Voltaire and the Theatre of the Eighteenth Century, and: L'Esthetique du tableau dans le theatre du XVIIIe siecle, and: Die napoleonische Theaterpolitik: Geschaftstheater in Paris 1799-1815, and: French Theatre in the Neo-Classical Era, 1550-1789, and: From Beaumarchais to Chenier: the droits d'auteur and the fall of the Comedie Francaise, 1777-1791, and: The Contested Parterre: Public Theater and French Political Culture, 1680-1791 (review)

Max Fuchs, a disciple of Gustave Lanson and by extension Émile Durkheim, introduced the teaching and research of eighteenth-century theater history to the French university system in the 1920s on the precept that theater must be studied not merely as a genre of literature nor as a venue for performance but as a “fait social.” By this he meant that theater studies must account not only for social relations among individuals and groups, authors, actors, patrons, critics, censors, and audience members, but also address what Fuchs’s student Henri La Grave would call “la vie théâtrale”—the experience of theater as an historical point of conjuncture between geography, society, economics, politics, and esthetics. In 1958, Jacques Scherer created a home for this tradition of French theater studies at the Institut d’études théâtrales of the University of Paris III (Censier), where it has thrived ever since; yet until recently, it had drawn little attention from scholars in other disciplines, especially outside France.

In the last ten years, however, this tradition has undergone a renaissance, as evident in variety of topics addressed, approaches used, and sources exploited in the books discussed below. Each, but particularly the three monographs by Frantz, Hillmer and Ravel, deploys extensive primary source research into the aesthetics and institutions of eighteenth-century theater to explore evolutions in dramaturgy, criticism and popular tastes from classicism to melodrama and pre-romanticism in relation to the commercialization of public theater and the concomitant decline in importance of the French Academy and the court. In this way, these books represent the first significant advances in this “social” tradition of French theater studies since M. de Rougemont wrote her comprehensive synthesis of the eighteenth-century theater world, La Vie théâtrale en France au XVIIIe siècle (1988). Since each emerges from a different disciplinary and national tradition, their nearly simultaneous publication also signals an evident and welcome convergence of scholarship along the lines proposed by Fuchs.

Of the five books under review, the closest institutionally and intellectually to this tradition is Frantz’s, drawn from a massive thesis on the drame, defended at the Institut d’études théâtrales in 1994. This book, based on roughly one-third of the thesis, asks how the dominant aesthetic of French theater passed from the classicism of the later seventeenth century tragedians, Racine and Corneille, to the romanticism that triumphed in 1830 with Hugo’s Hernani. Since Felix Gaiffe’s Le drame en France au XVIIIe siècle (1910, republished 1970), this problem has been addressed by studying the evolution of the drame, the “serious” genre advocated by Denis Diderot at mid-century as an alternative to classical comedy and tragedy...