Old Sluts and Dangerous Minuets: or, the Underlying Musical Tensions of the Querelle des Bouffons

The querelle des bouffons was once regarded as a mundane debate on the merits of French and Italian opera. Recent scholarship has shown, however, that the artistic arguments often concealed political subversion. This article investigates why theater was used in this way by examining the longstanding antagonistic relationship between French and Italian theater in France. This relationship created a space for broad criticism in which Italian theater threatened French absolutism as personified in French theater; the staging of political currents within the Franco-Italian dispute of the querelle may thus be seen as another example of this mode of discourse.