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
