The plywood tables and plastic chairs of the reading room in the municipal archives of Nantes have the feel of a secondary school classroom. Located at 1 rue d’Enfer (‘1 hell street’), the archive nonetheless boasts a handful of fantastic archivists and colourful police records. These records show a persistent concern with the management of eighteenth-century streets. William Beik, the famous historian of Old Regime French society, once noted that it was difficult to recreate the feel of early modern cities, such as Toulouse and Montpellier, since their historic centres had changed so much.[1] Nantes, a port city in the West of France, ought to be a particular challenge. The waterways that ran around its main islands were filled in the first half of the twentieth century, leaving the city greyed and tarmacked.
Yet the city of the eighteenth century can still be dug up through slim files in the municipal archives. There, concerned letters decrying raucous pleasure houses jostle with ordinances desperately trying to impose curfews or limit the number of errant chickens in the street. Fishmongers’ wives pool together their savings to create wax effigies of officials that they particularly dislike, flaunting these in shops, trading insults with the police. From the chaos emerges the sound of the city – the heavy ring of the bells of the cathedral of Saint-Pierre and of urban parish churches, such as Sainte-Croix, Saint-Saturnin, Saint-Léonard, Saint-Vincent, Saint-Laurent, Sainte-Radegonde, Saint-Denis, and Saint-Nicolas, which watched over the foreign merchants and sailors of the fosse district.
As a port city, Nantes was already home to numerous itinerant figures, as well as individuals who weren’t born in the metropole, let alone in the comté Nantais. As an observer commented in 1778, Nantes attracted many foreign merchants: “[t]he Spanish bring wines, fine wool, iron, silks, oils, oranges & lemons […] the Dutch send over salted fish, with all sorts of spices […] the Swedes [bring] their copper […] the English their lead, tin, coal […]”.[2] Since Nantes’s fortune was made through the slave trade, the city was also home to a small, but visible, group of enslaved and free people of colour – approximately 700 people out of an overall population of nearly 80,000 people in late 1770s. (As Sue Peabody’s work has pointed out, although France proudly proclaimed that there were ‘no slaves in France’, this seldom worked in practice.)[3] If most of these men, women, and children were born in the Caribbean, about a third of these came from West Africa, and many of these from Kongo (present day Angola).[4] Yet, it is not so much Nantes’s connections to the Atlantic, but rather its ties to an extensive fluvial system through the Loire River that made it an easy stop for street-performers.
Street-performers from beyond Nantes typically needed to petition the city to perform in the streets. For instance, a man named Bernardy requested permission in June 1777 to put on plays by a travelling troupe of children. Having already performed across the kingdom, he was sure that they would be a great success in Nantes but was anxious to find appropriate accommodation for them.[5] The municipal records are filled, therefore, with examples of fire-eaters, tightrope walkers and acrobats (mostly English and Italian), and even include a request for an elephant to be presented before the crowd. (Accommodation was also an issue where the elephant was concerned.)
Travelling performers often needed to make alterations to the urban landscape; this required careful deliberation by city officials. A request in September 1763 outlined a plan for the erection of a stage on the place de la Hollande, which was a large square outside of the Exchange upon which (as its name hinted) Dutch merchants traditionally gathered. (Since the Exchange was only open between 11 am and 1 pm, one can anticipate a great deal of waiting around during the day.) The request outlined the proposed nine-pillar stage in agonising detail, making a note of the scaffolding that would be required, how the stage would be held together and the steps leading up to it.
You might wonder how these street-performers, usually coming from across Europe, navigated these francophone streets. A quick glance through the local criminal and admiralty archives produces a number of interpreters and guides for hire, who regularly got into drunken scrapes, as well as quite a few transient individuals who relied upon their own language communities to get them out of trouble. On 12 July 1755 ‘Pierre’ (likely Peter) Magoran, an Irish Franciscan Priest who had arrived in Nantes from Spain, was imprisoned after drunkenly insulting a magistrate in broad daylight. (Magoran had taken issue with the magistrate’s outfit.) He had to be fished out of his predicament by local Irish priests who vouched for him to the police.[6] Phrasebooks for travellers are also useful for historians to get a sense of how non-locals might have safely made their way around an early modern city. These books included sample phrases such as ‘Mon amy, dites moi où est le Meilleur logis en cette ville’ (‘My friend, tell me where the best accommodation in town is’), ‘Nous voulons boire’ (‘We want to drink’), ‘Allez vous en’ (‘Go away’) and ‘Ma teste me fait mal’ (‘My head hurts’).[7]
If street-performers and itinerant figures provided plenty of entertainment – whether through fire eating or the insulting of magistrates – many also saw their role as central to the dissemination of knowledge. An artist, Granet, wished to exhibit a model of the ‘new church of Sainte Geneviève, the patroness of Paris’ in the streets, whereas a certain Gabriel Ardase, an ‘pyrotechnist and engineer’ hoped to present a ‘machine’ to throngs of passers-by. Through a ‘deep study of mathematics’ Ardase claimed that his work could represent the final judgement in all its ‘variations, as predicted in the scriptures’. Similarly scientific in inclination, a letter from December 1769 featured a request to practise from a certain Jules Bernard, a ‘director of a chemist’s practice’, who had showed off his work in ‘mathematics, physics, optics, and hydraulics’ in Orléans, and wished to do so in Nantes.[8]
It is tempting to view these latter ‘scientific’ performers as exclusively spreading a ‘rational’ enlightenment culture focused on experimentation and the elevation of the human mind. In doing so, we strip their work of its playfulness. That a chemist and a pyrotechnist appear in the same records as fire-eaters and acrobats show that these distinctions are, where the culture of the street is concerned, artificial. An elephant might have offered a novelty to be marvelled at, but it also provided insights into creatures uncommon to French shores. And what were fire-eaters and acrobats if not performers who stretched the capabilities of the human body? As the author of a 1693 French language-learning manual suggested, the best way to learn was first and foremost ‘through laughter’.[9] The rowdiness of the Nantais streetscape provides plenty evidence of that.
Cover Image: L’Éléphant, Jacques de Sève (1715-1795), pencil, ink and wash, 19 x 14,8 cm, Bibliothèque nationale de France, accessed via Gallica.
[1] William Beik, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century France State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 60.
[2] Nouveau Voyage de France Géographique, Historique et Curieux, Disposé par Différentes Routes, A l’usage des Étrangers & des François. Par M.L.R (A Paris: Chez les libraires associés, 1778).
[3] Sue Peabody, ‘There Are No Slaves in France’: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Regime (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
[4] Érick Noël, ‘Être Noir à Nantes’, Dix-huitième siècle 35.1 (2003): 341–358.
[5] Archives municipales de Nantes (henceforth AMN), FF 117, Oct. 1777.
[6] AMN, FF 284, fol. 5
[7] Dictionariolum und nutzliches Sprachbüchlein, auf welchem einjeder ganz leitchtlich, die gemeinste Gespräch und Wörter drener Sprachen der Latein/Französisch/Deutsch ergreiffen und erlehrnen kann. Wen Reisenden und Spraach liebhabenden sehr nothwendig (Bernæ: Typis Abrahami Welini, 1620),
[8] ANM, FF 117, Dec. 1769.
[9] Neu ausgefertigter Hand-Griff, die frantzösische Sprache lachend… zu erlernen, welcher fast 200 annuhtige Historien (Jena: J. Bielk, 1693)
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One response to “An Elephant and a Drunk Priest – Itinerant Entertainment in the Streets of an Eighteenth-Century Port City”
Visitors to Nantes can still enjoy the spectacle of mechanical elephants, beasts and marionettes produced by Royal de Luxe at their creative centre in Nantes’ former dockyards. Their giant puppets and machines perform all over the world. Not so sure how many drunken priests travel with them, though they might still welcome volunteers.