In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

14 Chapter 1 Investing in the Arts In late 1774, residents of Le Mans, a city of about fourteen thousand located to the southwest of Paris, complained in the local newspaper, the Affiches du Mans, that their city was now “the only one in the whole [region] deprived of the pleasure of a theater.”1 Many other French cities had recently dedicated public playhouses, but those acting companies willing to travel to Le Mans rented space in a private house to stage their performances. Although a group of citizens had petitioned the city government in 1768 to build a municipal theater, their request had been refused. Le Mans, officials explained, simply did not have the funds, “the meagerness of patrimonial revenues having always prevented the municipality from being able to provide this amenity to the citizens.”2 In the absence of financial support from the municipality or the state, a local judge named Mathieu Chesneau-Desportes joined with several other prominent residents to pursue a new plan: they would construct the theater through private investment. They organized a Society of Shareholders for the Construction of a Playhouse in the City of Le Mans, a joint-stock company that proposed to sell shares of 150 livres each in order to raise the eighteen thousand livres needed to build a public theater. In December 1774, the Affiches du Mans first advertised the project to provide the city with a theater described as “nicely decorated without luxury.”3 The society would operate the theater, with members receiving a share of the proceeds made INVESTING IN THE ARTS 15 from renting the stage to traveling acting and opera troupes as well as to popular performers such as tightrope dancers and musicians who played the glass harmonica. The city agreed to donate use of land for the theater and the theater-building society began recruiting investors. More than a hundred individuals came forward to purchase a share in the enterprise.4 Their efforts proved a success. The city celebrated the theater’s inauguration in 1776. Local residents began enjoying theatrical entertainment on a regular basis, and the society-operated theater remained the city’s primary performance venue, to the profit of its investors, well into the nineteenth century.5 For eighteenth-century cities like Le Mans theater in and of itself was hardly novel. Public performance had long enlivened urban life in France.6 From the Middle Ages into the middle of the sixteenth century,the Catholic Church, together with religious confraternities and trade guilds, had patronized the performance of religious works that included passion plays and mystery plays. Secular drama had made its debut in France in the thirteenth century. During the Renaissance, societies of amateur actors had performed bawdy, satiric farces that proved popular among urban crowds. In the seventeenth century, Jesuit colleges had begun to stage annual student productions of classically inspired works. Even professional theater already had a rich history, for traveling acting companies had begun entertaining urban audiences by the late sixteenth century. In fact, in Paul Scarron’s bestselling seventeenth-century novel Le Roman comique, the author recounted the adventures of a troupe of strolling players beginning with their arrival in the city of Le Mans, where Scarron had resided in the 1630s.7 What was new in the eighteenth century was the public playhouse. For decades, itinerant acting companies performed wherever they could find space. Most often, this was on a temporary stage erected in a jeu de paume, a building that housed a playing court for an early form of tennis. Actors also performed in private residences, in city halls, and even outdoors in courtyards or on plazas. The introduction of buildings dedicated expressly and permanently for the purposes of performance and entertainment provides an important indication of the changing status of theater in urban life. In 1671, an inn in Toulouse known as the Logis de l’Écu established what scholars consider to be the first dedicated public theater building outside of Paris.8 Although the inn had already hosted performances of farces and comedies by traveling troupes in one of its outbuildings for perhaps half a century, the hall had served as little more than a space in which actors put up their own stages for the duration of their stay. At this point, however, the “Salle du Logis de l’Écu” was endowed with a permanent stage as well as box seats from which the Capitovls,or city magistrates,could enjoy performances with 16...

Share