work, to lay down a bridge between the hall and the stage, to make the action of a drama a real action’.63 The main difference, as far as the text itself was concerned, would consist in the audience being directly addressed by Camille Desmoulins, Marat or Hoche, who summoned them to continue what they had begun. This could not proceed for long without the entrance of a new power onto the stage: ‘Music, the tyrannical power of sound that stirs the passive crowds; this magical illusion that suppresses time and gives what it touches an absolute character.’
If music took back its prior position, this was at the price of a reversal of roles. Music was now to substitute its illusion for the insufficient ‘sincerity’ of the theatre. Its role here was one of saturation. It had to be continuous, in order to ‘fill all the silences that a theatre crowd could never succeed in filling completely, that occur despite everything between its cries and destroy the illusion of continuous life’.64
But the power of a musical theme filling the gaps in both performance and life would not suffice by itself to realize the new principle of popular art – ‘the people itself becoming actor in the popular festival’.65 A new disposition was needed for the orchestra and choirs: the hymns sung by the characters on stage would be taken up by one or several groups of voices in the audience. And, after Hoche’s speech to the people, the same hymn would be ‘taken up at every level of the hall, on all sides, by groups of voices, small choirs, even little bands surrounding the public and morally forcing them to sing along’.66 At the climax, the choirs were joined by the sound of trumpets, by dances and rounds, ‘the tumult of a people and an army’.67
A great national festival . . . Romain Rolland and the champions of a popular theatre sought in vain in 1907 to have Le 14 juillet staged on the square in front of the Hôtel de Ville. Seven years later, other fanfares of unity would resound, those of the union sacrée. The energy of Louis Lumet and several other activists for popular theatre would finally find its culmination there. Rolland, for his part, decided to remain ‘above the battle’. And after the Great War was over, he drew the same lessons from it as did many others. In a theatre that no longer claimed to be popular, he pursued, from one play to the next, his demonstration of the fellow-travelling philosophy: reason on the march through the folly and crimes of revolutionary dictatorship; the necessity of individuals such as Condorcet perishing so that the peoples, instructed by their educational plans, would allow them to triumph over their executioners and would thus become worthy of having their theatre.
If the theatre dreamed of in the nineteenth century was never realized, it at least developed the philosophy of the twentieth century.
The ‘mecropolis’
The popular theatre had thus pronounced its own death certificate shortly before the government signed its act of birth. What was out of the running from now on, however, was the idea that a people could provide the principle of a new art. And equally finished was the attempt to create a dramatic literature inspired by the principle of this theatre. The Revue d’art dramatique had its own way of noting this death. A few years after having rewarded the project of Eugène Morel – which remained in the files – it had the idea of holding a new competition, designed this time to select the best plays that could constitute the repertoire of a popular theatre. The result plunged the Revue into an abyss of meditation. The concern to judge their playscripts submitted in terms of literary quality led to three prizes being awarded: the first to Le Pain, a social tragedy in three acts by Henri Ghéon, the second to L’Asinaire, adapted from Plautus’ Asinaria in free verse by Henri Dargel, and the third to Pierre Clésio’s Electra, in imitation antique verse. ‘It is bitterly ironic’, concluded the Revue, ‘how in a competition whose proclaimed ambition was to stimulate or discover a new form of dramatic art, two of the three plays selected are adaptations from the antique’.68 The evidence however had to be accepted, that the most socially interesting plays were unworthy of an award.
The Revue d’art dramatique now decided to turn the page, and become the ‘openly practical’ organ of the Association des Auteurs Dramatiques. Devoted above all now to championing young writers, from 1908 it was addressed only to members of this Association on payment of their subscription.
Before embarking on its official existence, the popular theatre had thus completed a period of mourning over both its form and its content. The humble doctrine of the civil service was now imposed, which Firmin Gémier, finally charged with organizing the Théâtre National Populaire, would make his own: the function of popular theatre was to familiarize those who did not attend the Comédie-Française or the Opéra with the classical masterpieces, in good productions at a modest price. Even if its pedagogic doctrine still accepted on the horizon the prospect of great popular festivals:
Before leading the crowds at the great artistic festivals that we dream of, it is indispensable to pursue their education, to familiarize them with the works of the repertory. Let us start by imbuing them with the taste for beauty, followed by the need for it, by popularizing those works that form the summits of literature and music . . . This programme may risk seeming narrow in the eyes of people in a hurry. But one must learn to read before studying philosophy.69
We know now what art was suitable for the people. We also know what made up the people that was suitable for art. As witness the active correspondence of Firmin Gémier with schools, barracks, local authorities and firms that promised, in return for certain reductions, to send their populations to profit from this ‘work of decentralization (!) and moral education’ that would popularize classics that were ‘far too neglected’, combat ‘the pernicious influence of the cinema’ on children, and be extremely useful to the latter ‘with a view to their preparation for the school-leaving certificate’.70 After seventy years of prehistory, the adjective ‘popular’ had finally acquired a fixed meaning, i.e. ‘designed for schools’. But some people already said about the man and woman of the people in the nineteenth century, that they could be more or less equated with a school pupil of thirteen years old. It was under these auspices that in November 1920, the Théâtre National Populaire opened its doors at the Trocadéro, under the wing of a prestigious actor and enthusiast for itinerant theatre who had nothing to do there but welcome the stars – or the understudies – of four major theatres, for some sixty or so productions a year.
A posthumous birth, about which a number of warnings had certainly been raised. It is true that these came from a rather suspect quarter. Against this project, vigorously supported by the trade unions and left political parties, the ‘moderates’ claimed to have a better understanding of the people. The workers, they said, would never leave Belleville or the Gobelins on return from work for a ‘popular’ theatre located in the midst of the bourgeois districts. Popular theatre had to reach its public on their home ground. And such a theatre did indeed exist: the old local theatres where workers used to go to see the melodramas after their run on the boulevard, but where they could also be brought to appreciate works of a higher class. Evidence of this was the work accomplished by Edmond Feuillet, a former lead in the Opéra-Comique, who, to save the people from the café-concert, took over the ‘people’s theatre’ of Belleville and the little theatres of Montparnasse, Grenelle and the Gobelins. Here Feuillet produced comic opera, drama, opera, vaudeville and operetta. He himself worked at all the trades of the stage, including that of electrician. He recalled how, during the First World War, he played while the bombs were falling, helping to maintain the morale of working class populations, and confident enough, if the means were at hand, to stage at the same time Britannicus at Montparnasse, Le Prophète at the Gobelins, La Closerie des Genêts at Grenelle, and La Mascotte at Belleville. For fifty years, he said, ‘families have handed down their numbered seats at Belleville and the Gobelins; they’re not going to change this’.71 Unless these theatres fell victim to the monopolies and were forced to give way to the competition that slowly transformed the majority of them in the popular districts and provincial towns into music halls, cinemas or supermarkets. A campaign accordingly developed that depicted these little theatres, the last vestiges of a certain popular life in which ‘the operetta that diverts and the drama that improves’72 were still performed, as victims of a double
