Industrial Revolution & Nation-State

The Capetian–Valois–Bourbon French realm, from the medieval crown through the ancien régime.

1 chapter

1500 - 1790

The 16th century saw the craft guilds of the Flemish-zone cities create the processional giants that still walk their streets today. In 1530, the Corporation des Manneliers (basket-makers) of Douai built Gayant from wicker for a procession honoring Saint Maurand — a local saint credited with saving the city from a French siege in 1479. At Cassel, the Reuze Papa giant embodies the Flemish-zone giant tradition, jointly UNESCO-listed with Belgian counterparts since 2005. When Louis XIV annexed Lille and Douai to France (1667), he brought military engineers: Vauban's Lille Citadel still dominates the city's skyline. The calendar of festivals became a political battleground — around 1770, the Bishop of Arras banned the Gayant procession's original date (commemorating the 1479 victory over France) and moved it to the anniversary of Douai's capitulation to Louis XIV, replacing a memory of resistance with one of submission. Meanwhile, at Dunkerque, shipowners began holding the foye — a farewell feast for fishermen departing for six months of Icelandic cod fishing — a tradition whose Flemish vocabulary (Visscherbende, cletche) encodes a maritime-guild origin beneath the surface of 'carnival.'

1914 - 1945

Walk through the two world wars and you encounter two radically different experiences within the same region. In the Somme department, the battles of 1916 destroyed civilian life entirely: the Thiepval Memorial records 73,357 missing British soldiers, and the Vimy Memorial marks the Canadian victory of 1917 on a ridge that still bears shell craters. In the Nord department, by contrast, civilians lived under German occupation for the entire war (1914–1918) — a distinct experience of deportation, forced labor, and survival strategies documented by historian James E. Connolly. Festival revival after WWI carried different meanings in each zone: in the Somme, it was post-destruction reconstruction; in the Nord, it was resumption of cultural life after occupation. The Gayant giants, suppressed during the occupation, were rebuilt after the war — a physical and mnemonic act. In Arras, the belfry and town hall, damaged by bombardment, were reconstructed identically using reinforced concrete. WWII brought another occupation and the mining basin became a center of resistance.

1350 - 1500

English armies marching through Picardy left two of the most consequential battlefields in European military history. Stand on the ridge at Crécy-en-Ponthieu (1346) where English longbows shattered French chivalry, or walk the Azincourt battlefield (1415) where it happened again — both sites now marked with interpretation centers. Under Burgundian rule, the cities of the Nord developed the civic institutions that would shape festival life for centuries. The belfry at Douai — begun 1380, finished 1410 — was both a watchtower and a symbol of communal self-governance; its carillon (installed 1391) rang the hours and summoned citizens to assembly. At Arras, the twin squares (Grand Place and Place des Héros) framed a prosperous cloth-trading city under Burgundian patronage. The belfries of this period, now UNESCO-listed (1999/2005), embody the civic independence of the medieval Flemish-zone commune — a claim to self-rule that would be contested by every subsequent regime.

From 1945

The last coal mine closed in 1990, and the landscape once defined by pitheads and slag heaps is now a UNESCO World Heritage site (inscribed 2012) — a 'cultural landscape of evolving memory.' At the 9-9bis pit in Oignies, the former mine hosts the Sainte-Barbe Festival des arts et du feu (revived 2018), where former miners in traditional costume carry the statue of Saint Barbara in the closing procession. At Loos-en-Gohelle, the terrils (slag heaps 11/19) become a sacred mountain during the torchlight ascent — industrial landscape transformed into festival space. In Bailleul, the Société Philanthropique (founded 1852) organizes the five-day carnaval with volunteer labor and a philanthropic mission — providing food parcels for the elderly — that its custodians insist distinguishes it from the tourist-spectacle model. The Chés Cabotans theater in Amiens performs Lafleur — the last surviving Picard-language puppet show, where Lafleur and his wife Sandrine speak in a tongue that most of the audience no longer uses daily. The Berck-sur-Mer kite festival (created 1987, now attracting up to 800,000 visitors) and the Maroilles flamiche festival are modern creations that risk being framed as ancient terroir tradition when they have no pre-modern roots. The 2008 film Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis fixed a national stereotype of the region — flattening the Flemish cultural layer into a single Picard/Ch'ti caricature — while UNESCO recognition of belfries (1999/2005) and processional giants (2005/2008) simultaneously provides an international framework for safeguarding these traditions. Today you can still walk the bande at Dunkerque, carry the Gayant through Douai's narrow streets, and climb the terrils by torchlight — but each act now carries a double meaning: communal memory and heritage spectacle.