Staging the French Revolution: Cultural Politics and the Paris Opéra, 1789–1794 by Mark Darlow (review)

Central to the story of the Revolution is the matter of rupture and continuity in the fate of Ancien Régime cultural forms. Mark Darlow addresses this and other key issues of Revolutionary cultural historiography in his meticulously researched study. Organized in two distinct parts, the book provides an institutional history of the Paris Opéra followed by a close examination of its repertory. This bipartite structure is a departure from typical approaches to the complex task of narrating the closely imbricated social and aesthetic history of performing arts institutions. Attending separately to contextual and textual analysis frees Darlow to conduct a thorough examination of the governance, management, finances, and artistic strategies of the Opéra, weaving them together in a ‘discursive web’ meant to show ‘how culture is conceptualized by a wide range of agents: creators, performers, and critics, but also municipal bureaucrats, crown officials, and deputies in the newly created National Assembly’ (p. 18). In doing so, he illuminates material and symbolic strategies employed by cultural institutions to negotiate their survival through the Revolution and finds a ‘contestatory politics that grew out of previous cultural forms, reinvesting them with new significance, rather than inventing anew’ (p. 383). The institutional history recounted in the first four chapters traces the Opéra chronologically from 1789 to Thermidor. Drawing on governmental and administrative records, journalistic publications, and pamphlets, Darlow reveals that perceptions of the Opéra prior to the Revolution condemned it as a decadent, disordered institution. In the first years of the Revolution the Opéra is transferred to municipal supervision in the context of debates that highlight disagreement about the autonomy of culture and its function as a public service. Darlow shows the paradoxical nature of the January 1791 deregulation of the theatre. The so-called Le Chapelier Law offered liberation from repertorial privileges held by Ancien Régime theatres while simultaneously asserting their new obligation as institutions of public instruction. The Terror period reveals repression and censorship for the Opéra, as well as tumultuous managerial restructuring. Methodologically, the book’s initial section allows Darlow to demonstrate that institutional history is essential to dispelling misconceptions and commonplaces about Revolutionary culture, including the notion that theatre operated under complete freedom following deregulation, that the Terror period was unequivocally repressive, and that Ancien Régime repertory was by definition divorced from the politics of the moment. The second part of the study (which, arguably, might stand separately) offers painstaking analysis of box office receipts, the composition of the Opéra repertory, and frequency of its performances. Two chapters, focused on the 1789–90 season and divided by genre (tragedy and serious works followed by comic and mixed works), reveal a company caught in a policy of artistic circumspection. During the Terror, a patriotic repertory shows less the success of censorship and coercion than a series of confused attempts to address the moving target of Terror-era ideology. Well researched and finely written, Darlow’s study introduces a welcome complexity to our understanding of the arts during the French Revolution and demonstrates the value of institutional histories.