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
