Games And French Social Evolution In The11-17th Centuries

Games played a much more important role in the daily lives of the medieval (to the early modern) French than in those of the contemporary society. Historical literature concerning games, the special connection between games and festivals, and people’s deep involvement in the games, all indicate the extraordinary enthusiasm of the ancient French towards playing. Moreover, the medieval French, regardless of class, gender and age, often either played the same type of games or played different roles in one game, which means differences in social identities did not lead to substantial differentiations in the ways and tastes of playing. Meanwhile, the clergy and nobility did not see the necessity to avoid the civilians when they played games seem be ugly or vulgar in the contemporary eyes. In short, there were essentially no such thing as barriers in playing cultural based on social differences in the Middle-Ages.Accordingly, it can be said that there was a Playing Community, or in French, communaute des jeux, in the lives of medieval French, which formed part of the larger Cultural Community unique to the early societies. This is a natural result of the specific living environment of the era. In essence, the culture of Playing Community in the medieval France was a system of survival in a world full of various real or imagined, natural or supernatural dangers. It was a time when the weak and fragmented church and state incapable of providing effective safeguard, and individuals had to rely on the closest community for survival. As a result, community lives, mainly divided by towns or natural villages, became the premier way of living. The communities needed certain special bonds to expel the aforesaid common dangers, while combining efforts of all the members to overcome hard times and ensure survival. Games provided such a bond, which endowed them the two vital features specific to the Middle-Ages:served as the religious rituals for expelling fears and seeking divine protection, as well as means of communal autonomy and self-management. The societe joyeuse, or festive societies, plays a prominent role in these aspects. In the late Middle-Ages, with dramatic social evolutions, games began to undergo fundamental changes. The first change was the secularization of games, in which the movement aimed at "purifying" Christian faith caused the games gradually lost their primitive religious functions and led to the decline of the Feast of Fools and Carnival celebrations. Secondly was their civilization, in which process violence subsided, rules clarified, people paid more attention to the elegancy of their body posture, and the games of the nobles became more and more self-contained.As the aforesaid evolutions occurred mainly in the middle as well as upper classes, the medieval community of games, or communaute des jeux, in which all people shared the same playing culture, began to disintegrate. Differentiations among classes, geographic areas, ages and even genders occurred. Games could no longer play their part in cohering communal solidarity. In the early modern social reconstruction, the playing culture of the upper classes proactively sided with the emerging absolute French nation, while those of the mass (which inherited the medieval playing tradition) became synonymous to brutality, vulgarity, disorder or even pagan customs, which turned them into objects of reform and suppression. And because of the inherent communal autonomy function carried by traditional playing culture, the suppression of those of the mass was fundamentally connected with the process towards absolutism. Meanwhile, the French monarchy also consciously used games as a tool for preaching absolutism ideology and controlling the subjects. In a word, with the daily modernization of playing ethics, the characteristic natural harmony of the traditional communaute des jeux was gone forever.