Unlike earlier, refined dances performed by elites, like the quadrille and the minuet, the waltz involved a scandalous amount of physical contact between partners. The truth is probably that the polka evolved from the waltz, which had itself been a dance craze in the 1780s.
“No father of a family…can rejoice in seeing his daughter’s waist spanned by the arm of some deboshed dragoon.”Īccording to March, this story is most likely the brainchild of intellectuals influenced by the Romantic movement, which idealized peasant culture without real knowledge of it.
