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French April Fool's Day Hoaxes and Events

The French Museum of Air and Space announced on its website that Concorde was scheduled to return to the air for a special two-hour flight in June. The supersonic plane had not flown since 2003, but the museum explained that one of two Concordes given to it had been kept flight-ready. The announcement was picked up by the French news agency AFP, which later had to retract it when the museum confirmed the news was a hoax. The museum explained that it perpetrated the hoax in order to publicize its hope that one day Concorde really would fly again.

The European Committee issued a communique in which it declared that it was banning single-shelled eggs, in order to prevent cracked eggs being found in food stores. The ban was a play on the French word "coque" which means both egg shell and ship's hull.

L'Humanite, the French Communist Party newspaper, reported that the European Commission had decided to allow German drivers to drive as fast as they wanted through other EC countries, because Germans had no speed limit on their own motorways.

The Parisien, a French newspaper, reported that an agreement had been signed to take down the Eiffel Tower and move it to the new Euro Disney theme park being constructed east of Paris. The Tower was to be replaced by a 35,000-seat stadium that would be used for the 1992 Olympic Games.

A French state-run radio station announced that European motorists were to begin driving on the left side of the road in order to help British drivers when they joined the Common Market. Almost immediately the radio station began to receive hundreds of phone calls from enraged French motorists. As a result, the station quickly admitted that the story was a hoax. The prank received wide coverage in the media.

International Soundphoto distributed a photo of a flying bus swooping over the Place de la Concorde in Paris, France. The photo ran in many papers, accompanied by the caption: "Well, Well, look how all those Parisians are being missed by the bus at Place de la Concorde. Anything can happen in the French capital on April Fool's day, they say, but it is suspected that some zany darkroom jokester had something to do with this." [Newsweek, Apr 10, 1950.]

On Wednesday March 29, 1950, between the second and third acts of No Orchids for Miss Blandish at Paris's Grand Guignol theater, actress Nicole Riche suddenly disappeared. Stage hands said she had been handed a note, went pale as she read it, walked outside, and then vanished. Unable to continue the play, the theater gave everyone in the audience their money back. The police, who suspected kidnapping, launched a massive manhunt. Her disappearance made headlines around the world. Some papers noted it was an odd coincidence that she had apparently been kidnapped while starring in a play about a woman who is kidnapped. Two days later, early on the morning of April 1st Riche, walked into a police station dressed in the same flimsy white negligee and furcoat she had been wearing during the play, plus a sweater she said some friendly gypsies had given her. She claimed she had been imprisoned for the past two days by "Puritans" who lectured her endlessly about her immoral lifestyle before finally abandoning her in a forest. The police were skeptical about her story since there's wasn't a speck of dirt or dust on her. Eventually Riche broke down and admitted she hadn't been abducted by Puritans. Her disappearance had been an April Fool's Day publicity stunt engineered by the Grand Guignol's manager, Alexandre Dundas. (For more details, see The Kidnapping of Nicole Riche.) [Los Angeles Times, Apr 2, 1950.]

Merle Blanc, a humorous Parisian newspaper, laid a trap for André Perate, curator of the Versailles Palace. They sent him a letter, using the aristocratic signature "Madame de Mesnil-Heurteloup," offering to donate a "double decimeter measure in rosewood" once used by Mme. de Pompadour. They suggested it could be placed in the recently reopened Pompadour apartments in Versailles.

Perate hand-wrote a reply, thanking "Madame de Mesnil-Heurteloup" for her gift, but questioning whether the relic was worthy of a place in the palace. He asked if the measure was mounted in leather and bore the Pompadour arms. He concluded by suggesting that she bring the measure to Versailles to allow him to judge its value.

Merle Blanc gleefully reproduced a facsimile of his reply, noting that the learned curator had failed to realize that Mme. Pompadour died thirty years before the metric system was invented. They suggested that they might seek space in French museums "for Napoleon's automobile, a bracelet worn by the Venus de Milo, and an eyeglass belonging to Victory of Samothrace." [The New York Times, Apr 12, 1925.]

The French government received a message from Athens, Greece, sent via official channels, announcing that three prominent Parisian critics of Catholicism had been awarded the Order of the Redeemer, the highest decoration awarded by the Greek government. The decoration is considered a high honor among Catholics, since it symbolizes the rebirth of the Greek nation through divine assistance. The three men who supposedly had been awarded the medal were M. Ferdinand Buisson and M. Aulard of the Sorbonne, and M. Victor Basch of the University of Paris. In reality, the decorations had been conferred on less controversial figures. It was not known who had found a way to use the Greek government to play such a joke. Ferdinand Buisson was later awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. [The Washington Post, Apr 19, 1925.]

The Associated Press reported that a prankster started a rumor alleging that Colonel House had announced that the peace treaty ending World War I had been signed: "The report rapidly spread over all Paris and the telephone wires to the American headquarters in the hotel de Crillon became hot with inquiries as to the truth of the rumor. It did not take long however, for inquiries to realize the character of the report when they were reminded that today was April 1st." The Treaty of Versailles, which marked the formal end of the war, was signed on June 28, 1919. [Daily Northwestern, Apr 1, 1919.]

The Geneva Tribune reported that on April 1 a French aviator flying over a German camp dropped what appeared to be a huge bomb. The German soldiers immediately scattered in all directions, but no explosion followed. After some time, the soldiers crept back and gingerly approached the bomb. They discovered that it was actually a large football with a note tied to it that read, "April Fool!" [The Atlanta Constitution, Aug 2, 1915.]

According to French legend, the Duke of Lorraine and his wife were imprisoned at Nantes. They escaped on April 1, 1632 by disguising themselves as peasants and walking through the front gate. Someone noticed them escaping and told the guards. But the guards believed the warning to be a "poisson d'Avril" (or April Fool's Day joke) and laughed at it, thus allowing the Duke and his wife to escape.

This story is occasionally offered as an early example of the custom of April Foolery. However, there is no evidence the story is true.

In 1563 King Charles IX reformed the French calendar by moving the start of the year from Easter Day to January 1. His edict was passed into law by the French Parliament on Dec. 22, 1564. This aligned legal convention with what had long been the popular custom of celebrating the start of the year on January 1.

Later, in 1582, Pope Gregory issued a papal bull decreeing sweeping calendar reform, which included moving the start of the year to January 1, as well as creating a leap-year system and eliminating ten days from the month of October 1582 in order to correct the drift of the calendar. The Pope had no formal power to make governments accept this reform, but he urged Christian nations to do so. France immediately accepted the reform, since it had already instituted part of the reform (changing the start of the year) in 1564.

This sixteenth-century calendar reform is frequently cited as the origin of the custom of April Foolery. Supposedly the people who failed to realize the start of the year had been changed had pranks played on them on April 1st.

There are a number of problems with this theory. First, the start of the year was changed from Easter day, not April 1st. Second, January 1st had, since Roman times, been the traditional start of the year anyway. Easter Day had been used as the start of the year primarily for legal and administrative purposes (in an attempt by medieval rulers to christianize the calendar).

The calendar-change hypothesis is more plausible if applied to Britain, where March 25 (the date of the christian Feast of Annunciation, aka Lady Day) was New Year's Day, followed by a week of festivities culminating on April 1. However, Britain only changed the start of its calendar year to January 1 in 1752, by which time April Fool's Day was already a well-established tradition.

In 1508 Eloy d'Amerval, a French choirmaster and composer, published a poem titled Le livre de la deablerie. It consisted of "a dialogue between Satan and Lucifer, in which their nefarious plotting of future evil deeds is interrupted periodically by the author, who among other accounts of earthly and divine virtue, records useful information on contemporary musical practice."

The poem would principally be of interest to historians of music, except that it includes the line, "maquereau infâme de maint homme et de mainte femme, poisson d'avril."

The phrase "poisson d'avril" (April Fish) is the French term for an April Fool, but it is unclear whether d'Amerval's use of the term referred to April 1st specifically. He might have intended the phrase simply to mean a foolish person.