Page - 62 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 04/02

Charivari or the Historicising of a Question | 61www.jrfm.eu 2018, 4/2, 55–66 lamation of the banns”.23 With his request the pastor, a member of the middle class living in the agrarian context of face-to-face communities, indicated that he was by no means eager for the “big event” mentioned in the editors’ call for this issue. He wished rather for discretion and privacy. These couples were not interested in an “alternative expression of the wedding ritual”, but instead hoped that the expression of their deviant marital relationship would be as qui- et as possible, even invisible.24 Another churchman, a preacher who declared himself “peu fortuné”, suggesting he was destitute, and “a friend of silence and calm” petitioned “to avoid noise and scandal that ordinarily accompanies this kind of [sacred] ceremony”.25 Abraham Puenzieux and Susanna Marie Vielland also hoped for dispensation from the need to have the banns read from the pul- pit: “His reasons are the following, he fears a charivari, nocturnal celebrations which are ordinarily accompanied in the parish by scandals and caricatures”.26 In their common petition Albrecht Salchli, a councillor, and his fiancée asked for it to be possible for them to marry “with neither pageantry, nor being accompa- nied by a charivari or being announced with gunshots”, because this was often the initiation of “real misfortune”.27 While many couples in the sources consulted do not name the reasons for their apprehension,28 Daniel Moser, father of bride-to-be Elisabeth, states them openly: he had promised his daughter to a local man of his own agrarian home town, but in the meantime his daughter had become engaged to another man from a different community. Now this wedding was approaching. In such cir- cumstances, the petitioner said, it was a “silly rural custom of the wedding night, to give a charivari to a woman who does not get married to a local by staging her transfer of the trousseau”.29 How such a charivari was performed, we learn from a contemporary travel report on the Bernese Oberland: the trans- fer of the trousseau from the bride’s home to the home of the newlywed cou- ple was enacted in a parody by unmarried men from the bride’s hometown. This simulation was accompanied by clanging cowbells and other noises, pro- duced by whips, pipes, horns, kettles and canes. Equipped with the improvised 23 “der, um Aufsehen zu vermeiden, sich ohne eine vorhergegangene dreymahlige Verkündigung verhey- rathen zu können wünscht”, BAR B0#1000/1483#490* 1802–1803, 111. 24 See the call for papers for this issue. 25 “ami de la tranquilité & calme”; “d’eviter par là le bruit & l’éclat qui accompagnent ordinairement cette espèce [sacrée] de cérémonies”, BAR B0#1000/1483#490* 1802–1803, 267. 26 “Ses motifs sont décidants, il craint un charivari, fetes nocturnes qui sont ordinairement accompagnier dans la Paroisse de scandales et de caricatures”, BAR B0#1000/1483#490* 1802–1803, 493. 27 “ohne gepräng, ohne mit chari vari begleitet, noch mit feur-geschoss angekündet zu warden; wirklich ohn-glük”, BAR B0#1000/1483#604* 1798–1801, 163–165. 28 In the five-year period from 1798 to 1803, more than 150 petitions from residents of Bern addressed the central government; these documents form the empirical material for my investigation. 29 “ländlicher unsinniger Gebrauch […], dass in der Hochzeitnacht einer Weibsperson die sich nicht mit einem Ortsbürger verehelichet, ein Charivarii gegeben oder welches nemlich bedeutet das Trossel geführt wird”, BAR B0#1000/1483#604* 1798–1801, 423.