The Censorship of Tango by the French Church in the Eve of the Great War (with a Post-scriptum by Erik Satie).

Abstract

The condemnation of tango in January 1914 by the archbishop of Paris, cardinal Léon- Adolphe Amette, and the apocryphal scene of pope Pius X watching the “devil’s dance” from his Vatican armchair before proposing to replace it by the furlana, the “pope’s dance”, are legendary episodes of the history of the genre. This article explores them from a historical perspective based on unpublished archives of the Paris diocese, and on a collection of Semaines Religieuses, the official reviews of all the dioceses of France. These sources show that the international campaign against the dance from the end of the world was launched by the French episcopate as part of its political battle against the Republican government that in 1905 had enacted the Law of Separation of the State and the Church. By so doing, as in other cases of moralist censorship, the bishops turned the tango into a powerful and vastly shared erotic fantasy. And also, in a source of inspiration for composers like Erik Satie, who in the sketches for his 1914 Tango perpétuel describes the devil dancing the tango while “sitting in an armchair”.