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Article Excerpt
The French Revolution engendered new types of theater, both inside and outside the playhouse. The lifting of theater and copyright restrictions in 1791 led to an explosion of new theatrical pieces written by previously unknown dramatists, who were now free to act outside the literal veil of anonymity. (1) While the French Revolution overturned traditional barriers to performance, the Revolution itself took on dramatic character and qualities. The spectacle of the French Revolution depicted on the stage, in festivals, and in Jacques-Louis David's artistic renderings celebrated and debated the meaning of the new republic. One of the functions of this flurry of dramatic activity on the streets of Paris was capturing spectators' imagination in order to bring a new fiction to fife: the republican citizen. While the scenes in front of the guillotine could be considered spectacles worthy of theatrical consideration in their own right, Revolutionary festivals represent the First Republic's primary mode of dramatizing its new identity. (2) The ideological and material background of French Revolutionary fetes publiques or public festivals relate to the eighteenth century's contemplation of theater's role in shaping communal manners and morals. Though the Revolution and, as this article will discuss later, its theater, have been labeled failures, the Revolution staged the theoretical debate about republican modes of performance initiated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
This article compares theatricality and performance in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Letter to M. d'Alembert on Theatre (Lettre a M. d'Alembert sur les spectacles, hereafter Letter) with Olympe de Gouges's (1748-1793) dramatic work. In particular, this essay examines the ways in which Rousseau's Letter, though generally considered an antitheatrical and antifeminist text, can be seen as inspiring republican performances during the early years of the French Revolution. The institution of Revolutionary festivals mirrors Rousseau's suggestion, at the end of the Letter, to revive the civic festivals of his youth. The second contention here is that Rousseau influenced new models of performance and gender in the late eighteenth century. A prominent political activist and dramatist, Olympe de Gouges (best known for her 1791 treatise, Declaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne or Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Citizen) helped organize and stage the Festival of the Law in honor of the assassinated mayor Simonneau in 1792. In this festival, as in her dramatic and polemical pieces, Gouges responds to Rousseau's concern about dissimulating women by insisting that women engaged in public life do not dissemble. Rousseau and Gouges are both concerned with what it means to act like a republican citizen and how spectacles inform national character.
Rousseau's theories about theater, theatricality, performance, and civic identity played such a large part in French Revolutionary culture because they responded to a specific need: the education, edification, and construction of a new republican identity. Despite groundbreaking works like Mona Ozouf's La fete revolutionnaire (1976; trans. Festivals and the French Revolution, 1988), Revolutionary festivals have been archived in historical annals alongside that era's long-forgotten plays and dramatists. From a scholarly perspective, public festivals and theater during the Revolution seem more like "spectacular failure[s]" than successful performances. (3) These French Revolutionary performances may all be failures in the sense that they did not elicit lasting public applause, but it is a third contention here that we need to redefine the terms failure and success when evaluating late eighteenth-century European theater, especially when it is situated outside of or marginalized from the national playhouse. This article counters the assumption that French Revolutionary Theater, which I define as a theatrical narrative, as European plays performed between 1789 and 1794 referring, in some way, to Revolutionary events, and the dramatization of republican identity found in public festivals, somehow constitutes an unsuccessful performance.
Others have also asserted that theater, theatricality, and performance were closely enmeshed with French cultural work at the end of the eighteenth century. (4) This essay investigates to what extent the much maligned and seemingly failed public festivals and French Revolutionary Theater represent an alternative public sphere in which women could (and did) perform. Part of the problem of evaluating French Revolutionary Theater is that it so easily conflates with the apparent failure of the Revolution itself. Karl Marx was the first to cast doubt on the so-called authenticity of the French Revolution's grandiose self-dramatization. The Revolution stages itself as a "great historical tragedy" and imitates Roman Stoicism, Marx says in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, because the bourgeois victors of the Revolution need to disguise their selfish cause (the accumulation of private wealth). (5) This Marxist historiography has permeated twentieth-century discussions on the subject, and in particular the history of women and the French Revolution. (6) Underlying this politically motivated ambivalence about the French Revolution as theater is the notion that depictions about it are fictional, artificial, and inauthentic. The key to breaking from this invocation of theater as false consciousness and to appreciating Revolutionary Theater lies in distinguishing theatricality from performance. Marx associates spectacular theatrical display with tyranny, but French dramatists in the 1790s were also aware of this connotation and used public performances to throw off the chains of aristocratic theatricality in place of a more democratic performance.
As the following analysis will show, Gouges and Rousseau share a desire to revise eighteenth-century theater into a free, unscripted manifestation of the self and consequently differentiate between theatricality and performance. David Marshall defines theatricality in Rousseau's text as "a critical investigation of what it means to face others as a spectator or a spectacle." (7) This essay expands on Marshall's definition. Theatricality in the Letter queries how republicans face other citizens as spectators and thereby self-author the spectacle of national identity, resulting in performance rather than theater. In place of Parisian theatricality, Rousseau's Letter advocates a kind of performance that sustains organic transparency and a sense of authenticity. Public festivals, Rousseau argues, allow the individual to represent him- or herself through genuine gestures to the community, without foregrounding the fictionality that theatricality entails. Performance theory helps us to identify Rousseau's polemic. Where the theater fosters illusion and depends on carefully defined scripts and direction, performance "does not aim at a meaning, but rather makes meaning" by engaging the subjective imagination of actor and spectator. (8) In order to recuperate Rousseau's place in the history of eighteenth-century performances, this article sets out to show how his Letter relates to the period's discussions about performance and gender.
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Perhaps no diatribe against the theater is as famous as Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Letter to M. d'Alembert on Theatre. Though it first appeared in 1758, his Letter remained an integral part of the European debate about the morality of the theater long after its initial publication. (9) Towards the end of the Letter, Rousseau predicts the misunderstandings it would provoke:
It is sometimes amusing for me to imagine the judgments that many will make of my tastes on the basis of my writings. On the basis of this one they will not fail to say: "that man is crazy about dancing"; it bores me to watch dancing; "he cannot bear the drama"; I love the drama passionately; "he has an aversion to women"; on that score I shall be only too easily vindicated; "he is vexed at actors"; I have every reason to be pleased with them.... (10)
David Marshall points out that the title of Rousseau's piece should be translated as Letter to M. d'Alembert on Spectacles (not on Theatre), since his discussion goes beyond mere actors and stage representation to encompass spectacles outside the playhouse. (11) Letter to M. d'Alembert takes Parisian theater to task not out of dislike for plays or entertainment in general (Rousseau was, after all, an opera writer himself). In fact, since "the general effect of the theater is to strengthen the national character, to augment the natural inclinations, and to give a new energy to all the passions," what playhouses teach about communal mores is of utmost importance (Rousseau 20). The Letter reveals Rousseau's apprehension about the ways in which artificial theatricality supersedes natural performance in Genevan civic life.
As noted...
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