Rites of the Republic: Citizens’ Theatre and the Politics of Culture in Southern France (review)

If the theatre is one of France’s most evocative cultural spaces, and theatrical performance and attendance the centrepiece of cultural policy-making in the twentieth century, how exactly are the politics of the stage negotiated at everyday levels? Where and when do policy discourses enter the lived experience of theatre practitioners? Given the specific vision of Republican citizenship mobilized by the French state’s cultural policies (universal, forged around a centralized cultural heritage, and wary of particular identity formations), how do artists invested in locality none the less utilize and reshape notions of universal citizenship and belonging? In an era of supranational formations, how is ‘a specifically national repertoire of values associated with culture in France’ (p. xiii) negotiated by artists with multicultural, international agendas? These are the questions that structure Mark Ingram’s captivating interdisciplinary study of the relationship between cultural policy, theatre making, and citizenship in contemporary France. Drawing on an extensive ethnographic archive generated from interviews and personal participation, Ingram combines theoretical frameworks from anthropology and performance studies with policy analysis to suggest that the relationship between art making and social life is ‘an important arena in which French people have self-consciously grappled with issues of cultural heritage and social change’ (p. xxx). Following an introduction to the project’s two field sites — the amateur voluntary association Théâtre Rural d’Animation Culturelle (TRAC) in Beaumes de Venise in the Vaucluse department, and the Friche arts centre located in the disadvantaged yet rapidly renovating Belle de Mai neighbourhood of Marseille — Chapter 1 provides a brief history of arts governance in France, from the Third Republic’s early attempts at democratization, to Jeanne Laurent’s postwar blueprint for decentralized theatrical production, to the post-1968 split between artists advocating for the autonomy of artistic processes and those insisting on the social responsibilities of animation. Against this background Chapter 2 establishes TRAC’s complicated understanding of popular education, artistic practice, and valorization of rural social networks and histories. Chapter 3 analyses the Friche’s position as a private Société Coopérative d’Intérêt Collectif that both draws on centralized policy principles and negotiates its inclusion in the EU’s Euroméditerranée urban renovation programme. In Chapter 4 the EU’s broader principle of ‘unity in diversity’ is examined in a study of how its political effects are filtered through municipal contexts, with a particular focus on Avignon and Marseille as European Capitals of Culture. Finally, Chapters 5 and 6 examine how the theatre’s public dimensions and flexible, embodied nature allow the artists at the TRAC and Friche to generate a complicated and often internally contradictory discourse of culture that is plural, multilingual, and ‘preserved at a personal level and protected from the influence of a market economy’ (p. 161). Throughout, Ingram’s study artfully demonstrates how the practices and ‘rites’ of state cultural policy are incorporated and negotiated at quotidian, embodied levels, even as European integration and globalization expand the scales at which individuals think and live.