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.
