Lace songs and culture wars: a nineteenth-century Flemish village soap opera

Journal article

Lacemakers sang while working at their pillows; this stereotype is amply confirmed in collections of folksongs made from lacemakers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, not just in England but also in France, Germany and, above all, Belgium. While the habit continued into adult life, lacemakers first contracted the practice in the institutions where lace skills were taught, such as lace schools. In Catholic Europe, lace schools were usually under some kind of ecclesiastical authority, which put them in the front line of the nineteenth-century culture wars. Church and state, liberals and conservatives, battled over the purposes and means of education, and particularly girls’ education. Consequently, the repertoire of songs used in lace schools became a fraught political issue. This article considers one attempt to shape young minds through song. Constant Duvillers was the priest of Middelburg in East Flanders, in the newly established kingdom of Belgium, during the crisis years of the ‘Hungry Forties’. Like hundreds of other members of the Catholic clergy, his response to growing poverty was to set up a lace school. He also wrote songs for use by the girls, which were taken up by other Flemish lace schools. All of Duvillers’ songs were set in and around the Middelburg lace school, and concern recognisable persons and actual events. They read like a soap opera, as an increasingly exasperated Duvillers cajoled, harangued or outright insulted his pupils and their parents. This village drama provides a microcosm of the nineteenth century’s culture wars: it illustrates both the successes and the failures of the clergy as they attempted to impose their vision of education, proper gender roles and the social order on their parishioners. One measure of Duvillers’ lasting influence is that several of his songs survived in lacemakers’ repertoires until the mid-twentieth century.

Authors: Hopkin, D

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: English Folk Dance and Song Society
• Journal: Folk Music Journal
• Volume: 12
• Issue: 4
• Publication date: 2024-01-01
• Acceptance date: 2023-02-14
• ISSN: 0531-9684
• Language: English
• Keywords: FFR