The Drama of Fallen France: Reading la Comedie sans Tickets

3. French Identity: The Intended Audience for Jean Giraudoux’s The Apollo of Marsac

3 French Identity: The Intended Audience for Jean Giraudoux’s The Apollo of Marsac Introduction As Marsh tells us, extracts from the writings of Jean Giraudoux, diplomat, government minister, and France’s most celebrated playwright, framed the publicity for Eight Hundred Meters and The Suppliant Women in the collaborationist arts weekly, Comœdia (“The Theatre . . .” 157–158). These quotes were reprinted to enhance the legitimacy of the double-bill spectacle and even to imply a certain sympathy on the part of Giraudoux for this project sponsored by the Vichy Ministry of Education and Sport. Here are a few: The peoples who have the most considerable percentage of art reviews are those who count the strongest in sports: Germany and Finland. A doctor who is not athletic is a chemist whose instruments are soiled.1 There isn’t a hero in Racine who isn’t athletic. There isn’t a great man whose image might be diminished by the attribution of an achievement in sports.2 And in Le Sport, Giraudoux declared, He who neglects the rapture of the body, neglects the health of his country. (“Le Théâtre . . .” 236)3 61 62 THE DRAMA OF FALLEN FRANCE Yet Marsh adds, “It is very ironic that these words had been cited in this context: they had been written by a man profoundly hostile to The National Revolution and the Germans” (237)4 , and he wonders why Giraudoux allowed these extracts to be published on behalf of Eight Hundred Meters. Giraudoux was in fact a complex man, indeed one of the few French dramatists between the wars who was both artistically respected and commercially successful, even widely admired by the public. Although Giraudoux’s only new play produced in occupied Paris, Sodome et Gomorrhe (Sodom and Gomorrah), opened to mixed notices, it ran from October 1943 through May 1944 (by which time he had died). Yet the playwright’s reputation would live on after the Liberation through the posthumous production of La Folle de Chaillot (The Madwoman of Chaillot), written during the War and produced at the end of 1945 by Giraudoux’s longtime director and friend, Louis Jouvet. In this seemingly fanciful view of modern society, the men who control various financial interests that destroy the beauty of life are tricked into sacrificing themselves, lured to their deaths by the very greed with which they would not hesitate to ruin all else. Not only were the reviews superlative, but Madwoman went on to become an international hit (and, more than two decades later, a film). In more recent years, David Bradby has come to view the play as “clearly meant as an old man’s valedictory attack on all that is petty and self-seeking in the modern world” and concludes, “it has dated very rapidly and now seems almost irresponsibly naive” (20). Jeffrey Mehlman makes more serious accusations, seeing in the play (in the context of the dramatist’s body of writings) an expression of Giraudoux’s xenophobic anti-Semitism (34–64). However, during the Occupation Giraudoux completed at least one other play, about which Bradby and Mehlman—and indeed, about which most critics—have remarkably little to say. This whimsical one-act comedy, generally known as L’Apollon de Bellac (translated into English as The Apollo of Bellac or The Apollo de Bellac), was first written and produced (and published) under the title, L’Apollon de Marsac (The Apollo of Marsac).5 Regarded by theatre reviewers and literary critics as a congenial minor work, the piece, when considered in light of its intended enactment and audience response, both of which must be grounded in the context of the Occupation, presents a pointed commentary on the self-esteem of defeated Frenchmen. Giraudoux’s political affiliations and beliefs were complicated, far more so, perhaps, than his plays suggest. The works that he composed between the wars, those that received popular and critical acclaim, belong to a large degree to a now-defunct genre: the drama of ideas. Likewise, in the tradition of French neoclassicism and romantic comedy, Giraudoux brings characters on stage who speak beautifully, and his wit, charm, and intelligence, as well as his occasional servings of sentiment, made his plays appear highly polished. French Identity 63 Still, lurking beneath the seemingly scintillating conversations and glittering debates are issues that are not merely raised but also ultimately resolved— never crudely, through mere disputation, but theatrically, through...