Gens de couleur dans trois vaudevilles du xixe siècle: Joseph Aude et J. H. d’Egville, ‘Les Deux Colons’; Clairville et Paul Siraudin, ‘Malheureux comme un nègre’; Duvert et Lauzanne, ‘La Fin d’une République, ou Haïti en 1849’ by Lise Schreier (review)

The front cover of this book shows the beautiful plaster bust of Saïd Abdallah of the Mayac tribe of Ethiopia, the first black actor on the French stage. It was commissioned in 1848 by the Société ethnologique de Paris and eventually used in their meetings to stand in for Abdallah when he could not be present in person to exemplify ‘la race noire’ (p. xxxix). They had never asked him to speak at these meetings, so a mute bust, in their view, was almost as good as the real thing. He did speak, however, a few weeks later on the stage of the Théâtre des variétés in the role of Atar-Gull in Clairville and Siraudin’s adaptation of Sue’s eponymous novel. In a fascinating and meticulously researched Introduction, Lise Schreier wonders whether Abdallah’s experience at the hands of the ethnologists affected the way he performed the ruthless character of Atar-Gull. Schreier’s presentation of three vaudeville plays provides a thought-provoking insight into contemporary attitudes to ‘race’, abolition, and human rights. Les Deux Colons (Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin, 1818) uses colour as a convenient dramatic device (a child of the wrong skin colour appears to be irrefutable evidence of infidelity) and as a useful vehicle for jokes and puns (‘Oh! Comme le mulâtre semble rembruni de colère’, scene 6). There is no obvious socio-cultural or political consciousness in the play. In contrast, Malheureux comme un nègre (Théâtre des variétés, 1848), performed a few months before the abolition of slavery in France, ridicules white slave-traders and the theatrical conventions for representing coloured characters (such as ‘blacking up’ the face or wearing black tights), and caused spectators to riot. La Fin d’une République, ou Haïti en 1849 (Théâtre du vaudeville, 1849) is a satire on the French Second Republic in which two democrats, one a cobbler, the other a fried-food vendor, quickly give in to bribery offered by the dictator Soulouque whose only words in the whole play are ‘Je suis content’ (scene 17). Schreier’s choice of texts seems intended to show a progression towards greater ideological consciousness of colour. This volume is a welcome re-evaluation of the significance of vaudeville, the most popular theatre of the period (three million tickets sold annually by the end of the 1840s in Paris, a city with a population of one million), whose theatrical, socio-cultural, and political merits stem mainly from its defining feature: spoken dialogue interspersed with new lyrics set to well-known songs. Playwrights exploited to the full the dramaturgical and satirical potential of this ‘intermusicalité’ (p. xv) to cultivate ‘sous-entendus’. For the modern scholar, it is quite a challenge to identify and explain these allusions, but Schreier takes the first play, Les Deux Colons, as a test case and maps a good deal of its intermusicality, transforming our understanding of it (see ‘Annexe I’). Given the intriguing results of decades of research on eighteenth-century intermusicality in vaudeville theatre, it is odd that nineteenth-century vaudeville is relatively virgin territory. This book should encourage more interest.