Turkeys Dancing on a Hot Metal Floor: The Theater in Eighteenth-Century French Print Culture

What is the epistemological advantage of interdisciplinary scholarship? Claire Trévien's Satire, Prints, and Theatricality in the French Revolution offers an answer to this question in a manner that challenges the question itself. At many turns, Trévien's study effectively dissolves the boundary between the disciplines of print-culture studies, and theater and performance studies. On some level, we seem to be aware of how disciplines create boundaries of convenience defined by nomenclature and notions of value, even if critically useful for knowledge and education. Yet in the language of analytic philosophy, these divisions of knowledge are institutional facts, not brute facts, and they can lead to as much blindness as they can insight. Trévien convincingly demonstrates how prints and theater in the early years of the French Revolution share songs, characters, overt and covert references, technical vocabulary, a distrust of showmanship, and, of course, political context. By giving a history of the ways that theater influenced French Revolutionary print culture, especially satirical prints, Trévien argues that prints constitute a site of performance in their own right and an alternative stage of the Revolution.

Trévien's study begins with a brief and convincing historiography of Revolutionary and counter-Revolutionary French prints before taking up the following themes by chapter: chansons and outdoor singing culture; the carnivalesque and commedia dell'arte; the history of science and showmanship; and depictions of death and the afterlife. Both prints and theater "have spectacle in common," she argues, and are subject to all the anxieties and benefits of presenting and representing vision (219). Giving due attention to the medium and the market for prints, she notes that the majority of revolutionary prints were etchings as opposed to more expensive engravings. Prints are not only images for viewing in her discussion; rather, they come alive as objects that were sung aloud, appealed to diverse audiences, and provided secret cues for private laughter. She takes the reader to unexpected places and cultural contexts, as in her delightful discussions of the history of hot air ballooning, which includes mention of their potential use as instruments of warfare, and her history of innovation in theatrical lighting for the stage (157, 192). Her writing in relation to the images discussed flows effortlessly throughout and constitutes a particularly successful aspect of the book. Each of the fifty prints shown in the text receives due attention and discussion. Trévien thus avoids the trap of some writers on print culture who can sometimes devote a sentence or less to a reproduced image. While it sometimes reads like a dissertation, her book is lucid and rewarding.

Beyond the influence of "high art" theater or even the popularity of theater over the whole of the eighteenth century, Trévien posits that theater and theatrical metaphors provided printmakers with "an effective and concrete way of imaging a concept, idea, or point of view" (17). She makes clear that the theater offered printmakers another arena of signs and sign making from which to draw. For example, she explains how the erotic, or at least semi-erotic, boudoir scene in the print Rosine! Rosine! ma chère Rosine! showcases the low position of the clergy and aristocracy after 1789. Rosine! decries and delights in their decadence. Using the name "Rosine" embeds a reference to Beaumarchais's Le Barbier de Séville, a play that likely influenced the print's staging and décor. Beyond this, the print appropriates the words to a tune from Louis Anseaume's comedy Le Tableau parlant. These references to theater engage the idea of the Third Estate in complex, sympathetic ways that add a narrative component to the clergyman and aristocratic woman arguing in the bedroom. In addition to communicating abstract ideas in images, for instance with caricature (Rosine looks a lot like Marie Antoinette in this print) and the mechanics of humor (the figures are incongruous and their setting breaks sexual taboos on many [End Page 102...