Mardi Gras, French for “Fat Tuesday” is the day before Ash Wednesday, and is also called “Shrove Tuesday”. The final day of Carnival, a celebration that is held just before the beginning of the Christian season of Lent. Perhaps the cities most famous for their Mardi Gras celebrations include New Orleans, Reo de Janeiro, and Venice. The carnival is an important celebration in most of Europe, and in many parts of Latin America and the Caribbean.
Mardi Gras arrived in North America with the Le Moyne brothers, Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville and Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, in the late 17th century, when King Louis XIV sent the pair to defend France’s claim on the territory of Louisiana, which included what are now the US states of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana.
The two explorers eventually found the mouth of the Mississippi River, sailed a while upstream and named the spot Point du Mardi Gras, 60 miles down river from present-day New Orleans. In 1699, the traditional Catholic celebration ensued leading to what many refer to as “North America’s first Mardi Gras”. Year 1704 began with the masked ball, Masque De La Mobile, and in 1711, Mobile began the first parades.
In 1723, the capital of Louisiana was moved, due to fear of tides and hurricanes, to an inland harbor town founded in 1718 called Nouvelle-Orleans or New Orleans. And the tradition, which was started 20 years earlier in Mobile, was expanded. Nearly 125 years after Mobile’s first parade of 1711, a Krewe from Mobile, the Cowbellion de Rakin Society (1830), began the first known parades in New Orleans (1835).
Mardi Gras Carnival celebrations became an annual event highlighted by lavish balls and masked spectacles. Some were small, private parties with select guest lists, while others were raucous, public affairs.
A Krewe (pronounced “crew”) is an organization that puts on a parade and or a ball for the Carnival season. The word is thought to have been coined in the early 19th century by an organization called themselves Ye Mystick Krewe of Comus, as an imitation or parody of Old English; with time it became the most common term for a New Orleans’ Carnival organization.