Stagestruck: The Business of Theater in Eighteenth-Century France and Its Colonies

6. Consumers of Culture

163 Chapter 6 Consumers of Culture During his travels in the south of France in the late 1780s Johann Georg Fisch made a point to attend the theater in every city that boasted a playhouse. At the theater, he explained, “in one evening one can learn so much more about the nature, the character, the taste of a public than one could collect in weeks of arduous observations” in the streets among the people, in narrow social circles, or in coffeehouses, where everyone is looking for distractions.1 While attending performances in cities such as Montpellier, Aix, Marseille, Nîmes, and Toulon, Fisch proved as interested in the drama taking place in the parterre and boxes around him as in the works produced onstage. In Toulon, where he attended a “very mediocre” performance of the comedies La Fausse Agnès and Le Fou raisonnable , he moved from box to box “in order to see the people.” Toulon’s theater audience, he was told, drew more heavily from wealthy elites, with men and women of the middling classes attending less often than in other cities. Those from “common bourgeois households”may well have been put off by the particularly reprehensible behavior of about half a dozen young military officers, whom he observed shamelessly propositioning prostitutes in language that Fisch suggested would make any respectable person blush.2 (Elsewhere,he found,theater audiences generally behaved with greater decorum .) Yet, from his perspective, the most important factor shaping the social composition of a theater audience was money. “In the long run,” he wrote, “it will be decided by who can pay the expenses.”3 164 CHAPTER 6 During the late Old Regime, keen social observers like Fisch turned to theater spectators and the ways they acted and interacted to obtain a unique perspective on urban societies in the midst of economic growth and cultural change. As dedicated playhouses opened their doors in more than seventy cities across metropolitan France, urban consumers claimed their places within these new institutions. From Metz to Marseille, even as royal authorities and city magistrates vied for seats that conferred honor and distinction, an array of other urban elites,including aristocrats,parlementaires,tax farmers,lawyers, négociants, bankers, and manufacturers, paid dearly for the privilege of sitting in a prominent first box or on benches on the stage itself.4 Meanwhile, low-end tickets were priced to sell, and sell they did. In the relatively inexpensive , standing-room-only parterre, contemporaries encountered a wide array of men from the working and middling classes,ranging from university students, shopkeepers, watchmakers, painters, chefs, clerks, secretaries, tailors, wigmakers, and domestic servants, to doctors, lawyers, city magistrates, local bourgeois, and foreign travelers.5 Women, too, turned out in significant numbers . Aristocratic ladies and bourgeois wives (and widows) attended performances with their husbands, daughters, and friends. These women sat apart In this contemporary representation of the interior of the Reims playhouse, a sizable number of women appear in the boxes and also in the amphitheater at the rear of the playhouse. “Salle de la rue Talleyrand en 1785,” by permission Reims, Bibliothèque municipale, LCII C 26. CONSUMERS OF CULTURE 165 from the female servants, shopgirls, and courtesans who also came to the theater.6 In ports, we have seen, captains and their sailors attended shows, whereas in garrisons army officers and common soldiers rubbed shoulders (and sometimes exchanged blows) with civilians.7 With tickets priced to accommodate a range of incomes and tastes, provincial theaters attracted a public that was even broader and more heterogeneous than that of the royal theaters in Paris. By drawing support across traditional social divides, the provincial public theater, according to one urban historian, stood out as “perhaps the sole marker of cultural union in the city.”8 For spectators,a theater ticket offered for sale was no ordinary commodity. Theater companies offered unprecedented access to performing arts culture, enabling theatergoers to choose among the rich and diverse offerings. Audience members bought the opportunity to experience these performances— but also much more. Contemporaries turned to these new public spaces to meet friends and acquaintances,conduct business,enjoy refreshments,display fashionable clothing and accessories, flirt, people-watch, make mischief, and stage demonstrations,among other things,all before a crowd of onlookers. A traveler attending a performance in Lyon undoubtedly spoke for many when he found that “the least interesting part of the spectacle was the actors.”9 At the same time that theaters offered up possibilities for a new...