal debt, then lent the city the money they had embezzled --at considerable interest.

Fury over finances and helplessness in the face of roving brigands compelled peasant and townsman alike to form "leagues" to advance their common purposes. Armorers did a brisk business in swords, helmets and arquebuses, forerunners of the musket. In February 1579 the drapers of Romans paraded with weapons and elected a burly colleague, Paumier, as their festival chief. He also became the factional leader of angry craftsmen, tradesmen and plowmen. Soon there were two governments in Romans: Paumier and his followers had seized control of the city gates, a vital link to leaguers in the countryside. By the latter part of 1579, butchers and bakers were defiantly withholding taxes. Daringly and, as it turned out, fatally, Paumier's faction was also demanding complete restitution of the funds stolen by the town administrators over the previous two decades.

Romans' royal magistrate, Antoine Guerin, bided his time in quiet rage. As Carnival began in 1580, the festivities were supercharged with hatred between competing camps of revelers. The parades of these mock "kingdoms" had sinister overtones. Masquers of Paumier's Sheep Kingdom carried rakes, brooms and flails, wore shrouds and grimly offered "Christian flesh" for sale. Guerin's ostentatious Partridge Kingdom mocked the poorer townsmen with price lists offering luxuries for a pittance. More immediately threatening was the Partridge army--a real one -- whose men carried new arquebuses and long Swiss pikes. The troops went into action during the notables' masked ball at the city hall on the night before Mardi Gras. They spread through the streets, found Paumier at home, and shot him dead. During the early hours of Mardi Gras, the leaguers were driven from the town wall gatehouses. Tantalizingly, Le Roy Ladurie stops the action at each strategic point of battle to explain the sociology of the neighborhood and just why its capture was important.

Judge Guerin's journal, a self-serving document, claims that the rebels were plotting their own attack on the notables. The historian's only alternative source, a seemingly unbiased royal notary, makes it clear that Paumier was cold-bloodedly murdered. Judicial murder followed, as the surviving rebels were rounded up, tried, and in many cases executed. The rural leaguers were crushed several months later after joining with Huguenot forces. Royal troops killed more than 1,000 at Moirans alone -- "a bloodbath," the author observes, "at least by the relatively humane standards of the time, as compared to our own."

Paumier never becomes more than an enigmatic figure, portrayed only polemically by his foe, and inadequately by the dutiful notary. Beneath the bearskin robe he liked to wear, the rebel leader remains a shadowy image, an unmeasured mix of guile, principle and erratic power. But Guerin's journal reveals the cunning, self-righteous man who rose to the nobility on the corpse of Paumier. "In the worst possible taste," notes Le Roy Ladurie, the unabashed judge chose as his coat of arms an uprooted apple tree -- in French, a pommier.

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