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IN SUMMARY...
1. A tarot born in a tense religious context |
Long overshadowed by the famous Tarot of Marseille, the Besançon tarot actually has its own unique history, shaped by religious tensions, Rhenish cultural exchanges, and a taste for popular gaming. This tarot, little known today, is in fact one of the most revealing witnesses to the evolution of divinatory cards between the late Renaissance and the 19th century.
1. A tarot born in a tense religious context
To understand the birth of the Besançon tarot, one must first consider the very status of tarot at that time. Far from any esoteric dimension, tarot was primarily a game. It was used in family, social, and festive contexts, without any divinatory intent or symbolic reading. The magical use of tarot would only emerge later, around the turn of the 19th century, notably under the influence of French occultists like Court de Gébelin or Éliphas Lévi.
In Alsace and the Upper Rhine territories at the beginning of the 18th century, tarot was widely circulated, appreciated for the richness of its trumps and the variety of games it allowed. But this spread faced a difficulty: two central figures of the classic tarot, the Pope (arcana V) and the Popess (arcana II), were poorly accepted in Protestant regions. The Pope was seen as a symbol of Roman Catholic authority, and the Popess as a heretical figure, associated with the legend of Pope Joan.
To maintain the use of tarot in a shared confessional space, the Strasbourg card makers chose a workaround. They replaced these two problematic arcana with figures from Greco-Roman mythology: Juno and Jupiter. This shift was clever. It preserved the structure of the game while neutralizing doctrinal tensions. The tarot thus became a ground for compromise, a graphic object that was at once playful, commercial, and diplomatic.
2. Rhenish birth of an ecumenical tarot
The Besançon tarot was therefore born in... Strasbourg, at the beginning of the 18th century, in a region marked by the fragile coexistence of confessions. Juno and Jupiter took the place of the two religious arcana, but the rest of the deck remained unchanged: Italian suits (batons, cups, swords, coins), Roman numerals, woodblock printing, and stencil coloring. The style was inherited from the so-called “type I” Tarot of Marseille, sharing its formal bases.
Some visual details reveal an aesthetic unique to the Rhenish region. The Cupid on the Lovers card directly aims at the characters, the Moon shows a frontal face, the Devil has a hairy, standing body, and the World figure adopts a contrapposto posture (a way of representing the human body standing with most weight on one leg while the other is relaxed). These features clearly distinguish the Besançon tarot while linking it to the large iconographic family of southern tarots.
The first printed sheets traveled along the Rhine, from Strasbourg to Colmar, then to Ulm and Swiss territories. Woodblock printing, thick papers, and bold colors attracted a varied audience. This tarot established itself throughout the Alsatian and southern German region, becoming the reference model throughout the 18th century.
3. Comtois golden age and Swiss influence
Around 1800, Jacob Jerger, a card maker from Kehl, settled in Besançon and printed the same deck as produced in Alsace. He changed neither the figures, the structure, nor the style. But from then on, peddlers from Paris popularized the term “Besançon tarot,” which eventually became the common name. The name stuck, and the deck took root in a new city.
Besançon Tarot. Source
The influence of the Besançon tarot then crossed borders. In Switzerland, Johann Georg Rauch, then his son-in-law Johannes Müller, printed in Diessenhofen a deck strictly identical, intended for the Alemannic area. The edition stopped in the mid-19th century, before reappearing in the 1960s thanks to the A.G. Müller company. The deck was then named “1JJ,” for “Juno, Jupiter,” honoring its founding figures. It became the official deck for the traditional Swiss games Troccas and Troggu, still played in some valleys of the Grisons.
4. Heritage and historians’ perspectives
In the rest of France, the 19th century saw the decline of the Besançon tarot, outcompeted by a more modern model: the New tarot (dedicated only to gaming, not divination), with French suits and clear figures, designed for cafés, contract games, and quick play. The Besançon tarot, considered too archaic, fell into reserves and collections.
But in the 20th century, researchers revived this forgotten heritage. The Besançon tarot was no longer just a regional curiosity: it became a subject of study, a witness to cultural exchanges between Catholic and Protestant worlds.
In 2013, collector André Humbert created a fully illustrated tarot with Besançon figures, a contemporary version that dialogues with Jerger’s legacy. Exhibitions, facsimile printings, and academic studies now continue this story. The Besançon tarot is not a poor cousin of the Tarot of Marseille. It is its Rhenish cousin and never really had a divinatory career, as it was indeed its southern French cousin that was ultimately chosen as the standard deck.
