The Time of Fools

Within just a few years, all the landmarks of the Western world were swept away: the invention of the printing press, the rise of religious intolerance, the Lutheran Reformation, the development of capitalism, and the emergence of the bourgeoisie gave way to a world that was as unprecedented as it was uncertain. Great discoveries brought, at once, extraordinary prospects for progress and a profound sense of loss. By holding these contradictions together, the figure of the fool reveals the birth of modernity.

While Erasmus’ Praise of Folly (1511) and Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) turned the fool into an emblematic figure, it has never been the subject of a major, dedicated study. Much about this central figure in European culture remains unknown.

Before becoming a recurring presence in the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the figure of the fool emerged within the Christian world, at the very heart of cathedrals. Associated by the Church with heresy and the non-believer, the fool gradually became an outcast and a marginal figure, taking on an increasingly political dimension. He became the one who resists the advance of the powerful, the grain of sand that disrupts the machinery, the fracture through which irreducible humanity persists.