Granville's carnival grew, like Dunkerque's, out of the departure of the Newfoundland cod fleet, and it keeps the shape of a send-off: five days of parades with around forty satirical floats built by neighbourhood committees, a confetti battle, and a closing night of intrigues, when masked townspeople in disguise accost friends and relatives and tease them about the year's private scandals in falsetto voices.
UNESCO inscribed it on the Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2016, citing exactly that combination of float-building committees and the licensed social teasing of the final night, which is the part no visitor can really join.
No attendance figure is published. A town of 13,000 receives a crowd that plainly exceeds its population several times over on the Sunday parade, but nobody counts it.
The five days end on Shrove Tuesday, so the whole event moves with Easter. Accommodation is thin — Granville is a small port — and the practical base is Avranches or the Mont-Saint-Michel bay, half an hour away.
PlanningEaster-linked: the five days sit immediately before Ash Wednesday and move with it.