The Bals
des victimes, or victims' balls, were balls that were said to have been put on
by dancing societies after the Reign of Terror. To be admitted to these
societies and balls, one had to be a near relative of someone who had been
guillotined during the Terror. The balls came to prominence after the death of
Robespierre, supposedly first being held in early 1795 and first mentioned in
popular writing in 1797. While anecdotal evidence attests to the balls'
occurrence, and generations of French and non-French historians described them
and accepted them as fact, some recent scholarship, citing a near-total lack of
primary evidence, argues that they may have been fabrications based on rumor.
Historian David Bell concludes: "The bals des victimes... never took place
— they were an invention of early nineteenth-century Romantic authors."
Background
The bals
des victimes allegedly began as part of a rash of merrymaking and balls that
broke out as the Terror came to an end. According to one source, they emerged
as an idea of youths whose parents and other near relatives had gone to the
guillotine, and to whom the revolution had now restored their relatives'
confiscated property. Reveling in the return of fortune they established
aristocratic, decadent balls open to themselves alone.
Descriptions
of the balls' particulars vary, but the common thread is that they were a
cathartic device in which the participants acted out the emotional impact of
their relatives' executions and the social upheavals occurring as a result of
the revolution. Many who described the balls, often generations afterwards,
nevertheless found them a scandalous idea. Whether real or imagined, the very
idea of the balls reflected the post-Terror generations' morbid fascination
with the horror of the guillotine and the excesses of the French Revolution
with its mass executions.
Those who
attended the orgiastic balls reportedly wore mourning clothes or elaborate
costumes with crepe armbands signifying mourning. Some accounts have both men
and women wearing plain but scanty dress in the wake of the impoverishment of the
Revolution, at least until the return of their fortunes at which time ball
dress became highly elaborate. Others describe women, in the fashion of
Merveilleuses, dressing scandalously in Greco-Roman attire, with their feet
bare, in sandals, or adorned only by ribbons, a possible allusion to the fact
that women often went barefoot to the guillotine.The style of dress at such a
ball was known by some as the "costume à la victime." Women, and by
some accounts men too, wore a red ribbon or string around their necks at the
point of a guillotine blade's impact. Both men and women attending the balls
were said to have worn or cut their hair in a fashion that bared their necks in
a manner reflecting the haircut given the victim by the executioner, women
often using a comb known as a cadenette to achieve this fashion. According to
some, this was the origin of the feminine hairstyle known as the "coiffure
à la victime" or more popularly the "coiffure à la Titus", or
(in England) "a la guillotine". Some sources state that a woman
sporting this hairstyle sometimes wore a red shawl or throat ribbon even when
not attending a bal des victimes.
In another
macabre touch, instead of a graceful bow or bob of the head to one's dancing
partner, a man who attended a bal des victimes would jerk his head sharply
downwards in imitation of the moment of decapitation. Some sources suggest that
women, too, adopted this salutation.
No comments:
Post a Comment