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chapter two The Drama of the Revolution The stage is a lie: its aim is to bring the lie close to the greatest truth. Louis-Sébastien Mercier (1773) Pre-Revolutionary Acting and Theater Despite a widespread desire for reform, French theatrical drama in the period immediately preceding the Revolution remained tightly constrained by institutional regulation: only three theaters—the Opéra, the Comédie Française, and the Théâtre des Italiens—enjoyed official support, and to them were granted exclusive rights over both dramatic repertoire and certain kinds of performance.1 During the latter half of the century, however, considerable pressures had been brought to bear on this closed theater world, as the unlicensed theaters along the Boulevard du Temple, in the Palais, and elsewhere attempted in various ways to circumvent the strictures on both the legitimate dramatic repertoire and its privileged performance modes.2 One way to do so was to exploit the legal separation between the aural and the visual aspects of theatrical performance, for the monopolies held by the licensed theaters were grounded in various ways upon theatrical speech: the Comédie was the primary domain of spoken drama, the Opéra and the Théâtre des Italiens, of song. Left to the fairground and boulevard theaters were the visual modes of performance: acrobatics, jugglers, animal acts, and pantomime, as their performers were barred from singing or speaking before the public. In their desire to present plays, these theaters devised various ways in which to present purely visual drama onstage, with offstage actors singing or speaking the parts. Puppet shows were the most obvious means with which to accomplish such ends, but pantomime, which had become popular in the city since the 1740s, offered an even better solution.3 In 1784, the Beaujolais, a “puppet” theater located in the Palais-Royal, began to employ child actors to mime the parts of plays taken from the repertoire of the Comédie, with adult actors speaking from the wings. This innovation was quickly picked up by competitors, and in 1787 the new BluetteComiques began having adult actors mime the parts onstage to offstage accompaniment .4 The resulting hue and cry raised by the licensed theaters gave rise to what Marvin Carlson described as a “ludicrously complex set of police rulings,” one result of which was the requirement, for the Bluette and another recent arrival, the Délassements-Comiques, that they hang a gauze curtain between the audience and the drama being mimed onstage.5 As is often noted, Plancher-Valcour, the director of the DélassementsComiques , decided at some point soon after the fall of the Bastille to rip down the gauze curtain that had been prescribed for his theater, an act he accompanied with the cry “Vive la Liberté!” The act was clearly understood by contemporaries as the moment when the theaters of Paris were “liberated,” freed finally of the absurd weight and ossified stricture of absolutism’s institutional rule.6 Critics have drawn from this implication the conclusion that the theaters then became a leading force in Revolutionary politics, and yet, as the work of recent theater historians has made clear, the Revolution did not give rise to a sudden richness of politically radical drama, for—as Plancher-Valcour must have sensed quite keenly after the great theatrical uprising of July 14—the theater proper had already been supplanted by the stages of Revolutionary politics.7 In contrast, Marie-Hélène Huet reads in Plancher-Valcour’s gesture a sign that “the theater provided models for public disclosure. The desire to “‘tear away the veil,’ the forceful and passionate search for unmediated action,” she notes, “was a constant theme of Revolutionary rhetoric.”8 However, if such a reading responds to the mode of the gesture, it misses what must have been part of its point. Certainly it is a sign of letting the public in, revealing all to its forceful and passionate eye, but it is also an act of opening the wall of the stage and letting the actors out. If Plancher-Valcour tore a veil of public disclosure, he also declared the opening of a Pandora’s box of public performance, releasing into politics the entire resources of a repressed, long-oppositional theater. Almost immediately, as Paul Friedland’s recent work makes clear, large numbers of actors and dramatists turned from the stage to the streets and political platforms, emerging in some cases to prominence as Revolutionary leaders.9 Actor-politicians...

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