Le Théâtre de Louis Lemercier: entre Lumières et romantisme by Vincenzo De Santis (review)

Vincenzo De Santis took two risks in writing this book. Firstly, he casts the little-known playwright, Népomucène-Louis Lemercier (1771–1840), as the lead role in a 728-page tome that includes scholarly editions of Lemercier’s Agamemnon (1797) and Pinto, ou, La journée d’une conspiration (1800). Secondly, by covering a period from approximately 1795 to the early 1830s, he tackles one of the most overlooked eras of French theatre — the putative wasteland between the neo-classicism of the French Revolution and the advent of Hugo’s drame romantique. De Santis’s risks pay off, and his account of one man’s theatrical trajectory illuminates a fascinating period of aesthetic uncertainty and innovation. De Santis’s Introduction underscores the relative lack of scholarship on Lemercier and on French theatre from the decades between Revolution and Romanticism. He then organizes his study chronologically, from the playwright’s neo-classical tragedies and Moliéresque comedies of the late 1790s through to his experiments with the grotesque and historical drama during the 1820s and 1830s. De Santis proves that Lemercier’s aesthetic trajectory was not a simple path from Lumières to Romanticism. Lemercier’s plays — from any decade — avoid easy classification: for example, his Agamemnon, a neo-classical success under the Directoire, is not that neo-classical at all, for the tragedy shows a unique ‘mélange des tons’, a ‘violation des unités’, and even an ‘exaltation de Shakespeare’ (p. 32) (most French neo-classicists were no fan of the Bard). Yet Lemercier was not a Romantic: even if Hugo’s gang claimed Pinto as a drame romantique avant la lettre, Lemercier despised their works and remained an ‘ennemi juré des romantiques’ until his death (p. 352). If there is one harmonizing factor in Lemercier’s narrative, it is that he is always difficult to pin down. Through close, clear readings of Lemercier’s drama, pedagogical cours, and personal writings, De Santis proves that the playwright was consistently enigmatic: he made criticisms of the Diderotian drame and Beaumarchais’s genre sérieux, yet adopted many of their emotional and ethical features; he hated Napoleon (after loving him), yet sought political and financial favours from the Empire; Racine, Voltaire, and Schiller were sources of Lemercier’s drama but also targets of his criticism. De Santis’s book is a lively journey through the political and artistic minefields of post-Revolutionary France. De Santis is a lucid writer, and any possible criticisms of his book are few. In my own view, the critical editions appended to the study are unnecessary, and even rather unfortunate: the MHRA’s Phoenix series and Classiques Garnier’s own Bibliothèque du théâtre français publish scholarly editions of French plays for a modest price. De Santis’s bundled editions of Agamemnon and Pinto, while truly excellent, are too expensive for students or for casual readers of drama. But, all in all, De Santis has written a fascinating book on Lemercier, and, more importantly, he has pulled back the curtain on a neglected but intriguing era of French theatre history.