Figures de l’histoire de France dans le théâtre au tournant des Lumières 1760–1830 (review)

The importance of national history in late eighteenth-century and romantic theatre has long been recognized; the implicit claim to the originality of the present volume (proceedings of a conference held in Pau in May 2002) is the focus on the historical character, rather than the event or period. It covers a useful range of material from spoken and musical theatre, including discussions of such characters as Henry IV, Mary Stuart, Louis IX, Clovis and others. Contributions are of mixed quality, and the volume is marred overall by fairly frequent errors; mostly typographical, but sometimes historical, such as the reference to Marie-Antoinette’s marriage ‘en 1770 au tout nouveau roi Louis XVI’ [acceded 1774] (p. 24). The work usefully takes a perspective of longer term development, from ‘Les Lumières’ to Romanticism, with a liberation from the forms of classicism (p. ix). But an opportunity has been missed to ask some fundamental questions about the attendant issues which that raises, such as the breakdown of genres, the ways in which this vogue for ‘national history’ might be related to the development of stadial historiography, whether the Revolution does anything particular with historical characters; not to mention whether a general evolution is discernible. To do so is of course much harder with a collective volume; but the introduction could have set out the issues much more helpfully. Indeed, when the individual chapters are case studies of admittedly obscure works, without such editorial work the volume feels like little more than the sum of its parts. The start- and end-dates of the volume are also somewhat questionable. Together, they are taken to englobe ‘le tournant des Lumières’, yet 1830 is rather late to mark the end of the Enlightenment (not to mention for a publication such as SVEC), and it is unclear why 1760 has been chosen as a beginning: many historical works date from before, as the editors note. There are some vague references to ‘patriotism’ and to a renewal of the repertory (which repertory?), but that is all. 1765, with its arguably watershed work Le Siège de Calais, might be a better bet, but one wonders, in the light of articles centred on Hénault’s François II (1747), and on Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots (1836), whether the dates have really been thought through at all. More seriously, though, several contributions needed tighter editorial intervention. I question the usefulness of Simonin’s rubrics on pp. 25–26 (particularly, ‘Onomastique’, a one-paragraph list of names with no critical comment whatsoever, or ‘Dramaturgie’, which explains that the plays are written in verse); several articles are padded out with appendices whose necessity is at best debatable (Bourdin, Cooper), whereas Guermès’s article on Meyerbeer makes no reference to the music, and her sole musicographical reference is Kobbé’s opera book. Naturally, there are some fine readings here too (Delon, Flammarion, Biard, Krakovitch, particularly), but they are very much in the minority. SVEC is a prestigious and highly regarded series, and this volume falls well below its usual standard.