Professors Jonathan Sterne and Natalie Zemon Davis’ piece in
Thursday’s Globe & Mail (“Quebec’s
manifs casseroles are a call for order”) manages the rare feat of
being both informative and disingenuous. As a McGill PhD
student (and, in fact, former student of Professor Sterne), working on (among
other things) understanding various elements of popular culture as
continuations of older practices, finding a discussion of the
now-for-the-most-part forgotten practice of charivari
in the Commentary pages of the G&M made for an initially welcome morning
surprise. Unfortunately, the essay’s details fail to live up to my high expectations
of two such distinguished scholars.
The authors strive to portray the manifs casseroles as joyful expressions of communities united in
opposition to the ostensibly oppressive provincial government while (somehow) bringing
order to the streets. But this is not at all the case. I (along with many other
Quebec citizens) do not support the casserolistes
or the seemingly never-ending protests against tuition hikes and find the
nightly rounds of pot-banging to be a sonic assault on my rights to have a
reasonable expectation of privacy and silence – and I’m certainly not the only
one who feels this way as the content of letters pages to Quebec newspapers
since it began make abundantly clear. Instead of recognizing the diversity of
opinions that exist within Quebec, and therefore the illegitimacy of attempts
to force one’s opinion on others outside of any democratic accountability, the
authors imperiously proclaim the casserolistes
as rightfully “enforc[ing] community standards.” But whose standards are
these (they’re certainly not mine) and what legitimacy, beyond that of
mob-rule, do they have to enforce them?
And here lies the real disingenuousness in the authors’ characterization of the history of charivari as “an alternative to violent exclusion” that “often [resulted in] a payment of money that allowed everyone to go down to the local inn for a festive drink or meal.” Sometimes this peaceful result did occur (as Professor Davis has amply documented [1975]) but then such enforcement of community standards were often of a very frightening if not violent kind. Anthony Fletcher (1995) writes, “Charivari could be intended as a warning and no doubt many offenders were subsequently left alone and were terrorized into greater conformity with communal values. But the intention could also be to drum out an offending couple, as happened at Burton-on-Trent in 1618 when William and Margaret Cripple, suspected of living together unmarried, subsequently left the town” (272) [my italics]. Bertram Wyatt-Brown (1995) notes, “The charivari included a range of crowd activity, from wedding-day jest to public whipping and tar-and-feathering” (192) [my italics]; furthermore (2007), charivaris in combination with lynch law “ensured the permanence of popular white rule” in the American antebellum South (436). And John Cashmere (1991) points to the diverse historical array of charivari activities countering Sterne and Davis’ assumption “that a typical charivari begins in a mood of laughter and derision and ends in expansive revelry, and that the manifestation of violence means that the charivari has somehow ‘gone wrong’ or not been played out according to plan…the outcome could all vary, and often violence was an integral part of the processual nature of the performance” (301-02) [my italics].
And here lies the real disingenuousness in the authors’ characterization of the history of charivari as “an alternative to violent exclusion” that “often [resulted in] a payment of money that allowed everyone to go down to the local inn for a festive drink or meal.” Sometimes this peaceful result did occur (as Professor Davis has amply documented [1975]) but then such enforcement of community standards were often of a very frightening if not violent kind. Anthony Fletcher (1995) writes, “Charivari could be intended as a warning and no doubt many offenders were subsequently left alone and were terrorized into greater conformity with communal values. But the intention could also be to drum out an offending couple, as happened at Burton-on-Trent in 1618 when William and Margaret Cripple, suspected of living together unmarried, subsequently left the town” (272) [my italics]. Bertram Wyatt-Brown (1995) notes, “The charivari included a range of crowd activity, from wedding-day jest to public whipping and tar-and-feathering” (192) [my italics]; furthermore (2007), charivaris in combination with lynch law “ensured the permanence of popular white rule” in the American antebellum South (436). And John Cashmere (1991) points to the diverse historical array of charivari activities countering Sterne and Davis’ assumption “that a typical charivari begins in a mood of laughter and derision and ends in expansive revelry, and that the manifestation of violence means that the charivari has somehow ‘gone wrong’ or not been played out according to plan…the outcome could all vary, and often violence was an integral part of the processual nature of the performance” (301-02) [my italics].
I by no means wish
to suggest that the casserolistes
have engaged in overt violence; thankfully they have not (although the student
protesters certainly have!). But as a scholar of sound studies such as
Professor Sterne certainly knows, sound can function very well as a weapon on
its own—as some US Marines demonstrated when they blasted hard rock music into
the Panamanian Vatican Embassy in 1989 to drive out Manuel Noriega or as the
broadcasting of classical music in public areas in order to “encourage”
teenagers not to loiter plainly reveals. The casserolistes are not the benign social bringers-of-order that
Sterne and Davis make them out to be; rather, they are a mass of people
convinced of their own righteousness, with obviously little concern for what
their neighbors who disagree with them might think as their nightly riot of
noise acutely shows. Sterne and Davis are correct: the manifs casseroles are descended from the charivari—but this is a relation to be troubled by not celebrated.
Works Cited
Cashmer, John. 1991. The social uses of violence in ritual:
Charivari or religious
persecution? In European History Quarterly 21: 291-319.
Davis, Natalie
Zemon. 1975. Society and culture in early
modern France: Eight essays.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Fletcher, Anthony. 1995. Gender, sex, and subordination in England,
1500-1800. New
Haven: Yale University Press.
Wyatt-Brown,
Bertram. 1995. Honor and violence in the
Old South. New York: Oxford
University Press.
———. 2007. Southern honor: Ethics and behavior in the
Old South. New York: Oxford
University Press.
