- Le Théâtre en liberté: Victor Hugo et la scène sous le Second Empire par Stéphane Desvignes
History has tended to hear the death knell sound for Hugo’s career as a playwright (and for French Romantic drama) in early 1843, but the debut of Les Burgraves has too often been wrongly characterized as a categorical flop rather than as a relative disappointment. As Stéphane Desvignes clarifies in this weighty study of Hugo’s exile theatre, the fallacy surrounding Les Burgraves must be dismantled if the full scope of Hugo’s writing as a dramatist is to be widely acknowledged. The fact that Hugo never again brought a new work to the stage in his lifetime cannot simply be read as a bruised ego’s adieu to stagecraft. Previous scholarship has identified various contexts for Hugo’s decision, especially the tragic association in his mind of the year 1843 with the death of his eldest daughter Léopoldine. Desvignes casts further — and extensive — light on Hugo’s relationship with the theatre as it evolved during his exile from the Second Empire, all the while acknowledging the debt to critics such as Anne Ubersfeld, Arnaud Laster, and Florence Naugrette (the latter of whom recently offered a salient reminder of how the clichés of failure surrounding Les Burgraves were later hammered in place by a Third Republic that was unsurprisingly keen to relegate German-influenced Romanticism to the past). In this respect, the book’s title could be misleading. Le Théâtre en liberté is the name given to the collection of plays Hugo wrote in exile, but which was only published posthumously in 1886. Notwithstanding the astute analyses of those works in the third and final part of his monograph, Desvignes looks beyond that collection, however, and prises open greater space for the relevance of Hugo’s theatre alongside his far more familiar achievements in fiction and poetry between 1852 and 1870. In turn, he opens a broader perspective on the stage’s importance to Hugo’s exile as a catalyst for freeing the imagination. Such breadth stretches from the Second Empire’s instrumentalization of theatre as an entertainment industry, to Hugo’s carefully considered critique of such bourgeois values in his 1864 essay on Shakespeare, in line with his enduring beliefs in theatre’s sociability and inclusive reach. This vantage point recognizes that, unlike Musset’s Un spectacle dans un fauteuil (1832), Le Théâtre en liberté was never destined only to be encountered on the page, in spite of imperial censorship. Far from being an unperformable series, Hugo always wanted it to question the concepts of genre and theatricality in practice as much as in theory, thereby endorsing Romantic dramaturgy over materialist trends. The experimental diversity of the collection’s eleven plays (their varying lengths, the shifts from verse to prose, the blend of history and myth, and the mix of genres from vaudeville to melodrama) emphasizes a telling line of continuity between the bataille d’Hernani of 1830 and the toils of exile. Given the density of Desvignes’s study, the overall pace could have been quickened with more judicious editing to lend greater momentum to the argument: many of the longer extracts and résumés would indeed have been better suited to the appendices alongside the useful data regarding Second Empire theatre production (and before a helpful index), while the excessive footnotes risk becoming languid in their effect. Such re-organization could also have allowed for further development of some [End Page 127] tantalizing if slightly tacit moments of discussion, not least ‘une utopie du grotesque’. Perseverant readers will nonetheless be rewarded.