What does ‘macabre’ have to do with the Bible?

When The Spectator took the pulse of Paris in 1897, it reported: ‘Macabre pictures, Macabre poems, and Macabre music are all the fashion. We hear of cafés where the tables are shaped like coffins.’ Macabre was a new word in English, and this was its sole 1890s Spectator appearance.

Its connections are indicated by a phrase in a song by that uneven chansonnier Georges Brassens: croque-macchabée. It means ‘undertaker’, macchabée being ‘a corpse’.

The French slang macchabée and the English macabre both originate in the Danse Macabre. There was a 14th-century French book called La Danse Macabré, with an accent, and Macabré seems to be an alteration of the Old French Macabé, a version of the biblical name Maccabaeus.

In Besançon in 1453 a performance was held after Mass of the choræam Machabæorum, ‘dance of the Maccabees’.