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.
