Petition for villagers prevented from dancing

The liberal and anticlerical Paul-Louis Courier (1772-1825) was a polemicist of great talent. A fierce opponent of the Restoration, he became a master in the writing pamphlets expressing his interest in the issues social. Pamphlets which will frequently earn him trials, fines and even a prison sentence. But nothing seems to be able to stop him. Thus, against the abbot Bruneau, for whom dancing is a practice disrespectful to religion and who seized the authorities to have it banned on Sundays, Courier does not failed to write in 1822 this remarkable political and social pamphlet, by in which he once again demonstrates his great freedom of spirit: a freedom as the greatest of goods, whether it be the freedom to dance or to to think, as if dance and thought were ultimately to be heard as one one and the same thing: an art of living together and being in the world.