Composing the Citizen: Music as Public Utility in Third Republic France (review)

In the minds of many, the idea that a government would use music as a tool to help shape public attitudes and behavior raises the specter of twentieth-century totalitarian states, whether in the literary guise of Orwell's 1984 or in the all-too-real histories of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. As a result, the use of music to promote values deemed important to the state seems a rather malevolent exercise, one far removed from the principles of a modern democracy.

But the totalitarians of the twentieth century were not the first to recognize music's usefulness in the promotion of government policy, and the various manifestations of government involvement in music are not necessarily sinister, as Jann Pasler demonstrates in her monumental new study, which traces the myriad ways in which the republicans of fin-de-siècle France used music to promote their values and further their agenda. Drawing on her many years of research into French music and musical life, taking account of the contributions of virtually every scholar currently working in the field of late-nineteenth-century musical studies, and employing a dizzying array of primary and secondary sources, the author presents a wide-ranging and insightful examination of music and musical life in the first three decades of the Third Republic, roughly 1870-1900, as seen through the lens of a fascinating and ever-shifting political, social, and cultural context.

The book contains many contemporary photographs and illustrations, reproductions of programs and cover sheets, twenty-nine music examples, and three appendices. The first of these presents a time line of important political and musical events in the early Third Republic (1870-1902). The other two are related to specific topics covered in the text: a list of references in Le Ménestrel to performances of French operas in other countries from 1872-88, and a list of publications on music of the French Revolution published after 1870.

Unfortunately, there is no bibliography. Instead, authors' names appear in the index. Given the number of entries a bibliography would have contained and the resulting bulk it would have added to an already very thick volume, one can certainly understand the omission while, at the same time, lamenting the absence of what would have been a very useful tool for scholars eager to broaden their knowledge of both primary and secondary sources. One could reasonably argue that a bibliography might have been more beneficial to most readers than the latter two appendices.

Arranged into four large sections, the book follows a basically chronological scheme. The first section opens with a detailed history of the concept of "public utility" in France and then moves on to an examination of the musical legacy of the Revolution and the various ways in which republicans sought to recreate the success of the grand public spectacles that had been such an important feature of public life in Revolutionary France. Each of the remaining three sections roughly covers a decade, but the approach and the range of topics vary according to the issues and concerns of the decade under consideration. One finds in section 2, for example, a discussion of the debates that raged in the 1870s over the relationship of French music to that of other countries (particularly Germany) and an examination of the ways music was used in early republican attempts to reform the educational system. In the third section (the 1880s), there is a chapter devoted to the role of music in the controversy over French colonial policy and the impact that music from various colonial lands had on French composers and listeners. Another examines the place of music in the consumer culture that began to emerge in that decade, symbolized by the grand new department stores that sprang up in Paris. The last section includes, among others, a chapter on music at the 1889 Universal Exposition and one that...