Welcome back to White Rose of Avalon, my Darlings.   For today’s first blog post of April, I will be exploring a very interesting and very watery connected tradition from France.   This tradition is Poisson d’Avril, or April Fish Day!  

I have been so fascinated by this tradition ever since I took my first French language class in Middle School.   The fact that there was this tradition of celebrating April 1st, what we in America celebrate as April Fool’s Day, by taping fish to people’s backs simply seemed so strange and whimsical!   I remember us making fish out of construction paper and celebrating this tradition in my French class.   Other students seemed to see it as weird or silly, but I thought it was truly interesting to see how other countries celebrated the day.   I also loved it for the watery connection, especially given my lifelong adoration of all things aquatic, a love that has never abated. 

Upon looking a bit further into the story of why this celebration takes place, the answer is quite uncertain, just like the reasoning for April Fool’s Day is a bit uncertain.   I think that is actually quite fitting, given that it is a day that celebrates pranks, trickery, and playful energy.   After all, Tricksters are never quite clear on why they are doing what they are doing, and that seems to be the case for the origins of both Poisson d’Avril and April Fool’s Day!   There are apparently theories that put the origins of the celebration of Poisson d’Avril and associating fish with April Fool’s Day in France all the way from Antiquity through the Renaissance.   One famous theory involves the calendar change from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, which changed the celebration of the New Year from the Spring to January 1st.   This theory states that this confusion led to uncertainty during the Springtime of the year, as the New Year was now celebrated months earlier.   However, even as famous as this theory is, it has been proven false, as it seems that the association between April 1st and trickery and mischief-making goes back far further than this!

Now, as for the association with fish, in particular, it seems that it goes back to either a belief that April was traditionally a bad time to fish or that it was forbidden to fish in April, as the newly spawned fish needed time to grow before they could be captured and eaten.   So, the joke was that you could not eat fish in April, and if you claimed to, you were obviously lying or trying to trick someone.   I love that this association could have sprung up from an understanding of the natural world!   As a sidenote, I found the information on these theories about the origins of Poisson d’Avril in an excellent article by Alysa Salzberg on copycat.com, which is linked below in the further reading section.   

Now, I want to finish this post by touching on some ways that Poisson d’Avril is celebrated.   In my research for this post, I found that the French media apparently loves to play April Fool’s Pranks each year, which is something we also see in the US and other countries.   Beyond that, there is the tradition of school children taping paper fish to each other’s backs as a joke, which is what I recollected doing in my French class at the beginning of this post!   There are also many old French postcards you can find celebrating Poisson d’Avril, which look a bit like vintage Valentine’s cards, but all feature fish.   The image at the top of this post is one such example.   You can see several more examples in the articles linked below from thefashionarchaeologist.com and curiousprovence.com.   Finally, many people exchange chocolate fish to celebrate the day!   Which again makes me think of the French celebrations to be a bit of a mix between Valentine’s Day and April Fool’s Day, which, honestly, is a very joyful thought.

I hope that you have enjoyed this short exploration of Poisson d’Avril, a French tradition I have long been fascinated by for years now, and one that I could not get out of my head this year.   What are your favorite April Fool’s traditions?   Let me know your thoughts in the comments below!

Note on Image: The image at the top of the post is an example of a Poisson d’Avril Card.   I found the art on https://curiousprovence.com/poisson-davril/.

LINK TO AVALONIAN ROSE FAERY MYSTERIES PATREON: patreon.com/AvalonianRoseFaeryMysteries 

Further Reading

• https://copycatcafe.com/blog/poisson-avril
• https://www.reachtheworld.org/alisas-journey-france/traditions/poisson-davril
• https://thefashionarchaeologist.com/research–essays/poissons-davril-musings-on-a-charming-french-tradition-of-april-1st
• https://curiousprovence.com/poisson-davril/