SHOCK AROUND THE CLOCK
The annual, monster-filled Lucerne Carnival is a strange combination of anarchy and Swiss-engineered order
THE swans of Lucerne speak French. That fact might strike you as a little implausible, given that the town is German-speaking. But there is a convincing historical explanation: the swans who mooch along the river Reuss are descended from a bevy of curvy, French birds given to the town by King Louis XIV in the mid-18th century, in gratitude for the services of his Swiss guards. A famously loyal regiment of mercenaries, they were mostly sons of Lucerne.
From the Middle Ages till the French Revolution, Lucerne was Europe’s “Mercenaries R Us”. The area was a broke backwater, reeking of cow dung, blood and fondue. Its women could castrate a bull by looking at it; its men spoke the universal language of violence. Countless local roughnecks went abroad to become freelancers, in the original sense: elite bodyguards to the Popes and monarchs of Catholic Europe.
Nowadays, Lucerne is comically placid and genteel. The scariest citizens you will see are the somewhat spooky swans — unless, that is, you visit during Carnival week at the butt-end of winter, just before the beginning of Lent, when an army of fantastical monsters take over the town.
Lucerne’s Fasnacht carnival is insane, in a very sane, Swiss way. It is nothing like its sexy cousins in Rio or New Orleans — the streets are too chilly for nudity and too Swiss for Latin syncopation.
But, unlike those famous bacchanals, Fasnacht hasn’t become a corporatised tourist cash cow either: it is staged for the people, by the people. Most of the population of Lucerne gets fancy-dressed and throngs the beer-drenched alleys, from dawn till dusk and beyond.
Some 80 000 revellers are prowled by dozens of amateur brass bands, and the old wooden bridges across the Reuss rattle to the flatulent emissions of tubas and trombones. (Lucerne is brass-bedonnerd: it boasts more trombones per capita than any
other city on Earth.) The soundtrack is a gemors of hot funk, chart hits and oompah rubbish, and the musicians range from ancient to adolescent, funky to dorky, male to female, excellent to crap. Everybody gets to blow their own horn.
The horror-costume theme is a legacy of the days when one of the Carnival’s projects was to terrify Old Man Winter into retreat. So zombies, corpses, witches, cannibals, orcs and
Game of Thrones warriors haunt the streets.
But there’s much else to spot. Over there is a gang of human streetlights, lighting up a walking disco floor. Here’s a drunken Getafix, preparing to retch some schnapps on a family of Smurfs. There’s Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, resurrected as Swiss pensioners, knocking back draughts at 4am. Here’s a tribe of middle-aged punks in the tartans and dog collars, making like it’s 1981. Everywhere you look there’s fake fur, stage blood and plastic bones.
The masks are properly creepy: sculpted in a grotesque tradition dating back centuries. Massive warty noses, gaping eye sockets, leering lips. They are made afresh every year, but the style never changes.
The hidden meaning of the Christian carnival tradition goes deeper than the ostensible project of letting off some hedonistic steam before Lenten austerity kicks in. Mikhail Bakhtin says the Carnival’s essence is a week-long suspension of feudal hierarchy: in 14th-century Europe, it offered a window of delirious half-anarchy. Anyone could pretend to be anyone. A mask and a mood of ambient chaos would give a sozzled stonemason or cowherd a priceless chance to insult his king, his bishop, his lord.
In the egalitarian world of modern Switzerland, that no longer matters. And an atmosphere of convincing anarchy can never be created in Lucerne. A strict schedule covered every parade or performance, with scheduled start times like 2.21am. The only crimes committed were sartorial.
But still, if you can’t abandon control, then controlled abandon will do nicely. And we had nothing to fear but the swans.
Carlos Amato visited Switzerland as a guest of Chocolat Frey, Switzerland’s biggest-selling chocolate brand. Thanks also due to Lucerne Tourism, Titlis Cableways, Swiss International Air Lines and Switzerland Tourism.