Quel est le sens spirituel du Carnaval et du Mardi Gras ?

"Quel est le sens spirituel du Carnaval et du Mardi Gras ?" has been shared to the blog from the French reading practice section of the learning library where you can find a large selection of interactive texts to help you with your reading skills.


Carnaval and Mardi Gras are huge, weeks-long celebrations in Nice, Venice, New Orleans, Rio de Janeiro, and many other cities around the world. Find out about their religious origins in this video. Below, you’ll find the transcript in our bilingual reader: click any French phrase for the English translation and related grammar lessons.

Click any word in the text to see its translation and related grammar lessons.

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Author info

Aurélie Drouard

Aurélie is our resident French Expert. She has created most of the wonderful content you see on the site and is usually the person answering your tricky help questions. She comes from a small village near Chartres in Central France, country of cereal fields and not much else. She left (in a hurry) to study English at the world-famous Sorbonne in Paris, before leaving France in 2007 to experience the “London lifestyle” - and never looked back! She's worked as a professional French teacher, translator and linguist in the UK since.  She loves to share her love of languages and is a self-professed cinema and literature geek!

Laura K Lawless

Laura is a French expert and Kwiziq's Head of Quality Control. Online educator since '99, Laura is passionate about language, travel, and cooking. She's American by birth and a permanent ex-pat by choice - freelancing made it possible for her to travel extensively and live in several countries before settling permanently in Guadeloupe. Laura is the author of Lawless French, Lawless Spanish, and other websites and books on French, Spanish, Italian, English, and vegetarianism. She spends most of her spare time reading, playing with food, and enjoying water sports.

Comments: 2

Are you sure that this article is level B1? Sure it has few subjunctives (level B2) but it uses more complex phrases and less common words when simpler would do. This reminds me of a native French teacher tutoring me at an Alliance Francaise Institute who told me to beware of "snob French". For example, she told me to throw away the book "Ensuite - Cours intermediare de francais" by Bette G. Hirsch and Chantal P. Thompson as ordinary people do not speak or write as per articles in that book. Likewise an Englishman with a PhD in French told me that French writers in general love to use complex and sophisticated text - it shows their education and intellect! To me the composition of the above article seems very different from your vast trove of French sentences used to illustrate grammar, and also to a trove of level B1 sentences elsewhere on the Internet. (www.learnwitholiver.com but this site does not cover grammar).

Bonjour Mike !

I had a look, and I completely agree with you : this text is definitely B2 :)

Thanks to you, we've now updated its level.

Merci et bonne journée !