Читать книгу The Melodramatic Thread - James R. Lehning - Страница 10

On June 8, 1794, at the height of the Terror, the leaders of France and the people of Paris celebrated a Festival of the Supreme Being in central Paris. With Jacques-Louis David as impresario, the houses of Paris were decorated with tree branches, flowers, and tricolored flags to demonstrate the productivity of the soil of France and the glory of the Republic. The Tuileries Gardens, which would be the site of the first part of the festival, featured a statue representing atheism, with the inscription “only hope of the foreigner” on it. Across the Seine, the Champs de Mars, the site of previous revolutionary festivals, had been renamed the Champs de la Réunion. In the immense field rose a high mountain that would be the focal point for the second half of the celebration.

The Festival of the Supreme Being began with a cannon salvo summoning men and women from each section of the city to the Tuileries. Mothers carrying roses symbolizing mercy, young girls with baskets filled with flowers to symbolize youth, and men and boys with tree branches to represent the masculine virtues of strength and liberty all converged on the Tuileries Gardens. They were met by members of the Convention, with Maximilien Robespierre, in his role as president of the Convention, at their head. The Conventionnels also participated in the symbolism of the festival, holding shocks of wheat, flowers, and fruits.¹

Robespierre welcomed the processions from around the city with a speech celebrating France’s devotion to the Supreme Being, the source of all that was good, including the Republic and the liberty written in men’s hearts. In spite of the ongoing war, the Terror, and the need for revolutionary vigilance, he urged his fellow citizens to give themselves over to joy on this day of festivities. This speech was followed by a performance by the Opera of Theodore Désorgues’s song “Father of the Universe, Supreme Intelligence,” set to music by François-Joseph Gossec. Robespierre then set fire to the statue of Atheism, which disappeared in flames to be replaced by a statue of Wisdom. Interpreting the pageant in a second speech, Robespierre described the disappearance of atheism and with it “all the crimes and unhappiness of the world.” Only wisdom, he told his audience, could lead to the prosperity of empires.

After the ceremony at the Tuileries the members of the Convention marched in procession across the river to the Champs, surrounded by tricolored banners and children with flowers. A coach in the middle of this procession carried tools and goods made around the country, a plow covered with wheat and oak branches, and a printing press. These were placed next to a statue of Liberty, to indicate that liberty was necessary for the arts to flourish. Robespierre was at the head of this procession, exposing him not only to the cheers of the crowd but also to hecklers who accused him of wanting to be a god.²

At the Champs de la Réunion the Conventionnels assembled at the highest point of the mountain constructed in the middle of the field, while a hymn to the Supreme Being and a symphony were performed. The groups of men and women sang while children threw their flowers into the air. Young men drew their sabers and swore to be victorious, while elderly men gave them a paternal blessing. The festival ended with another artillery salvo, representing the national vengeance, and a fraternal embrace by all of the participants and the cry of “Vive la République!” Impressed by its perception of the festival—the beauty of the weather, the decorations, the joy of the people, the unanimity of the sentiments expressed, the speeches, and “the cordiality and order” that reigned during the ceremony—Le Moniteur summarized the events as “the most beautiful festival whose memory could be perpetuated in the pomp of the Revolution.”³

Mona Ozouf has shown how the Festival of the Supreme Being marked clear divisions in the politics of the Republic. While endorsing equality of origins and celebrating agriculture, a “festival of dairy products, fruit and bread,” it articulated support for the Republic against radicals on the left who supported the radical dechristianization that had been portrayed in the Cult and Festival of Reason the previous winter.⁴ But it was also about reconciliation and national unity. The symbolically destroyed Atheism was replaced by Wisdom. The national representatives in the Convention were prominently featured. The ceremonies were open to, and incorporated, the entire population of revolutionary Paris.⁵ The festival was therefore not only a description of the virtue of the Republic and the evil of its enemies, but also an attempt to consolidate the Revolution as part of the patrimony of France in a unified Republic of all the French. Yet, while Robespierre might urge his listeners to set aside their political concerns for a day of festival, reminders of the internal and external enemies of the Republic remained present, not only in the heckling he received but also in the need to mark the day as a hiatus in the domestic and foreign conflicts of the Republic.

At the same time as Robespierre and his allies were performing the Festival of the Supreme Being on the Champs de la Réunion, Parisian actors were performing plays for audiences in theaters in central Paris and on the Boulevard du Temple. Some of these performances were closely bound up with the events of the Revolution. Marie-Joseph Chénier’s Charles IX, ou l’Ecole des rois, first performed on November 4, 1789, seemed to express the goals of the first year of the Revolution for reform of the monarchical state.⁶ Jean-Louis Laya’s L’Ami des lois appeared in January 1793 during the trial of Louis XVI and portrayed on stage the difficult task of reconciling Old Regime noble status with the new society created by the Revolution.⁷ In October 1793, Sylvain Maréchal’s Le Jugement dernier des rois reinforced the emphasis on popular democracy and republicanism that the Terror brought to the fore.⁸ In the words of theater historian Michèle Root-Berstein, “Liberty walked among the actors on stage and exhorted the French to brave deeds and republican ideals.”⁹

But while Chénier, Laya, Maréchal, and others dramatized revolutionary conflicts, most plays performed in revolutionary Paris appeared at first sight—and to later historians—to have little to do with the Revolution. Three years before the Festival of the Supreme Being, in March 1791, one of the successors to the Comédie-Française of the Old Regime, the Théâtre de la Nation, performed a new drama by one of the most popular playwrights of the period, Monvel, entitled Les Victimes cloîtrées. The play was popular, but it made only a few overt political references. The cast of characters in the play included a heroine, Eugènie, whose virtue was threatened; an evil abbot, Père Laurent, and his henchmen; a noblewoman in the clutches of the Catholic Church, Mme de St-Alban; a distraught (and not particularly helpful) bourgeois, Dorval, who was in love with the heroine; and a collection of representatives of the forces of progress and Enlightenment, notably Mme de St-Alban’s brother, M. de Francheville. In the end, Eugènie is rescued from apparent death by the not particularly honorable device of a rebellious monk reading the private correspondence of the abbot.¹⁰

Monvel’s play was more interesting as a diversion from the events of the Revolution than anything else, and its plot places it in a long line of French plays of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that feature imprisoned characters. But like the Festival of the Supreme Being, it described a world divided between virtue and threatening evil, a rescue not in heroic fashion, as in classical tragedy, but through questionable means, and an attempt to reconstruct a unified world that the events of the play had disrupted. And while civic ceremonies such as the Festival of the Supreme Being and stage plays such as Les Victimes cloîtrées depended to some extent on verbal articulation of their meaning through the speeches of political leaders such as Robespierre and characters such as Eugènie and Dorval, they were also representations that used different kinds of stagecraft—sets, costumes, effects such as the burning statue of Atheism—to get across their message.

There are few questions of greater importance in the early twenty-first century than those related to the development of democratic political systems, in which the exercise of power is broadly shared and limited. Political scientists recently gained interest in the process of democratization in the aftermath of dramatic changes around the world between the mid-1970s and the 1990s, a period Samuel Huntington described as the “third wave” of democratization. Following a first wave that occurred over the century between 1828 and 1926, and a second in the aftermath of World War II, the third wave began in 1974 with the Portuguese Revolution. It continued to the fall of the Eastern European Peoples’ Democracies and the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1989–91, and into the 1990s.¹¹ Subsequent research has speculated about the end of the third wave, about a reverse wave in which some of the new democracies would revert to authoritarian government, and about the possibility of a fourth wave.¹²

This growing concern with democratization processes reflects on the past experiences of European countries such as France as they moved from absolute monarchies to more democratic political systems. The history of this process in modern France revolves around a handful of significant themes: the impact of the disruptions of the revolutionary upheaval of 1789 and the 1790s; the establishment after 1789 of a political regime based on popular support; the creation of links between the French nation and that regime; and the struggles that resulted from divisions about the nature of the regime, especially the direct heir of the Revolution, the Republic. The conjunction of the Festival of the Supreme Being and a popular Parisian play suggests the way in which this book seeks to contribute to our understanding of that history. Examining public ceremonies and theatrical performances in tandem leads to an explicitly interdisciplinary approach, drawing on insights from the study of political culture and the methods of cultural and literary studies to understand the meaning and power of public performance. In particular, I will suggest that both political culture and theatrical performances drew heavily on a particular form of performance, melodrama, and that this “melodramatic thread” in French political culture provided a significant model for the ways in which French men and women constructed the political life of their country.

Political scientists who have studied the process of democratization in a variety of chronological and national contexts have pointed to a number of different factors that seem to have an impact on the process either of establishment of democratic institutions or on their persistence.¹³ Often these emphasize elite behavior.¹⁴ Larry Diamond and Juan Linz more broadly list eleven different categories of “sources of democratic progress and failure” in their 1989 survey of democracy in Latin America. These included leadership, institutions, the strength of the state, civil society and associational life, socioeconomic development, cleavages of class and inequality, historical factors, economic policies, international factors, and political culture.¹⁵ Other studies have cited structural factors such as economic development, dependency and world-system role, class structure, democratic diffusion, resource distribution, and actors as the most important factors.¹⁶ Almost all of these explanatory or functionalist models of democratization give some place to the role of political culture. As one of the most important political scientists to focus on democratization in recent years, Larry Diamond, remarked, “few problems are riper for illumination from the political culture perspective than the sources of democratic emergence, consolidation, and persistence,” and “democratic consolidation can … only be fully understood as encompassing a shift in political culture.”¹⁷

It is striking, however, the extent to which different disciplines have examined political culture in different ways. Social scientists have tended to view it in terms similar to the way it was originally defined in the 1960s, as an “over-arching set of social values” or “the system of empirical beliefs, expressive symbols, and values which defines the situation in which political action takes place.”¹⁸ Many social science approaches to political culture assume it to be static, giving it an inherently conservative tone. For example, many studies of democratization in Latin America have assumed that an authoritarian political culture in the region made the development of democracies there virtually impossible. Giuseppe Di Palma’s emphasis on the role of elites in presenting democracy as a viable alternative in a crisis of an authoritarian regime is one response to this.¹⁹ Another has been Larry Diamond’s insistence that political culture could change in response to social and economic change, social and civic mobilization, institutional practice, historical experience, and international diffusion.²⁰

But scholars in other disciplines have viewed the concept of political culture differently. In a formulation that is typical of the approaches of historians and other students of cultural studies influenced by the “linguistic turn” of the 1980s, Keith Baker defined political culture as the “discourses and practices” through which individuals and groups articulate, implement, and enforce the claims they make on each other.²¹ This study seeks to bring to social scientists’ concern with democratization an understanding of political culture, and ways of examining it in the past, that reflect the latter approach. In particular, I will emphasize the discursive aspects of political culture, a view that allows us to see how ceremonies and theatrical performances could contribute to the French experience with the process of democratization and create a particularly French way in which this process occurred.

To make the link between political culture and performance, we may start with one of the most influential arguments about these processes in European history, and one that has already had a significant impact on our view of the French version of this process. This came from Jürgen Habermas in a work that, while first published in German in 1962, gained influence in France and the United States only in the 1980s. In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas argued that a rational bourgeois public sphere, articulated in settings such as coffee shops and newspapers, laid the foundation for the development of nineteenth-century liberal democracies.²² While very limited in Habermas’s original formulation, this view has been extended to take into account the obvious ceremonial aspects of those political systems.²³ We might go further and note that if, as Gary Thurston suggests, the public sphere elaborated by Habermas describes the “thinking, discussing part of society that took literature, theater, music, and museums seriously,” then the representations of the public sphere, and the theatrical performances that in France had sought since before the Revolution to “arm the people with reason” and break down cultural barriers between the elite and the people, are an important aspect of the development of a democratic civil society.²⁴ Public ceremonies, in this view, have an educational effect similar to that of the coffee houses and press that Habermas emphasized, increasing the rationality of public discourse.

But if we follow this argument through several disciplinary perspectives, it becomes immediately apparent that it raises as many questions as it resolves. Including performance as a part of a democratic polity seems to assume that performance has a transparent ability to communicate understanding without distortion. In the eighteenth century, this question was at the heart of a dispute between Denis Diderot and Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the nature of representation, a dispute framed in both aesthetic and moral terms. Diderot thought that there was a clear distinction between the representation and the represented. But for Rousseau, representation needed to be as close as possible to what was being represented. This was a dispute with more far-reaching implications than the realms of painting or acting. The connection Rousseau posited between representation and reality—the “navel or spindle which connects the represented to its representation,” in Frank Ankersmit’s words—opened the possibility of the represented being corrupted by its representation, a possibility that Diderot’s formulation did not allow.²⁵ In this view, the performance or representation of public reason might be not a source of “reasoned, progressive consensus formation,” as Habermas hoped, but “an occasion for the manipulation of popular opinion,” the means by which individual interests, far from being banished from the public sphere, become the coin of politics, a perversion of the rational, critical operation of the public sphere.²⁶

The potential for deception and perversion of political democracy through theatrical methods has hung over the efforts to create such political systems, ironically reversing the optimism of Diderot and the pessimism of Rousseau. In recent years complete separation of representations from any underlying reality, such as Diderot optimistically posited, has been suggested as the most important danger to democracy. This was the argument Guy Debord made about the postwar society of France, a society that he called in 1967 La Société du Spectacle. Debord emphasized the way in which spectacles of all kinds worked to justify the existing system of economic, social, and political relations and the alienation that they generated for the individual. They turned all life into appearance rather than reality, a “material reconstruction of religious illusion.”²⁷ With the spectacular reconstructing reality as it speaks of it, reality is completely foreign to the integrated spectacular.²⁸

The broad brush strokes of Habermas and Debord inevitably leave scholars in disciplines with more empirical methodologies somewhat unconvinced. The art historians Michael Fried and Thomas Crow have explored aspects of visual culture in eighteenth-century France and related these aesthetic developments to the limited public culture of the late Old Regime and the Revolution.²⁹ Other art historians have claimed that the nineteenth century increased the significance of these visual aspects of French culture. In his study of the relationship between Impressionism and modernism, T. J. Clark closely connects visuality and modernism, arguing that “the circumstances of modernism were not modern, and only became so by being given the forms called ‘spectacle.’” Late-nineteenth-century Paris was distinguished for Clark by the “sheer density of signals conveyed and understood, and the highly coded nature of the conveyance.” In this formulation, it is not just that Paris was the location for public ceremonies and theatrical performances. It is also the ways in which these ceremonies and performances involved “contact and transaction, contests of nuance and misreading.”³⁰ There is a history interwoven with this view, in which the narrative describes the intensification of the symbolic aspect of Parisian culture. This history was punctuated by a nineteenth-century form of viewing, the flâneur. This (male) strolling bourgeois figure who used the modern city as the object of his explorations was complemented by a feminine form of viewing in the increasingly commodified world of department stores.³¹

Paralleling the concerns of historians of art and capitalist consumption are descriptions of the many public ceremonies, mass public meetings, parades, and party rallies of popular nineteenth-century politics as a part of the public sphere and as a way of creating support for the state that organized the events. Mona Ozouf’s study of Revolutionary festivals was a landmark work not only for inventorying the important ceremonies of the Revolution but also for suggesting their contribution to the creation of an inclusive Revolutionary movement and their expression of the ideals of the Revolution. Avner Ben-Amos has written a history of republican funerals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, carrying Ozouf’s thesis about the consolidating effects of such public ceremonies forward in time. Matthew Truesdell has described the public ceremonies of the Second Empire, and Olivier Ihl the festivals of the Third Republic.³² Other historians have examined events such as the fête nationale and the centennial and bicentennial celebrations of the Revolution.³³ In a related vein, the works of Maurice Agulhon on the symbolism of Marianne have emphasized the importance of visual representations as companions to verbal descriptions of republicanism.³⁴

Historians of other countries have also examined public ceremonies as a way of understanding political culture. A series of studies of English ceremonies suggested the importance of events such as royal coronations in creating English national identity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.³⁵ American historians have shown how festivals, especially those celebrating the events and ideals of the Revolution in France, were used in the American debate over the nature of the American republic and the legacy of the American Revolution. These celebrations also provided opportunities for groups such as women, the poor, and African Americans to find a public place denied them in celebrations such as the 4th of July or Washington’s Birthday.³⁶ Celebrations in the early Republic were also, as one Jeffersonian orator said in 1806, “so many engines, made subservient to electioneering purposes.”³⁷ In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries parades and other public performances were an integral part of an increasingly democratic American politics.³⁸

Russian historians have also described the use of a number of cultural forms, including poster art, spectacles, and theater, to rally support to the New Regime in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917.³⁹ Spectacular public festivals in the Bolshevik regime offered an “aesthetic equivalent to the revolution in politics,” a parallel that Lenin himself noted. Influenced by popular carnival theater, the organizers of public festivals in Russia broke down the separation between theatrical performances intended for elite groups and those with a more popular audience.⁴⁰ These performances also marked the moment of Revolutionary origin. A dramatization of The Storming of the Winter Palace presented on its third anniversary on November 7, 1920, on the site of the original event, Palace Square in Petrograd, utilized festival and theatrics to perform a foundational myth for the Soviet regime. Reflecting Rousseau’s fears of distortion and Debord’s insistence that performances turned appearance into reality, the performance suspended historical recollections of the event, and instead created a new version, “history the way it should have been.” In a staging similar to avant-garde theater, the spectators in Petrograd in 1920 were placed in the middle of the action. The actor playing Alexander Kerensky contributed to this effect by stepping across the proscenium to ride in a car across the square to the entrance of the palace. The play could be performed only on the site of Palace Square and the Winter Palace, which reprised their roles as sets for the revolutionary drama. As James von Geldern notes, this is not theater as ritual, but a theatricalization of life itself,⁴¹ similar to what Debord called “the society of spectacle.”

Other scholars have more directly linked public ceremonies to concerns about the effects of modern consumer culture. Maurice Samuels’s analysis of early-nineteenth-century French novels and theater, for example, emphasizes the commodification of spectacle and the “obsession” with the recent past that marked early-nineteenth-century French culture. For Samuels, this is a way in which French culture dealt with the aftermath of the French Revolution of 1789 and its subsequent events.⁴² The cultural historian Vanessa Schwartz argues “that a culture that became ‘more literate’ also became more visual as word and image generated the spectacular realities” of the late nineteenth century.⁴³ Schwartz links this to Charles Baudelaire’s flâneur, in which “the spectator assumes the position of being able to be part of the spectacle and yet command it at the same time.” The effect of this, she says, was “the collective participation in a culture in which representations proliferated to such an extent that they became interchangeable with reality.”⁴⁴

While Schwartz describes a position of power for the flâneur, the strongest theme in these varied approaches has been an emphasis on ceremonies and spectacles as instruments of social control, a way in which a dominant state, or consumer capitalism, consolidates support. In the end, then, this emphasizes the mystification of an externalized “reality” about the exercise of power through the use of symbols. But this (Durkheimian or Marxian) approach too narrowly construes the relationship between symbol and politics by creating an artificial distinction between the domains of symbol and politics. The anthropologist Victor Turner argued a generation ago that “every type of cultural performance, including ritual, ceremony, carnival, theater, and poetry, is explanation and explication of life itself.”⁴⁵ For Turner these performances are metacommentaries, stories a group tells about itself, “an interpretive reenactment of its experience,”⁴⁶ a means by which both actors and spectators reevaluate the social order, and are transformed in the process.⁴⁷ At about the same time, Clifford Geertz wrote about the “theater state” of nineteenth-century Bali, emphasizing the “expressive nature of the Balinese state,” and its use of spectacle and ceremony in the dramatization of public issues. The state, in Geertz’s reading of Bali, “was a device for the enactment of mass ritual.” And while he contrasted the “theater state” in Bali, in which ceremonies were the central function of the state, with Western states, in which, he claimed, such ceremonies are peripheral to the exercise of power, he in the end suggested that an emphasis on politics as a “domain of social action” misunderstands the role of ideas. These last are not, he argues, “unobservable mental stuff. They are envehicled meanings” that must be interpreted. “The real,” he concludes, “is as imagined as the imaginary,” and the performances of the state were “neither illusions nor lies, neither sleight of hand nor make-believe. They were what there was.”⁴⁸ More recently, and more relevant to our concern with democratization, Laurence Whitehead has suggested the use of a dramatic metaphor as a heuristic device for the study of democratic transitions, even while suggesting the importance of theatrical techniques for the success of leaders in the process. Theater thus was no longer a metaphor for Whitehead, but rather a fundamental part of the process of democratic transition as it was led by men such as Nelson Mandela, Václav Havel, and Boris Yeltsin.⁴⁹

While the concerns of Rousseau and Diderot continue to pervade discussions about theatricality and performance in political culture, the insights of Turner, Geertz, and Whitehead suggest that representations of power actively participate in the creation of meanings about the state, the nation, and the use of power. A modern French political culture influenced by forms of public performance must have had strong implications for the creation of French political institutions and practices and for the twists and turns of that creative process, the narrative of French history that we know. But few sources speak to audience reactions to performances: Victor Hugo’s description of the return of Napoleon’s body in 1840, or Maurice Barrès’s description of the funeral of Hugo in 1885, are famous not only because of the literary renown of their authors, but because they are almost unique as first-person accounts of these huge public events.⁵⁰

The methods of literary analysis and cultural studies provide an alternative to relying on such anecdotal accounts. Historians, especially French historians, have long recognized the important role that literary figures played in political life, and there have been several recent efforts at increasing the links between historical and literary studies. These have most often emphasized the political roles of literary figures, intellectuals, and performers, as well as the impact of literary forms such as drama or the novel on public opinion.⁵¹ Lynn Hunt moved away from this approach in her reading of the “family romance” of the French Revolution, emphasizing the way in which the French “collective political unconscious … was structured by narratives of family relations,” and Judith Walkowitz similarly linked narratives of sexual danger to popular culture in late Victorian England.⁵² The methodological assumption of this book extends this approach chronologically to emphasize the importance not just of the role of literary figures and institutions acting in their sphere, but also of the circulation of forms of performance and spectacle in the political culture of modern France. By paying attention to the form of public ceremonies and consciously viewing them as theatrical, I suggest, we can understand better their place in French culture and their ability to resonate with the people of France. Literary critics may focus on texts such as poems or novels. But their methods lead us to think more carefully about the ways in which particular texts—not just written texts, but any collections of symbols that create meaning—accomplish their cultural tasks, and lead us to see how performances such as plays and public ceremonies create meaning.

Historians often read dramatic works and novels for their content. But I wish to focus on the form of public performances in the same way that a literary critic would analyze a literary text in terms of its structure and genre. Genre can be seen as a set of rules about how a literary text should be structured in order to create meaning. As such, it has often been prescriptive, providing the basis for literary criticism that measures the extent to which a poem, or novel, or play conforms to the rules that supposedly define Aristotle’s genres of lyric, epic, and drama, or other subgenres discerned by later critics. Because of this prescriptive character, it has fallen into disfavor in recent decades. But the important point here is not the prescriptive ways in which genre has been used in literary criticism, but rather the insight that, by acting as a set of expectations, genre helps the reader to understand the work, “relating it to the world as this is defined and ordered by the prevailing culture.”⁵³ Discerning the form of a public performance allows us to understand how a particular discourse—in this case, the French discourse about politics and especially democracy—operates to create, for French men and women over the last two centuries, an understanding of the uses of power in their political, social, and cultural institutions.

The form of performance, then, will help us to understand French political culture by giving us insight into the discourses that make up that culture. But in contrast to Habermas’s assumption of an external “rationality” to bourgeois discourse, or Debord’s positing of an equally external “reality” that spectacle distorts, I will emphasize the discursive constitution of both the objects available for study and the conditions under which statements about these objects may be considered “true” or “false.” This process is intimately connected with power and the institutions that exercise power. Discursive power is “an opening up of fields in which certain kinds of action and production are brought about. As power disperses itself, it opens up specific fields of possibility; it constitutes entire domains of action, knowledge, and social being by shaping the institutions and disciplines in which, for the most part, we largely make ourselves.”⁵⁴ Discourses about democratic politics, therefore, create the terrain within which political action takes place as well as the actors-the state, political elites and leaders, citizens—who perform. This means not only the institutional setting, such as parliaments, bureaucracies, civil society, and elections, but also the possibilities for different kinds of political action, such as revolution, compromise, political maneuvering, and even corruption. The emphasis on discourse also suggests the importance of similarities, “family resemblances” throughout a culture of the practices and sciences of that culture, as similar forms of knowledge appear in seemingly distinct forms of cultural activity.⁵⁵

The following pages explore the extent to which the dramatic forms of nineteenth- and twentieth-century theater and film were present as well in the public performance of political power and constituted a particular version of politics. To see how this approach can help us understand French political culture, let us return to the French stage for a moment. Ten years after the premiere of Monvel’s Les Victimes cloîtrées, a similar plot was used by another French playwright, Charles Guilbert de Pixerécourt, in a play entitled Coelina, performed for the first time on September 2, 1800, in the Théâtre de l’Ambigu-Comique on the Boulevard du Temple. The title character is an orphan who has inherited the wealth of her father, the Baron des Echelettes, and has been raised by her paternal uncle, Dufour. Coelina’s virtue is demonstrated by her kindness to a mute, Francisque, whose tongue had been cut out several years earlier. But while she is in love with her cousin Stephany, Dufour’s son, their happiness—and Coelina’s virtue—are threatened by the designs of Coelina’s maternal uncle, Truguelin, who proposes a marriage between Coelina and his own son.

Dufour, however, rejects the proposed marriage and instead announces that Coelina and Stephany will be engaged the next day. The celebration of this engagement opens the second act, but is interrupted by Truguelin’s servant with a letter informing Dufour that Coelina is not his niece, but rather the illegitimate child of another man, none other than Francisque Humbert, the mute. Dufour orders Francisque and Coelina to leave his house, and when Stephany protests, he is also sent away. The mysteries of the plot begin to be cleared up when Dufour’s doctor, Andrevon, informs Dufour that he recognized Truguelin as someone who, eight years earlier, had beaten and mutilated Francisque. He had alerted the authorities that Truguelin and Germain, his servant and confidant, were in the area, and he hoped that “at this moment they were taking them to Chambéry to deliver them to justice.” The play ends with Francisque explaining that he had been secretly married to Coelina’s mother when Dufour’s brother met her. Truguelin, wishing to obtain the property of this new suitor, forced his sister to marry the baron. Hoping eventually to gain control of Coelina’s fortune through her marriage to his own son, Truguelin pursued Francisque for years, literally silencing him to prevent obstruction of his plans.⁵⁶

Pixerécourt’s Coelina was the harbinger of a new dramatic form on the Parisian stage, melodrama, in which suffering heroes or heroines, villains, and well-meaning comics play a moral, humanitarian, and sentimental plot in a world divided into good and evil, where virtue is protected and vice punished.⁵⁷ Pixerécourt had been writing plays since 1793, but with Coelina he found his true métier. For the next thirty years, he reigned supreme on Parisian stages, turning out hit after hit, milking for all it was worth the conflict between good and evil characters and plots that brought the characters to the brink of disaster. From its slow beginnings during the Revolutionary decade, melodrama blossomed in the first part of the nineteenth century. Even after other forms of drama replaced it in the elite theaters, melodrama remained the preeminent form of theatrical entertainment in boulevard and other popular theaters into the twentieth century. Adopted in the twentieth century by the new media of film and television, it became a staple form of modern mass culture.

If we seek to understand better the role of public ceremony and performance in French political culture, the rise and pervasiveness of the specific form of melodrama needs to be taken into account. This is especially true if we consider the argument by Peter Brooks that melodrama “is vital to the modern imagination” and that “the origins of melodrama can be accurately located within the context of the French Revolution and its aftermath.” By destroying a series of certainties—Church and monarch, Christendom, organic and hierarchical society, as well as literary forms dependent on that society—the Revolution provided, in his view, the starting point for an unsuccessful response to those losses. Brooks directly connects a reading of the politics of the Revolution with the melodrama that marked the French stage in the aftermath of the events of the 1790s. “The Revolution attempts to sacralize law itself, the Republic as the institution of morality. Yet it necessarily produces melodrama instead, incessant struggle against enemies, without and within, branded as villains, suborners of morality, who must be confronted and expunged, over and over, to assure the triumph of virtue.” And he goes further, to argue fundamental similarities between the melodramatic form and the ways in which the Revolution described itself. Saint-Just claimed that “Republican government has, as its principle, virtue; or if not, terror,” similar to melodrama’s strategy of division into good and evil and its intention to impose a new society. Robespierre, Saint-Just, and the Committee of Public Safety are final references for melodrama, personifying virtue in themselves and projecting evil onto the enemies of the Republic. Both the orators of the Revolution and melodrama are concerned, Brooks claims, with the “expression and imposition of basic ethical and psychic truths.”⁵⁸

Melodrama and the Revolution are both therefore about virtue, performing a Manichean conflict between good and evil and the reassertion of virtue. But the form was faced with an impossible task, describing not a final meaning or vision of life, but the search for that meaning. Melodrama is thus not life, but a “complete convention in the interpretation of life,” a form that searches for ethical certainty even as it operates solely in the realm of representation.⁵⁹ Similarly, as Paul Friedland has noted, the political actors of the postrevolutionary era “were always a moment away from implausibility—if they forgot their lines, if they were heckled by the parterre, or even if the audience lost interest.”⁶⁰ The constant threat of rivals denouncing the entire basis of the new society—whether it be that of the Terror, the two empires, the restored monarchy, or the various republics of modern France—was a reminder not only of that potential implausibility but also of forces making it impossible to create the desired certainty.

Even if it was not ideologically committed to democratization, melodrama was democratic in its attempt to make clear its message to everyone. A representation of virtue with widespread popularity, melodrama allowed French culture to act as if it had a basis for a new morality even if the form underlined that, in the aftermath of the Revolution, it was impossible to find such a foundation. It distanced postrevolutionary French society from the violence and bloodshed of the revolutionary era by describing a world in which the virtue of the heroine was threatened only by the actions of an evil traitor, figuring the virtue of the French nation threatened by revolutionary or counterrevolutionary extremists. It is therefore a cultural accommodation to the disruptions of the 1790s. But while it represents the divisions in French culture, melodrama is inherently unable to resolve those disruptions. Virtue may triumph over vice by the end of the play, but melodrama does not perform this accommodation to the challenges faced by postrevolutionary France by describing a new society, as would comedy, or even through the communal sacrifice and transformation of tragedy.⁶¹ Rather, it speaks only in terms of the religious, familial, and social hierarchies of the old society, purportedly absolute values that no longer existed in the postrevolutionary world. Amidst all of its shifting styles and popularity—a high point between 1800 and 1830, a decline through the rest of the nineteenth century (when it became less concerned about public virtue, more domestic, primarily “plot, suspense, excitement, the search for new categories of thrills”), and a drift in the twentieth century to film as popular theater declined—melodrama nonetheless has been a fundamental form with which modern culture can describe and understand change.⁶²

Were melodrama limited to theater history, it would be of little interest for French political culture. But as Brooks suggests, it is a powerful insight into a fundamental problem faced by postrevolutionary culture in all of its manifestations, on stage and in the spaces in which political power was represented and exercised. Brooks’s description of melodrama as a form seeking to create its own version of reality, operating solely in the realm of representation, bears striking similarities to the spectacles described by Clark, Debord, Samuels, and Schwartz. Its fundamental themes of threatened virtue, good versus evil, and an attempt to restore the assumed wholeness of a lost past reverberate through French political ceremonies as well.⁶³ The Festival of the Supreme Being, with its portrayal of virtue and vice, the triumph of the virtuous Republic opening the way to the happiness of the French people, and the tenuousness of that reassembly of the French nation in the dramatized unity of the festival, bears similarity to the travails of Coelina and Francisque at the hands of Truguelin, and the eventual capture of the villain and restoration of the happy household of Dufour.

These links between theater and public ceremony are underscored by the frequency with which theatrical performances were often a part of public festivals and performers were contributors to the festivals themselves. As recently as the events of May–June 1968, both politics and theater aimed at creating a transparent identity between the spectacle, whether of a public ceremony or a stage performance, and the viewer.⁶⁴ As the theater scholar Christophe Campos noted then, as in 1789 and 1871 “there was no need to go to the theater to commune with the gods of imagination, because they were everywhere. For several weeks [in 1968] Paris was a producer’s dream, an enormous street happening; everything was theatrical, and there was no need for theaters.”⁶⁵

If we discard the prescriptive idea of melodrama as a set of rules to be followed by an author, and rather understand it as a form that creates a particular understanding of the world, we can see how speaking of both public ceremonies and theatrical performances in terms of melodrama allows us to see the similarities in these different practices of representation. It suggests not only that there was a significant theatrical dimension to modern French political culture, but that this theatricality took a particular form, a melodramatic sensibility, in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We can also see how the French experience with democracy was informed by these ways of representing the transformation of the Old Regime into the New. As Brooks emphasized, the rhetoric of the Revolution and of later Republican leaders was melodramatic in its construction of a world of good and evil, of virtuous revolutionaries and evil counterrevolutionaries, and of the ultimate inability to eliminate the Old Regime and create the dreamt-for new society here on earth. The opponents of the Revolution similarly viewed the world as sharply divided. The interaction of theatrical form and political culture—the melodramatic thread this book describes—helped to shape nineteenth- and twentieth-century France, portraying and performing the relationship between the state and that civil society as it developed through the public debates and political upheavals that are such an important part of French history in those centuries.

This theatricality was intimately linked with the development of a mass political system as French political culture struggled to become more democratic in the two centuries after the Revolution. As French men and women came to participate actively in the exercise of power, the assumptions they learned about that process were presented in a particular form that drew on the rupture created by the revolutionary decade. It was not only that republicans such as Léon Gambetta, Georges Clemenceau, and Jean Jaurès saw themselves as virtuous workers for human progress and their opponents as corrupt reactionaries, or that monarchists (or Vichyites) saw themselves as the representatives of virtue, and republicans as the opposite. These divisions, arising from the Revolutionary crisis, we know provided the basis for many of the controversies of modern French political history. But the process went even further. My contention here is not the unoriginal point that after the Revolution France was often divided into two political camps, one supporting the Revolution of 1789, the other opposed to it and wishing to restore some version of the Old Regime. My point, rather, is that these representations employed melodramatic forms when they were performed in the public spaces of Paris. The parallels we will see between the performances in French theaters and those on the Champs de Mars and Place de la Nation are important aspects of the French experience with mass democracy. The popularity of the genre of melodrama lent itself to solving one of the fundamental problems of mass democracy, that of attaching citizens to the institutions, processes, and decisions of the Republic. But in so doing, melodrama shaped the political culture by forcing the very complicated events and questions of French public life into the plots, characters, strengths, and weaknesses of the theatrical form. The construction through melodrama of events like the June Days in 1848, the Commune in 1871, the trial of Dreyfus, the defeat of 1940 and subsequent occupation and resistance, and the loss of empire made individuals such as Louis-Eugène Cavaignac, the Petroleuses, Alfred Dreyfus and the general staff, Philippe Pétain and Pierre Laval, and Charles de Gaulle specific kinds of characters, capable of some actions but incapable of others. They could be heroes or villains, but it was difficult to see them as compromisers. The plot line of melodrama, emphasizing a conflict between virtue and vice, right and wrong, weakened the attempts of figures such as Louis-Philippe, Adolphe Thiers, or Paul Reynaud to find a middle ground in the political disputes of the country. And the inability of melodrama to resolve its Manichean vision of the world damaged efforts to find reconciliation between the proponents and opponents of the Revolution. François Furet’s essay arguing that “the Revolution is over” may be read as a hope that French political culture might find a different way of organizing its representations of the players, plots, and outcomes of French politics than through political divisions based on the disputes of the 1790s. As with Debord’s spectacles, these representations drawn from the “revolutionary catechism” had seemingly cut loose from any connection with what they purported to represent.⁶⁶ The problem, it seemed, was to find a representation of French political life more in tune with the post-colonial, democratic France of the late twentieth century.

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At the conclusion of this introduction, it is worth making clear what the following pages attempt to do, and what they do not. My primary goal is to describe the ways in which public spectacles in two different locations in French culture—public ceremonies on the one hand, theatrical and film performances on the other—contributed to the public life of France between the Revolution and the Fifth Republic. While we will not see rigid adherence to any supposed “rules” of melodrama in French theatrical or public culture, I will argue that the seepage of melodramatic conventions between stage and public ceremonies is an important aspect of that public life, creating a characteristic form that shaped modern French democracy as it became more participatory. In this respect French mass democracy is closely linked to the development of commodified spectacle in modern French culture. In order to make this argument, I will focus primarily, although not exclusively, on ceremonial and theatrical representations of the Republic and the Revolution of 1789.

It might be suggested, especially by historians familiar with the works of Agulhon, Ozouf, Ben-Amos, Ihl, and others, that this approach has already been made a part of our version of the French past. Certainly these studies have unearthed much about the ceremonial life of French politics, and a strong cultural tinge has pervaded our version of events such as the Revolution itself.⁶⁷ But these public ceremonies have not led to a rethinking of the story of modern France. Surveys of French history written in the late 1980s and early 1990s by François Furet and Maurice Agulhon make mention of well-known public ceremonies such as the Festival of Federation, the Festival of the Supreme Being, the funeral ceremonies for Victor Hugo, the quatorze juillet, the Centennial, the Bicentennial in 1989, and others.⁶⁸ But in both cases the narrative is constructed around the central theme of the actions of political leaders—the thumbnail sketches of Robespierre, Napoleon, Gambetta, Jules Ferry, Laval, and De Gaulle are brilliant pieces of character construction—and the ceremonial aspects of French political culture serve only to illustrate themes such as the contested nature of French politics.

If we were to take these accounts as typical of the way modern French history is narrated today—and there seems little reason not to do so⁶⁹—we would have to say that the results of monographic research by historians such as Agulhon, Ozouf, Truesdell, Ory, Ben-Amos, and Ihl on the ceremonial aspects of French public life have not been integrated in any significant way into that narrative. The prevailing narrative of French history tells a story about rulers, elections, and social developments, and overwhelmingly about actions and what people have said in words. These actions and words are taken usually at face value, not analyzed as performance. Performance and ceremony are relegated to the margins, useful illustrations but not a part of the story.

The following chapters suggest that Clifford Geertz’s insight about the importance of public ceremony in the theater state in Bali and Laurence Whitehead’s perception of the dramatic aspects of democratic transitions may find applicability in one of the most important states in modern Europe. They sketch an outline of the interactions between French political culture and a melodramatic sensibility by examining key elements of these developments over the last two centuries. Chapter 2 discusses several significant events of the nineteenth century. In spite of such massive spectacles as the return of Napoleon’s remains in 1840, this was a period in which civic performances were severely limited by the restrictions placed on French civil society by the governments of postrevolutionary France. Nonetheless, debates in the Restoration assembly, trials of republicans during the July Monarchy, and the public spectacles of Napoleon III’s Second Empire allow us to trace the growing theatricality of French political culture and assess the significance of melodramatic conventions in those performances. Chapter 3 views the full-blown theatrical culture of the triumphant Third Republic after 1870 through the work of one of the most important playwrights of Belle Epoque culture, Victorien Sardou. In the series of plays that Sardou wrote using the Revolution as material, and in ceremonies such as the Centennial in 1889, we can see the specific ways in which melodrama served to define important aspects of the politics constituted by his work, especially the way in which Sardou utilized gender conventions to dramatize his version of the place of virtue and vice in France’s culture.

Chapter 4 moves into the period between the two world wars, an era marked not only by the popularity of the new medium of film, but also by attempts to channel the crises and conflicts of republican politics into ceremonial forms. Both film representations of revolutionary events and the civic ceremonies of the early 1920s and the Popular Front of the 1930s reflected the deep melodramatic sensibility of French culture, especially the desire to create a post-revolutionary culture that would unify the nation. In the struggle to maintain a functioning democracy that marked the interwar period, we can see the ability of melodrama to link citizens and the republican state, as well as the limits such a sensibility placed on the viability of that state. The inconsistencies of the republican promise, however, became apparent not only, as at the turn of the century, in questions about gender, but also through the ways in which previously marginalized groups such as workers, women, and colonial subjects appeared in these performances. Chapter 5, finally, concludes our journey by examining a significant experimental theater company of postwar France, Ariane Mnouchkine’s Théâtre du Soleil. In the various representations of French republican culture by the Théâtre du Soleil in the 1970s and 1980s, we will see the pervasiveness of melodramatic conventions as they interacted with post-1968 attempts to revitalize the radical message of French republicanism.

This brief overview should make clear that this book is neither an exhaustive catalogue of melodramatic forms in modern French culture nor a synthesis of the role of the memory of the Revolution in France over the last two centuries. The first is a task better suited to the theater and film historians on whose work I will draw in the following pages. My focus on performance also skews my sampling of the memory of the Revolution. The political volatility of the message of the Revolution over the last two centuries often forced it underground, leaving other topics more easily performed. It also leaves aside the most important location in French culture in which that memory was reproduced and represented, the school system. Beginning during the Revolution itself, and flourishing after the foundation of the Third Republic and the Ferry Laws of the late 1870s and early 1880s, this system has inculcated versions of the Constituent Assembly, the Convention, Louis XVI, Robespierre, and Danton in the minds and hearts of French students. So instead of a definitive narrative of theater history or memory, my concern in concentrating on the Republic and the Revolution and on theatrical performances is to provide a focus for my selection of materials related to the larger purpose of examining the performative aspects of French political culture.

In spite of these limitations, however, the following pages make an argument that moves toward a more cultural understanding of the political differences that have marked France in many of the years since 1789 and that have seemed so important, to both contemporaries and later historians, as explanations of the twists and turns of the country’s political history. Like bits of glass in a child’s kaleidoscope, the elements of French political culture reassembled in different ways and at different times over the last two centuries. The discourses of French culture that divided the world into a conflict of good and evil, that sought to rescue threatened virtue, and that continually hovered on the edge of exposure helped assemble the elements of French political culture into images of the world and, through them, create the processes of social, economic, and political life for French men and women.