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

Introduction: The Making of a French Theater Industry

1 Introduction The Making of a French Theater Industry “Never has talent been so rare among us,” complained theater director, dramatist, and talent scout Charles-Simon Favart. Writing from Paris in the early 1760s, Favart maintained that all of France was facing an acute shortage of able and experienced actors, actresses, and singers for hire. “We are beating the drum to find them,” he observed, “and if our capital, which is their usual rendezvous, lacks them today, one cannot hope to find them elsewhere.”1 Favart, who corresponded widely with performers and auditioned talent in provincial cities as well as in Paris, understood France’s changing talent market well. In recent years, the salaries demanded even by performers he considered mediocre had escalated rapidly, rising “in proportion to need and rarity.” Demand for qualified personnel exceeded supply and the reason was clear. “Each provincial city wants to have a troupe,” he explained, “and they recruit all the way to our [Paris] boulevards.” Moreover, France’s expanding theater industry, Favart felt certain, was only gathering momentum. With the Seven Years’ War finally coming to an end and peace almost sure to stimulate economic growth, he predicted that the number of French theater troupes “is going to multiply . . . to infinity.”2 Favart’s lifetime spanned from the reign of Louis XIV to the French Revolution , most of it working in the theater business, so he occupied a particularly good vantage point from which to witness the profound transforma- 2 INTRODUCTION tions sweeping the performance industry in France. Yet his contemporaries also noticed the enthusiasm for theater that was taking hold in provincial cities and its consequences for everyday life. The French, it seemed clear, were stagestruck. “The public theaters, although innumerable, do not suffice, we construct them in villages, in the armies, . . . in private homes,” complained a Catholic moralist living in Montauban, a city that had acquired its first dedicated playhouse only in 1760: “We run to them, we go in, we perform there, we spend our lives there.”3 Moreover, as this author and others noted, this growing passion for theater was not restricted to the metropole. Plays, published accounts of the latest theatrical happenings,and even actors crossed the Atlantic and Indian oceans to reach cities throughout the empire.4 This book is a history of the making of a French theater industry in the late Old Regime. I use the term “French” because this study examines why and how professional public theater became a regular aspect of cultural and social life for city dwellers throughout France and its colonies, a phenomenon that was rooted in the eighteenth century. In comparison with Spain, Italy, and England, professional theater came late to France. The first troupes of Italian actors began to stage commedia dell’arte in French cities during the 1570s. French actors soon followed their lead,and by the 1630s Parisians had begun to enjoy regular public theater. Outside of the capital, however, professional performance long remained on the margins of urban public life.5 When King Louis XIV founded the Comédie-Française,France’s royal dramatic theater company, in 1680, only a single provincial city enjoyed a dedicated playhouse, Toulouse. Yet between the 1680s and 1789, at least seventy metropolitan cities and eleven cities in France’s colonies celebrated the inauguration of their first public salle de spectacle (theater).6 (See appendix .) On the eve of the Revolution, more French cities boasted theaters than universities, chambers of commerce, royal academies, or local newspapers.7 Together, these provincial and colonial playhouses could accommodate as many as fifty-seven thousand customers on any given evening, an estimate that swells to seventy thousand when Parisian theaters are included.8 In these auditoriums,spectators who had long made do with sporadic and often brief visits by traveling acting troupes began to enjoy regular seasons of theater and opera. By the late 1780s, large resident performing arts companies entertained audiences with comedy and tragedy, musical theater and opera yearround in over a dozen French cities that stretched from Lyon to Rouen to Cap Français, in the Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue (modern-day Haiti). During the final decades of the Old Regime, France’s theater industry came to surpass even that of highly commercialized and theater-loving England, where all troupes outside of London toured for much of the year.9 THE MAKING OF A FRENCH THEATER INDUSTRY 3 The consequences of this expansion were striking. Theaters emerged as the most...