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

Epilogue: Culture, Commerce, and the State

225 Epilogue Culture, Commerce, and the State In 2009, the French Ministry of Culture and Communication celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. This branch of government , created by Charles de Gaulle in 1959, advances a mandate “to make accessible the capital works of humanity and above all of France to the greatest possible number of French citizens, to assure the widest audience for our cultural patrimony, and to promote the creation of the works of art and the spirit that enrich it.”1 Today’s ministry employs much of its multibillion euro budget to sustain and encourage the arts and humanities, with a primary emphasis on French culture construed in the broadest terms.2 Theater has long enjoyed a place of prominence in the ministry’s agenda.3 Former minister Christine Albanel praised France’s performing arts industry as “the premier network in Europe, and probably in the entire world,” one that included no fewer than 1,235 ensembles and companies devoted to the performance of theater, opera, music, and dance.4 The French state, rather than the public, is the primary source of support for many of these performing arts institutions. For a national theater company such as the Comédie-Française, the government provides substantial subsidies that in recent years have exceeded 70 percent of the troupe’s annual operating budget. This level of state funding is well over twice what noncommercial English theaters receive from the British state and more than ten times the proportion of direct federal funding enjoyed by a premier 226 EPILOGUE American performing arts institution such as New York’s Lincoln Center.5 Indeed, the French state’s especially prominent role in the nation’s cultural production,embraced as an integral aspect of French exceptionalism,is without parallel elsewhere in the West.6 The high-profile cultural interventions through which the government has sought to engineer the cultural marketplace in the performing arts have drawn praise both domestically and abroad from those who admire the ministry ’s initiative and deep financial commitment to promoting French culture . “What money can buy, culturally speaking, the French have bought,” one commentator observed.7 Yet these policies have also sparked controversy , as demonstrated by the heated debates that erupted in the 1980s and 1990s. Critics have taken issue with the limited agency accorded to local and regional authorities in determining cultural policies,as well as the disproportionate scale at which Parisian institutions are funded, prompting repeated calls and initiatives for decentralization. They have questioned the effectiveness of the state’s policies in achieving its stated goals of fostering cultural creation and democratizing participation in cultural institutions. Others have turned a spotlight on the sensitive issue of just what constitutes “French” culture worthy of public support.8 During these modern-day culture wars, politicians and scholars alike have identified deep historical roots for France’s distinctive state-driven cultural agenda, often tracing its origins back to France’s absolute monarchs. There is little doubt that the policies of Louis XIV and his Bourbon heirs deeply marked the cultural landscape in Paris and, through the preeminent royal institutions that Old Regime kings established and patronized,the nation as a whole.Yet viewing the cultural policies of the Old Regime court as a precursor for the current-day relationship between the state and cultural production , I suggest, obscures more than it illuminates. The evidence presented in this book throws the limits of such a genealogy into relief,with the relationship between the state and the stage in eighteenth-century France emerging as considerably more complex than the myth of a nascent absolutist cultural state would seem to allow. When the history of the French theater industry is reframed to take into account the experiences of the vast majority of French playhouses, actors, and spectators—namely, those in provincial cities located throughout the Hexagon as well as in France’s colonial possessions—the cultural ambitions of Old Regime monarchs appear considerably more limited in scope than those of postrevolutionary regimes. Aimed at promoting theater and opera that would glorify the monarchy and establish the cultural supremacy of France,the royal policies established in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries focus almost exclusively on the capital and the court. CULTURE, COMMERCE, AND THE STATE 227 What is perhaps most remarkable is their lack of concern with theatrical life elsewhere in the kingdom. Even as patronage, privilege, and direct royal oversight came to define theatrical production in Paris,the emergent French theater industry as...