Annual Carnival Ritual Confirms That the French Relationship with Fish Is Deeper Than Cuisine
DUNKIRK — The northern French port of Dunkirk concluded its annual carnival season with local officials flinging shoals of herring from the balcony of the town hall to tens of thousands of revellers dancing in the street below, a tradition that has been occurring annually long enough that it is no longer remarkable to the participants and is still completely remarkable to everyone else. The event coincided with the rare alignment of Chinese Lunar New Year, Ramadan, Christian Lent, and the general mid-winter carnival season, producing what observers described as “a fandango of fasting and feasting across Europe,” in which Dunkirk’s herring was the French contribution.
The World Seagull Cry Championship
Accompanying the herring throw was the World Seagull Cry Championship, in which competitors caw into a banana-shaped microphone to mimic local herring gulls, a competition that requires no further explanation to be understood as an event worth attending. The championship has been running alongside the carnival for decades and has produced its own specialist community of competitors who travel from coastal regions across northern France and Belgium to participate, because expertise in seagull mimicry is, apparently, geographic rather than universal, and the Dunkirk seagull has a particular call that requires specific regional knowledge to reproduce convincingly.
The Tradition’s Value
Civic rituals that involve throwing food at citizens represent a category of public event that urban planners cannot design and which exist because communities chose to keep doing them despite having the option not to. Dunkirk’s herring throwing is in this category. Its continuation is a small but genuine expression of the French capacity to maintain apparently absurd traditions with complete seriousness, which is distinct from irony and more interesting than it. France is a country that takes its cheese regulations seriously, its wine appellations seriously, and its herring-throwing seriously, and this consistency of seriousness across categories is either a national characteristic or a national religion, and possibly both.
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The Dunkirk carnival’s herring tradition draws participants from across northern France and Belgium who make the journey specifically for it, creating a temporary community around a shared practice that does not exist at any other time of year. This temporary community formation is one of carnival’s oldest functions: the festival as social container for behaviours that ordinary time does not permit. When the herring throwing ends, the participants return to their ordinary lives, and the streets are cleaned, and Dunkirk resumes being a northern French port rather than the specific place where officials throw fish from balconies and grown adults cry like seagulls into banana microphones. The resumption is part of the tradition: the threshold between carnival and ordinary time is what makes both meaningful.
