Читать книгу The Intellectual and His People - Jacques Ranciere - Страница 5

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The People’s Theatre: A Long Drawn-Out Affair

July 1848. Citizen Eugène Delaporte, a former student at the Conservatoire and musician in the town of Sens, submitted to the members of the National Assembly a project approved by the minister of the interior. He drew their attention to an essential weapon for ‘spreading Holy Fraternity’ and ‘dissipating the shades of fanaticism and ignorance with the help of science’: the development of choral music. As evidence, he cited the story of workers from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine who were canalizing the Marne and had been poorly received by the locals. Brawls had already broken out, when some Paris workers emerged from their ranks and performed in the open air ‘some of those choruses that stir the masses, calm hatreds and lift up populations by reminding them of the common heavenly origin of us all’. Fraternity then reigned on the Marne, and would soon reign throughout the Republic, by means of a unified organization of musical education and choral societies that this Citizen Delaporte was prepared to devote himself to directing.1

November 1853. The same Delaporte, who had spent the last five years organizing local bands in the departments of Yonne, Aube, Marne and Seine-et-Marne, wrote to His Excellency the minister of the interior to remind him of a great truth: music is ‘the most certain means to achieve the moralizing of the people’. This was not because it raised them to heavenly fraternity, but more modestly because it drew them away from the bars. And over the years, high officials of state and His Majesty himself would be able to witness this: evil haunts and evil doctrines had lost ground, while religion, the family and social order had gained as choral singing expanded – was this not a practical demonstration of the impossibility of achieving anything fine or great without the authority of a leader? A benefit for which the Empire would soon show appreciation, by appointing M. Delaporte to the post of inspector-general of musical societies.

What we can see here, over and above the opportunism of a particular individual, is the singular temporality that enables major socializing initiatives to be always timely. Social harmony through the artistic education of the people reflects the logic of social inventions. These stubbornly follow a dynamic of their own, whether summoned on the royal road of reform or that of governmental revolution, most often conveyed by the countless networks which are generated by the daily demand for new ideas to handle new school populations, distract new populations of workers, give new life to abandoned rural regions, instruct conscripts or moralize prisoners, not to mention creating new markets, ensuring the expansion of the press or giving substance to political alternatives. Everywhere that a connection is needed, the social inventors are at hand, resurging under every regime and acting as a pivot for new political investments – less out of opportunism than from the spontaneous Aristotelianism that helps every particular regime to survive by establishing the most suitable form of sociability for all involved. What government would not welcome the project of improving popular manners by means of art? Everyone can understand heavenly fraternity or earthly docility as they like, and the socializing ideas will follow their course, ready to draw the contours of an objective socialism that is often far removed from the hopes and conflicts of politics. That does not simply mean that all cats are grey in the dark, but rather that roles and significations are distributed at an early stage according to an autonomous logic, forming a finished ensemble of alternative solutions to which the most dominant theoretical and political novelties cannot help bending.

The long drawn-out story of the ‘people’s theatre’ offers a good illustration of this. The idea found a place early on at the centre of positions on Art and the People, positions that were both mutually contradictory and equally available for conservatives and revolutionaries. After half a century of oscillation between the accelerated revolutions of art and the permanent inertia of theatre administrations, by around 1900 this idea had become a complete set of possibilities that the novelty of Marxism had to accept as it was. The Brechtian critiques made much later demonstrated this, denouncing the Théâtre National Populaire under Jean Vilar for its project of having a socially undifferentiated people celebrate their ‘communion’ in one and the same ‘ceremony’, and contrasting this with a theatre that would keep the real people at a critical distance, away from petty-bourgeois consumers.2 This diagnosis was both correct and ineffective. In fact, Jean Vilar, just like Copeau, Gémier, Pottecher and a number of others, saw their audience as Michelet’s ‘people’. But there was no other audience for our popular theatre. Its project kept to the minimal proposition of not being a class theatre. The ‘good’ people, the ‘undiluted’ people, were left outside the field where desires for a people’s theatre might dwell. They belonged to a different tradition, one that precisely sought to remove the people from the social mingling and communitarian passions of the theatre. The undiluted people were the support for a certain idea of popular art, ‘art without representation’: that of folk tales, nursery rhymes, pottery and embroidery that were an extension of handicraft life and rural leisure activities. In the places and non-places allocated by the contradictory investments of art for the people, a popular theatre with neither communion nor identification belonged rather to critical thought than to the actual stage.

Taste and temperament: Athens and Épinal

Let us start at the beginning. In other words, with the simple proposal to moralize the people through the spread of art. The constraints of the petitioning style in difficult times may embroider this with soothing images of decreed public festivals or homes regenerated by the sound of the harmonium and reproductions of Raphael. It is just that these images were never enough to mobilize any artist’s desire. Even musicians who were fervent upholders of the established order always refused to accept a bandsman’s wrong notes for the false satisfaction of having pulled him away from the bar. And politicians who were a little enlightened knew that the question was more radical. To moralize meant creating manners. But manners are not created by lessons, rather by identification and imitation, in other words by learning a certain jouissance. And they only take hold of the social body insofar as they are held in common. To moralize the people thus meant providing them with some enjoyment in common with the aristocratic classes. Where moral submission to duty and the political claim for rights were equally powerless to merge or to exclude one another, moralization by way of art had a strong ideal to offer, that of a pleasure that simultaneously elevated the more powerful, subjected those below to discipline, and united both in a single community.

Understood in this way, popular morality has an unchallenged homeland: Athens, and a privileged place: the theatre. The people as legislator, both aesthetic and military, melded into the cult of the collective stage and the enjoyment of the masterpieces of Aeschylus or Sophocles, made available to all – such is the emblematic image of all modern aesthetic education. In every case, the question is ‘to adapt to the conditions of modern popular life the spirit that gave birth to and inspired the theatrical festivals of Greece’.3

We still have to know what precisely this spirit was, and in what place and forms it could render the manners of a society once again harmonious.

One path taken was resolutely urban and educational. The secret of Athenian greatness was that its state entrusted the education of the people to artists; and that is what the modern state had also to do. This was at least the task that the marquis Léon de Laborde set out in Quelques idées sur la direction des arts et le maintien du goût public – an exemplary approach on the part of an equally exemplary character. A social inventor, and himself the son of a social inventor (promoter among other things of mutual instruction and amorous gymnastics), commissioner of the Republic to the Exposition Universelle of 1851, and reporting on this task to the Empire, Laborde sought to show that everything went together. France was faced with the threat of industrial decline, if it let the artistic taste that supported both public civility and national energy fall into confusion:

The French have to live in the good company of great things . . . Just as a well brought-up person only attracts to his salons and his intimate acquaintance his equals in education and good form, so must the state act for the nation. It will surround it with masterworks of art, so that the people are impregnated with these without noticing it, by habit and by imitation of all the elegant tendencies that pass in procession.4

To transform the taste of the people, taking it by surprise, was the precept that many a progressive educator would borrow from this dignitary of the Second Empire, along with the vision of the world that organized it: the opposition between high and low that wasalso that of centre and periphery, and a vision that blended the republican mission with the court as model of elegance. A single principle, therefore, for this crusade of good taste: ‘Combat that which rises from below, spread and make general what descends from above.’5 The ‘below’ here meant such things as the whining of barrel-organs or the decorations of pâtissiers; above all, it meant the countryside where ‘people grow stupid and coarse’ and the images d’Épinal which depicted lives of the saints and the Stations of the Cross – a museum and library of the countryside, with their uncouth language, crude drawings and glaring colours that ridiculed the great deeds of national history. The ‘above’ meant the state, the city and the court, which would flood France with the productions of good taste: plays entrusted to the best writers, actors, directors and designers who would define the centre of conversation and the canons of fashion with twenty exemplary productions in Paris which would then be exported to the provinces; reproductions of Raphael, Leonardo, Murillo or Gros distributed right down to the most wretched hamlets; calendars drawn by Daumier and Gavarni, engravings by Vernet or Decamps, printed in millions of copies and sold for ten centimes by selected local dealers with a view to stifling the dross of images d’Épinal with their competition; and all objects of daily life, through to playing cards, redesigned according to norms of aesthetics. As Laborde wrote, ‘we stand at the dawn of popular publicity’.6 And this publicity had to make the whole people dwell in familiarity with the beautiful, or at least, in constant comparison of the beautiful with the ugly. For this progressive conservative the ugly, ‘an extreme and an asperity’, would be always superior to the mediocre that ‘softened the most lively and determined feelings’.7

Publicity was thus to transform a crowd of styleless rurals into a public of taste, living by the generalized regime of distinguished public opinion. Out of this radical educational project, the more empirical retained one point in particular: the development of the decorative arts as substitute for the decline in handicraft values, and as stimulus to industrial quality. The rest of the programme scarcely convinced politicians any more than it did aesthetes. The former were hardly inclined to make such major efforts to arouse in the people ‘the most lively and determined feelings’, while, for the latter, it was the serials of the Petit Journal and the performances of the café-concert that the ‘dawn of popular publicity’ particularly illuminated. And the very penetration of works of a more ‘elevated’ taste into the countryside could only make clear to both parties the destruction of the traditional modes of expression of well-behaved country folk. The elevation of public taste was therefore opposed by a certain idea of the popular temperament. It was a tamed bohemian, Champfleury, who set the tone for this in the same era. In the aftermath of the revolution of 1848, he set out to gather popular songs, imagery and pottery. And in his Histoire de l’imagerie populaire, he targeted connoisseurs who found the gaudy colours of images d’Épinal ‘barbaric’. For him, their horror of coarseness amounted to a defence of the ‘artifices’ of academic routine. The image d’Épinal, on the other hand, displayed the virtue common to both nature and genius, i.e. naivety. ‘Among the savage and the man of genius we may note a boldness, an ignorance and a break with all rules, which make them stand out.’8 With the ‘quality’ of Parisian celebrities, this aesthetic was lost:

Today the maker of images d’Épinal has seen the drawings of Gavarni. I leave the reader to conceive what a singular ‘elegance’ his pencils depict . . . M. Gustav Doré’s ‘Wandering Jew’ has penetrated these regions . . . M. Doré takes particular care with the décor; he has Ahasuerus sacrificed to the background of old Brabant houses, storms and cloudbursts, pine forests and crocodiles. These are simply exciting Bengal lights that the set designer turns on during the performance of his drama . . .9

The major vice of Doré’s Parisian taste was to bring the peasant reader into the world of representation. This opened the way for enjoyments that were not those of high art, but rather feuilletons and the choruses of the café-concert: the Greece of Offenbach rather than Aeschylus. With the disappearance of naive imagery, a certain popular sentiment, a certain normal regime of popular life, was corrupted:

Popular imagery was engraved for the people and spoke to the people. The punishment of crime, the remembrance of heroic deeds, were traced here in striking colours. This teaching was clear, visible and speedy. The moral lesson was combined with a good temperament. It would be desirable that the people never saw any worse pictures than these.10

The moral issue arose at two levels: the Prodigal Son or Wandering Jew of these images, like Old Man Poverty in the almanacs, gave the people healthy lessons in resignation. But above all, this imagery established between its producer and its consumer a relationship of circularity and mutual recognition that effected a self-regulation of the popular temperament.

An alternative model was thus defined in which the same principle of naivety brought into communication at a distance popular art and great poetry. This was in some sense a certain ‘spirit of place’ that assured the social foundation of lettered civilization and the principle of its artistic renewal. Between the frank expressiveness of popular art and the ‘strong poetry of the ancients’,11 between these two manifestations of the spirit of nature, the distance travelled by the sap in the social body had to be respected. The principle of corruption lay in compositions that fell between the two.12

From Salamis to Domrémy: the theatre of the nation

Two paradigms thus separated out. On the one hand, the education of the public by artistic impregnation; on the other, the poetics of the spirit of place – the light shining down from top to bottom, and the sap rising from bottom to top. The people’s theatre was summoned to define its identity between these two paradigms, prepared to cross their effects and divert their trajectories in order to assure its own circuit, that of a great art that was the education of the people by way of their own legend. It was Michelet who laid down the principle of this in his lectures of 1847–8, in which he taught the students of the Collège de France their duty to ‘feed the people from the people’.13 But this relationship of people to people, in which the student takes the place of the travelling salesman, no longer had anything in common with the tepid regime of regulating village passions. The people’s theatre that would carry out this programme would be one in which the people would perform their own grandeur for themselves. And this they could only do if they were a true people, abolishing a class division whose principle did not lie in the distribution of property but precisely in the separation of languages.

Such was the theme of these lectures, which a clairvoyant government suspended after three sessions: the evil that our society suffered lay in the divorce between the educated classes and the people. This divorce went back five centuries, when the clergy opposed their Latin, and the nobles their French, to the diction of the people. Caught between the old and the new, the people no longer had a tongue of their own. Or, what amounted to the same thing, they had a hundred tongues. But not one, at all events, in which to speak to the men of culture. It was this absence of common language that deserved the name of barbarism. It was opposed to the very principle of civic life: the constant movement from ‘instinctive wisdom’ to ‘reflective wisdom’, ‘the mutual initiation of the instinctive and the educated classes’.14 The revolutionary ‘miracle’ that had given the coming unity its legend had not managed to abolish the separation between the two virtues that were supposed to mutually irrigate one another: the culture of the lettered class that summed up the experience of the men of the people, and the energy of the men of the people in which the lettered had to immerse themselves. It was up to the young, who were not yet ‘classified’, to reunify these two halves of the national body. What they needed to give the people was not ‘popular’ books. The people would create these for themselves, if they could only speak. In order for them to speak, they had to be given ‘the sovereign teaching that was the whole education of the glorious cities of antiquity: a theatre that is truly that of the people’.15 Here Michelet takes up Plato’s analysis, while reversing its meaning: it was the manners of the theatre that made the laws of democracy. Democracy was essentially theatrocracy:

Athens deserved the name that the sophists gave it without grasping its significance: a theatrocracy . . . The sovereign People at the theatre, by turn actor and critic, constantly rediscovered the unity undermined by disputes in the public space; they created for themselves this community of thought and feeling, this common soul that was the genius of Athens and still remains in history the flaming torch of the world.16

For Plato, theatrocracy meant the noise of the mass, applauding themselves by applauding the actors. For Michelet, it meant community of thought based on a spectacle that was fundamentally self-representation: the theatre as mirror in which the people could view their own actions, the scene of reciprocity in which each could be at once the judging critic, the playing actor and the chorus in dialogue. A representation without separation in which the warrior-citizen himself wrote and played his victory, which was the victory of the community. A single image summed everything up: that of Aeschylus, the soldier of Salamis who on return from the battlefield acted before the people the victory over the Persians, and by this very act communicated its secret.

This emblematic image is also a screen-image: the victor playing victory, this summary of citizen theatre, masks the question as to how the relationship of the stage and the public tiers actually achieved the essence of a theatre in which each half of the people was alternately the representation of the other. Michelet’s popular religion comes up against the same problem as Feuerbach’s humanist religion: how can representation be at the same time the immediately experienced essence of the community? Michelet avoids this difficulty in two ways. On the one hand, he endows this representation with a moral surplus: the essence of the theatre is not the glamour of illusion but rather the accomplishment of sacrifice. ‘What is theatre? The abdication of the actual, self-interested individual in favour of a better role.’17 On the other hand, this moral form of the theatrical act serves to express a content that is the legend of national unity formed from the sacrifice of each.

The solution of popular communion is thus shifted to the side of the represented. No one clearly sees how the people will play for themselves. But it is clear how the people can be fed from themselves: by the representation of their legend which is their anticipated unity. In a certain sense, what would be played in the theatre of our New Athens would simply be episodes in the equivalent of The Persians: the sacrifices and victories of the nation. But also, since France was not a city that could contemplate itself in a single theatre, being rather an organism enlivened by constant circulation from the centre to the periphery, it would make this pulsation its essential theme.

Exemplary in this respect were the two first characters that Michelet proposed for a people’s theatre. Joan of Arc, first of all, indicated its style: her youthful charm and the earthly vigour of her answers to the tribunal did away with any artifice of representation or distinction of language. After her, La Tour d’Auvergne was the prototype of Michelet’s positive heroes. This first grenadier of Republican France was also an erudite Breton and panegyrist of the Celtic tradition. His comings and goings between his study and the battlefield combined not only the man of letters and the soldier, but also the spirit of place with that of the Republic. The opposition between rootedness in the soil and antique grandeur was thereby resolved. This people’s theatre, intended for production in every village, would represent the union between the national virtues of the Convention and the earthly virtues of the Vendée.

The theatre thus had its unifying effect by virtue of this power of an ‘embodied legend’ in which the representation that abolished the division of the audience also abolished its distance in the national history that a united public inherited. By the same token, the Rousseauean opposition between the corruption of the theatre and the health of the militant festival was likewise suppressed. At the limit, the people’s theatre was simply a Fête de la Fédération ceaselessly replayed.

Between field and office

One might imagine that the citizen spectators would tire of an unending festival, at least if they were given the opportunity. But what began with these words of Michelet was just the prehistory of this festival, the interminable gestation, theoretical and administrative, of the popular theatre. The project, called for in 1848 but submerged by the vicissitudes of the Republic, would reappear in 1856 in a more modest form – that of a theatre offering the working classes the comfort of an elevated bourgeois leisure activity with a moral suited to their condition. The character of the putative director, D’Ennery, a leading impresario, suggested a morality that had little in common with the Athenian, though the ruin of a certain financier put an end to this fine idea. Solicited anew in 1867, the superintendent of theatres settled the question as follows: ‘The theatre will never be a school of morality for anyone . . . It is already hard enough to prevent those existing now from doing more harm than they do.’18

This spontaneous Rousseaueanism, buttressed by both administrative inertia and budgetary restriction, found an echo in several of those who sought to raise up the people by art. For them, the world of the theatre confessed its true nature in the age of the great corrupter Offenbach, that of an art demoralized by the spatial barrier that separated it from the great sighs of the soul. It was in this sense that the new champion of local bands, the flautist Jules Simon, attacked the corruption of musical religion by theatrical speculation:

Saddened by this confined horizon that surrounded it like an inflexible circle, the Muse now moved her wings and her lyre without an echo, and under her weakened fingers rendered only soulless melodies and chords lacking strength and warmth . . . The divine and chaste Muse has been stripped of her azure tunic, and in greedy and profane hands has donned the spangled garb of the acrobat and juggler.19

This diagnostic was not haphazard. It implied a different idea of Greece, harmonic rather than dramatic in essence. It was not Plautus and Terence who made the literary grandeur of the cities of antiquity, nor even Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, but rather Horace, Cicero, Plato, Virgil or Pindar: the heaven of philosophical harmonies and the earth of bucolic poetry united against the theatrical stage. It was the symphony and the oratorio that were in harmony with a people unified less by its heroic history than by its everyday work and life. Music would create the true legend of the people, by accompanying them everywhere they worked and prayed, to the glory of life, ‘whether in the solitude of the field, the noisome activity of the workshop, the public place, the church or the home’.20

Here again, alliances crossed the division between ideological and political camps: the spokesman of the well-behaved local bands was not far in his opinions from red Proudhon. Immorality and barbarism lay in separating the performances of the theatre from the labours and seasons of life. The symbol of this, for Simon, was the theatre; for Proudhon it was salon or concert music, to which he opposed ‘music in situation’, whether fanfares in processions, hunting songs in the woods, or oratorios in cathedrals. Such was the music of the future that would one day be sung everywhere: ‘during the harvest, haymaking and the vendange, at seed-time and in school’.21 Popular art was the art of the harmonics of work. Once again, therefore, the end of art was this limit at which it was abolished in what it had to celebrate. In this case, it would cease when the cultivated earth became an immense garden, and organized labour a vast concert.22

The idea of a popular theatre was thus established in the long duration of its contradiction. It had its theoretical rise at the moment when new urban spaces and new scales of artistic values set in motion a long process: that of the artistic devalorization of the theatre and its desertion by the people.23 But this idea now went hand in glove with the great project of national education, and all the high tides of this idea and of progressive struggle brought it to the front of the stage: the liberal Empire of Émile Ollivier and Victor Duruy; the secular Republic of the 1880s; the Republic of the 1900s; and, after the world wars, the breath of reconstruction and of the Resistance. Each time round, the clear need arose for a supplementary means of national education and unity, for rooting the lettered classes in the people, and for having the people participate in the riches of culture. And on each occasion, too, the growing decline in the spectacles of high art, the advance of the café-concert, followed by cinema, sport, radio and television, only added practical urgency to theoretical necessity.

In the logic of administration and budgets, the question was quickly pinned down: the people’s theatre was simply one more subsidized theatre to add to the two major dramatic stages and the two great opera companies. The Beaux-Arts budget was meagre under any political regime, and even the least socialistic state was always inclined to the radical solution of making the rich pay. The 1870 project already defined the doctrine that would reign until 1951: the popular theatre would be a hall in which the four subsidized theatres of the rich would take turns to enrich the poorer classes with the treasures of their repertoire. (Students at the Conservatoire would find an ideal initiation to their trade in filling the remaining evenings.) From 1870, too, the artists and managers of these theatres would adduce evidence that such performances, on top of the increased costs they incurred, would always present too ‘precarious’ conditions ever to bring the people displays of art that were worthy of them.24

But the simple thinking of the Beaux-Arts civil servants would nonetheless continue its path. In 1902 it again lay at the centre of the project for a popular theatre, initiated this time round by the city of Paris. Certainly, other demands were also periodically heard. The project of Viollet-le-Duc, in 1882, insisted on a genre designed to make the people’s theatre ‘both a stimulant and an education’ for popular manners:25 the historical and social drama, whose development would indeed require the contribution of new dramatic writers. The director would be held to produce each year a minimum of ten new works, including at least five three-act ones, one of which had to be from a French writer who had never had a play of more than two acts performed at a Paris theatre. It goes without saying that dramatic authors warmly supported this vocation of the popular theatre for historical and social creation. In 1902, they sought in vain to press their opinion against that of the leading light of the conservative faction, Adrien Bernheim, administrator of the Théâtre Français and of ‘Trente ans de théâtre’, an organization that assisted retired members of the company. For Bernheim, the popular theatre’s task was to undertake periodic tours to perform selected pieces of French literature in local or suburban theatres, introduced by lecturers primed to show the popular public that the subject of Andromaque was no different from any crime story in the newspapers. His doctrine was simple: ‘The theatre is only a means of instruction and popular education if the people are offered masterpieces and nothing but masterpieces.’26 And if death was not a sufficient condition for recognizing the author of a masterpiece, it was certainly a necessary one.

It was naturally a civil service logic that settled these factional quarrels. The thinking of the late Empire’s superintendent of theatres still prevailed in 1920 when the organization of the Théâtre National Populaire was entrusted to Firmin Gémier: travelling productions of Werther, Faust and Manon were its staple in its heyday, before economic crisis and an ageing population brought the whole business into decline.27

Poetic communion

This logic was certainly too petty to express the militant enthusiasm that sought to raise the people to the luminous temple of art, or refill art from the treasury of popular energies. This enthusiasm found expression, in the final years of the nineteenth century, in the Revue d’art dramatique – though with an interesting shift of priorities. Activism was now the cause of aesthetes rather than politicians. The scepticism of the latter was clearly expressed in the way that Jaurès reversed the order of reasons given by Michelet:

Theatre is not, and by its nature cannot be, an avant-garde force. It only proclaims ideas long after these have been proclaimed elsewhere, in books . . . A new idea has to have matured forcefully before it starts to take theatrical form.28

Conversely, the pioneers of art for the people often shared the contempt of the new literary generation for the parliamentary republic. They rejected en bloc ‘titbits of socialist preaching’,29 and even those comedies of manners in which social criticism and ‘literary’ theatre often excelled, dissecting the corruption of institutions and bourgeois manners or depicting popular misery and suffering. Whatever its literary value or social significance might have been, popular theatre would rediscover here the moral atmosphere of melodrama: ‘sad visions of cruel humanity, ignorant and painful’.30 It would draw the same moral: the fatality of a world condemned to violence and hatred, in which ‘unbridgeable barriers divide the humble from the powerful’.31 In short, despite the activist sympathy of certain authors, such as Lucien Descaves, popular theatre could not be identified with social theatre. The latter was always a representation of social classes that gave one or the other a moral lesson. And the very distinction was a demoralizing one.

The principle of aesthetic action, therefore, was no longer to be found either in the needs of the people, nor even in the need to unite the different classes. It lay rather in the cult of the beautiful and the celebration of the poetic office. The key word was not ‘theatre’ or ‘culture’, but ‘beauty’. And if much was said – as with Michelet – about ritual and ceremony, what was involved here was not so much a national festival, but far more a Wagnerian mass or Mallarméan rite. The young defenders of the popular theatre did not belong to the symbolist sect. But they had learned the lessons of the Revue Wagnérienne that were much in the air. The communion they spoke of was less the warmth of a group vibrating to the spectacle of its unity, than the participation of the crowd in the high mystery of art.

That was the first lesson learned from Wagner: the people whose melodies Auber and Rossini had hunted out – from Alpine passes to the markets of Naples – before handing these back to them as choruses for barrel-organs, had become denatured. The aristocratic stage had confiscated their melodies and drained their vital sap. Separated from their essence, the people had become a mass, good only for consuming the spectacles produced for them. The essential task of the poet today was to restore unity at the root. That unity lay in myth, the poem of a collective conception of life, or the popular unconscious. Drama was the elaboration of myth, the primitive language rediscovered for telling the essential conception of life, its object being not the people in arms but free individuality. The author of the music drama, a unity of the poet’s male egoistic understanding with music’s female liberating love, was himself the prototype of this essential individuality.32

Rather than the activist writer, it was now the poet, as herald of the free man, who thus addressed himself to the people. And he did so first of all in order to have them attend him in his priestly role. If the theatre was once more the site of this encounter, this was not by virtue of its powers of communion. On the contrary, it was because the theatre, invaded by bourgeois digestions and distractions, was the profaned temple of the beautiful, and its ceremonial vocation had to be restored. The people would serve there in the first instance as vestal guardians of the cult. And the model for this role was supplied precisely not by the public’s participation in the theatre, but rather by their silence in the concert hall. In one of his Offices, Mallarmé summed up all the components of this Wagnerism without mythology:

Where sounds are concerned, the crowd, which begins to surprise us so greatly as a virgin element, or as ourselves, fulfils its pre-eminent function as the guardian of the mystery! Its own mystery! It offers its rich silence to the orchestra, in which lies its collective grandeur.33

Here the concept of music concealed that of drama, furnishing the principle of a communion that was neither the divinization of the people nor the popularization of art, but rather a participation that arose from a double displacement:

The miracle of music is this reciprocal penetration of the myth and the hall . . . The orchestra floats, fills the space; and the happening does not set itself apart, we do not remain just witnessing . . . Mystery – something other than representational – I compare to something Greek.34

Here vibration is opposed to representation in defining the new relationship of the poet to the crowd. The new principle of the popular theatre would be a coincidence between the poetic vibration of spiritualized materiality and the exaltation of the unified power of the crowd. A key concept in the late nineteenth century underlay this combination: that of energy, the force of matter en route to spiritual individualization. In this way, it was possible to unite the symbolist legend with the legend of Michelet, to make the Wagnerian poet the officiate of a new popular theatre. That is what was proposed by the young and ardent inspirer of the ‘Théâtre civique’, Louis Lumet:

A theatrical performance is a religious festival in which the people, celebrating their passions and their deeds, divinize their glorified life, the adventures of their ancestors, the existence of their city.

It is a solemn communion.

The poet shivers, intoxicated by all the forces of the world, and his word reveals and fixes these in phrases whose rhythm is that of the universal. He sums up the potential of fates, and the drama bursts forth in the midst of landscapes that see both love and death. In himself, he accumulates energy and has to spread it as the sun spreads its light . . . And now the crowd arrives, contemplative, ready to receive the thrill, blending this with the story of the race, with nature and passions. One and the same flame burns the poet, one flame for those who speak and those who listen. Theirs is a genuine communion.35

But this universal vibration of energy soon rediscovered themes already known: those of the spirit of place and the harmonics of work. Any place, says Lumet, is suitable for the ceremony: ‘The stadium of a tumultuous town, the barn of a peaceful hamlet, the tiled parlour of a farm, even a field or a country lane.’36 The visible inconvenience of ‘civic theatre’ in a country lane is sufficient sign that this indifference was in fact the consecration of a new idea of place, in which Taine’s theory of milieux supported a symbolist dramatic doctrine: place is the territory in which mystery is rooted, where the race shares a common energy and thrill. This latter notion conjures up here calm dreams of evenings in which women crack nuts and spin hemp, while listening to the storyteller mingle tales of distant adventures with evocations of the ploughs and marriages of yesteryear; in which, once the harvest is over, processions are organized where each person carries the instruments of their labour – the sickle, the rake or the seed drill – to pay homage to the nourishing earth, accompanied by blonde or red-headed girls adorned with flowers and sheaves. But Lumet soon returns to the urban vicissitudes of evenings organized in outlying districts to reveal to the ‘poor extinguished eyes’ of the people the light that should shine for the free man, the great words of beauty and freedom.

The theatre on the mountain

A dream of combining Michelet with Champfleury, and Mallarmé with Proudhon, even prepared to entrust the Wagnerian high mass to Jules Simon’s town band – the paradigm of civic theatre was evidently rustic. It has to be said that the people’s theatre, after half a century, had just taken its first practical steps, and in a very determined place – even overdetermined, one might say. In 1895, Maurice Pottecher opened Le Théâtre du Peuple in Bussang, at the foot of the Vosges, which offered the scenery of rural Greece as well as bordering on the territory seized by the enemy. On a summer’s day, in front of two thousand spectators – workers from his family’s textile mill, peasants, holiday-makers and drama-lovers from Paris – the curtain was raised to the natural backdrop of pine-covered hills and fields, in which real straw fell under real scythes wielded by real reapers. This was the stage on which Maurice Pottecher directed his tale of Le Diable marchand de goutte, and where the miracle was produced:

For three whole hours the hills heard below them the murmur of this crowd, by turn amused, saddened, amazed, irate and relaxed, expressing in a dozen different attitudes – some still completely spontaneous, others already measured and contained – the various emotions that stirred it; a living, vibrating people, who laughed and cried as the people of Athens laughed and cried when the great heroic Muse covered the distant beating of the Aegean Sea with the sound of her verses.37

Life, emotion and expression were the three key words of this Vosgian Greece. The basis of this fraternity lay less in the play performed than in ‘the commonality of sad or joyous emotions that the magic of the theatre arouses’. Popularity was a function of the expressive essence of art, ‘the means for man to express and share with his fellows the emotion excited in him by life’.38 And the power of theatre was fundamentally the expansion of this life itself: ‘Art, the most intimate means of expression and the most direct communication of life, expands and grows all the more as it contains more life and conquers more lives.’39 Understood in this way, art did not need to concern itself with popular morality. Even if Pottecher’s play dealt with alcoholism, it did not set out to cure a single drunkard. It did not make ‘so great or so little a claim’.40 All it had to do was set the propagation of life against solitary amusement, energy that falls back into matter – that of the child toying with sand, the idle worker shifting his materials, or the aesthete turning his verses and polishing his prose. The true artist, for his part, in the metaphysical paradigm of the time, spiritualized his material into luminous energy. His freedom was thus synonymous with his capacity to offer himself equally to all. This conquering communication of life was the means of uniting the two elements that constituted the new notion of the people in the late nineteenth century: the group of ‘already independent individualities that compose the elite’ and ‘the still confused and formless masses that constitute the crowd’.41 The collective joy that united the philosopher with the porter, by their more or less fine perception of the spectacle, was that of their common aspiration in a process which, out of the pleasure of each different person, created the principle of their ascent into the spiral of individualization. What unified the public was precisely the diversity of emotions among which this joy could be distributed.

The key question, therefore, was to maximize this intensification of vital energy that the magic of the theatre produced. One word summed it up, that of emancipation. It was in one and the same movement that dramatic art emancipated itself, emancipated its traditional public from its closed walls and cobwebs, and emancipated the people who had formerly been left in the darkness outside. The question of place was thus central. This place had to permit a wider and more immediate communication between the daily life of the people and the intensification proper to theatrical magic. Open-air theatre opened up the theatrical box, with its lowered ceiling, its select public, and the mendacious frippery of its sets. It broke these walls to put theatrical action in the ‘outdoor air’ that was at the same time the backdrop of everyday life and the horizon of the infinite life in which ‘the soul of crowds’ could breathe freely.

But was the equivalence between the frisson of the Vosgian hills and that of the Aegean Sea a sufficient basis for the tragic grandeur of Le Diable marchand de goutte? This shows us the devil, disguised as a German peddler, use his trade in eau-de-vie to sow hatred in the village and set a son against his father. It is true that this village story, half realist and half fairy-tale, was enhanced by the Wagnerian struggle of a woman – the incarnation of love and pity – who offered her life as a sacrifice to hell in order to redeem the misdeeds of her husband and the evil of male egoism. But that was not enough, as the author himself recognized, to restore the grandeur of Aeschylus: ‘The sublime voice is silenced; the voice that has just awoken here amid these modest hills is simply the humblest stammering of an inglorious echo.’42

This people, devoid of great memories and the bearer of a young hope, had to rest content with the more modest expression of virtue that reflected in a minor key the spirit of soil and race: the sincerity of the work in which it would rediscover a little of its reality and its aspirations. Fraternity of ‘race’ – a word still certainly closer to its origins in Taine than to its future apocalypse – was the common description for this unproblematic circuit between author, actors and audience. Factory workers, a junior manager, college students, a teacher, an industrialist, a gardener and a representative on the departmental Conseil Général, acted in the play along with members of Pottecher’s own family. Recognizing familiar features in the author’s characters, they would be able to find, by an ‘instinctual fraternity’, the ‘precise gestures’, ‘natural intonations’ and ‘picturesque attitudes’ of a certain ‘popular type’.43 Thanks to them, a different fraternity would find expression between the public and the author writing for ‘men of the same race as himself, and almost of the same rank, men whose history, instincts, passions and inspirations he knows, and among whom he can, better than anywhere else, study and fix this reality from which every work of art draws its value.’44

The great community in which the vibrating soul of liberty breathed thus tended to boil down to a collusion between the village intellectual and his local territory. But the work’s ‘sincerity’ was not just a matter of this. It had in fact to obey a principle of maximum profitability. On penalty of being no more than a rural entertainment, it had to touch all the wellsprings capable of moving the unevenly cultivated energies of those who formed its public. ‘Simple as a twilight tale’ and constructed around a passion familiar to the local audience, it had to blend ‘comic lowness with the pathos of tragedy, and the fantastic with the exact quest for reality’.45 Suffice it to say that its ‘sincerity’ had to effect a precisely calibrated blend between realism – bitter and comic – and fairy-tale – neither too nebulous nor too familiar – in order to fix the contradictory investments of both its local and its lettered public. For the one, the scenes of rural life, allusions to everyday stories and traditional legends, served to procure a pleasure of recognition. For the other, these had to satisfy a mixed interest in the mists of legend and the exoticisms of naivety. Pottecher acknowledged this in the presentation of his second spectacle:

This taste for rustic pieces, for more or less naive idylls of action, is far more particular to the cultivated public and the educated minority than it is to the truly popular section of the audience to which the Théâtre du Peuple addresses itself.46

Country dwellers, just like urban workers, ‘prefer, to a theatre that presents themselves on stage, spectacles which, by the heroism of their passions and the novelty of their scenery and costumes, transport them far from themselves and their daily lives’, into ‘the unknown world of the ideal’.

Pottecher’s second spectacle, therefore, combined a farce, full of village folklore designed for the lettered class (Le Sotré de Noël), with a play of a quite different genre. Morteville related a conflict from time immemorial between mountain woodcutters and the people of an industrial town, stirred up by the intrigues of an intermediary, the dealer in hides. This is the classic theme of the combination of self-interest and backwardness against peace. But it was also a parable of the missionary action of young educated elements in the service of the people. The son of the village leader, Laurent, has come as an apostle to preach peace and instruction to the mountaineers. He falls victim to the fanaticisms inflamed by the intrigues of the dealer in hides, but his sacrifice, along with that of the wife of the woodcutters’ leader, will later serve the cause of peace between the two tribes. The annual performances of the Bussang theatre thus swung between dark dramas of backwardness – of peasant cupidity or superstition kept up by intrigue – and fairy-tale or comic entertainments based on local tradition. By way of this double form, they almost all dealt with the same theme: the encounter between peasant values and those of the city, the good and the bad ways of sticking with tradition or taking on the values of others. Le Sotré de Noël has the son of a peasant, who has spent time in the city and returned as a small businessman, opposed to an old peasant whose earthly cupidity blinds him to urban progress while exposing him to the embezzlement of a seedy business agent from the neighbouring town. L’Héritage has the solitary hillside as backdrop to the horrifying drama of a farmer conquered by his wife’s greed. The woman forces him to drive away his natural son, and she even sets under way an intrigue that leads to the boy being murdered by his father. Chacun cherche son trésor has a prince on the quest for a happy man coming into contact with various representative figures of the village world: the superstition of a greedy farmer, the manoeuvres of a plotting sacristan, the good humour of a philosophical shoemaker ruined by these intrigues and the bourgeois pretensions of his wife, the bragging of a good-looking soldier who has returned to the village – all this in the context of a traditional young people’s festival. Liberté, set during the Revolution, contrasts a traditionalist father with his son who has tasted the air of the revolutionary city and killed his aristocratic master when this man raised his hand to him: the conflict of two great social forces, liberty and tradition, called to reconcile themselves in the struggle for the endangered fatherland; while Le Lundi de la Pentecôte has two young people whose schooling has made them foreigners in their native world act as pacifiers at the centre of a grotesque conflict of village Montagues and Capulets.

This oscillation between the familiar and the grandiose, in both its form and its content, constantly tells the same story: the conflict that always has to be appeased between a world of local roots that is also one of egoism and prejudice, and a world of civilized values in which the great voice of the Ideal is steeped in the speech and manner of the city. This sustained externality was expressed even in the financial arrangement that supported the Bussang theatre. Though performances were free, costs were covered by putting on each year an advance premiere of the play that would be offered the next season to the popular public, for a paying audience of connoisseurs and benefactors. One day each year, therefore, the Théâtre du Peuple performed its own metaphor and warded off its own impossibility.

The exception and the rule

For certain people, to be sure, this impotence was the result of infidelity. In an article in the Revue d’art dramatique, Adrien Souberbielle criticized Pottecher for having betrayed ‘Michelet’s wish’. He had replaced the ‘embodied legend’ of national deeds with a symbolist legend created by the writer’s arbitrary will. But ‘legend is not imposed on the crowd by the initiative of an intellectual aristocracy . . . Legend is rather the “summed-up history, focused in simple and sublime images” by the spirit of the people. It is this that provides the fund of popular thought, while everything else is for them a frivolous tale soon forgotten.’47

The annual summer festival at Bussang, therefore, did not resolve the question of popular theatre. At the very most, it could play a pioneering role in that other requirement of art for the people: the objective of decentralization that – depending on convictions – could appeal to the people of Michelet, the ‘milieux’ of Taine, or the idylls of folklore. In fact, Pottecher’s work was followed in a variety of places where the encounter between the people and the lettered class, and the shock between old and new, took place in various ways. At Ploujean, near Morlaix, a progressive mayor had to overcome the hostility of the clergy to have La Vie de saint Guénolé performed by a troupe of rural players, replacing the professionals in ‘unknown accents and a singular wild tongue’. This theatre, however, encouraged by Charles le Goffic, could still not have a truly revolutionary character, and the mediaevalist Gaston Paris expressed the desire that the Breton people’s ‘capacity to feel and convey the dramatic forms of religious ideas’ should serve today to express the union of men with and in God that was, according to Tolstoy, the religion of the age.48

In Grenoble, Émile Roux-Parassac, promoter of both popular theatre and popular mountaineering, turned his double passion to good use by having presented to the people the story of a guide saving the rich man who had seduced his fiancée.49 In Poitou, an ‘elite made up of members of the Ethnographic Society and a certain number of guests’ attended, in the ruins of the Château de Salbart, the performance of Bonne Fée in honour of the Niort poet, M. Émile du Tiers. But ‘things get known quickly in the provinces, particularly in the countryside. The rumour spread far and wide that a play was to be shown at Salbart and a fairy would appear. Great emotion! People rushed in from all sides. When the show began, there were at least 1,500 or 2,000 people sitting wherever they could.’50

Thus the Ethnographic Society’s theatre became de facto a popular theatre, despite the barrier of alexandrine lines. And under the impulse of a producer who took the name of Pierre Corneille as his pseudonym, this continued in the following years; they performed La Légende de Chambrille, another fairy tale acted by two intelligent and pretty working women in a deep and narrow gorge of the Puy d’Enfer, and Erinna, prêtresse d’Hésus, a Gallic and patriotic tragedy, in which the actors were enlightened amateurs and the characters were villagers.

At all events, these attempts at ‘decentralization’ could not resolve the problem of a Parisian popular theatre. The Revue d’art dramatique, on the margin of the still young administrative prehistory of this theatre, took a bold initiative in 1899 and established a competition for the best popular theatre project. The successful candidate, Eugène Morel, showed a contrario the ineffectiveness of popular summer festivals. The point was not to create, by the magic of theatre, the moment of a one-off relationship between a work and an audience. Theatre was a site not of communion but of education; and education implied a certain discipline. It was necessary to start by ensuring the first precondition for any serious schooling, assiduousness. This formed habits and created a particular preparedness, rather than transmitting a specific content:

It is only by seeing fine things that taste is formed; education demands repetition. To act on an audience effectively, one must have it constantly in hand. Occasional festivals may make more of a show, but their influence is zero. A random audience, attracted by one spectacle and repelled by another . . . does not advance. On the contrary, it is attracted only by flattering its worst instincts.51

In order for the people to be ‘regularly summoned to beauty’, the solution lay not in free entry – a vestige of the one-off performances that the monarch would decree for the people – but rather in subscription, a form of aristocratic attendance at the great dramatic theatres that needed to be popularized. Subscription made the theatre a familiar place, in which one rediscovered one’s seats, neighbours, and habits:

Once we have obtained, just once, the decision to subscribe, the worker will go to the theatre off his own bat, will let himself go there. There is nothing extraordinary about this; it is simply habit. It costs him no more to go than not to go. He arrives, and is happy to rediscover the people who were there last week, the actors he knows, etc. The theatre for him is a little business that he follows; there is ‘interest’ involved.52

To strengthen this aspect, a collective membership drive was organized, and a restaurant reserved close to the theatre where it was possible to dine en famille, a newspaper that gave the emotion of the theatre an educational extension, exhibitions in the foyer, musical interludes supplied by local bands, plenary meetings of subscribers who judged plays presented in a competition, just as in ancient Athens, balls where the true art of dance was given pride of place, perhaps even open-air performances in summer and little trips – in short, everything that could ‘create a normal current, a permanent tendency, towards beauty’. In this way, the audience was kept sufficiently well in hand that the level of spectacles could be slowly but steadily raised.

Halfway between activist enthusiasm and administrative constraint, Eugène Morel rediscovered the logic of Léon de Laborde, and defined, in the wake of his nationalized Schillerism, what could be called a trade-unionized Schillerism. His theatre association would quite naturally seek a certain clientele, that of professional organizations. The common conditions of work in a particular trade were eminently suited to establish audiences of subscribers. The character of festive conviviality would be thereby strengthened – once a year, the trade association could have its own review there – as well as its educational character: a condition would be met that was desirable for any school, a ‘public of equal intellectual level’. It would thus be possible, on each occasion, and according to the specific level of each occupational body, ‘to know in what language to address it and the means to be taken to raise its artistic understanding by a degree’.53

This arrangement, however, raised a certain question. It was uncertain whether the associative structure was a means for educating the people to beauty, or whether the establishment of a certain regime of honest sociability was not the final purpose of the institution. This second hypothesis was suggested by Morel’s curious indifference to the question: ‘What shall we put on?’ That, he said provocatively, did not matter to us. Aesthetic education was first of all a revolution of habitus in the form of a Pascalian conversion. What was needed above all was to come and trustingly admire, and the rest would follow: ‘Admiration is not a state in which a fine performance immerses us, it is almost always a preliminary state, a disposition that the spectator has brought.’54

In short, the motor of education was suggestion, and this was the particular aim that official support could promote:

The government has to help us to say: ‘By coming to the Théâtre Populaire you honour your fatherland and yourself. You are going to hear fine things! You are going to hear beautiful things! The things you are going to hear are beautiful. Make the effort. You need to come to feel that this is beautiful.’

And if this was not the case?

We have said: it does not matter to us what is played. If our project is good, then it is so whatever is played.55

What theatre for what people?

Beyond any provocation, Romain Rolland expressed the voice of those who, believing less in the theatre than in the people, wanted to know what the people should be offered. He also preferred the mobilization of energies to the formation of habits. The notion of energy lay at the centre of the three commandments he set out for the popular theatre. This should be first of all a relaxation. That ruled out Wagnerian ‘sicknesses’ that the elite could keep for themselves, but also works that were too gloomy for many a friend of the people, such as Tolstoy’s Power of Darkness. Sadness should be ruled out in the sense of a diminution of vital power. The second law, in fact, was that this theatre should be a source of energy, a ‘bath of action’ in which the people, to prepare themselves for action, found in the poet ‘a good travelling companion, alert, jovial, heroic if need be, on whose arm they could lean, and whose good humour made them forget the fatigues of the road’.56 We should note this theatrical origin of the concept of fellow-traveller, which Rolland would apply to politics before Sartre did. Finally, the road in question was that of understanding oneself and the world: the theatre should be a guiding light for intelligence. In this production of light from the relaxation of the material, it was energy that held the decisive place. And this meant that almost all classical theatre was useless for the theatre of the people. ‘No beauty, no grandeur, could take the place of youth and life.’57 The ‘beautiful death’, which clever lecturers sought to inspire with new life by comparison with tales of everyday crime, should thus be opposed by a theatre of creation, bound up with the sufferings of life but also exalting its joys.

Romain Rolland, however, found hardly a trace of this in the activist or commercial attempts that sought to anticipate the interminable official gestation of the popular theatre. The activist side was represented in particular by the theatre established on the premises of the Université Populaire in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. This university was originally the project of a group of Positivist workers, who met for the first time in 1886, in the back room of a wine shop. Its organizer, Georges Deherme, gave it the title of Coopération des Idées. In 1889 it was able to set up its theatre in the premises of a former café-concert, and inaugurate it with Liberté, the only play of Maurice Pottecher that glorified the Michelet style of legend. Its producer believed this theatre could only come alive by creating its own dramatic literature. Creation was ‘the only sign of life. Anything that simply reproduces and copies, without generating, is simply a more or less skilful machine, a soulless automaton.’58

In actual fact, the few creations of this theatre – for example L’École des juges, a ‘rural comedy’, or Dis-donc Ugène, did not seem to lead the public very far along the path of the Idea. They were also drowned in an eclectic choice that largely reproduced all the theatrical tendencies played on other stages, from Courteline to Porto-Riche, or Labiche to Breix and Mirbeau, with Molière and more rarely Corneille in the form of extracts. This theatre was caught up in the decline that rapidly affected the popular universities, in which, according to Rolland, the public came to look, politely applauded the lecturers, but felt a boredom that was very soon fatal to the project.

The other attempts to found popular theatres experienced a success inversely proportional to the social radicalism of their project. At the Théâtre Moncey, Robert Beaulieu, a former student of Antoine, posted his colours to the mast with his first creation: L’Affaire Grisel by Lucien Besnard tells how a rich industrialist forces his mistress, who works for the post office, to have an abortion. The foetus, hidden in a wood, is discovered, and a teaching assistant who has recently arrived in the town and is cohabiting outside of marriage is accused. The condemned teacher is saved in extremis by the remorse of the industrialist, who kills himself after confessing his crime. This dark register seems to have had only limited success with the public of the Batignolles – petty-bourgeois, according to Rolland. The theatre closed its doors after just six months.

The Belleville theatre, founded by Ernest Berny, another student of Antoine, also proclaimed Romain Rolland’s three principles. But it knew how to dispense with them when circumstances dictated, which brought it a greater prosperity, based on a more eclectic repertoire, before it was itself taken over by a regular impresario.

For Rolland, however, these attempts at popular theatre all suffered from a still more worrying prejudice than the mistakes or half-measures of their promoters: the suspicion of the working-class population towards spectacles described as ‘for the people’. For the working people of Paris, this was synonymous with a poor-quality entertainment for the poor:

The worst enemy was the people. They didn’t want to be a people. They said to M. Beaulieu: ‘People yourself! We’re just as good bourgeois as you . . .’ To bring them in, the theatre should have been called ‘Théâtre de la Bourgeoisie’.59

This was, in Rolland’s view, the evil that struck the project of popular theatre at its root – the disappearance of its people:

The demoralizing atmosphere of the city of luxury, pleasures and scandals has sapped its strength. To be more exact, there are two peoples in Paris: one that, once it has emerged from its misery, is immediately attracted and absorbed by the bourgeoisie; the other that is defeated and abandoned by its more fortunate brothers, and dwells in its wretched condition. The former no longer wants a popular theatre; the latter is unable to attend it, being harassed by work and overcome by fatigue.60

If the policy of the bourgeoisie was to absorb one of these peoples with a view to destroying the other, that of the promoters of popular theatre had to be to weld together again the two divided pieces of the popular body. The socio-cultural barrier now lay within the people themselves. By the same token, however, the powers of the theatre were now annulled. As Jaurès saw it, it was politics that would have to give the theatre a people worthy of the name. ‘Only a new society will be able to raise the new theatre.’61

The end of Bastille Day

But this limited effectiveness of the theatre was perhaps a limit of the theatre itself. The people’s theatre once more found itself being no more than the substitute for a life whose image could only be provided by the great civic festivals of the united and victorious nation:

The theatre presupposes a poor and disturbed life, which seeks in dreams a refuge against its cares. If we were happier and more free, we would no longer hunger for it. Life would then be our most glorious spectacle. Without claiming ever to attain an ideal of happiness, which recedes in proportion as one advances, let us dare to say that humanity’s effort seemingly tends to restrain the field of art and expand that of life – or rather to make art an adornment of life, rather than a closed world and an imaginary life. A happy and free people need festivals more than theatre; they will be always their own finest spectacle.62

This helps us to understand the double tension that had marked the ‘theatre of the Revolution’ that Rolland sought to develop, from the last years of the nineteenth century through to the eve of the Second World War. We could say that this whole construction was inspired by a single thought: that of the cunning of reason, its triumph passing by way of the blind forces of the people and the caricatures of goddesses and festivals of Reason. But this tirelessly repeated theme, particularly in Le Triomphe de la raison devoted to the fall of the Girondins, or Le Jeu de l’amour et de la mort, on the fate of Condorcet, led towards two distinct forms of theatre.

The first of these was represented by Le 14 juillet, for which Rolland wrote two different endings, one designed for regular production and the other for a popular festival complete with orchestra and choirs. The object of this expanded stage was ‘to realize the union of the public and the work, to lay down a bridge between the hall and the stage, to make the action of a drama a real action’.63 The main difference, as far as the text itself was concerned, would consist in the audience being directly addressed by Camille Desmoulins, Marat or Hoche, who summoned them to continue what they had begun. This could not proceed for long without the entrance of a new power onto the stage: ‘Music, the tyrannical power of sound that stirs the passive crowds; this magical illusion that suppresses time and gives what it touches an absolute character.’

If music took back its prior position, this was at the price of a reversal of roles. Music was now to substitute its illusion for the insufficient ‘sincerity’ of the theatre. Its role here was one of saturation. It had to be continuous, in order to ‘fill all the silences that a theatre crowd could never succeed in filling completely, that occur despite everything between its cries and destroy the illusion of continuous life’.64

But the power of a musical theme filling the gaps in both performance and life would not suffice by itself to realize the new principle of popular art – ‘the people itself becoming actor in the popular festival’.65 A new disposition was needed for the orchestra and choirs: the hymns sung by the characters on stage would be taken up by one or several groups of voices in the audience. And, after Hoche’s speech to the people, the same hymn would be ‘taken up at every level of the hall, on all sides, by groups of voices, small choirs, even little bands surrounding the public and morally forcing them to sing along’.66 At the climax, the choirs were joined by the sound of trumpets, by dances and rounds, ‘the tumult of a people and an army’.67

A great national festival . . . Romain Rolland and the champions of a popular theatre sought in vain in 1907 to have Le 14 juillet staged on the square in front of the Hôtel de Ville. Seven years later, other fanfares of unity would resound, those of the union sacrée. The energy of Louis Lumet and several other activists for popular theatre would finally find its culmination there. Rolland, for his part, decided to remain ‘above the battle’. And after the Great War was over, he drew the same lessons from it as did many others. In a theatre that no longer claimed to be popular, he pursued, from one play to the next, his demonstration of the fellow-travelling philosophy: reason on the march through the folly and crimes of revolutionary dictatorship; the necessity of individuals such as Condorcet perishing so that the peoples, instructed by their educational plans, would allow them to triumph over their executioners and would thus become worthy of having their theatre.

If the theatre dreamed of in the nineteenth century was never realized, it at least developed the philosophy of the twentieth century.

The ‘mecropolis’

The popular theatre had thus pronounced its own death certificate shortly before the government signed its act of birth. What was out of the running from now on, however, was the idea that a people could provide the principle of a new art. And equally finished was the attempt to create a dramatic literature inspired by the principle of this theatre. The Revue d’art dramatique had its own way of noting this death. A few years after having rewarded the project of Eugène Morel – which remained in the files – it had the idea of holding a new competition, designed this time to select the best plays that could constitute the repertoire of a popular theatre. The result plunged the Revue into an abyss of meditation. The concern to judge their playscripts submitted in terms of literary quality led to three prizes being awarded: the first to Le Pain, a social tragedy in three acts by Henri Ghéon, the second to L’Asinaire, adapted from Plautus’ Asinaria in free verse by Henri Dargel, and the third to Pierre Clésio’s Electra, in imitation antique verse. ‘It is bitterly ironic’, concluded the Revue, ‘how in a competition whose proclaimed ambition was to stimulate or discover a new form of dramatic art, two of the three plays selected are adaptations from the antique’.68 The evidence however had to be accepted, that the most socially interesting plays were unworthy of an award.

The Revue d’art dramatique now decided to turn the page, and become the ‘openly practical’ organ of the Association des Auteurs Dramatiques. Devoted above all now to championing young writers, from 1908 it was addressed only to members of this Association on payment of their subscription.

Before embarking on its official existence, the popular theatre had thus completed a period of mourning over both its form and its content. The humble doctrine of the civil service was now imposed, which Firmin Gémier, finally charged with organizing the Théâtre National Populaire, would make his own: the function of popular theatre was to familiarize those who did not attend the Comédie-Française or the Opéra with the classical masterpieces, in good productions at a modest price. Even if its pedagogic doctrine still accepted on the horizon the prospect of great popular festivals:

Before leading the crowds at the great artistic festivals that we dream of, it is indispensable to pursue their education, to familiarize them with the works of the repertory. Let us start by imbuing them with the taste for beauty, followed by the need for it, by popularizing those works that form the summits of literature and music . . . This programme may risk seeming narrow in the eyes of people in a hurry. But one must learn to read before studying philosophy.69

We know now what art was suitable for the people. We also know what made up the people that was suitable for art. As witness the active correspondence of Firmin Gémier with schools, barracks, local authorities and firms that promised, in return for certain reductions, to send their populations to profit from this ‘work of decentralization (!) and moral education’ that would popularize classics that were ‘far too neglected’, combat ‘the pernicious influence of the cinema’ on children, and be extremely useful to the latter ‘with a view to their preparation for the school-leaving certificate’.70 After seventy years of prehistory, the adjective ‘popular’ had finally acquired a fixed meaning, i.e. ‘designed for schools’. But some people already said about the man and woman of the people in the nineteenth century, that they could be more or less equated with a school pupil of thirteen years old. It was under these auspices that in November 1920, the Théâtre National Populaire opened its doors at the Trocadéro, under the wing of a prestigious actor and enthusiast for itinerant theatre who had nothing to do there but welcome the stars – or the understudies – of four major theatres, for some sixty or so productions a year.

A posthumous birth, about which a number of warnings had certainly been raised. It is true that these came from a rather suspect quarter. Against this project, vigorously supported by the trade unions and left political parties, the ‘moderates’ claimed to have a better understanding of the people. The workers, they said, would never leave Belleville or the Gobelins on return from work for a ‘popular’ theatre located in the midst of the bourgeois districts. Popular theatre had to reach its public on their home ground. And such a theatre did indeed exist: the old local theatres where workers used to go to see the melodramas after their run on the boulevard, but where they could also be brought to appreciate works of a higher class. Evidence of this was the work accomplished by Edmond Feuillet, a former lead in the Opéra-Comique, who, to save the people from the café-concert, took over the ‘people’s theatre’ of Belleville and the little theatres of Montparnasse, Grenelle and the Gobelins. Here Feuillet produced comic opera, drama, opera, vaudeville and operetta. He himself worked at all the trades of the stage, including that of electrician. He recalled how, during the First World War, he played while the bombs were falling, helping to maintain the morale of working class populations, and confident enough, if the means were at hand, to stage at the same time Britannicus at Montparnasse, Le Prophète at the Gobelins, La Closerie des Genêts at Grenelle, and La Mascotte at Belleville. For fifty years, he said, ‘families have handed down their numbered seats at Belleville and the Gobelins; they’re not going to change this’.71 Unless these theatres fell victim to the monopolies and were forced to give way to the competition that slowly transformed the majority of them in the popular districts and provincial towns into music halls, cinemas or supermarkets. A campaign accordingly developed that depicted these little theatres, the last vestiges of a certain popular life in which ‘the operetta that diverts and the drama that improves’72 were still performed, as victims of a double offensive, wedged between the commercial invasion of the cinema and the managerial illusions of a centralized popular theatre. During the course of this campaign, a strange typo occurred in an article criticizing the still young Théâtre National Populaire. The Trocadéro, this argued, was suitable only for a company headquarters or a gala performance:

For regular performances, it is a distant mecropolis [sic!], inaccessible and devoid of attractions, in which echoes fall in silence and scatter in the void. The Théâtre Populaire can stop there on tour. But it should certainly not settle there. It would succumb to the place.73

But it did not actually succumb. It continued to live there the death of its idea, just as long as it could resurrect each new season its suicidal Werther. In order for it to rediscover more conquering ambitions, the Resistance had to revive, for a while, the people of Michelet.