A Brief History of Guy Fawkes Night Controversies

If the point of Guy Fawkes Night was once, “Thank god this Catholic didn’t get one over on us!” these days – an era in which lots of people profoundly dislike politicians – it’s something closer to, “This Guy Fawkes fellow had the right idea trying to blow up Parliament!”

Partly thanks to the enduring legacy of the 2006 film V for Vendetta (in which a vigilante rebels against a right-wing dystopia while wearing a Fawkes mask), and partly because of the adoption of the same mask by hacker group Anonymous, Guy Fawkes is now viewed as a figure of righteous anti-authoritarianism – far more folk hero than folk demon.

People have been lighting bonfires to mark Guy Fawkes Night since 1605, and within a few decades it became customary to burn effigies of whichever public figures were most despised at the time (this was, more often than not, the Pope).

Throughout the 19th century it was an often raucous and violent affair, though the anti-Catholic sentiment started to die down by the 1850s. According to David Whelan, writing in VICE: “Bonfire Night was the night of choice to celebrate anarchy. Throughout the country during the Napoleonic Wars, the 5th of November was home to many food riots.”

Throughout the history of Guy Fawkes Night, all manner of public figures have been symbolically burned at the stake, including the Suffragettes, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Adolf Hitler, Margaret Thatcher and John Major. Today, the real epicentre of Guy Fawkes Night is Lewes, a town near Brighton, where burning effigies is still an important tradition. The town’s population of 17,000 is served by seven different rival bonfire societies, some of which stretch back 170 years.

The celebrations today can still have a sectarian air. For example, every year, Lewes still burns an effigy of Pope Paul V, who was in charge of the Catholic church at the time of Guy Fawkes’ failed attack. In 1981, Northern Irish loyalist politician Ian Paisley turned up in Lewes and attempted to distribute anti-Catholic literature, in an effort to stir up local tensions. This scheme backfired quite spectacularly when, the following year, Paisley himself became the subject of an effigy.

Lewes’ mayor, Graham Mayhew, told the New York Times in 2016, “It’s not right-wing. It’s not left-wing. It is a great celebration of Lewes-ness.”

If you tot up the political figures targeted, you can see there’s an element of truth to this. In 2014, the year of the IndyRef, effigies of centre-left Scottish politicians Nicola Sturgeon and Alec Salmond were burned – which you could arguably take as a mark of reactionary Little Englishness, but less as evidence of any right-left allegiance.

That said, other years have seen effigies of right-wing politicians like Donald Trump, David Cameron, George W Bush, Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson.

Outside of UK politics, there have also been effigies burned of Vladimir Putin (wearing a Borat-style mankini), Bashar al-Assad, Colonel Gaddafi and Kim Jong-Un.

The 2012 event featured a model of Angela Merkel making a Hitler salute –which seems a bit much – after she was chosen as a target in response to the EU enforcing crushing austerity measures on Greece. Maybe Lewes’ bonfire night could be said to be the “equal opportunities offender” of archaic traditions.

The absolute nadir of this centuries-long tradition happened elsewhere. In 2018, a group of people in south London – all of them white, one of them a property millionaire – filmed themselves burning an effigy of Grenfell Tower.

The cardboard tower had Black and brown faces painted at the windows and, in the video, the group can be heard sarcastically shouting “help me” and “stay in your flat”. After the footage went public, and was condemned by campaign group Justice4Grenfell as “an unnecessary sickening act of hate”, arrests were made on Public Order charges.

Paul Bussetti, one of the two men charged, eventually walked free. Claiming that the video actually featured effigies of himself and his friends (despite the fact the words “Grenfell Tower” are clearly legible), he told the court: “It was funny. Everyone knew it was funny.” He was found not guilty after it emerged that a second video had been shared on WhatsApp and the prosecution was unable to prove that Bussetti had taken the film.

Justice4Grenfell described the acquittal as “certainly a shocking and appalling situation”. This was a particularly vile incident, and doesn’t really represent the traditions of Guy Fawkes Night it general, but it does show that effigy-burning can easily cross over from questionable taste to outright cruelty.

Outside of Lewes, it’s unclear whether Guy Fawkes Night will continue to be a major holiday. It’s been in decline for some time, with many people arguing it was supplanted by Halloween (which, while having its roots in Scotland and Ireland, is in some ways a cultural import from the US).

Historian David Cannadine argued: “The 5th of November has been overtaken by a popular festival that barely existed when I was growing up, and that is Halloween… a vivid reminder of just how powerfully American culture and American consumerism can be transported across the Atlantic.”

Mind you, as long as people hate politicians, there’ll probably always be the appetite to fashion them into grotesque effigies and burn them in public.