Père Fouettard

Also Known As: French, “Father Whipper” or “Old Man Whipper”; called Hanscrouf, “Jean le Bossu”, around Liège; his Alsatian counterpart goes by Hans Trapp and his Swiss German one by Schmutzli
Region/Culture: Western Europe
Mythos: French Mythology, Belgium Mythology, Swiss Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: He carries the punishment half of Saint Nicholas’s visit, dealing out rods, coal and threats to children the saint has passed over.
Role in Mythos: In the commonest telling he is the butcher who murdered three children and was sentenced by Saint Nicholas to follow him forever as his shadow and his enforcer.
Relation to Humans: He exists entirely for children, and only for one night of the year, when he walks a pace behind the saint through the streets of Lorraine, Wallonia and French-speaking Switzerland. Adults invoke him the rest of the year as a threat, which is what the word meant before it belonged to anyone in particular.

The chain comes first. It drags and jumps on the cobbles somewhere behind the singing, and every child on the street knows the sound before they can see what is making it, and the pitch of the singing changes. Then the bishop turns the corner in his mitre with his sweets and his gilded crozier, and behind him, a pace back and to one side, comes a man in black with a face like a chimney and a bundle of birch switches under his arm.

Père Fouettard means Father Whipper, and the word arrived in French before the figure did. The Académie française traces the adjective to the eighteenth century, when it appears as *frère foëtard*, a straightforward derivative of *fouetter*, to whip. For a long time that was all it was: a threat you kept in the cupboard, a bogey with no biography, useful to any parent with a child who would not sit still. The stories that gave him a past came later, and they came from at least three different directions, none of which entirely agrees with the others.

The oldest and by far the bloodiest is the butcher. Three children, in most tellings small boys gleaning in the fields, are caught out by the dark and knock at a butcher’s door for shelter. He takes them in. He kills them, cuts them into pieces and puts them down in his salting tub with the pork. Seven years pass. Saint Nicholas comes by, asks for lodging, and then asks for salted meat, specifically for the meat in that tub, and the butcher and his wife go down on their knees. The saint makes the sign of the cross over the brine and three children climb out alive, having slept, as one version has them say, very well. In Wallonia and northern France the butcher does not get away with a pardon. He is condemned to walk behind Nicholas for the rest of time, carrying the whip, and that man is Père Fouettard.

The tale is medieval and it is older than the whipping father who was eventually fitted into it. It turns up in the twelfth century in Wace’s verse life of the saint, and it is one of the legends Charles W. Jones catalogued as the Miracle of the Three Clerics, a story oddly thin in the written record of Nicholas’s life and enormously fat in the visual one, painted and glazed into churches across France for centuries. The city of Nancy, which throws the largest Saint Nicholas festival in the country and has reason to know, offers a deflating explanation for where it came from. Among the miracles credited to Nicholas is one in which he saves three army officers wrongly condemned by the emperor Constantine, appearing to him in a dream to demand their release. That story travelled west with the saint’s cult in the tenth century and ran straight into Byzantine picture conventions, in which the holy figure is drawn far larger than the mortals beside him. Western eyes looked at three small men standing in a tower and saw three children standing in a barrel. The rest was storytelling.

Metz tells it differently, and Metz tells it about a real siege. In 1552 Charles V sat down in front of the city, which was held for the French by François de Guise, and in the first days of December he gave up and went away with his army wrecked by cold and disease. One version has a citizen of Metz dressing head to foot in black and falling in behind Saint Nicholas that year to jeer at the emperor, the joke being that the man who had frightened all of Europe was now good for frightening nobody but children. Another has the tanners’ guild building the figure with the whip during the siege itself, to keep the city’s spirits up. Whether either happened is not documented; what is certain is that Lorraine has been telling it for a very long time and that the face the Metz figure wears is the emperor’s, long and severe, with a thin brow and a heavy black beard.

Further east the same job is done by a different man with a name and a death certificate. Around Bitche and through Alsace he is Hans Trapp, and behind Hans Trapp stands Hans von Trotha, a knight who held the castle of Berwartstein between 1485 and 1503 and conducted a feud against the abbot of Wissembourg with such enthusiasm that he devastated the crops and terrorised the villages of the abbey. Writing in 1897, Jules Hoches described the Alsatian version as a kind of Lucifer’s deputy, a biblical bogeyman speaking nothing but dialect, holding a switch of three coloured branches over children who had failed to keep the promises they made to the Christkindel. At Wissembourg he still rides in on the fourth Sunday of Advent, hairy and mounted, ahead of a crash of drums.

The song is why anyone outside Lorraine knows any of this. In 1842 Gérard de Nerval printed a complainte he had collected in the Valois, opening “Il était trois petits enfants qui s’en allaient glaner aux champs”, and it went everywhere. Nerval gave no tune. Children have supplied several since, and they sing the butcher’s line about the pig salted seven years ago with the cheerful ghoulishness that children reserve for exactly this sort of material.

His powers are borrowed and they are all negative. He cannot give anything. He carries no sweets, works no miracles and owns nothing but the rods, the chain, the sack and a reputation, and even the reputation is on loan from a saint who could have destroyed him and chose to employ him instead. He can only withhold, and the worst he can actually do is put a lump of coal where a sugar mouse should have been. His limits are equally strict. He appears one night a year and is powerless the other three hundred and sixty four. He cannot enter a house uninvited, since he arrives in the saint’s company and leaves in it. He is beaten by a recited poem or a decent school report. And in the twentieth century he began losing even the face he had: in Belgium his costume slid into the page’s outfit worn by the Flemish Zwarte Piet, a different figure with a different history, and in Switzerland he was appearing with a blackened face from the 1960s onward, understood locally not as a portrait of anybody but as a man come out of the dark. Both traditions are now argued over in public, which is a fate the medieval butcher could not have anticipated and probably deserves.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Père Fouettard?

Père Fouettard is the companion of Saint Nicholas in French, Walloon and French-speaking Swiss tradition, whose name means “Father Whipper”. He accompanies the saint on his rounds on the evening of 5 December and the feast day of 6 December, punishing badly behaved children while Saint Nicholas rewards the good ones. His usual props are a whip or bundle of rods, a chain, and sometimes a sack of coal.

Why does Père Fouettard follow Saint Nicholas?

In the best-known legend he is a butcher who murdered three children and hid their bodies in a salting tub, and Saint Nicholas resurrected them and sentenced him to serve as his assistant forever. The punishment is the point: he spends eternity handing out the discipline he once escaped. This version is especially strong in Wallonia and northern France.

What does Père Fouettard do to naughty children?

He threatens them with a whip or a switch of birch rods and leaves coal instead of sweets. In practice the threat does the work rather than the whip, and a child who recites a poem or produces a good report escapes him. Some versions give him a sack or wicker basket in which children can supposedly be carried off.

Is Père Fouettard the same as Krampus or Hans Trapp?

They are separate figures who do the same job in different regions. Hans Trapp is the Alsatian version and is built on a real fifteenth-century knight, Hans von Trotha of Berwartstein, while Krampus belongs to the Alpine and Austro-Hungarian world and Schmutzli to German-speaking Switzerland. Père Fouettard is specifically the French-language companion of Saint Nicholas.

Did Père Fouettard really come from the siege of Metz?

Lorraine tradition says the figure was born at Metz in 1552, when Charles V abandoned his siege of the city and a citizen dressed all in black followed Saint Nicholas to mock him, or when the tanners’ guild built a whip-carrying effigy of the emperor to raise morale. The story is widely repeated in the region but it is not documented, and it competes with the older butcher legend rather than replacing it.