Bunnies, bells and fish! Behind France's Easter and April Fools' Day traditions
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00:00 And today is both April Fool's Day and Easter Monday.
00:03 So Solange Magin is with us now on set to walk us through how these two traditions are celebrated here in France.
00:09 And actually Solange, these two dates coinciding is actually quite rare.
00:12 Yeah, it's only the seventh time since 1900 that these two traditions fall on the same Monday,
00:18 as the date of Easter is often chosen, is chosen depending on the full moon.
00:22 And this national holiday, or le Lundi de Pâques as it's called in French,
00:26 won't be on April Fool's Day again until 2086.
00:30 So I'm going to take advantage of the good timing and walk us through how fish, bunnies, and bells
00:36 have everything to do with these holidays in France.
00:39 Here kids wake up on Easter wondering if les cloches sont passées, or if the bells have come,
00:45 bringing chocolates for them. Now why bells?
00:47 Well, traditionally, France's church bells, they would stop ringing between Good Friday and Easter
00:52 to get, for the bells to be blessed in Rome by the Pope. So upon their return of sorts,
00:58 children would say that the bells had come bearing gifts for them for the Holy Day.
01:03 Actually, the French had eight days off for the holiday until Napoleon in 1802 changed that to just one day off.
01:12 Oh, Napoleon.
01:13 I know, Napoleon.
01:14 Nowadays though, the Easter bunny increasingly has his place in supermarkets in France,
01:20 in the aisles of the 15,000 tons of chocolate that are sold for Easter.
01:25 You're likely to find more bunnies and eggs than bell-shaped chocolates now.
01:30 Okay, so that's for Easter. Let's move on now to April Fool's Day.
01:34 How is that celebrated in France? Is it celebrated in France?
01:36 Well, it's not called that. It's not called April Fool's Day.
01:40 But like the ancient Greeks and Romans who paid tribute to laughter gods in the spring,
01:45 in France there is a tradition of hoaxes, or les canulars as we say in French.
01:50 And thanks to the INA archives, we found some fun ones,
01:53 these made-up stories that once really pulled the legs of spectators.
01:57 There's oil beneath the Arc de Triomphe.
02:03 It seems unbelievable, but we're digging in the heart of Paris at Place de l'Etoile to find oil.
02:08 Until now, champagne's been this.
02:11 But soon it will be this.
02:14 This gesture, you'll no longer be able to do it freely.
02:19 The smoking ban is in all professional spaces with more than four people.
02:23 Now, as we just saw with the 1972 smoking ban story, some of them actually do come true.
02:31 Like, for example, another one, special lanes for bicycles and public transport,
02:37 things that were once out of this world on television that are pretty normal now.
02:42 I don't think we're anywhere near those seeing champagne in a pop-top.
02:45 No, we're not there yet.
02:46 Not quite yet.
02:47 All right, let's talk about fish.
02:48 So in France, like in other countries like Belgium or Italy or Switzerland,
02:51 fish actually play a very significant role on April 1st.
02:55 They do.
02:55 In France, April Fool's Day is actually called Poisson d'Avril,
02:58 which literally translates to April Fish.
03:02 And as a joke, children and sometimes adults,
03:04 they pin a paper fish on the back of an unbeknownst victim,
03:07 who then walks around all day with a fish on their back.
03:10 These kids always tell the truest truth of flipping situations on their head.
03:19 We stuck the fish on the teacher's backs.
03:23 Now, where did this tradition come from?
03:27 Well, there are a number of competing theories.
03:30 First, it's important to note that fish are historically a sign of fertility,
03:35 the sacred and spring.
03:37 There's the possibility that April 1st marked the start of the fishing season at some point.
03:42 Then there's the calendar theory.
03:44 In the Middle Ages, April 1st was actually the culmination of New Year's Eve celebrations,
03:49 as the end of March was the end of the year in the Julian calendar.
03:52 It was a time when people would give gifts to one another.
03:55 But then in 1564, King Charles IX, he changed it to the Gregorian calendar,
04:00 the one that we have today.
04:01 And the theory goes that people kept giving gifts like they used to.
04:06 They would be made fools of so they would switch to the newer calendar.
04:09 And this morphed into the fake fish.
04:12 Who knows if this is true?
04:13 But all the same, the Poisson d'Avril is a moment to joke around.
04:17 And to use a Franglish, a French-English joke that we use in my family,
04:21 we "s'en fiche du reste," "s'en fiche du reste,"
04:25 or we forget about all the rest on April Fool's Day.
04:29 Jeannie, I have some treats for you.
04:31 Oh, fish!
04:31 I have some fish that we can play around with in the studio afterwards.
04:34 As long as you don't stick it on my back.
04:36 Well, I think our executive producer has already beat me to it.
04:40 No!
04:40 Turn around! There we go!
04:42 You got me!
04:44 Happy April Fool's Day.
04:46 Thank you so much, Solange.
04:47 Oh, they got me, they got me.
04:49 It's not just my kids that get me.
04:50 All right, Solange, thank you so much for that.
04:51 Solange Marjean with that look at Easter Monday or April Fool's Day here in France.