Bal Des Ardents

Here’s a Burning Man party of a completely different nature: this “Bal des Ardents” (Ball of the Burning Men) happened in late January of 1393, and the story encapsulates the place of French Medieval aristocratic culture with all its quirks.

The event involved a big party, during which the French king staged a performance with five other men all dressed up in the Wild Man costume. Somehow — perhaps by the accidental spark from the king’s brother’s torch — the entertainers all caught fire, and four of the six actors perished. The immolation was horrifying to see, and there are multiple accounts of it.

This painting is a 15th century miniature from Jean Froissart’s _Chronicles_ showing the costumed men in mid-immolation. Froissart was intimately involved in the courtier life of Medieval France, and his account of the Bal des Ardents is vivid. The French king Charles VI was mentally unstable, and the winter’s festivities had been perhaps something his advisors would have encouraged to get his mind off of paranoia that people were going to assassinate him (he may have had paranoid schizophrenia).

The costume the king wore — along with the others — as “Wild Men” would have resonated: there had been a tradition of Wild Men as uncivilized, powerful figures who dwelt outside the boundaries of Christianity for centuries before. Masking to dress up like wild creatures was something the Church heavily disapproved of. It was thought to be a deliberate covering up of the God-given power and authority that man was supposed to wield. The official Church line followed the sixth-century bishop Caesarius of Arles, who condemned those “who wear the heads of beasts so they do not seem to be men”.

But masking, and the Wild Man, and parties still went on, despite the Church’s disapproval. In relaying what happened at the Bal des Ardents, chroniclers like Froissart could describe how the tragedy was a sort of moral retribution (although he blamed the king’s brother for starting the fire). Charles VI was one of the two survivors, his young aunt saving his life by throwing her long skirt over the king’s body to snuff out the flames.