The Rise of Revolutionary Sentiment in France and Its Impact on the Theater

Theater and Public Opinion.

The sensation that Beaumarchais caused with his Marriage of Figaro was hardly the first or the last time the Parisian theater was to be the center of controversy. Yet his work was ultimately tolerated and performed in the Comédie-Française, the very heart of the theatrical establishment in France, which had been licensed and lavishly supported by the crown for more than a century at the time of Figaro's performance. During the high tide of the Enlightenment the Comédie-Française had frequently fulfilled a dual role. The theater was a medium for shaping public opinion and at the same time it was a barometer of those sentiments that allowed the crown to measure the popular mood. During the 1770s and 1780s criticism of France's entrenched social order, of the privileges of its clerics and nobles, and of the ineptitude of its royal government steadily rose. Although the country was one of the most prosperous and productive in Europe, the system of royal government that Louis XIV had developed in the later seventeenth century had been notable for its corruption and inefficient centralization. Louis' successor, his great-grandson Louis XV, had done little to lessen the sclerosis that lay at the heart of French government, and his involvement in numerous international wars had left the royal administration perilously drained of funds. When his grandson Louis XVI succeeded him in 1774, he was at first forced to embark on an ambitious program of reform, having no other choice but to increase the financial efficiency of his government. By the early 1780s, however, the plans of his reforming chief minister Jacques Necker were increasingly blocked by special interests. Rather than opposing those bastions of privilege that were preventing improvement in government, Louis capitulated to the enemies of Necker, and in the years following his dismissal, royal policy drifted, ever subject to increasing criticism. At first these great political trials played little role in the theatrical life of Paris' three official theaters: the Comédie-Française, Comédie-Italienne, and the Opera. Each institution had been founded with the express purpose of nourishing the theatrical arts of drama, ballet, and opera in France—a powerful mission at a time when French kings desired to use these media as tools for promoting national glory. In all three theaters ties to the court meant that the material performed in them was expected to uphold the values of the crown and the Catholic Church. Since the early eighteenth century onward, though, Voltaire and other playwrights had begun to produce dramas at the Comédie-Française that challenged these values either subtly or overtly. When a play excited too much controversy or seemed to challenge accepted mores or state policies too vigorously, it was often suppressed. As the tide of criticism of France's government and entrenched social order rose, however, patrons demanded new dramas that captured the political pulse of the age. The wild success of Beaumarchais' Marriage of Figaro thus demonstrates the appetite that existed just below the surface of French society for an art that addressed the major social topics of the day.

The Parterre and Public Opinion.

At the same time, the theater began to be an important way to measure public opinion. As the audience for dramas expanded in Paris in the course of the eighteenth century, new classes of people began to fill the Comédie-Française's parterre, or ground floor. Admission to this section was far cheaper than in the balconies above where wealthy members of the Parisian aristocracy or bourgeoisie sat; while the cost of admission was still beyond the means of most of the laboring classes in the city, the parterre became the preserve of shopkeepers and skilled artisans—the middling and lower ranks of the bourgeoisie, that is the French middle classes. In the second half of the eighteenth century playwrights like Beaumarchais increasingly took up the challenge set by Enlightenment thinkers like Diderot, who had argued that the theater should favor contemporary themes and that its subjects should be portrayed realistically in ways that educated audiences about social issues. Beaumarchais's Marriage of Figaro was one such production, but there were others; in the 1770s and 1780s, audience response to these dramas was frequently the talk of Paris since the theatergoers of the parterre used the relative anonymity of the crowd to express vigorous reactions to the dramas they saw. The evidence suggests that in these years the parterre became increasingly opinionated, pronouncing its tastes on the acting styles of performers, booing or catcalling when something displeased them, and expressing support when the sentiments of the dramatist mirrored their own. Of course, this system was open to manipulation. Actors, stage managers, and dramatists often tried to pack the parterre with claques—that is, groups that were favorable to them—in order to ensure positive reviews from the crowd. Mounds of free tickets were often given away in attempts to manipulate audience's responses, so that the Comédie-Française became a venue in which two dramas were paradoxically being presented side by side: one on the stage, the other in the auditorium itself. At the same time, the sensation that a work like Beaumarchais' Marriage of Figaro produced in the mid-1780s points to the importance that the theater had attained in French society for presenting viewpoints on contemporary social issues and for testing the waters of public opinion. In that drama, the wealthy bourgeois Beaumarchais used his position of relative security at court to rail against aristocratic privilege, to mock the church and clergy, and to celebrate the homespun virtues of the working classes. Both the court and the Comédie-Française had debated about whether the play should be performed for years before finally giving in to widespread pressure to stage it. The favorable reactions the drama received from the parterre and the drama's unprecedented run were but another proof positive of the widespread desire for reform, while the joyous reaction the parterre's crowds expressed at Figaro' s performances ultimately protected the play from censure. The genie, in other words, had escaped from the bottle, and the French theater had emerged as a powerful vehicle both for shaping and expressing the public's sentiments.

Rise of New Theaters.

In these same years new theaters were also emerging on the scene in Paris, institutions that were even more potentially volatile than the relatively conservative, state-supported Comédie-Française. Since Louis XIV's day, laws had forbidden dramas from being staged in Paris in any other venue except the officially recognized and licensed state theaters. As in England, though, attempts to regulate and confine the stage had always left some loopholes. In Paris, short dramas, for example, had long been tolerated in connection with the great suburban fairs that were celebrated on the city's fringes during the summer months. Actors and playwrights had used these events to supplement their incomes by participating in the carnival shows. A definite shift in the course of Paris's theatrical history occurred in 1759 when Jean-Baptiste Nicolet, a promoter of fair acts and short dramas, obtained permission to rent a building in the city's Temple district and to use it as a theater for variety acts. At the time, the Boulevard Temple was a hotbed of Parisian public life, a haunt visited by Enlightenment thinkers, prostitutes, and a broad swath of the city's society. Nicolet was a showman, not a politician, but to please his crowds he soon set about testing the boundaries of royal regulations forbidding the performance of dramas outside the state's theaters. Into his succession of vaudeville acts he built short dialogues that gradually grew longer until the management of the Comédie-Française began to complain to the authorities. Nicolet was questioned, imprisoned for a time, and fined, but then allowed to go about his business. After his release he grew more careful, but he continued to test the regulations. His example emboldened others, and by the end of the 1760s the Boulevard Temple and its surrounding area was populated with a number of variety theaters. Royal and municipal authorities at this time seemed to have thought of these institutions as little more than a nuisance, since the production values of most of these "boulevard theaters," as they became known, were crude and the theaters tended to cater to rowdy audiences. The typical Parisian boulevard theater at this time was thus similar to the emerging English music hall. Both, in other words, rose as a result of the practices of censorship, but each identified its audiences in the poorer segments of society who, because of their income levels, were not able to attend the more expensive theaters in London and Paris. The Comédie-Française, with its older, more experienced, and well-trained troupe of actors, remained the venue par excellence for drama in the capital around 1770. The management of the three state theaters in Paris (that is, the Opera, the Comédie-Française, and the Comédie-Italienne) may have frequently complained to the authorities, but few educated Parisians thought that the boulevard theaters were going to replace or seriously threaten the dominance of these more venerable institutions.

The Triumph of the VariÉtÉs.

By the late 1770s, though, this situation had changed dramatically. At least two of the boulevard theaters, the Variétés and the Associés, had begun performing pirated versions of works that belonged to the Comédie-Française's repertory—a definite violation of the law. While the Associés' productions were thought to be crude and lacking in finesse, those of the Variétés were considerably more polished and were now attracting audiences from the Parisian upper classes. In 1781, a controversy over the building of new theaters for the state institutions brought to a head the long-standing enmity between the boulevard theaters and the Comédie-Française. In that year the theater used by the Paris Opera at the Palais-Royal burned, and Philip II, the Duke of Orléans, who owned the complex, began to build a new grand replacement for the company that might attract even more patrons to his burgeoning commercial development that adjoined the theater. The Palais-Royal was then the hub of street and café life in the city, buoyed by its ideal location in the very heart of ancient Paris, not far from the Cathedral of Notre Dame and the Palace of the Louvre. Philip spent an enormous sum constructing the new theater, but intrigues at court soon turned against him, and the duke's cousin, Louis XVI, decided to house the Opera, not in Philip's grand new theater, but in a far cheaper building that was hastily constructed at the far northern fringes of town along the Boulevard Saint-Martin. While Louis' decision may have pleased his courtiers, it rankled his cousin Philip as well as many of Paris' elite who were now forced to travel a far greater distance into an unfashionable quarter of town to attend the Opera. As a result, attendance at the new musical theater quickly declined, while Philip eventually scored a huge success with his grand new theater. The king's decision to relocate the Opera had left the duke holding a valuable piece of real estate, and to fill his expensive venture, he invited the Variétés, the most artistically successful of the boulevard theaters, to rent his space. With their new state-of-the-art theater in one of the most fashionable locations in the city, the Variétés soon prospered and competed vigorously with the Comédie-Française, an institution that throughout the 1780s seemed to many of Paris's intellectuals to appear increasingly worn and tired. Even the installation of new stage lighting in 1784 and the controversial production of The Marriage of Figaro soon afterward did little to stem the relative decline of the venerable institution against the vanguard of the Variétés. As the decade progressed and the monarchy grew more unpopular, the Comédie-Française's status as a royal institution made it appear to many in Paris as a bastion of aristocratic reaction in a sea of change. The theater's relatively conservative choice of repertory as well as its managers' constant complaints to the king for redress against the boulevard theaters' violations of its monopoly did little to dispel such an opinion. For his part, Louis XVI's attentions were clearly diverted elsewhere in these years by the host of problems his government faced, and so he refused to uphold the Comédie-Française's rights. Thus the Variétés continued to challenge royal authority over drama.

The Boulevard Theaters Grow More Radical.

The relocation of the Variétés, while an important event in helping to challenge royal control of the theater, was not, in and of itself, a factor in the growth of revolutionary sentiments in 1780s France. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, French actors and dramatists who achieved success on the Parisian stage had often been the most enthusiastic supporters of royal power. The example of figures like Voltaire, who had frequently been censored and imprisoned for his unpopular opinions, had inspired great caution in the theatrical community, and even Voltaire—though he questioned aspects of the exercise of royal authority in France—had been an enthusiastic supporter of despotic government. As the Variétés moved to its newfound highly respectable home around 1785, it tended to voice the same conservative political sentiments that had long flourished in the state theaters. At the same time, other forces were at work in the boulevard theaters, those institutions that remained along the streets and avenues of the capital that catered to a less elevated clientele. During the 1780s a radical press began to explode on the Parisian scene that was filled with satires and attacks on the monarchy. Queen Marie-Antoinette figured prominently in many of these works, some of which were boldly printed with their place of publication as "Peking," a joke intended to mock the inability of the French government to censor them. In these years the Austrian-born queen was singled out for the most violent abuse and accused of all kinds of sexual outrages, from voracious lesbianism to orgiastic sex rituals, even as the popular press also heaped abuse on the king, his ministers, and the clergy. France's radical press was always more vicious in its criticisms than were the boulevard theaters that lined the cities' streets. After all, pamphlets could be published anonymously and it was difficult for the authorities to unearth just where, when, and by whom an offending work had been printed. The theater, by contrast, occurred in a public space, where police could seize an actor or easily trace the identity of the author of an offensive dramatic skit or the composer of a song. But as criticism of the crown mounted generally in the 1780s, Paris's neighborhood authorities seem to have grown increasingly lax about supervising the boulevard theaters, in part because they often approved of the anti-monarchical and anti-governmental sentiments that were being uttered in them.

The Revolution Proceeds.

As the state of the government drifted perilously close to bankruptcy at the end of the 1780s, Louis XVI responded by calling a meeting of the Estates General, France's parliament, a body that had not been summoned since 1615. In the course of 1789 hopes for reform without drastic alterations to the government's constitution faded, and members of the third estate, or the commons, formed a new National Assembly. They formulated a new constitution for France that eliminated many noble and clerical privileges. The king swore allegiance to these documents, but as a result of the impending bankruptcy of his regime, he now faced greatly straitened circumstances. One result of these financial crises was that Louis XVI was forced to abandon patronage of Paris's royal theaters, and the city's government assumed control of the administration and supervision of these institutions. In 1791, the National Assembly deprived the Comédie-Française, Opera, and Comédie-Italienne of their monopolies, abandoning all pretenses that these were the only theaters legally sanctioned to perform in Paris. A key consequence of these measures was to make available to all the great repertory of French plays that had long been licensed as the sole preserve of the Comédie-Française. Since the 1770s the boulevard theaters had been encroaching upon this material by performing these plays in edited forms or by staging them under different titles, but now the new revolutionary government erased the long-standing privileges of the Comédie-Française, allowing the vast storehouse of works by Voltaire, Racine, Corneille, Molière, and all playwrights who were deceased to be performed by anyone who wished to stage a production. For a time the abolition of the old monopolies wreaked havoc on the Comédie-Française, which searched for both new and old material to perform that might be suitable given the greatly altered political realities of the times. Disagreements within the troupe eventually caused an irreconcilable breach, and the company split in two. In their separate houses the two remnants of the Comédie had varied success, and even from their greatly reduced position, both houses continued to dominate the elite theater of the day. Most critics of the period agreed that the great French classics were best performed in the astute hands of the troupes that had grown out of the Comédie-Française. At the same time, scores of new theaters arose to compete with the older houses. Where they had been nine boulevard theaters in 1789, an additional twenty were founded by 1795. Not all of these new theaters succeeded, but everywhere in Paris the stage came to be increasingly subjected to heightened competition.

The Revolution Grows More Radical.

The National Assembly's decision in 1791 to eliminate the long-standing monopolies on the performance of opera, drama, and ballet in France soon were followed by new measures to control and censor the theater. As the Revolution progressed, the threats that it posed to royal authority grew more grave, and in June of 1791, Louis XVI and his family tried to flee the country to rally support from outside France to overthrow these threats. Caught at Varennes, Louis and Marie-Antoinette were brought back to Paris, where they now became virtual prisoners of the Revolution. In the months that followed calls for the abolition of the monarchy steadily rose, and the campaign of Republicans to rid the country of counter-revolutionary forces gave birth to the Reign of Terror. As a result, the National Assembly and Parisian city government began to sanction spectacles and dramas that glorified the cause of republicanism. Propagandistic plays that supported the Revolution became more common, but throughout most of the Revolution it was the classic French repertory as well as light contemporary comedies that continued to provide the most common fare in most of Paris' theaters. Theatrical managers, in fact, preferred these works because they were not controversial, and in the overheated political climate of the day they sensed that avoiding controversy was a good thing. By 1793, at the height of the Terror, the government took decisive measures to censor and control the theaters. The Directorate, the controlling committee within the National Assembly, stipulated that the theater must serve patriotic ends—that is, that it must defend and promote the Revolution and the cause of republican government. Thus for a time these directives altered the course of theater in Paris by prompting the writing and staging of works that were overtly republican in nature. Yet even during the height of the Terror, when as many as 17,000 people were executed for counter-revolutionary deeds and sentiments, some of the most frequently performed works were those of Corneille, Molière, Voltaire, and Racine—works that by this time had achieved a "classic" status in French similar to Shakespeare's opus in English. These, it could be argued, met the Revolution's demands since they were masterpieces of the French language. During this dark period, many actors and playwrights who had served the monarchy fell under suspicion. Some fled to England or more congenial spots on the Continent. Others met their fate on the guillotine. But despite the suspicion that surrounded some actors and playwrights, there seems never to have been any shortage of performers willing to take their place. As greater stability and tranquility returned to the city at the end of the 1790s under the rule of the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, Paris now had more theaters than ever before in its history, and the city entered the nineteenth century as the undisputed European capital of both literary drama and popular vaudeville. Napoleon was to try, like the Bourbon kings before him, to restrain and censor the theater, introducing licensing and other censoring requirements in 1799 similar to those common under the Bourbon kings. But the sheer scale of the Parisian theatrical establishment made the institution increasingly difficult for state authorities to control. Thus the disputes and dilemmas that had become common in France in the last decades of the eighteenth century paved the way for the mass culture of theatrical entertainment that was to satisfy both popular and elite tastes in nineteenth-century Europe.

sources

Gregory S. Brown, A Field of Honor: Writers, Court Culture, and Public Theater in French Literary Life from Racine to the Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).

Robert Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982).

William D. Howarth, Beaumarchais and the Theatre (New York: Routledge, 1995).

Emmet Kennedy, et al, Theatre, Opera, and Audiences in Revolutionary Paris: Analysis and Repertory (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996).

John Lough, Paris Theatre Audiences in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London: Oxford University Press, 1965).

Jeffrey S. Ravel, The Contested Parterre: Public Theater and French Political Culture, 1680–1791 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999).

Michele Root-Bernstein, Boulevard Theater and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1984).

see also Dance: Ballet in an Age of Revolution