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241 Notes The following abbreviations are used in the notes. Archives and Libraries AD Archives départementales AM Archives municipales de AN Archives nationales, Paris ARS Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Paris AV Archives de la Ville et de la Communauté urbaine de BM Bibliothèque municipale de BMCF Bibliothèque-Musée de la Comédie-Française, Paris BNF Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris CAOM Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer, Aix-en-Provence NL Newberry Library, Chicago SHD Service historique de la Défense, Vincennes Journals AESC Annales: Économies. Sociétés. Civilisations AHR American Historical Review FHS French Historical Studies JMH Journal of Modern History RHMC Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine RHT Revue d’histoire du théâtre RSBAD Réunion des sociétés des beaux-arts des départements Introduction 1. Charles-Simon Favart, Mémoires et correspondance littéraires, dramatiques et anecdotiques , de C.S. Favart, 3 vols. (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1970), II: 45, Favart to M. le comte de Durazzo, 28 December 1762. 2. Ibid., “to need and to rarity” and “multiply . . . to infinity,” II: 133, Favart to Durazzo,29 July 1763; “each provincial city,”II:45,Favart to Durazzo,28 December 1762. 3. Bertrand de La Tour, Réflexions morales, politiques, historiques, et littéraires, sur le théâtre, 10 vols. (Avignon: Marc Chave, 1763-66), I:1–2. 4. Ibid.,2–3; Charles Desprez de Boissy,Lettres sur les spectacles:Avec une histoire des ouvrages pour & contre les théâtres, 6th ed., 2 vols. (Paris: Boudet, 1777), I: 601. 5. On the origins of professional theater in France and the establishment of regular public theater in Paris, see W. L. Wiley, The Early Public Theatre in France 242 NOTES TO PAGE 2 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960). On theater in provincial cities during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including the marginal status of seventeenthcentury professional public theater when compared with Jesuit theater, see Sara Beam, Laughing Matters: Farce and the Making of Absolutism in France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007). 6. For the locations of the new public theaters inaugurated in French and French colonial cities between the 1670s and 1789, the dates of their inauguration, and the citations for this evidence, see the appendix. 7. Roger Chartier,Dominique Julia,and Marie-Madeleine Compère,L’Éducation en France du XVI au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Société d’édition d’enseignement supérieur, 1976) 249–50; “chambre de commerce,” in Jacques Savary des Bruslons, Dictionnaire universel de commerce, d’histoire naturelle, et des arts et métiers, 4 vols. (Paris: Veuve Estienne , 1750), I: 797–809; Daniel Roche, Le Siècle des lumières en province: Académies et académiciens provinciaux, 1680–1789, 2 vols. (Paris: Mouton, 1978), I: 15–74; and Gilles Feyel, “La Presse provinciale française dans la seconde moitié du 18e siècle: Géographie d’une nouvelle fonction urbaine,” in La Ville et l’innovation: Relais et réseaux de diffusion en Europe, 14e–19e siècles, ed. Bernard Lepetit and Jochen Hoock (Paris: Éditions de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 1987), 89–111, esp. 93. According to Ran Halévi, Masonic lodges, which numbered at least 650 by the Revolution, did outnumber theaters: Les Loges maçonniques dans la France d’Ancien Régime: Aux origines de la sociabilité démocratique (Paris: A. Colin, 1984), 19. 8. Of the playhouses operating in French domains as of 1789, the largest accommodated more than a thousand spectators,including those of Lyon (2,000),Bordeaux (1,726), Rouen (1,450), Metz (1,400), and Le Cap Français, Saint-Domingue (1,500). The smallest public theaters, such as those in Avignon and Vienne, held only a few hundred. Here, I take the audience capacity of the theaters of middling cities such as Arras (550), Montauban (500), Le Mans (600), Pau (800), Dunkerque (984) and Cambrai (900–1,000) as more broadly representative. Therefore,I base this estimate on seven hundred spectators per theater for the eighty-two public theaters in the provincial and colonial cities listed in the appendix. Most of these theaters, it should be noted, did not host resident theater companies. They would have offered performances several evenings a week, for only part of the year. Pierre Frantz and Michèle Sajous-d’Oria,with Giuseppe Radicchio,Le Siècle des théâtres:Salles et scènes en France, 1748–1807 (Paris: Bibliothèque historique de la Ville...

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