Badger-Men Assault: Can Women Secure a Role in Southern France’s Violent, Wine‑Soaked Carnivals?
In the early afternoon of Ash Wednesday, ominous figures dressed in white roam the lanes of the medieval southern‑French village of Cournonterral. They wear long masks made of black badger hair, top hats tipped with feathers and sprigs of boxwood, and armor fashioned from sacks filled with straw. Though