Une histoire du théâtre à Paris: de la Révolution à la Grande Guerre by Jean-Claude Yon (review)

Reviews 247 Yon, Jean-Claude. Une histoire du théâtre à Paris: de la Révolution à la Grande Guerre. Paris: Flammarion, 2012. ISBN 978-2-7007-0188-3. Pp. 437. 29 a. Yon offers a valuable compendium of information about the underpinnings of nineteenth-century Parisian theater. This is a wonderfully informative book for those of us who have taught plays such as Hernani, La dame aux camélias, or La fille Élisa and longed to know more about the behind-the-scenes battles over censorship, theater construction and personnel, authors’ and actors’ rights, patronage, and the theatrical experience itself. This is not an histoire of Paris’s greatest theatrical works, but of its theaters. Yon adopts a resolutely historical approach, considering plays themselves as historical documents (259). He provides a comprehensive overview of the social and cultural forces that influenced theaters and their operation in nineteenth-century Paris.Although Yon uses the term théâtre largely to refer to state-sanctioned structures until 1864, he also discusses a variety of other spectacles including cafés-concerts, circuses, and sports, particularly in sections devoted to the Belle Époque. The book’s first section, “L’État face aux théâtres parisiens,” develops chronologically from 1791 to 1914, tracing theater’s fate in the hands of each political regime. The second, “Les structures de la vie théâtrale,” evokes the way theaters were laid out, operated, frequented , and supervised (fire laws for example), explains how authors and personnel collaborated to bring texts to the scene, describes the working conditions of performers and stage hands,and the experience of the theater-going public.The third part,“Répertoires et diversité des spectacles,” provides a thematic overview of different generic categories of the 32,000 pièces performed in Paris from 1800–1900 (259): they ranged from tragedy and opera to melodrama, vaudeville, dance, pantomime, panorama, circus, and sports.Yon’s conclusion describes the controversial droit des pauvres, the tax levied on theaters to support charitable activities, and interprets its unpopularity as symptomatic of the tenuous associations between theaters and their perceived social utility. Each section of Yon’s book draws upon a wealth of archival materials (letters from Haussmann to ministers, from the police to ministers, among writers and actors), to reveal the book’s overarching thesis: that nineteenth-century French theater was a dramatocratie, meaning that theater was at the heart of public life and informed public opinion (7). Indeed, he shows that all nineteenth-century French rulers were concerned by theatrical spectacles’ influence on the lower classes, and the threat that such a dramatocratie represented for the state. Even Third Republic leaders were concerned by the shape and form exerted by theater and struggled (ineffectually it would turn out) to control public spectacles. But Yon also perceives the Third Republic as the moment when theater lost this social privilege, when it morphed into one among many attractions in a developing société du spectacle (351). Yon’s work is thus not a neutral accounting of the development of bourgeois Parisian theaters, le grand théâtre, but a commentary on theater’s implications for nineteenth-century French society as a whole. This book will be a valuable resource for teachers and students alike. It is published in an affordable paperback edition, it is well-documented, contains a useful index,and is full of interesting excerpts from historical documents and correspondence. While sometimes a bit technical, it would make an excellent French-language historical resource for literature courses dedicated to nineteenth-century French theater and theatrical history. Montclair State University (NJ) Elizabeth Emery Society and Culture edited by Frederick Toner Beffa, Jean-Louis. La France doit choisir. Paris: Seuil, 2012. ISBN 978-2-02-106499-5. Pp. 287. 18 a. Ce choix crucial est celui du type de capitalisme que la France devrait adopter. Ex-PDG de Saint-Gobain (1996–2007) et conseiller politique actif, Beffa analyse clairement la mondialisation, dissèque le mal économique français, et propose des solutions. Il distingue entre les “métiers mondiaux [...] où la production d’un pays donné est en concurrence directe avec les productions d’un autre pays” (17), et les métiers régionaux o...