“Les Poissons D’Avril,” by Grandville (a.k.a. Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard), 1868. Image of fish fishing for people, using wine, tobacco, jewelry, etc. for bait. The caption reads:
“Poissons d’avril, poissons de tous les mois, de tous les temps, de tous les âges: on aura beau être trompé aux appâts que vous nous tendez, on s’y laissera reprendre jusqu’à la fin—et trop heureux!”
(April fish, fish for all the months, for all time, for all the ages: one could easily be fooled by the bait you lure us with, but we will let it go on until the end—all too happily!)
1 April 2021
No one knows for sure why April, and in particular the first of April, is associated with the playing of pranks on unsuspecting dupes, but the tradition seems to have evolved from the long association between love and springtime—the initial association was with those who have been made foolish because of love or lust. The practice of playing pranks in April, and specifically on April First, appears to have arisen on the European continent and was imported into Britain in the seventeenth century.
In French, the phrase poisson d’avril means April fool (literally April fish). The earliest known use of the phrase is in a 1508 poem by French poet Eloy d’Amerval titled Le Livre de la Deablerie, lines 325–27:
Houlier, putier, macquereau infame
De maint homme et de mainte fame,
Poisson d’apvril, vien tost a moy!(Debauched man, base man, infamous pimp
Of many men and many women,
Fish of April, soon to be mine!)
Amerval is punning here. Macquereau is slang for pimp, but it literally means mackerel, hence the April fish. In the sixteenth century the phrase, perhaps because of this poem, came to mean a go-between or procurer. It wasn’t until the eighteenth century that poisson d’avril came to mean the butt of a springtime prank.
The German phrase jemanden in den April schicken, meaning to play a trick on someone on April first, dates to 1645.
The earliest use of April fool in English is attested to a bit earlier than the German phrase, though, and appears in Edmund Lechmere’s 1629 A Disputation of the Church, in which he describes how his argument grew from a short treatise to an entire volume:
TO one, of the two papers which you had from me long agoe, you haue shaped, as it seemeth, a kind of answere; yet not an answere neither, for you send him that would haue one, to looke it in other men that are in print. For my part, I was not willing at the sight of yours (which I espied by meere chaunce, and neuer sawe but once) to be made an Aprill foole, and therefore would not be so farre at your commaund. Yet to declare that I was not satisfied, Presumed the chiefe question, out of which the rest are easilie resolued; and disputed it more at large: putting downe the conclusions together with their grounds; and maintaining them against that which your self, or your abettors haue obiected. I endeuoured to do this briefly; but it so fared with me in this intellectuall businesse, as it doth with such as breede: the child in the natiuitie is much bigger then at the conception: the matter I speake of heere, hath an inward inclination to dilate it self, and whilst I was writing, the discourse prooued a booke.
A reference to April Fool’s pranks can be found in Charles Cotton’s 1684 The Scoffer Scoffed. In the following passage, a translation of one of Lucian’s dialogues, Diogenes is sending Pollux to find Menippus, the cynic and satirist, and Pollux questions whether or not he is the butt of an April Fool’s prank, specifically a purposeless errand or wild goose chase or snipe hunt:
Pray sir don't make of me a Tool,
And send me like an April Fool,
But tell me now before I go,
By what mark I the Spark shall know?
The association specifically with April First is in place by 1686 when it appears in antiquarian John Aubrey’s book Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme. The Latin quotations are from Book 2 of Ovid’s Fasti (Almanacs) a poem about the Roman calendar. The lines from Ovid, however, are in reference to 17 February, and are about people making fools of themselves by letting their fire from their burnt offerings to the gods destroy their homes:
Fooles holy day.
We observe it on ye first of April.
Lux quoq’ cur eadem stultorum festa vocetur.....
Farra tamen veteres jaciebant, farra metebant;
Primitias Cereri farra resecta dabant.And so it is kept in Germany everywhere.
Nam modo verrebant nigras pro farre favillas;
Nunc ipsas igni corripuere casas.
The Latin translates as:
(And likewise that is why the day is called the feast-day of fools.....
Yet the ancients sowed grain, reaped grain;
They surrendered to Ceres the first fruits, the harvested grain.)
And
(Sometimes they swept up blackened ashes instead of grain;
When their homes themselves caught fire.)
Not only does Aubrey associate the early modern practices of 1 April with Roman practices of a different date, but there is no evidence that the practices of April Fools Day date to ancient times.
William Congreve’s 1693 play The Old Batchelour conflates the earlier ideas of one being made foolish by love and a purposeless errand, a prank. This conversation between the characters Sharper, Bellmour, and Heartwell is about the character Vainlove, who foolishly searches for love but never finds it:
Sharp. And here comes one who Swears as heartily he hates all the Sex.
Enter Heartwell.
Bell. Who Heartwell! Ay, but he knows better things——How now George, where hast thou been snarling odious Truths, and entertaining company like a Physician, with discourse of their diseases and infirmities? What fine Lady hast thou been putting out of conceit with her self, and perswading that the Face she had been making all the morning wos none of her own? for I know thou art as unmannerly and as unwelcome to a Woman, as a Looking-glass after the Small-pox.
Heart. I confess I have not been sneering fulsome Lies and nauseous Flattery, fawning upon a little tawdry Whore, that will fawn upon me again, and entertain any Puppy that comes; like a Tumbler with the same tricks over and over. For such I guess may have been your late employment.
Bell. Would thou hadst come a little sooner, Vainlove would have wrought thy Conversion and been a Champion for the Cause.
Heart. What, has he been here? that's one of Loves April-fools, is always upon some errand that's to no purpose, ever embarking in Adventures, yet never comes to harbour.
Joseph Addison gives a fuller description of April Fools in his The Spectator of 24 April 1711, but he doesn’t use the phrase April Fool’s Day:
IN the first Place I must observe, that there is a Set of merry Drolls, whom the common People of all Countries admire, and seem to love so well, that they could eat them, according to the old Proverb: I mean those circumforaneous Wits whom every nation calls by the Name of that Dish of Meat which it loves best. In Holland they are termed Pickled Herrings; in France, Jean Pottages; in Italy, Maccaronies; and in Great Britain, Jack Puddings. These merry Wags, from whatsoever Food they receive their Titles, that they may make their Audiences laugh, always appear in a Fool’s Coat, and commit such Blunders and Mistakes in every Step they take, and every Word they utter, as those who listen to them would be ashamed of.
BUT this little Triumph of the Understanding, under the Disguise of Laughter, is no where more visible than in that Custom which prevails every where among us on the First Day of the present Month, when every Body takes it in his Head to make as many Fools as he can. In proportion as there are more Follies discovered, so there is more laughter raised on this Day than on any other in the whole Year. A Neighbour of mine, who is a Haberdasher, and a very shallow conceited Fellow, makes his Boasts that for these Ten Years successivly he has not made less than an Hundred April Fools. My Landlady, had a falling out with him about a Fortnight ago, for sending every one of her Children upon some Sleeveless Errand, as she terms it. Her eldest Son went to buy an Half-penny worth of Inkle at a Shoemaker’s; the eldest Daughter was dispatched half a Mile to see a Monster; and in short, the whole Family of innocent Children made April fools. Nay, my Landlady her self did not escape him. This empty Fellow has laughed upon these Conceits ever since.
THIS art of Wit is well enough, when confined to one Day in a Twelve-month; But there is an ingenious Tribe of Men sprung up of late Years, who are for making April Fools every Day in the Year. These Gentlemen are commonly distinguished by the Name of Biters; a Race of Men that are perpetually employed in laughing at those Mistakes which are of their own Production.
The phrase April Fool’s Day isn’t attested until April 1748 when it appears in the title of a song published in the British Magazine:
On the first of APRIL, called APRIL-FOOL DAY,
A SONG
To the Tune of A Cobler there was &c.
Approach ye nine Muses, Parnassus descend,
And help out the weak Verse of a destitute friend;
To a poor silly fool prove prevalent tools,
To shew that mankind are all APRIL-FOOLS.
Derry Down, down, &c.
It is mistakenly thought by some that the origin of the April Fool tradition dates to the introduction of the Gregorian Calendar in 1582 and the moving of the start of the year from March to the first of January. Those who continued to celebrate the new year on 1 April were marked as fools. But under the old Julian calendar the first of January was still the most common day to mark the start of the new year. 25 March was celebrated as the start of the new year in some countries, including Britain, but that would make it a March fool, not an April one. Another myth is that Chaucer makes reference to foolish tricks on April First in his Nun’s Priest’s Tale, but that reading is based on a transcription error.
Sources:
Addison, Joseph. The Spectator, no. 47, 24 April 1711, 179–80. The Spectator, vol. 1, second edition. London: S. Buckley, 1713. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).
Amerval Éloy d’. Le Livre de la Deablerie, Paris: Michel Le Noir, 1508, sig. B3r. Bibliothèque Nationale de France: Gallica.
Aubrey, John. Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme (1686). James Britten, ed. Publications of the Folk-lore Society 4. London: W. Satchell, Peyton, and Co., 1881, 10. HathiTrust Digital Archive. Ovid, Fasti, book 2, lines 513, 519–20, and 523–24.
Congreve, William. The Old Batchelour. London: Peter Buck, 1693, 4–5. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Cotton, Charles. The Scoffer Scoffed, the Second Part. London: Edward Goldin, 1684, 7. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Lechmere, Edmund. A Disposition of the Church. Douai: Marck Wyon, 1629, 6r. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
“On the First of April, called April-Fool Day.” The British Magazine, April 1748, 172. ProQuest Historical Periodicals.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2020, s. v. April fool, n. and int.
Image Credit: Grandville (Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard), 1868. In Le Diable a Paris. Paris Et Les Parisiens a la Plume Et Au Crayon, Tome 2. Paris: J. Hetzel, 1868, 128. Public domain image.
Thanks to Adleen Crapo for the Middle French translation of Le Livre de la Deablerie.