Carnival and "Mardi-Gras". [French Folks Traditions] part 2 : Masks and disguises.
If they are rudimentary, they generally symbolize the abolition of social and sexual barriers, but also animal and human. Men dressed as women (and vice versa), paper masks, widespread accoutrements, blackening of the face or even part of the body with shoe polish or charcoal (a well-known Celtic tradition), animal adornments (such as animal skins, horn crowns), are common.
In the Vallespir valley (Pyrenees) for example, the bear is honored in a dramatization that depicts its hunt while it tries to capture a woman.
[schembartläufer-nuremberg-facsimile-published-in-1897]
The Cavalcades : Rabelais (in his Quart Livre) speaks of a mannequin named "Mâche-croutte" ~ "Chew-the-Crust" ~ who was paraded in Lyon. This (popular) dragon was a "monstrous, ridiculous, hideous and terrible effigy in the eyes of small children : it had eyes larger than its belly, a head larger than the rest of its body, with large and horrific, very serrated jaws [...] which are regularly snapped in a terrifying way."
A few centuries later (18th century) Mâche-Croute, who no longer appears in the Carnival, becomes a bogeyman used to scare children.
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["Carnival, history and traditions", Van Gennep and M. C Delmas, arranged and translated by me. If you want precises ref, DM-me.]
