(The New Cultural History of Music Series) Mark Darlow - Staging The French Revolution - Cultural Politics and The Paris Opera, 1789-1794-Oxford University Press (2012)

Staging the French Revolution
s e r i e s e d i t o r Jane F. Fulcher,
s e r i e s b oa r d Celia Applegate
Philip Bohlman
Kate Van Orden
Michael P. Steinberg
Enlightenment Orpheus:
The Power of Music in Other Worlds
Vanessa Agnew
Voice Lessons:
French Mélodie in the Belle Epoque
Katherine Bergeron
Songs, Scribes, and Societies:
The History and Reception of the Loire Valley
Chansonniers
Jane Alden
Harmony and Discord:
Music and the Transformation of Russian Cultural Life
Lynn M. Sargeant
Musical Renderings of the Philippine Nation
Christi-Anne Castro
Staging the French Revolution:
Cultural Politics and the Paris Opéra, 1789–1794
Mark Darlow
The Sense of Sound:
Musical Meaning in France, 1260–1330
Emma Dillon
Staging the
French
Revolution
Cultural Politics mark darl ow
and the Paris

Opéra,
1789–1794
1
1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Darlow, Mark.
Staging the French Revolution : cultural politics and the Paris Opera, 1789–1794 / Mark Darlow.
p. cm. — (The new cultural history of music series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-977372-5 (alk. paper)
1. Opera—France—Paris—18th century. 2. Opera de Paris—History—18th century. 3. Opera—
Political aspects—France—Paris—History—18th century. 4. Opera—Production and direction—
France—Paris—History—18th century. I. Title.
ML1727.3.D37 2012
792.50944’36109033—dc23 2011018802
_____________________________________________________________________________
987654321
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
c o n ten ts
Acknowledgments vii
Sigla and Abbreviations ix
Note on Abbreviations xi
About the Companion Website xiii
Introduction 3
1. The Outlook in 1789 21
2. From Crown to Town: Governance of the Opéra,
March 1789–April 1790 63
3. Control by the Municipality:
April 1790–April 1792 99
4. The Opéra during the Terror 141
5 . Finances and Repertory 183
6. Tragedy and Serious Works 213
7. Comic and Mixed Works 277
8. Republican Repertory (1792–1794) 325
Conclusion 383
Bibliography 395
Index 415
This page intentionally left blank
a c know l ed g m ents
I have acquired many debts in the writing of this book, a project begun back
in 2004. For their assistance and advice in locating particular primary sources,
I would like to thank Francis Delon (Archives de Paris), Marie-Claire Waille
(Bibliothèque Municipale de Besançon), and Pierre Jugie (Archives Nationales).
I owe particular thanks to the staff of the Bibliothèque de l’Opéra who under
sometimes difficult circumstances were unfailingly helpful and supportive of
this project: Pierre Vidal, Matthias Auclair, and their colleagues, all of whom
have helped me navigate and make use of the exceptionally rich holdings of
the Opéra.
I gratefully acknowledge permission to reproduce particular images granted
by the Bibliothèque Municipale de Besançon, the Archives Nationales de
France, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Syndics of Cambridge
University Library, and the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris.
For pointing me to specific sources and for discussing issues and ideas
that found their way into this book, I would like to thank David Charlton,
Christian Donath, John Golder, Yann Robert, and Solveig Serre. Particular
thanks are due to my mother, Janet Darlow, who spent large amounts of time
creating the spreadsheet on which the evidence for Chapter 5 is based, for
creating tables and graphs, and for spotting and correcting several factual
blunders in my data. Research assistance in the early stages was also provided
by Julia McLaren and her colleagues at Cpéderf in Paris, and my own primary
research was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council matching
leave scheme and a Philip Leverhulme prize, awarded in 2005, and generously
supplemented by the University of Cambridge. I am grateful to my colleagues
in the Department of French at Cambridge and at Christ’s college for their
support, and particularly to Emma Wilson, Nicholas Hammond and Bill
Burgwinkle.
For reading late drafts of the book, I would particularly like to thank
Thomas Wynn, Sarah Hibberd, Katherine Astbury, the anonymous reviewer
for Oxford University Press, and most important Matthew Rice, whose
support during the completion of this project has meant so much.
viii | acknowledgments
s i g l a an d abbre vi ati ons
AP: Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860, recueil complet

des débats législatifs et politiques des Chambres françaises,
imprimé . . . sous la direction de J. Mamidal et E. Laurent
. . . 1re série (1787 à 1799), 47 vols. (Paris: P. Dupont,
1867–1896). Cited by volume and page number.
AP, lx.73 [volume 60, page 73]
[AN]: Archives Nationales de France. At the time of
writing, documents in the O/1 series are numbered,
and I cite them by box and document number, hence
O/1/617 #47. AJ/13 documents remain unnum-
bered, but classified within different numbered
dossiers, and I cite them as follows: AJ/13/3.II.
Ars: Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Paris
BCF: Bibliothèque de la Comédie-Française, Paris
BHVP: Bibliothèque historique de la ville de Paris
BMB: Bibliothèque municipale, Besançon
BN-Est: Cabinet des Estampes, Bibliothèque nationale de
France
BnF: Bibliothèque nationale de France
BNM: Département de la musique, Bibliothèque nationale
de France
CER: Conseil d’Etat du Roi
CIP [In the text]: Comité d’instruction publique
[In footnotes]: Procès-verbaux du Comité d’instruction publique de
l’Assemblée législative, publiés et annotés par M. J.
Guillaume (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1889), and
Procès-verbaux du Comité d’instruction publique de la
Convention nationale, publiés et annotés par M. J.
Guillaume, 8 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale,
1891–1958), henceforward CIPa; and new edition of
the whole series by J. Ayoub and M. Grenon, 17 vol-
umes (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997–1998), hencefor-
ward CIPb.
CoIP: Commission d’instruction publique
CSP [In the text]: Comité de salut public
[In footnotes]: Recueil des actes du comité de salut public, avec la corre-
spondance officielle des représentants en mission et le registre
du Conseil exécutif provisoire, publié par F. -A. Aulard,
28 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie nationale/Presses univer-
saitaires de France, 1889–1951), 3 vols. tables (Paris:
Imprimerie Nationale, 1893–1964), 5 vols. supple-
ments (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale, 1966–1999).
Cited by volume number and page number in the
text: CSP, xx.483 [volume 20, page 483], prefaced
by “Table” or “Supplément” where necessary.
Lacroix: Actes de la Commune de Paris pendant la Révolution,
publiés et annotés par Sigismond Lacroix (Paris: Le
Cerf— Charles Noblet—Maison Quantin, 1894–
1955): 19 volumes in 2 series, cited: I.iii.476 [série I,
tome 3, page 476]
MC: Minutier central des notaires Parisiens
Moniteur: I am citing the Réimpression de l’ancien Moniteur, depuis
la Réunion des Etats-généraux jusqu’au Consulat (mai
1789–novembre 1799) (Paris: Bureau central, 1840–),
by number, (date), and volume and page in the
reprint.
Po: Bibliothèque de l’Opéra, Paris
x | sigla and abbreviations

n ot e o n abbrevi ati ons
Abbreviations of other periodicals than the Moniteur are given in the bibliog-
raphy. I use the term minister throughout, even though the official title
was secrétaire d’Etat (e.g., de la Maison du roi), because the terms were used
interchangeably in the pamphlets and memos I cite, and because the formal
title is cumbersome, and the distinction not relevant to the subject matter
of this book. In order to avoid cumbersome French terms I have also used
the following designations: principals [ premiers sujets], artists [sujets], employees
[préposés]. Arrêt/arrêté: the terms arrêt (Fr.: ruling) and arrêté (decree, order) are
sometimes used interchangeably in the administrative and legal works that
I cite. In general, the Conseil d’Etat du roi published arrêts, the Revolutionary
texts in my corpus tended to use the term arrêté. My usage follows the title in
the orginal text.
Unless otherwise stated, I have respected orthography and punctuation
when quoting from period sources. For manuscript sources, missing letters in
abbreviated words are given between square brackets, interlinear additions by
[+], crossings-out by [−].
a b out th e co m pani on w ebsi te
www.oup.com/us/stagingthefrenchrevolution
One of the complexities of Revolutionary culture, which makes it such a rich

field of study but also such a daunting period, is the breadth of reference to
historical and socio-political context which is needed to make sense of the
most innocent-seeming of art works. I have drawn up the accompanying docu-
ments for those readers who do not already specialise on the Revolution.
A glossary of the various Revolutionary terms, a brief chronology of the
Revolutionary events, and formal titles of the Opéra, are given first. I also
provide full references to primary musical documents (librettos and scores),
from which I quote in part 2 of the book. Original sources for the longer
quotations translated into English in the main text may also be found.
Staging the French Revolution
i n t r o d u ctio n
The Opéra has always been considered a political establishment, because of the
emulation it encourages amongst the arts, the perfection of taste to which it
contributes, and the number of foreigners it attracts and retains in the Capital.
Since its establishment in 1669, it has seen frequent changes of management
regime. Expenses have always exceeded income, but it has always been recognised
that this superb theatre was necessary and should be maintained in a state of
magnificence.1
The Opéra can be considered as a monument to the glory of the French Nation,
which must be supported, even politically, at the price of certain sacrifices.2
The Opéra is not just a business, whose principal aim is to produce a profit. It is
also a theatre which contributes to the embellishment of the Capital, attracts
foreigners, encourages artistic talents and contributes to the progress of all arts.3
1 Villedeuil to Louis XVI, 8 May 1789, AN: O/1/613 #118, f.1r. Throughout this
study, quotations have been translated by me in the text; for longer passages, the original
sources may be found in the accompanying web resource.
2 [Papillon de La Ferté], “Conclusion”, [1790], AN: O/1/617 #46, f.1v.
3 Papillon de La Ferté, “Mémoire”, undated, AN: O/1/617 #36, f.1r.
Faced with a financial crisis at the Paris Opéra on the eve of the Revolution,
the Intendant of Royal Entertainments Denis-Pierre-Jean Papillon de La Ferté,
was forced to lobby for funding from his immediate superior, the minister for
the Royal Household, whose department oversaw the royally protected the-
aters of the capital and provided sporadic funding. His argument implicitly
tapped into a series of commercial, symbolic, and political functions that had
been ascribed to cultural institutions ever since Louis XIV’s minister, Jean-
Baptiste Colbert, had taken those institutions under the control of the crown
over a century before. These concerned the relationship between the state and
cultural institutions, the role played by the Opéra in the polity, its capacity to
stimulate performance and to educate public taste, its ability to attract foreign
visitors to the capital, and its potential to encourage the creation of other works
in a variety of different arts (quotation 1, La Ferté’s superior, writing directly
to the monarch). In short, it was a “monument” to the glory of the Nation
(quotation 2). With these functions in mind, it was admitted that the institu-
tion might well run at a loss (quotation 3), which the state should make good
because the political prestige which the institution might bring would out-
weigh the expense, even at a time of exceptional financial stringency. But as
those memos passed between the various officials in 1789, Paris had entered a
process during which the entire fabric of life would be torn asunder.
The story of the Revolution has been told many times. But historians con-
tinue to debate some of the issues about continuity and change initially asked
by one of the first (and finest) historians to have discussed the period, Alexis de
Tocqueville. Tocqueville argued that the Revolution had torn down the struc-
tures of the Old Regime, only to rebuild society by using the debris of the old
edifice, thereby inscribing an element of continuity into a process of rupture
with the past: this view has been taken up in several quarters to demonstrate
the close imbrication of continuity and change around the faultline of 1789.4
Although the Revolutionaries declared their break with the past and insisted
that they were embarking on a process of unprecedented new beginnings, they
were constrained, as surely all human beings are, by the limits of what they
could envisage, and this was itself determined by their lived experience,
their memories, their way of seeing the world, which by necessity grew out of
the old, however much the structures created were novel in appearance.
4 “Unconsciously, the Revolutionaries had retained from the Old Regime the majority
of feelings, habits and ideas by means of which they led the Revolution, and without wish-
ing to, they constructed the edifice of the new society out of the resulting debris.” L’Ancien
Régime, ed. G. W. Headlam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1904), p. 1.
4 | staging the french revolution

Because the problems of continuity and change are related to the habits and
memories of political and civic agents, they call for a fundamentally cultural
approach. By cultural, I mean an approach that is concerned not just with the
formal poetics and structure of the work of art but also its place within a spe-
cific field of signification and/or representation, and in a defined social and
historical context. Yet even so, to study the cultural structures of a period of
unprecedented political and social upheaval by focusing upon an opera house
might seem odd, even downright perverse. Surely the immediate priorities in
the aftermath of the fall of the Bastille were more down-to-earth than support-
ing an institution which—theorists claimed—had long been devoted to
“magic,” to “enchantment,” and to irreality;5 and surely this most frivolous
of institutions was based upon the very characteristics the Revolution sought
to repudiate: luxury, social elitism, and an aesthetic that tended away from the
everyday, unlike prevailing theatrical reforms of Diderot and others, who
sought to recreate a stage of moral import for a bourgeois public.6 Indeed these
criteria were themselves to shift during the transition away from crown
control, such that by the middle of the Revolutionary period, the arts were
described according to renewed criteria, which themselves had been estab-
lished in reaction to the courtly criteria that had hitherto prevailed (the efforts
of men of letters notwithstanding). For instance, the word “taste” became sus-
pect (because elitist), and instead it was argued that theater was uniquely
capable of arousing a series of pre-rational responses—patriotism, fraternity,
and so on—which inhere in all citizens, but which need direction for the
greater civic good of the nation.7 One might expect that in such a context,
institutions redolent of “Old Regime” cultural elitism would themselves have
been ripe for suppression, just as the Royal Academies were to be closed down
in 1793. Yet not only was the Opéra able to escape closure and attract state and
municipal support during this transition, it was able to establish itself as the
5 See, for instance, Jean-François Marmontel, Eléments de littérature, ed. Sophie le

Ménahèze (Paris: Desjonquères, 2005), pp. 798–824 (s.v. “Opéra”). For studies of lyric
theater’s poetics and theories of illusion, see, respectively, Catherine Kintzler, Poétique de
l’opéra français de Corneille à Rousseau (Paris: Minerve, 1991) and Marian Hobson, The Object
of Art: The Theory of Illusion in Eighteenth-Century France (Cambridge University Press,
1982), pp. 255–72.
6 Elie-Catherine Fréron, in the Année littéraire, said just this, reviewing [Martin]’s
Discours et motions sur les spectacles, but his seems to have been a minority opinion: AL, vi.
476 [orig. p. 72].
7 Mark Darlow, “The role of the listener in the musical aesthetics of the French
Revolution,” SVEC, 2007:06, pp. 143–57.
introduction | 5
pre-eminent “national” theater, capable of playing an important role in civic
education through music and spectacle. A recent study has established that
part of the reason for this is that the Opéra was thought of as luxurious by
definition and established with state patronage in mind.8 Yet the full story of
the Opéra’s trajectory during the Revolution has never been told, nor have
scholars yet examined the central question which that story elicits: how a cen-
tral cultural institution of the Old Regime negotiates the transition to the
status of a national theater during a period of Revolution. To do so, this book
combines musical, cultural, and institutional history, and offers a case study
for wider problems in cultural history, because it puts the mediating structure
of the cultural institution, and the problematic question of policy, at the heart
of its investigation.
Institutions
A growing trend within cultural history views institutions as providing a space
for literary production and sociability. Marc Fumaroli uses the metaphor of
scaffolding (échafaudage), and demonstrates how state patronage conferred pres-
tige and status upon the Académie Française over a long duration.9 Moreover,
although early-modern writers certainly cultivated a personal prestige before
an urban as well as a courtly public, Paul Bénichou’s classic Le Sacre de l’écrivain
shows how the structures of patronage and institutional support continued
to be crucial to the experience of writers and the production and reception of
their works, right up to the early nineteenth century.10 More recent studies
have demonstrated how institutions act as important loci for sociability,
whether Antoine Lilti’s examination of the Salons, or Jean-Luc Chappey’s study
of the Société des observateurs de l’homme.11 I argue here that the privileged
crown theaters deserve similar treatment, since they were considered by con-
temporaries as monuments intended to cultivate urban taste, to contribute to
national cultural prestige, to stimulate performance quality, and to attract the
attention—and money—of a cosmopolitan urban public. Rather than seeing
8 Victoria Johnson, Backstage at the Revolution: How the Royal Paris Opera Survived the
French Revolution (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2008).
9 Marc Fumaroli, Trois Institutions littéraires (Paris: Gallimard/Folio, 1994), p. xiii.
10 (Paris: J. Corti, 1973).
11 Jean-Luc Chappey, La Société des observateurs de l’homme, 1799–1804: des anthropo-
logues au temps de Bonaparte (Paris: Société des Etudes Robespierristes, 2002); Antoine Lilti,
Le Monde des salons: sociabilité et mondanité à Paris au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2005).

them as spaces for social interaction, which they undoubtedly were as well, at
stake in such an investigation is how theaters as cultural institutions shaped
the creation of plays and operas and what their interaction with organs of state
reveals about policy in the period of a fundamental reorganization of education
and culture. It is my hope that looking at the Opéra in this way will offer a
fresh angle on the theater and culture of the Revolutionary period.
To date, studies of Revolutionary theater have been primarily interested in
the development of forms and genres and concerned above all with aesthetics
and poetics. By these accounts, until recently, it did not fare well. Considered
as mere propaganda for successive regimes of the period 1789–94, the produc-
tion of this period—we are told—had no serious impact upon the develop-
ment of the arts, nor has much of it survived the test of time. Concomitant
rejections of the work are common. Typical is Bernard Pingaud and Robert
Mantéro’s claim that “the literary renewal clearly began once the Revolution
was over, and was oriented against it: it came from the Emigrés, from abroad.”12
James Leith’s study of art as propaganda also concludes with the “sterility” of
the concept in the 1790s.13 And more recently, Matthew S. Buckley claims
that the period was a hiatus in literary production, characterized by “fairly
static weakness.”14 But although it is true that the works of the period suffered
from state meddling, from the absence of genuine literary talent due to wide-
spread emigration, and from an obsession with current events, more culturally
minded critics (especially since the bicentennial) have tended to emphasize the
importance of these works within a political context. Studies of spoken theater
have long emphasized the importance of politics and ideology,15 and various
musicologists have also studied the interrelation of revolutionary rhetoric and
musical form.16 The danger of such accounts is that the plays or operas they
12 Les Infortunes de la Raison, 1774–1815 (Paris: Hatier, 1992), p. 94.

13 The Idea of Art as Propaganda in France, 1750–1799: A Study in the History of Ideas
(Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1965).
14 Tragedy Walks the Streets: The French Revolution in the Making of Modern Drama
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), p. 2.
15 Beatrice Hyslop, “The theater during a crisis: The Parisian theater during the
Reign of Terror,” Journal of Modern History, 17.4 (December 1945), 332–55; Marvin
Carlson, The Theatre of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966);
Graham Rodmell, French Drama of the Revolutionary Years (London: Routledge, 1990);
René Tarin, Le Théâtre de la Constituante ou l’école du peuple (Paris: Champion, 1998).
16 Winton Dean, “Opera under the French Revolution,” Proceedings of the Royal Musical
Association, 94 (1967–68), 77–96; Jean Mongrédien, La Musique en France des Lumières au
Romantisme (Paris: Flammarion, 1986); Anthony Arblaster, Viva la Libertà! Politics in Opera
(London: Verso, 1992); M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet, “The new repertory at the Opéra during
introduction | 7
study are more often than not reduced to the status of an epiphenomenon, a
symptom of “something else,” such as an event or mentality; and only rarely are
the creation or reception of the work also considered. As a result, the relation
between politics and artistic form tends to be rather unidirectional: politics is
reflected in the writing of the operas, but there is no consideration of how those
operas might reciprocally have shaped mentalities.
We also have a series of studies of the Opéra during this period, but these
tend to focus upon single composers, rather than wider institutional factors.
However, Elizabeth Bartlet, in her study of Méhul, also provides essential
information on the material organization of the two theaters in which he was
performed during the Revolution, Consulate, and Empire: the Opéra and the
Opéra-Comique.17 Her work has done much to clarify the workings of these
theaters at the turn of the century, and is invaluable for anybody interested in
the Paris opera scene in that period. Three related institutional histories should
also be mentioned. Michael McClellan and Alessandro di Profio (two studies of
the Théâtre de Monsieur) have provided valuable evidence of the interrelation
of political and institutional control with aesthetics and popular reception, as
has Michèle Root-Bernstein in the case of the Boulevard theaters.18 But these
also tend to focus upon genre, at the expense of wider questions of policy. Two
recent works have focused upon the more problematic interface of theater and
politics and have transformed the way in which we think about Revolutionary
theatricality, so we also have a sophisticated model for thinking about the way
theater functioned in the period.19
the Reign of Terror: Revolutionary rhetoric and operatic consequences,” in Music and the
French Revolution, ed. Malcolm Boyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989),
pp. 107–55.
17 M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet, Etienne-Nicolas Méhul and Opera: Source and Archival Studies
of Lyric Theatre during the French Revolution, Consulate and Empire, 2 vols. (Heilbronn: Lucie
Galland, 1999), pp. 3–54.
18 Alessandro di Profio, La Révolution des Bouffons: L’opéra italien au Théâtre de Monsieur
1789–1792 (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2003); Michael McClellan, “Battling over the
lyric muse: Expressions of revolution and counterrevolution at the Théâtre Feydeau,
1789–1801,” Ph.D. thesis, University of North Carolina, 1994; Michèle Root-Bernstein,
Boulevard Theater and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Research Press, 1984).
19 Paul Friedland, Political Actors: Representative Bodies and Theatricality in the Age of the
French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002); Susan Maslan, Revolutionary
Acts: Theater, Democracy and the French Revolution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2005).

In short, we understand Revolutionary culture far better than we did a
decade or so ago, but what is still missing is an account of theatrical institu-
tions, linked up with politics and reception. In this context, we have much to
learn from cultural approaches pioneered for other periods. For instance, Mark
Everist has studied the Paris Odéon between 1824 and 1828, offering a “thick”
description of the theater’s place in what he names a “web of culture.”20 Olivier
Bara has studied the opéra-comique as genre during the Restoration, but with
a sizable section on the Théâtre de l’Opéra-Comique itself.21 The importance
of the relation of institution to state has long been recognized by scholars
of “Grand Opera,”22 and this relation is arguably more complex in a period
where the lines of authority regulating cultural institutions and works were
themselves a matter of contestation.
The reason theatrical institutions are interesting in the period of the
Revolution is that theater undergoes far-reaching administrative and legal
changes, beginning with managerial abandoment by the crown and then
deregulation by the state, and ending with Napoleon Bonaparte’s reforms of
1806–7, bringing the Parisian theaters back under state control. A study of the
Opéra as one such institution ought to be able to shed light upon the reasons
for the state’s deregulation of theater in January 1791, offer additional evidence
and explanations for the ambiguous and shifting relation of theatrical works
and explicit political content, and elucidate the material experience of the
individuals involved with the production of plays in a period when theater,
according to almost all recent critics, has enormous importance. Useful mate-
rial has been published on the breakdown of literary privilège and the rise of
droits d’auteur, on theatricality and politics, and on repertory, but much of this
material focuses upon the Comédie-Française which had a specific place in
the theatrical administration of the Old Regime and which followed a special
path in the 1790s. Opera, however, also partook of debates on literary prop-
erty and presented special problems of administration. Moreover, the figure-
head of the Society of Dramatic Authors in the Revolution—Nicolas-Etienne
Framery—was himself a librettist, albeit a rather mediocre one. And alongside
Hoffman, Framery set out special conditions for droits d’auteur in the case of
20 Music Drama at the Paris Odéon, 1824–1828 (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 2002).
21 Le Théâtre de l’Opéra-Comique sous la Restauration: Enquête autour d’un genre moyen,
“Musikwissenschaftliche Publikationen,” 14 (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2001), pp. 19–183.
22 William L. Crosten, French Grand Opera: An Art and a Business (New York: King’s
Crown Press, 1948); Jane F. Fulcher, The Nation’s Image: French Grand Opera as Politics and
Politicized Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
introduction | 9
opera. Finally, the Opéra was structurally different from the Comédie-Française
(it was not a self-governing board of principals [société ], even though the artists
would have wished it to be so as early as 1767)23 and—unlike that theater—
fell under municipal regulation in April 1790. Opera moreover is a special case
within the wider field of French Revolutionary theater, because musical sensi-
bility has different implications for reception than does spoken theater, because
its financial situation makes it particularly precarious, and because its admin-
istrative structure makes it more appropriate for financial speculation than
sociétés such as the Comédie-Française and Comédie-Italienne, where artists
shared in the profits of the enterprise. Finally, I have decided to concentrate
upon an institution specializing in French opera, partly because of the long-
standing and continuing view that indigenous culture was a proper subject of
national pride, and partly because Italian opera in Paris—sporadically per-
formed in Paris both in original version (during the 1752–54 Querelle des
Bouffons and the 1778–80 de Vismes season) and intermittently in parody or
disguised translation from 1754, as well as being the purview of the Théâtre
de Monsieur from 1789—is already well served as regards its institutional
history.24 Indeed, the Académie Royale de Musique is the most important
indicator of Old Regime state culture because (unlike the Comédie-Italienne
which is derived from the commedia dell’arte), it has its roots in court spectacle
and crown commission.25 The ballet was a central component of the produc-
tion of the Opéra both before and after 1789, but after reforms by Noverre and
Angiolini increasingly evolved into a separate genre in its own right; and this
study concentrates on lyric theater, because a brief overview of ballet in the
period has already been made,26 and because surviving sources on it are too
scanty to allow a deeper integration of aesthetics, contemporary criticism, and
management.
23 Hemmings, Theatre and State, p. 17.

24 On Italian opera in France generally, see Andrea Fabiano, Histoire de l’opéra italien
en France (1752–1815): Héros et héroïnes d’un roman théâtral (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2006).
On the Théâtre de Monsieur, see Michael McClellan and Alessandro di Profio, note 18. All
three works combine dramaturgical and/or musical analysis with attention to cultural and
administrative aspects.
25 Bartlet, Méhul, p. 59.
26 Judith Chazin-Bennahum, Dance in the Shadow of the Guillotine (Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1988).

Recent historiographical reviews have pointed out the need for research on
the French Revolution to consider the relation of state to individual,27 an
approach that has been applied to theater in other contexts. For instance,
Murray Frame has considered theater as an essential intermediary between the
state and society in Imperial Russia, and has shown how it was used variably
by the government and by intellectuals.28 Likewise in our context, I believe
that it is impossible to account adequately for questions of ideology in the
theater of a period like this by means of a close reading of the plays alone. To
speak of politics or ideology brings into play institutional structures and issues
of reception, yet Revolutionary theater studies have never attempted to link
these up in any systematic way. So although such studies tell us much about
what works were produced and what their apparent cultural relevance might
have been, they have tended to leave in the background the motivations and
choices that explain why certain works were favored and not others, and the
ways in which institutions responded to the various pressures exerted upon
them. An exception must be made for the preliminary findings of a research
team led by Emmet Kennedy, which made a quantitative repertory study of all
the Parisian theaters for the Revolutionary decade and found that there was a
striking predominance, in the day-by-day repertory, of works written before
1789. From this they concluded that in a situation of market forces and open
competition, this trend must reflect public taste, which therefore must have
been predominantly for works not primarily concerned with current events
and politics, save for the period of the Terror, when the state’s imposition of
repertory control reversed the trend. By implication, the ideologically charged
theater of the Terror was imposed top-down on an otherwise reluctant theater
world, and public taste was resistant to such control.29 The statistics are
striking, and the argument is a logical and consistent interpretation of the facts
27 Susan Desan, “What’s after political culture? Recent French Revolutionary

historiography,” French Historical Studies, 23.1 (2000), 163–96.
28 School for Citizens: Theatre and Civil Society in Imperial Russia (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2006).
29 Emmett Kennedy, Marie-Laurence Netter, James MacGregor, and Mark Olsen,
Theatre, Opera and Audiences in Revolutionary Paris (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1996).
The César project (Oxford Brookes-MIT) and David Charlton/Nicole Wild, Théâtre de
l’Opéra-Comique, Paris: Répertoire, 1762–1972 (Sprimont: Mardaga, 2005) also provide
essential data for other institutions. André Tissier, Les Spectacles à Paris pendant la Révolution:
répertoire analytique, chronologique et bibliographique, 2 vols. published to date (Geneva: Droz,
1992–2002) provides chapters on the Opéra’s repertory, but without any performance
dates, save for that of the premiere of each work, and no analysis of his data, save for
synoptic introductions to each volume.
introduction | 11
presented; but I believe that it oversimplifies the reality. As this study will
attempt to show, cultural regulation was more complex than a top-down
imposition of repertory, but rather negotiated between institutions and the
state; and reception (which Kennedy’s study all but ignores) is crucial.
Of course, a statistical survey that has done so much to clarify the realities of
performance practice and to reverse many cherished but inaccurate ideas could
hardly be expected to take on these issues as well; but asking such questions
allows us to test the explanations set forth in that work. Put simply, my origi-
nal feeling was that it was necessary to investigate the nature and extent of
state intervention in theaters during the Revolution, in order to explain either
why plays have so often been considered as “propaganda” or, conversely, why
(as we have learned more recently) the repertory for Paris as a whole was so
apparently apolitical. Studies of the Revolution have not as yet considered such
institutional aspects per se, save for Adélaïde de Place’s macro study that has
asked many important questions but still tends to construct a model where a
unified state authority exerts univalent control over an institution otherwise
more concerned by commercial imperatives.30 F. W. J. Hemmings’s study,
Theater and State in France 1760–1905 also deserves credit for having investi-
gated this relationship, though the much wider scope and longer time frame
make his study a more superficial, macro-level analysis, which likewise does
regrettably little to interrograte the assumption of a unified, centralized state
apparatus in the Revolution.31 In such a model, questions of self-fashioning,
the variable appeal to state and public as rival authorities, the vagaries of cul-
tural control in a period of contested political legitimacy, and the fragmentary
authority of the state over culture are all but swept under the carpet. Conversely,
this study will seek to attend to these issues and argues that ideology in the
theater of the French Revolution cannot be determined without a discussion of
the material reality of administration and control, without which the reasons
for individual repertory choices can only be a matter for surmise; nor can it be
discussed in the absence of reception, which is where the real meaning of such
works is constructed.
30 Martin Nadeau, “La politique culturelle de l’An II; Les Infortunes de la propa-
gande révolutionnaire au théâtre,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française, 327
(January–March 2002), 57–74; Adélaïde de Place, La Vie musicale en France au temps de la
Révolution (Paris: Fayard, 1989)
31 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). See particularly chapters 5 (“The
royal theatres under the Revolution”) and 6 (“The theatre in the service of the
Republic”).

In order to do so, I see the theater in a triangular relationship with organs
of state, and popular/municipal groups. I trace the nature and extent of influ-
ence over the Opéra exerted by the National Assembly, the Commune, the
executive committees (Committee of Public Instruction, Committee of Public
Safety, Commission of Public Instruction), and the police. To look at the
theater in this way is to place the theatrical institution at the hub of interac-
tions between the various organs which regulated culture, creators, critics and
the public.
Research Questions
This study will ask three main research questions. First, what were the differ-
ent organs exerting control or surveillance over theaters, and what was the
overlap in their spheres of influence or the communication between them?
This question is essential because the multiplicity of potential modes of con-
trol has never been studied and could provide one reason for the contradictory
nature of cultural control in this turbulent period. Classic studies assume a
blanket policy of propaganda, whereas recent statistical research by Kennedy’s
team proves that this is not the case; this study will offer an explanation of the
reasons why. Second, to what extent were the theaters compliant with such
modes of cultural control, albeit confused; conversely what degree of freedom
existed in the establishment of repertory? A rich series of documents survives
from the internal workings of the theaters, and these allow us to consider how
official orders, laws, and decrees were received and how theaters ran repertories
in the light of the sometimes conflicting demands placed upon them. Among
the range of influences on repertory, including which public opinion and press
reviews are of paramount importance, works that were sponsored, supported,
or removed from the repertory deserve analysis, since these extrinsic controls
over performance runs alter the “free market” model of repertory that recent
critics assume. Third and finally, how were these works received, and how did
their reception feed back into programming decisions? This final stage of the
cycle is crucial in early-modern France, where works were routinely modified
in the light of audience and press reactions. I shall be considering the ways in
which the institutional aspect impacted the materiality of staging—for
instance, in financial constraints over productions, programming, set design
where evidence has survived (we are lucky enough to possess sketches by the
Opéra’s designer Pierre-Adrien Pâris for at least some of the productions).
There is also evidence of changes made in the light of first performance reviews,
and of revisions: this is also considered in the second part of this book. Where
introduction | 13
press notices give evidence of the conduct of performances—disturbances in
the auditorium, applications, and others—these are also considered.
The repertories recently published by Tissier and Kennedy provide rich
data on performances, and they are both already divided into works performed
for the first time after 1789 (described for convenience here as “new works”)
and those already in the repertory before 1789. It has often been assumed that
the Opéra had a particularly low proportion of “new works,” being more tied
to its repertory of classics than many more “commercial” theaters, hence its
public reputation for being hidebound and resistant to change; this assump-
tion has turned out to be false. The Opéra was in line with the average of
Parisian theaters as a whole in performances of new works and was adhering to
an explicit, if tentative, policy of repertory reform even before the Revolution
began. Among other issues, the second part of this volume considers the extent
to which these new works draw on Old Regime forms or, by contrast, present
genuine musico-dramatic innovation.
Part one of this study considers the governance and management of the
Opéra, from the beginning of the 1789–90 season to Thermidor. It traces the
transition from crown ownership and control, via municipal regulation, and
finally to self-governance by the principals of the company, answerable to the
Paris Commune. Chapter 1 briefly establishes the outlook at the beginning of
this period. In particular, it surveys the long-standing discourse according to
which theater, and particularly opera, is an object of national cultural prestige,
and the more recent argument that it is a source of revenue for the city of Paris,
by attracting foreign visitors. In spite of this discourse, the pre-Revolutionary
decade witnesses widespread criticism of the institution’s perceived decadence:
the supposed stagnation of the repertory, which is based more on revisions of
the classics than innovation in programming (not true, in point of fact, but a
long-standing myth), poor singing technique, chaotic internal discipline, and
disorder in the finances. There was a consensus for reform, in the light of the
experiment placing the Opéra in the hands of the entrepreneur de Vismes du
Valgay (1778), only for his license to be revoked in 1780. The 1780s, though
characterized by widespread crown reform to the Paris theater world as a whole,
closed with uncertainty over the future of the three royally protected theaters,
which is crucial to understanding why the early Revolution administered
theater in the way it did.
Chapter 2 considers experiments in the administration of the Opéra against
the backdrop of a public debate over private entrepreneurship (particularly a
failed takeover bid by the violin virtuoso G. B. Viotti in 1789), municipal
regulation, the continued power of the crown, or self-governance by the prin-
cipals of the company itself. In the context of competition from the newly

created Théâtre de Monsieur and a continuing financial crisis, the city of Paris
municipality took over the institution in April 1790. This chapter considers
these public debates over who should run the Opéra and according to what
principles. In particular we shall see a tension between competing discourses
on liberty, which was variously mobilized to support calls for a free-market
organization, or self-determination by the company itself, or the right of the
municipality to regulate culture “by and for the people.” Far from being a
simple question of administration, the organization of culture is a fundamen-
tal indicator of competing models of liberty, education, and publicity.
Le Chapelier’s deregulation of the theater world on 13 January 1791 has
generally been seen as a victory for the radicals of the Society of Dramatic
Authors, a pressure group working against the monopoly over spoken theater
of the Comédie-Française. Its effects on the other royally protected theaters
have not yet been considered, nor indeed on the sphere of opera in particular.
In Chapter 3, I show that the Le Chapelier bill constitutes the point where two
discourses meet: the ideological repudiation of privilège, assimilated to the Old
Regime and hence ethically and politically tainted, and the continuing need
for moral instruction through the arts. Paradoxically, perhaps, Le Chapelier
claimed that freeing the theaters would ensure the increased ethical import of
theater, because only in a free-market situation would virtue prevail. A study
of the Assembly’s debates of January 1791 shows that the impetus behind Le
Chapelier’s bill is ideological rather than practical: indeed, consideration of
pamphlets surrounding the bill shows that most critics were actually against
the complete deregulation that was to occur. Since most significant writers to
have pronounced on theatrical “liberty” were affiliated with the nascent Jacobin
club (the Société des amis de la Constitution) it is reasonable to suggest a
filiation from early Revolutionary calls for “liberty” and the Jacobin policy
that prevails during the Terror: in abolishing distinctions and outlawing cor-
porations, the laws of early 1791 make the state the sole guarantor of liberty,
the sole corporation, and the sole “institution littéraire” (in Fumaroli’s termi-
nology). Rather than a process of “freeing” the theaters, the deregulation
paves the way for state control. The chapter concludes with a consideration of
the chaos that ensues in theater administration generally, including the loss of
repertory property for the Opéra and other hitherto royally protected theaters,32
the loss of revenue which they derived from the unofficial stages (bail), and
the lack of any control over quality in Parisian theatrical offering, this latter
32 Indeed, as Hemmings notes, because of these dues, the Opéra “had a vested
interest in the continuing prosperity of the commercial sector.” Theatre and State, p. 42.
introduction | 15
factor being the main reason for the reassertion of strong repertory control
in 1793–94.
In Chapter 4, I turn to the period of the Terror, when the Opéra was run
by a management committee composed of the artists. The classic account of
the Terror is that the state attempted to impose a Republican repertory upon
the theaters, such as in the law of 2 August 1793, which insists that all the-
aters perform certain patriotic plays (Brutus, La Mort de César, Guillaume Tell)
on a weekly basis, and that theaters and audiences were unfavorable to such
control but were obliged to submit.33 I have found that the theaters comply
with these requirements less often than one might expect, that there are no
penalties imposed for non-compliance, and that the committees’ interventions
are short-lived and ineffective. Disproportionate attention to the closure of the
Comédie-Française for performing Paméla has, in most accounts, bolstered a
view of the Terror as culturally repressive. State attempts to impose repertory
in this way are sporadic, however, and frequently unsuccessful, partly because
the legality of censorship and control remain contested after 1791. Instead,
I suggest that the Terror sees theaters appealing to three separate constituen-
cies: popular intervention, press criticism, and state surveillance. In the case of
the last of these, financial incentives create coercive measures, yet the frequent
confusion between the policies of different committees or between state
committee and Commune, or between either of these and the press, which
I study in detail, mean that there is no clear direction nor policy prevailing in
the period of the Terror. Moreover, popular assemblies exert much more strin-
gent control over repertory than do organs of state. A study of repertory shows
confusion in programming decisions, particularly at the Opéra, which stages
many patriotic works. This is still a repressive situation, but far from the
simple “propaganda” model normally assumed.
This trajectory having been traced, the second half of the study turns to
repertory, and the issues affecting it. Chapter 5 sets out the internal working
of the company—its management structure, procedures for hiring and firing,
pensions, procedures for reception and preparation of performances; it gives a
holistic overview of the repertory for the entire period by tracing, year-by-year,
the evolution of genres, the balance between “old” and “new” works, propor-
tions of premieres to reprises, changes in performance practice (such as how
works were combined in double bills), and pièces de circonstance. Chapters 6 to
8 then study the works themselves. One problem posed by this type of study
33 d’Estrée’s concept of a “Théâtre de la peur,” the subtitle to his work, makes such a
link explicit; I discuss his account at the beginning of Chapter 4.

is the question of organization: should the works be considered generically,
with chapters on lyric tragedy, comedy, ballet, or chronologically? Recent stud-
ies of the King’s Theater and the Pantheon in London take a chronological
perspective, considering individual seasons in turn. Accordingly, specificities
of seasons are highlighted, the focus is upon the managerial dimension, and
the study reconstructs, as far as is possible, the practical and concrete experi-
ence of the company “on the ground,” with the attendant contingency that
material conditions of organization have upon the choice and production of
works.34 What such a structure loses, arguably, is an overall consideration of
dramaturgy, the style of works performed at the theater, and their constituent
elements, and little can be said synoptically of the development of a genre
over a period of time. Alessandro di Profio’s study does just the opposite and
consists of a musico-dramaturgical study of the constituent parts of the Italian
lyric work, since his focus, as a musicologist, is the poetics of the works them-
selves, and his approach is less concerned with the managerial dimensions,
although these are to some extent considered by his first section.
Since this work studies a larger chronological span of the Revolution than
di Profio (his study concludes with 1792), both approaches are potentially
valuable. Works need to be considered paradigmatically (as examples of a
genre, of a style, etc.), but also “syntagmatically,” as parts of an individual
season. Studying the Opéra chronologically in blocks, if not precisely seasons
(which would quickly become tedious), allows us to (1) consider reprises of
works in the repertory as well as premieres, essential in the case of a theater so
closely tied to its inherited repertory, as I show below; and (2) relate the pro-
ductions to a political and historical context, teasing out allusions and explicit
references to the context where they exist (and in the case of the Revolution,
this changes very fast), while (3) considering the overall shape of seasons and
their managerial and financial aspects, and (4) grouping works for analysis
within the individual chapters according to genre. In other words, I attempt
to combine the two approaches I have outlined previously. The chapters are
divided by managerial period, because changes in management had important
implications for repertory choices, for funding streams, and for the organiza-
tional structure of the company as well as decisions over personnel. The peri-
ods also happen each to be of comparable lengths (always between one and two
years) and produced roughly comparable numbers of new productions. Within
each of the chapters, an overview of the repertory and finances is followed by
34 Curtis Price, Judith Milhous, Robert D. Hume, and Gabriella Dideriksen, Italian
Opera in Late Eighteenth-Century London, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995–2001).
introduction | 17
sections where the works are grouped generically for analysis. In both, my
concern is with a cultural study of the works’ selection, production, perfor-
mance, and reception, rather than a poetic study of the development of musical
drama, which would require a wider selection of works and a different meth-
odology, and has in any case been partially completed by Julian Rushton.35
Chapters 6 and 7 look at the repertory during the one final season under
crown management, 1789–90, where the institution answered to Papillon de
La Ferté, himself subordinate to the Minister for the Maison du roi; and the
period of regulation by the city of Paris (1790–92), with Chapter 6 concerning
serious works and Chapter 7, mixed and comic works. The chapters consider
the balance of tradition and tentative innovation, against a backdrop of finan-
cial insecurity, the Opéra aiming for a controlled quantity of “safe” premieres
(as La Ferté never tired of pointing out, failed new works were ruinously expen-
sive). New works followed tried-and-tested forms, save for an increase in lighter
comic works, which were the biggest single innovation. Continuity in a period
of instability (political, managerial, and financial) was the overriding priority.
This does not mean apolitical performances but rather works celebrating cul-
tural renewal in a context where the lines between left and right had yet to be
clarified. Chapter 8 turns to works performed under Francœur and Cellerier,
and thereafter under a committee of principals after the directors’ arrest during
the Terror. This is the period of widespread surveillance over repertory, of
pièces de circonstance, works dealing with French national history, and with a
re-interpreted Antiquity, and the relation of this new repertory with tradition
is explored, as well as its political significance.
Throughout this book, my aim has been to integrate textual and political/
contextual analysis, in order to place the works in a network of influence,
creation, and reception. Conclusions will be drawn at the appropriate time,
but it is worthwhile to end here by pointing out that my hope is to contribute
to the revision of three principal areas. First, an analysis of what we might
call a “discursive web” surrounding the institution alongside the material
circumstances of governance should allow us to look again at how culture
is conceptualized by a wide range of agents: creators, performers, and critics,
but also municipal bureaucrats, crown officials, and deputies in the newly cre-
ated National Assembly. Second, by focusing not only upon what works were
performed but also the processes whereby they were brought into production,
I hope to reveal something of the improvisatory nature of Revolutionary
35 “Music and drama at the Académie Royale de Musique (Paris), 1774–89,” D.Phil.
thesis, University of Oxford, 1970.

culture, which was often thrown together on the hoof, in the light of a
rapidly changing and complex set of competing and sometimes conflicting
imperatives. And finally, by looking in detail at both creation and reception,
I hope to show how control over the theaters is not only negotiated between
officials (state and municipal), critics, and public, but also that ideology is
created as much in the writing of the institution and reception of works
(in reviews, pamphlets) as in the official establishment itself. The culture of
the Revolution was certainly political, yet how it functioned as propaganda, if
at all, remains to be seen.
introduction | 19
1 The Outlook in 1789
One cannot deny that nowadays the taste for theater is more widespread
than ever. (JdP, 1789, p. 500)
Central to any investigation of the theater in the period of the Revolution is

the role of state and local authorities in regulating repertory, overseeing
appointments and finances, and ensuring public order. It is implicit in any
discussion of Revolutionary art as “propaganda,” has subtended most hostile
discussions of theater before the renewal of the 1980s, and is also—a contrario—
a central element of Kennedy’s 1996 statistical project which concludes with
the traditionalism of theater during most of the Revolutionary decade.
Although the lines of authority regulating culture were relatively straightfor-
ward in Old Regime France—albeit within a complex state apparatus—they
became less clear-cut after 1789, when the rival demands of the municipality,
the police, and the legislative body and its committees blurred the centralized
system of cultural control that had hitherto prevailed. To make sense of this
development, the following pages set out the situation as it was at the end of
the Old Regime and offer some methodological considerations.
1. Theater and the State: The Concept of a National Opera

As Jeffrey Ravel has shown, the aim of the “arts bureaucracy” established for
Louis XIV had been to “glorify the King in the eyes of his subjects and foreign
observers, at Court and abroad.”1 From the beginning it was accepted that the
Académie Royale would run at a loss and deserved crown support to defray the
director’s investment: subsidy in the form of gratifications came from the budget
of the Menus-Plaisirs. The Opéra was thereby integrated into the royal enter-
tainments, although it was still privately leased by Lully. A discourse justifying
continued state support for such forms by reference to national glory and inter-
national prestige subsisted throughout the Old Regime and remained entrenched
in 1789, as suggested in the Introduction. That is, state control, national cul-
tural prestige, and crown subsidy remained inextricably linked. But from June
1769, new Letters patent referred to the Opéra as an établissement public.2 And in
the following year the Journal de musique described the Opéra as a “spectacle
national.”3 The role of the institution within an urban public context was thereby
recognized, and while the terms used do not seem to have been widely discussed
until later, tensions over the purpose and ownership of the institution—
whether the crown and thereby court fashion, or an urban taste that increas-
ingly self-defined in contradistinction to the court—increased accordingly.
At stake is the question of how and when the Opéra became considered a
“national” theater. The issue is complicated because of the different meanings
attaching to the term “nation,” which designated not just a territorial and
political entity but also (in the lexicon of “patriot” writers) the mass of French
citizens: for that reason, to speak of a national theater was by implication to
discuss isssues of control and governance, of purpose and policy. The transfor-
mation whereby a public theater named a “royal academy of music” becomes a
“national opera” is not only a managerial and legal affair but also a cultural
shift that invents a new category, one that can take place only in tandem with
practical changes in the institution’s management and governance. Hence
to think about this issue requires consideration of both the discursive web
surrounding the institution and the materiality of the institution itself.
But because this was a Revolutionary situation, changes were made without a
1 The Contested Parterre: Public Theater and French Political Culture, 1680–1791 (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1999), p. 82.
2 AN: O/1/614 #5, p. 1. The Letters patent of June 1769 were, as Paul Tillitt reminds
us, a reaffirmation of the Opéra’s privilège and the institution’s freedom, in the context of a
conflict with the Corporation des Ménétriers. “Un monopole musical sous l’Ancien Régime:
Le privilège de l’Opéra de 1669 à la Révolution,” in Droit et opéra, sous la direction de
Mathieu Touzeil-Divina and Geneviève Koubi (Paris: LGDJ / Poitiers: Université de
Poitiers, 2008), pp. 3–24 (p. 5).
3 “L’âme de Poinsinet” in Journal de musique, 3 vols. (Genève: Minkoff reprints,
1976–77), i.46–47 [February 1770].

formal or explicit agenda or sense of purpose, and sometimes within a vacuum
of authority; only with hindsight could critics rationalize the change that had
begun. Although changes were under way, we will not find explicit discussions
of what a national theater might be in the early years (although we shall find
much discussion of what a public theater might look like).
There are at least three broad senses in which one might talk about the
Opéra as a national institution. The first is that it performed works representa-
tive of a style or an aesthetic identified with its own country and was thus the
home of “French” opera (as opposed, for instance, to Italian), an idea explicitly
problematized in the various musical quarrels that took place throughout the
eighteenth century in France. A second might be that the Opéra has a civic
utility for the commonality of citizens of a geopolitical area, thereby foreshad-
owing what much later would be juridically and politically recognized by the
state as having utilité publique. The third, and most contentious, sense of the
term is that the institution is in some sense owned by the “nation,” defined by
patriots as a public sphere of civil society distinct from the state or the crown.
This binds the institution into the contestatory politics of Revolutionary Paris
in complex ways, some of which were only slowly to become explicit. Aspects
of all three find their way into discourses upon theater before 1789.
The concept of a “national” culture is problematic in the Old Regime;
while there is some degree of acceptance that one can speak of “French” music,
this was also frequently understood to be universal or cosmopolitan in nature.4
There is also debate over the extent to which it is legitimate to see musical
taste in eighteenth-century France as chiming with nationalism, however
defined. In particular, Alessandro di Profio has disputed Michael McClellan’s
suggestion that debates over Italian opera when performed at the Théâtre
Feydeau can be related to concepts of the nation or to national chauvinism, and
questions his conclusion that the rejection of Italian opera can be seen a defense
of any local musical tradition, seeing it instead as the product of a historical
tradition of management of entertainments in the capital and of long-standing
aesthetic debate.5 One might add that the role of the Opéra during the Empire
is an excellent example of French cultural prestige, but decidedly not of
“French” poetics, Napoleon’s marked preference being for Italian composers
and a style that was seen as cosmopolitan, not foreign. The Revolutionary
4 “Avant-propos,” Philologiques III: Qu’est-ce qu’une littérature nationale? Approches pour

une théorie interculturelle du champ littéraire, sous la direction de Michel Espagne, Michael
Werner (Paris: Maison des sciences de l’homme, 1994), p. 7.
5 di Profio, La Révolution des Bouffons, p. 11.
the outlook in 1789 | 23

situation does, however, become markedly more politicized and chauvinistic as
the 1790s advance; and the aesthetic quarrels over French and Italian music
had a decidedly chauvinistic dimension. The issue is different for the Académie
Royale, construed as the home of French operatic tradition, an aspect brought
out in pamphlets in the Querelle des Bouffons and the later quarrel over Gluck
and Piccinni. Likewise, the widespread insistence upon visual splendor had a
cosmopolitan dimension, since the Opéra aimed to bring foreign visitors to
Paris and to be a beacon of French taste outside the realm as well as within (see
quotations at the beginning of the Introduction). According to this account,
the Opéra deserved subsidy because only with sufficiently lavish productions
could it “enchant.” Johnson shows that this assumption is so bound up with
the institution that it survives during the Revolution. In 1790, the pamphlet
Réflexions sur l’Opéra et sa conservation6 argued that one needed to look beyond
narrow concerns about the Opéra’s annual deficit because the institution was
expensive by its very essence; the point was used to allow the claim that the
institution should stay in the hands of the King or the Commune, not an
enterprise, unless financially solid. In other words, the pamphlet aligns three
suggestions: that the specificity of the institution is French opera; that the
institution is expensive, because luxury is part of its definition; and that it
should remain in public, not private hands.7 The Opéra moreover appears
to embody the classical ideal that art is a worthy element of policy because
it forms an individual’s taste and hence aligns the aesthetic and the moral
dimension (or “plaire” and “instruire”). But a fault in this approach appeared
around the 1770s, when the requirement of luxury became problematic in the
light of neoclassicism’s demand for sobriety, and when the institution became
embroiled in debates over the respective roles of the state and the urban public
in regulating taste. I attempt to show that elsewhere, but it is worth noting
that the tension remained unresolved in the early years of the Revolution. It is
no accident that a pamphlet written against the institution by discontented
performers in 1790 contains the following passage:
A printed memorandum in favour of the Management [La Ferté’s Précis
sur l’opéra, 1789] has recently appeared which insists, with singular
6 (n.p.: n.pub, n.d.), 6 pp. There is a manuscript annotation dating this text to 12
January 1790 on the copy held at [Po: B.Pièce.544], p.[1], which is unverifiable, but
plausible.
7 Likewise AN: O/1/617 #13, f.6, claims the Opéra should not be an “objet de spécu-
lation” because the penny-pinching economies of businessmen are antithetical to “good
taste.” Cf. Spectacles de Paris, 1792, p. 30.

affectation, upon this false but convenient idea: that magnificence is nec-
essary to the Opéra. Indeed so, if we mean the old Opéra whose only
interest was magic and fairy-like enchantment. But now the real guid-
ing force of the Opéra, which has enobled this genre in the eyes of
people of taste, is artistic beauty, music which speaks to the soul, libretti
which are based on reason, which are logical and contain genuinely
dramatic plots; and were they to entail merely the appropriate pomp, surely the
audience and foreigners would still attend. But the author has to justify the
expense, so he has to speak of magnificence.8
In this account, luxury is not so much bound up with national glory as it is
associated with the frivolity of the Baroque: left-wing, “patriot” rhetoric has
seized upon the standards of neoclassicism, as we shall see presently.
This shows why the question of regulation is important. As Jane Fulcher
has demonstrated in her study of Grand Opera, national theaters are public
organisms and as such have a “personnalité morale,” by which she means a
public resonance and an implicit association with the state. In a related article
she has observed the “[m]ultiplex nature and multifarious results of the state’s
engagement in culture,” which “effects not only perceptions of political author-
ity and legitimacy” but also “allows for a reciprocal influence, and thus trans-
forms the culture in far-reaching but subtle ways.”9 The state had regulated
the institution as a component of its policy, via the ministries; however, a
growing patriot rhetoric throughout the eighteenth century pointed increas-
ingly to a split of civil society from state and the contested place of cultural
institutions; and this is the third way in which “national opera” might be
construed. The work of Jürgen Habermas and the concept of a “public sphere”
require no introduction here, as his insights have permeated eighteenth-
century studies in a variety of significant ways.10 But there is still space for a
consideration of how cultural institutions were caught in a split between state
(court) and urban regulation. In a different context, Tim Blanning has claimed
that the French state did not control its public sphere, unlike other European
8 Mémoire pour les sieur et dame Chéron, p. 24n1.

9 “French Grand Opera and the quest for a National image: An approach to the
study of Government-sponsored art,” Current Musicology, 35 (1983), 34–45 (p. 44).
10 The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois
Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity, 1999).
Cf. Anthony La Vopa’s useful review article “Conceiving a public: Ideas and society in
eighteenth-century Europe,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 64.1 (March 1992), 79–116.

nations, and that Revolutionary culture was fashioned out of that breach.11
Yet other than Blanning’s valuable discussion of music and the public sphere
(pp. 357–74), the place of the Opéra in the politics of culture after Gluck
has never been considered, despite some recent work on theaters and the “public
sphere.”
In a discussion of Imperial Russia, Murray Frame offers a useful discussion
of the interrelation of theater and civil society, which he defines as a “public
sphere of organized and mainly self-supporting associational activity that is
separate from the state.”12 As he sees it, to speak of civil society in this way—
distinct from the state, but not necessarily antagonistic to it—is to recognize
its potential to counterbalance central state institutions which, though neces-
sary, might otherwise acquire a monopoly of power and truth. In France, when
Buirette de Belloy’s Siège de Calais described itself as “perhaps the first French
tragedy in which the Nation could take an interest in its own concerns,” the
beginnings of patriotic rhetoric permeated playwriting. What de Belloy seems
to mean is that the public/theatrical audience in a particular country can take
an exceptional interest in subject matter from that country’s history, and that
the material aims to produce veneration for great men, and to inspire national
pride.13 This was not yet constructed as politically oppositional to the state, as
de Belloy’s text was prefaced by an epistle to the King, and its subject matter
concerned a revival of French patriotism after the defeats of the Seven Years
War. Different are the “patriot” playwrights, such as Louis-Sébastien Mercier,
and their rhetoric that aligns civil society, radical politics, and playwriting
against the Comédie-Française, seen as a crown institution.14 Chénier’s “Epître
dédicatoire à la Nation française,” which accompanied the publication of his
own “national tragedy” Charles IX in 1789, also addresses itself to the collec-
tivity of French citizens, but with an even more strongly Republican flavor.
11 The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture: Old Regime Europe 1660–1789 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2002).
12 School for Citizens: Theatre and Civil Society in Imperial Russia (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2006), p. 2.
13 I am quoting from the edition given by Jacques Truchet in Théâtre du XVIIIe siècle
ii (Paris: Gallimard/Pléiade, 1974), pp. 447–516 (448, 449).
14 Feminine and Opposition Journalism in Old Regime France: “Le Journal des dames”
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); “ ‘Frondeur’ journalism in the 1770s:
Theater criticism and radical politics in the prerevolutionary French press,” Eighteenth-
Century Studies, 17 (1983–84), 493–514; Gregory Brown, “Le Fuel de Méricourt and the
Journal des théâtres: Theatre criticism and the politics of culture in pre-revolutionary
France,” French History, 9 (1995), 1–26; Brown, A Field of Honor, chapter 6: “From Court to
Nation: Liberty of Theatres and Patriot Playwrights, 1789–1791.”

By 1789 patriot discourse had penetrated arguments over a “national theater”
and “national tragedy,” as that text shows in its alignment of masculine virtue,
morality, education, and civic duty, and its final flourish that calls upon the
“Nation” to “protect those citizen artists who enter the lists to strike down the
enemies of the Nation.” In his “Discours préliminaire,” Chénier goes further
still by comparing an imagined Antiquity, where Greek tragedy “echoed with
the praise of Greece and Greek heroes,” with the reign of Louis XIV, character-
ized by intellectual servitude. Indeed, unspecified predecessors are stigmatized
for having written tragedies on national historical subjects but which remain
“a school for prejudice, slavery and stylistic poverty.”15
In claiming that the French monarchy has stifled what good art should be,
the Republican dimension is brought center stage, and the neoclassical dimen-
sion is also emphasized. Central here is the notion of public opinion, which the
Revolution, in Chénier’s eyes, has favored, by allowing freedom of speech and
of the press, by privileging “public opinion,” and by allowing discussion of the
“chose publique” (a res publica, or matter of common concern):
What more propitious moment indeed to establish National tragedy on
our stage! We can see a res publica emerge in our very midst: popular
opinion is now a force to be reckoned with. The most Enlightened
Nation of Europe sees at long last the nullity of its Constitution. Soon
it shall assemble to suppress the innumerable abuses which ignorance,
sloth, corporatism and private interest have accumulated in France over
the past 14 centuries.16
Shortly afterward, the Révolutions de Paris discussed what the title of national
theater might mean at the moment when the Comédie-Française took the title
“Théâtre de la Nation.” In its eyes, the title should be reserved for the institu-
tion that had most “favored the development of patriotism and public spirit.”17
The strongly Republican rhetoric of Chénier is not related to thinking about
the Opéra until the patriotic works performed during the Terror. But what
does appear as early as 1790 is a preference for national history as source, and
a continued insistence that theater can hone judgment. The Journal de Paris,
for instance, expressed the hope that out of the breakdown of a hierarchy of
connoisseurship might at least come the possibility that each might develop
15 Marie-Joseph Chénier, Théâtre, ed. Gauthier Ambrus and François Jacob (Paris:
Flammarion/GF, 2002), pp. 68, 70, 71.
16 ibid., pp. 78, 75, respectively.
17 RdP, xxiii.38.

his own taste.18 And discussions of the Opéra will increasingly turn on its
importance for the Commune (that is, the commonality of citizens of Paris)
and for the polity more widely, as early as the debates in 1789 which I analyze
in Chapter 2. Later still, Boissy d’Anglas’s Quelques idées sur les arts (1794) would
explicitly link national theater (in this final sense of the term), site of memory,
and public education:
More than once, you will devote stage drama to express popular
gratitude, evoking the Great Men you have lost, retracing with all their
pomp the Great National actions which must live on for posterity and
which will be doubly cherished by your citizens, since they are part of
the great epochs of your history.19
Discussion of who should own and manage the Opéra, as we shall see, are
bound up with discussions of liberty, which is variously mobilized to support
competing views of what theater should be.
2. Was Revolutionary Culture Propaganda?

Most writers and critics in eighteenth-century France recognized the power of
theater, and especially musical theater, to persuade. Starting from a sensualist
epistemology, the argument was that music in particular appealed to the senses
and produced pre-rational effects, such as enthusiasm, which were more easily
communicated in a context of physical proximity such as a theater audience.20
A large body of critical writing recognized the role of music for the Ancients
and its capacity to influence psychological states in a manner that other
arts could not achieve. And the developing conceptualization of “energy” and
“electricity” as metaphors to explain these effects, plus the nascent concept of
“contagion” to consider the communication among individuals, meant that
musical theater was uniquely placed to influence members of an audience: this
18 JdP, 1789, p. 500.

19 Boissy d’Anglas, “Quelques idées sur les arts, sur la nécessité de les encourager, sur
les institutions qui peuvent en assurer le perfectionnement, et sur divers établissements
nécessaires à l’enseignement public,” in Bernard Deloche and Jean-Michel Leniaud, La
Culture des sans-culottes (Paris: Les Editions de Paris/Montpellier: Les Presses du Languedoc,
1989), pp. 150–73 (159).
20 Mark Darlow, “The role of the listener in the musical aesthetics of the Revolution,”
SVEC, 2007:06, pp. 143–57.

is one of the major critical presuppositions inherited by the Revolution.21
I shall single out three strands elaborated during the eighteenth century that
are particularly relevant to the Revolutionary opera, leaving aside for the
moment those institutional “utopias” that propose a fundamental change in
the organization of theaters (which I shall discuss later), to focus upon the
poetic dimension.22
Materialists such as d’Holbach and Helvétius pointed to the Greek ideal of
a civic theater presenting public subject matter such as citizenship, and by
contrast they saw in modern French theater nothing but frivolous entertain-
ment that presented corrupt models of behavior.23 Rousseau’s Letter to d’Alembert
had also repudiated public theaters, believing that they could only favor innate
mores and dispositions, preferring the festival. This view prevails in the
anonymous pamphlet from 1789 Discours et motions sur les spectacles and is the
backbone of what I shall later designate “negative” censorship: the removal of
offensive elements of existing works for performance in a specific context, born
of a fear of the power of negative models of conduct on the stage. Henceforward
theater must not present evil characters except where they are explicitly hate-
ful, nor must it contribute to the perdition of the popular classes, as the popu-
lar theater, with its doubtful morality and prurient subject matter, has done
until now.24 By contrast, Diderot’s theory of the drame used family roles and
relationships to demonstrate, in a domestic context, that virtue and interest
could be reconciled, and we could see this as the ancestor of a positive censor-
ship, in the sense of creating positive exempla for conduct, frequently based
upon domestic or other microcosmic social settings in which the innate good-
ness and morally good behavior of characters is favored.25 (Indeed, this filiation
is considered in detail by James Leith.)26 Finally, Mercier’s Du théâtre has in
common with the sensualists mentioned earlier an insistence upon sentiment
as a motor for awakening the judgment of the spectator, but it focuses on the
popular and Republican dimensions and proposes a theater of national history,
celebrating the exploits of great men and other actions of merit in the polity.
21 Michel Delon, L’Idée d’énergie au tournant des lumières (1770–1820) (Paris: Presses
universitaires de France, 1988).
22 For an overview: Martine de Rougemont, “Quelques utopies théâtrales du XVIIIe
siècle français,” Acta universitatis wratislaviensis, 25.845 (1985), 59–70.
23 Marc Hulliung, The Autocritique of Enlightenment (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1994), p. 140.
24 Discours et motions, review in AL, vi.476.
25 Hulliung, Autocritique, pp. 138–39.
26 Leith, Art as Propaganda, chapter 2.

This is the intellectual context in which such papers as the Révolutions de Paris,
in an analogy with the pulpit, felt that theaters needed close control because of
their capacity to influence thought:
At this moment in time, genius cannot be too free, nor can we encour-
age it too much: indeed, only the government is able to allow it to truly
develop and to support it at an appropriate level. Let us speedily imitate
and soon surpass Greece and Rome; let the French people be daily
accommodated in vast auditoria to attend the great practical lessons
which will be offered instead of the flat sermons and religious ceremo-
nies of the past.27
There has been a long-standing assumption that the Revolution is the apogee
of this movement, instrumentalizing culture for ideological purposes, a
process that can be described as propaganda. The term “propaganda” deserves
consideration. Early-modern definitions of the term concern spreading or prop-
agation of some kind of message and were normally used to relate to the Roman
Catholic’s post-Tridentine committee of cardinals founded in 1622 by Pope
Gregory XV for the “propagation of the faith” (or de propaganda fide), by which
the Vatican sought to counteract the rival ideas of the Protestant reformation.28
In 1798, the fifth edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française recognizes
the verb “propager” as “étendre, augmenter, répandre, faire croître” and gives
as examples “propager la foi, l’erreur, la vérité, les lumières, les connoissances”
and “les préjugés, les lumières se propagent” (p. 377).29
There is no doubt that in this wider sense much eighteenth-century French
theater was harnessed by the Philosophes with the intention of spreading
27 JdesS, 156 (15 Frimaire An II / 5 November 1793), p. 1238, citing Révolutions de

Paris.
28 Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française, 4th edition (1762), p. 484, defines it in this way.
Cf. Encyclopédie, xiii.459, which points to a similar ecclesiastical society established in
seventeenth-century England.
29 Similar definitions were found in England: OED, xii.632 also cites J. MacPherson’s
letter to George, Prince of Wales (27 September 1790): “All Kings have . . . a new race of
Pretenders to contend with, the disciples of the propaganda at Paris, or, as they call them-
selves, Les Ambassadeurs du genre humain” (ed. A. Aspinall, Correspondence of George,
Prince of Wales, 1964); and the August 1797 Gentleman’s Magazine (p. 687) which states
“The Propaganda, a society whose members are bound, by solemn engagements, to stir up
subjects against their lawful rulers. . . . ” For discussions of modern (that is, twentieth-
century) conceptions of propaganda, see Toby Clark, Art and Propaganda in the 20th
Century: The Political Image in the Age of Mass Culture (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
1997); J. Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (New York: Vintage, 1973).

“Enlightenment,” whether Voltaire’s tragedies such as Mahomet or the drames of
Diderot. Yet the application of the idea of propaganda to eighteenth-century
and Revolutionary theater poses at least two methodological problems. Modern
propaganda is normally linked to mass culture and the ways in which this is
harnessed by individuals or groups in authority. Yet despite some unconvinc-
ing attempts to link it to the subjection of the early-modern artist to his patron,
early-modern theater reaches too small a public to qualify for this, and the
reception of works is too various. Moreover, to say that propaganda is any effort
to change an audience’s opinion, or any form of communication, is too broad to
be genuinely meaningful. Indeed, whether we focus our attention toward
intentionality or effect (the production of conformity and stability around a
core ideology/message), neither seems to qualify. Revolutionary culture is
improvisational, as I hope to show, and rarely solved the issue of how theaters
could best claim to embody public or popular opinion. There are several
reasons for this.
3. Liberté
The first is a tension at the heart of Revolutionary concepts of liberty, because
Revolutionary ideology placed unprecedented demands upon the administra-
tion of culture. I agree with Jann Pasler that we should “take seriously the
French Revolutionaries’ faith in music as a force to help form French citizens.”30
As she reminds us, the 1804 Civil Code codifies the concept of utilité publique:31
there is no recognized juridical standard for utility in Old Regime or
Revolutionary France, but it is a central aspect of the debates in the Revolution.
As she notes, public utility is a problematic aspiration which easily conflicts
with the ideals of freedom, since it can be “prescriptive of how desires can be
educated and needs constructed to constitute the general interest,” and thereby
“powerfully normalizing.”32 In later chapters dealing with the Terror, I propose
to return to the question of whether, and how, the Opéra was “normalizing.”
But we shall see throughout the period that one fundamental question for
bureaucrats was how state or municipal regulation was compatible with lib-
erty; and if it was not, how to reconcile the ideals of freedom (which quickly
became synonymous with deregulation) with control over quality. This by
30 Composing the Citizen, p. 30.


implication is also a question of legitimacy. As Jane Fulcher describes the issue,
public culture “had to represent public interests, embody public taste, and
voice the common opinion. This became problematic as soon as the realities of
power emerged, as they did very early in the French Revolution, immediately
implicating the national stage. The state was forced here, for reasons of rheto-
ric, to try to respect an ideal of transparent public expression that clashed
dramatically with the realities of the political world.”33 As we shall see in
chapter 3, respecting the ideal of free expression while regulating the theaters
was the crux of debates between the Le Chapelier law and the Terror.
4. Rupture and Continuity

A second issue to be considered is the Revolutionary theater’s complex rela-
tionship with the Old Regime, or whether 1789 constitutes a watershed in
aesthetics and/or policy.34 There is a large body of research on the complex
relationship between the Enlightenment and the Revolution.35 There are at
least two approaches to this problem as concerns our topic. The first is institu-
tional: the works performed in the first two seasons of the Revolutionary
period were by necessity written before the problems of 1789 took place and
were rather products, in terms of their genesis, of the pre-Revolutionary situa-
tion, in particular the years of crisis surrounding the failure of the Assembly of
Notables and the convening of the Estates-General. Whatever the magnitude
of that crisis, it arguably took place in a context of cultural continuity and
reform, rather than Revolution or rupture. This does not preclude the themat-
ics of the works from being forward-looking—in a particularly fine-grained
study Thomas Crow has replaced David’s Brutus and Serment des Horaces in
precisely such a “pre-Revolutionary” reformist context36 —but we need to avoid
33 The Nation’s Image, p. 5.

34 On rupture see also Michael Fend, Cherubinis Pariser Opern, chapter 1.II.
35 Roger Chartier, Les Origines culturelles de la Révolution française (Paris: Seuil, 1990),
chapter 1; Thomas E. Kaiser, “This strange offspring of Philosophie: recent historiographi-
cal problems in relating the Enlightenment to the French Revolution,” French Historical
Studies, 15 (1998), 549–62; Michael Sonenscher, “Enlightenment and Revolution,” Journal
of Modern History, 70 (June 1998), 371–83.
36 “The oath of the Horatii in 1785: painting and pre-revolutionary politics in France,”
Art History, 1 (1978), 425–71. See also Jean Starobinski, 1789: Les Emblèmes de la raison
(Paris: Flammarion/Champs, 1979 [1973]), pp. 6–7 on the question of a “pre-Revolution-
ary” context (although he does not use the term).

attempting to find in works dating from 1787–88, views that could only have
crystallized after, say, the fall of the Bastille. In Chapter 5, I discuss the time
taken to mount a production (on average, eighteen months in 1788), and some
of the implications of this systematic delay for the interpretation of works are
explored in Chapters 6 and 7. The temptation to read works with hindsight
dates from the Revolution itself and rapidly became part of a strategy of self-
defense by writers criticized for the rather tame political dimensions of their
works, or, conversely, formed a self-congratulationary proleptic discourse that
claimed foresight for discussion of issues topical after 1789 in works written
before (the famous example is Chénier’s Charles IX, written before 1789 but
banned; Beaumarchais, the librettist of Tarare, did much the same: Chapter 7).
Indeed, the fact that works produced during the pre-Revolutionary decade
could be so successful just after 1789 points to a duality of continuity and
rupture: a rupture in institutional practices, which liberates a host of hitherto
banned works for performance; yet continuity between patriot material before
and after the fault line. Indeed, according to Jean Starobinski, the Revolution’s
artistic production is best seen as a continuity with a neoclassicism invented
long before 1789, and I agree that we should study the Revolutionary context
and the works of art conceived before 1789 but finished in that year as a con-
junction of circumstances [conjoncture], where work and context can mutually
illuminate, even if a link of causality cannot be postulated.37 Lynn Hunt has
likewise pointed to the broad currency of Republican ideas that are not acted
upon until an “unexpected invention of revolutionary politics” can sustain it.38
This being the case, we might also question whether thematic “mapping” is
the most appropriate way of studying cultural artifacts produced during a
period of crisis. As has been shown elsewhere, moments of crisis or trauma can
only be interiorized over time, and the immediate effect of trauma is a lack of
explicit response.39 On a more material level, it could be claimed that what
1789 represented for those making repertory decisions at the Opéra was uncer-
tainty, maybe also insecurity; the most plausible response to this would be to
seek stability in continuity of service, hence inscribing a strong element of
continuity into a moment of instability. Indeed what is clear from surviving
administrative paperwork is that the crown was responsive to public demand
37 Emblèmes, p. 6.
38 Politics, Culture, and Class, p. 3.
39 Katherine Astbury, Narrative Responses to the Trauma of the French Revolution, forth-
coming.

and was embarking on a tentative process of repertory reform before 1789;40
but also that its principal concern was to assure continued service and to stabi-
lize finances. We will not, therefore, find explicit thematic discussion or appro-
priation of matters that were socially and culturally contemporaneous in the
early works. In fact, such thematic mapping consists of a retrospective projec-
tion back onto 1789 of a cultural expectation that is anachronistic, namely,
that the work of art might be an explicit reflection of the circumstances of its
first creation. This assumption, as I shall attempt to show, is a product of
modernity and has little to do with the early-modern period, which implied
different cultural expectations of state institutions and works. For although
eighteenth-century urban taste, particularly at the elite theaters, was dictated
by fashion, state institutions whose purpose was glory focused more upon the
continued preservation of an artistic tradition and heritage that shifted accord-
ing to longer-term factors than that of public taste. How can we conceptualize
the “classic” material?
Hans Robert Jauss has pointed out that in matters of art, there is an
essential continuity between modernity and obsolescence, because the new
eventually becomes old, and thereafter obsolete; whereas the opposite of
modernity—classicism—does not age in the same way.41 He notes however
that this distinction is itself a product of the eighteenth-century, since it
depends upon a historical development inaugurated by the Quarrel of the
Anciens and the Moderns but not completed until the end of the eighteenth
century. Amongst other long-term effects, that quarrel replaced a cyclical view
of history with a linear view of history: in the cyclical view, the term classique
implied timeless authority, whereas the modern, linear view of history allowed
for a growing awareness of the historical specificities of taste and aesthetics. In
this latter view, the classique could increasingly be thought of as past rather
than as timeless. Accordingly, whereas in the mid eighteenth century the
Encyclopédie could still define the classique as “qui fait autorité,”42 romanticism
would define classicism in opposition to itself, as an obsolescent period,
antithetical to modernity.
One might assume that the crown’s approach to a national repertory
theater would precisely be founded on the “classic” approach, and that the
40 See my “Repertory reforms at the Paris Opéra on the eve of the Revolution,” Journal
of Eighteenth-Century Studies, 32.4 (December 2009), 563–76.
41 “La “modernité” dans la tradition littéraire et la conscience d’aujourd’hui,” in Pour
une esthétique de la réception (Paris: Gallimard/nrf, 1978), pp. 173–229 (177–78). [orig.
Literaturgeschichte als Provokation, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974].
42 Jauss, p. 202n. Encyclopédie, iii.507, does not however contain this sentence.

performance of classic works had symbolic value as the manifestation of
tradition. This approach did indeed endure, but by the 1770s and 1780s offi-
cials such as La Ferté were also increasingly aware that works became dated in
the public’s esteem. William Weber has demonstrated that the Opéra, from
the accession of Louis XVI onward, accordingly centered its programming
upon contemporary musical taste.43 Gluck’s place in this shift is particularly
interesting, since he was seen as both an example of extreme musical moder-
nity and the heir of the noble simplicity of Antiquity. (In this sense, he was
both a classique and a moderne.) This awareness had implications for the rotation
of works and the length of productions as well: Crown officials also recognized
that the obsolescence of works was regulated not only by external factors such
as fashion, but also by the number of productions they received. Indeed in
their view, it is not the speed of aesthetic development that matters but the
extent of public exposure and familiarity: the greater the stock of works for
rotation, the longer they can be retained. (I shall return to the material issues
which this raised for the repertory in Part Two.)
This approach, however, was particularly problematic in the Revolutionary
context, which not only presented itself as a rupture with the past but also as
a moment of novelty. In such a context, tradition became obsolete with such
speed that few critics even discussed what had been left aside. What changes
more quickly than aesthetics is the public’s approach to the material and its
readiness to find new messages in it; and accordingly, much of my discussion
will center upon reception. Following them, we retrospectively project an ideal
of “Revolutionary” culture onto these past seasons. But the realities of political
oppression meant that the Opéra also avoided contestation. An analysis of the
repertory will reveal a more multi-layered response to circumstances, accord-
ing to four axes: the revision of classics for primarily financial reasons; the
varying standards by which older works are discussed; the progressive injec-
tion of new works into the repertory to respond to demand and to fill the gulf
created by politically obsolescent works; and the time-lag between creation
and reception, which gives even the newest works a rather dated feel.44
43 “La Musique ancienne in the waning of the Ancien Régime,” Journal of Modern
History, 56.1 (March 1984), 58–88 (83).
44 We do not possess full data, because the sources concerning acceptance of works
have large gaps. But Po: Rés.1025.1, a rare day-by-day log of the internal management of
the theater before 1789, suggests that most of the major works from the 1789–90 season
had first been proposed at least one, sometimes two years before, giving dates of a reading
of the libretto by the committee as follows: Castor [et Pollux], 2 June 1786; Cora, 2 March
1787; Corisandre, 22 June 1787; Nephté, 1 February 1788; Antigone, 2 May 1788.

More than either propaganda or political reaction, the repertory reveals how
the materiality of an old institution is unable to cope with a vastly accelerating
cultural temporality, until its very principles are substantially overhauled.
5. Governance in 1789
Governance of the theaters was itself in a state of flux. Because they were all
located in the capital, jurisdiction over the privileged theaters was shared
between the royal household and the city of Paris (both under the authority of
the same minister). Internal regulation was exercised by the royal household,
whereas policing powers over public spaces (including theater auditoria) were
invested in the lieutenant general of police, who also exercised pre-performance
censorship (but not that of plays for printing, which fell within the purview of
the book trade). In Paris, it was up to the author of a play to obtain police
censorial permission. A royal censor was delegated by the privy seal to read
manuscripts on behalf of the police; the police lieutenant signed the authoriza-
tion and also sent a representative to the performance.45 Plays were likely to
incur a ban if they contained offense to friendly countries, slander of promi-
nent individuals in the kingdom, criticism of the current authorities, or refer-
ences to state religion and rites that might seem to be commenting on
catholicism. Opera libretti were approved by both censor and performing
institution before the librettist approached a composer.
Most institutional studies of Old Regime and Revolutionary theater have
focused upon the Comédie-Française. Of the three royally protected theaters
of the pre-Revolutionary period, it had a stable administrative structure—
composed of a board of shareholding principal performers, sometimes accom-
panied by accountants and lawyers (a société ) —a structure that remained
unchanged for the entire period covered by this book.46 The Comédie-Italienne
likewise was a société and, apart from its merger with the Opéra-Comique in
1762 and several changes in its rights over sections of the theatrical repertory
45 See Hemmings, Theatre and State, pp. 44–49. The procedure is set out in Les Pièces
de théâtre soumises à la censure, p. 16.
46 Jules Bonnassies, La Comédie Française: Histoire administrative, 1658–1757 (Paris:
Didier, 1874); Emile Campardon, Les Comédiens du roi de la troupe française, pendant les deux
derniers siècles: Documents inédits recueillis aux archives nationales (Paris: Champion, 1879);
Henry Carrington Lancaster, The Comédie Française, 1701–1774, plays, actors, spectators,
finances (London: Oxford University Press, 1941); Claude Alasseur, La Comédie-Française:
Etude économique (Paris: Mouton, 1967).

and in its composition, was also structurally stable.47 Compared with these
two institutions, one specific feature of the Opéra was the instability of its
management.48 Between the granting of Letters patent in 1669 and the begin-
ning of the Revolution, the institution saw a series of no fewer than twenty-
nine changes of governance.49 Many of these were short-lived and tended to fall
into one of several categories: directorial privilège, such as that granted to Lully
in 1672, whereby a private individual acquired the sole right to the production
of dramas in French (or other languages, according to the Permission text), set
to through-composed music;50 or direction by one or several named entrepre-
neurs on behalf of the city of Paris, where the crown asked the city to award
the directorate to a person they chose. Governance was a crucial issue in the
history of the Opéra because of an unquestioned need to maintain this pre-
eminent national theater: in spite of its often disastrous financial situation,
crown officials were keen to find an appropriate mode by which the institution
could finally find stability.
Concerns with governance of the Opéra grew in the light of the increasing
popularity of the Comédie-Italienne and the establishment of the Théâtre de
Monsieur.51 The rivalry threatened both to weaken the institution’s prestige
and to further damage its finances. This was a particular concern after the
seasons of 1778–80 under Anne-Pierre-Jacques de Vismes du Valgay, a tax
farmer who ran the Opéra under lease from the city of Paris, at his own
47 Clarence Brenner, The “Théâtre-Italien”: Its Repertory. With an Historical Introduction,

University of California Publications in Modern Philology, 63 (1961); Martin Nadeau,
“Théâtre et esprit public: le rôle du Théâtre-Italien dans la culture politique parisienne à
l’ère des Révolutions (1770–1799),” Ph.D. thesis, McGill University, 2001.
48 [Durey de Noinville], Histoire du Théatre de l’Académie Royale de Musique en France,
depuis son établissement jusqu’à présent, 2e éd. (Geneva: Minkoff, 1972 [Paris: Duchesne,
1757]); François Henri Joseph Blaze [a.k.a. Castil-Blaze], L’Académie impériale de musique:
Histoire littéraire, musicale, chorégraphique, pittoresque, morale, critique, facétieuse, politique et
galante de ce théâtre, de 1645–1855, 2 vols. in-1 (Paris: n.pub., 1855); Solveig Serre, L’Opéra
de Paris (1749–1790): Politique culturelle de l’Opéra de Paris au temps des lumières (Paris: CNRS
Editions, 2011).
49 AN: O/1/616 #106.
50 Permission pour tenir Académie Royale de Musique, en faveur du sieur Lully (n.p.: n.pub.,
n.d.), 3 pp. For a recent discussion of privilège, see Victoria Johnson, Backstage at the
Revolution, pp. 84–85, 98–102, 149–50, 159–67.
51 On competition from the Théâtre de Monsieur (not just in terms of repertory but
also performance quality), see Cahier de doléances, remontrances et instructions, de l’assemblee de
tous les ordres des théâtres royaux de Paris (n.p.: n.pub., [1789]), p. 13; AN: O/1/617 #19, f.1r;
O/1/617 #26, f.1r. By 1792, the AGTS was categorical about the preeminence of the
Théâtre de Monsieur: pp. 112–13.

financial risk (and then, from 1779, with their financial support merely as a
director). The latter season created one of the biggest deficits in the institu-
tion’s history, despite its artistic successes.52 For the majority of the 1780s the
Opéra also ran at a deficit, albeit reduced, and from 1785 the financial problem
was compounded by an internal crisis that saw director Antoine Dauvergne
openly attacked by the principals of the Opéra who continued to clamor for
self-governance of the institution.
State control over theaters and music was also in a state of flux during the
last decades of the century. The strictly regulated Parisian theater hierarchy
began to disaggregate from 1759, first with the establishment by Nicolet of a
theater on the Boulevard du Temple. Nicolet had received crown approval,
provided he present only puppet shows and rope dancers: this presented no
genuine challenge to the three royally controlled theaters and was ignored by
them. Successive establishments in the same quarter include the Comédiens de
Bois (established by Audinot in 1767), which from 1771 replaced puppets with
child actors performing mini-operas against protests from the Académie
Royale, Sallé’s Théâtre des Associés (reopened in 1778), Delomel’s Théâtre des
Beaujolais (opened in 1784), and Gaillard and Dorfeuille’s Variétés-Amusantes
(established in 1785), all of which performed plays in infringement of strict
regulations, yet were encouraged, from 1784–85, by the crown’s relaxation of
privilège.53
Theatrical privilège also came under increasing pressure from playwrights
dissatisfied with the Comédie-Française, including procedures pertaining to
reception, programming, and performance of works; the complicated and often
humiliating procedure for submitting plays; and the calculation of royalties.
Although critics were not always in favor of the plethora of minor troupes nor
of the complete abolition of privilège, they nonetheless attacked the monopoly
of the Comédie-Française, calling for a second spoken French theater.54 At the
beginning of the Revolution the practice of censorship and the institutional
structure of the book trade were also crumbling, in part as a result of the
52 Andrea Fabiano, Histoire de l’opéra italien en France (1752–1815): Héros et héroïnes d’un
roman théâtral (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2006), pp. 71–103.
53 Michèle Root-Bernstein, Boulevard Theater and Revolution in eighteenth-century France
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press, 1984).
54 Gregory Brown, A Field of Honor: Writers, Court Culture and Public Theater in French
Literary Life from Racine to the Revolution (New York: Gutenberg, 2002); and, for the SAD
itself, Brown, Literary Sociability and Literary Property in France, 1775–1793: Beaumarchais,
the Société des Auteurs Dramatiques and the Comédie Française (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006):
Brown reviews the relevant major critical literature on pp. 3–7.

convocation of the Estates-General in 1788, when districts of France were
asked to submit Cahiers de doléances, a request that amounted to a declaration
of freedom of expression and led to the freedom of the press one year later. This
was closely followed by Chénier’s calls for “theatrical liberty” as part of the
quarrel over his “national tragedy” Charles IX.55 From 1789, debates over
monopoly were conflated with an ethical repudiation of all types of privilège,
particularly after the night of 4 August 1789 when the Constituent Assembly
abolished feudal rights. To debate theatrical privilège in 1789 was also, there-
fore, to open up wider questions of authors’ rights, the freedom of theaters and
theater entrepreneurs, the right of individual performers to draw pecuniary
rewards from their own “industry,” and to open up the tension between state
regulation of the theaters and “liberty,” a cultural buzzword that was variously
defined but seen by many as the sole condition for the renewal of the arts.
The early 1780s had seen an attempt to rationalize the Paris theatrical
world. During the period 1778–80, de Vismes du Valgay, as director of the
Opéra, was able to negotiate a new lease [bail ] for the Comédie-Italienne. The
already draconian conditions of the lease of 1766 were extended to outlaw not
only Italian music and through-composed opera from the repertory of the
Comédie-Italienne; but any new parody versions of works in the repertory of
the Opéra as well; given that the Opéra performed almost exclusively French
works, this effectively removed any Italian opera from Paris until the creation
of the Théâtre de Monsieur in 1789.56 In parallel, the Comédie-Italienne was
invited to revive opéra-comique en vaudevilles, arguably as part of a realignment
of the comic dimension of that theater’s repertory.57 Since the Opéra then
failed to take advantage of this realignment by itself performing those Italian
works denied the Comédie-Italienne, the public progressively shifted toward
55 Carla Hesse, Publishing and Cultural Politics in Revolutionary Paris, 1789–1810

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), chapters 1 and 2 (especially pp. 6,
19–20).
56 Arrêt du conseil d’état du roi, Approbatif du Bail ou Concession du Privilége de l’Opéra-
Comique, faite par la Ville aux Comédiens, dits, Italiens, pour trente années, à commencer le 1er
Janvier 1780. Du 16 Octobre 1779. Extrait des Registres du Conseil d’état du Roi (Paris:
Imprimerie de Lottin, 1779). Also reproduced in Campardon, Les Comédiens du roi de la
troupe italienne, ii.350–58. (A typo in Campardon’s book misdates this text to 1789). The
earlier lease may be consulted at AN: AJ/13/2.II.: 4p., dated 29 January 1766, and due to
take effect from 1 January 1767. My thanks to David Charlton for pointing me to this
source.
57 Mark Darlow, “Le vaudeville à la Comédie-Italienne, 1767–1789” in Carlo Goldoni
et la France: Un Dialogue dramatique de la modernité (Revue des Etudes italiennes, 53 [2007]),
ed. A. Fabiano, 87–95.

Montansier’s theater at court, precipitating a crisis at the Opéra.58 In addition,
authors’ rights at the Comédie-Française were revised by the terms of the
decree [arrêt] of 9 December 1780, in the light of a campaign by the Society of
Dramatic Authors established by Beaumarchais in 1777, although new research
demonstrates that this was at the behest of crown officials themselves, whose
own reforming impulses should not be underestimated.59
The Opéra’s governance was also to change several times during the 1780s.
The arrêt of 17 March 1780 reintegrated the Opéra into the royal domain,
declaring that the King’s will was that the institution should never again be
run by private enterprise. It thereby fell under control of the minister for the
royal household and city of Paris,60 without the intervening authority of the
four Premiers Gentilshommes de la chambre who oversaw the Comédie-
Française and Comédie-Italienne, but was instead overseen by the Intendant
des Menus-Plaisirs Denis-Pierre-Jean Papillon de La Ferté.61 La Ferté reported
to the minister, because les Menus-Plaisirs fell within the royal household. This
change formed part of a wider project, presented in the preamble of the arrêt
as a cost-cutting exercise, to share resources of the theaters of the royal court
58 di Profio, La Révolution des Bouffons, p. 31.

59 See note 54.
60 Antoine-Jean Amelot de Chaillou (1776–1783), succeeded by Louis Auguste le
Tonnelier de Breteuil (1783–1788), Pierre-Charles Laurent de Villedeuil (1788–July
1789), and François Emmanuel Guignard, comte de Saint-Priest (July 1789–December
1790).
61 L’Administration des Menus: Journal de Papillon de la Ferté. Intendant et contrôleur de
l’argenterie, Menus-plaisirs et affaires de la chambre du roi (1756–1780), publié avec une intro-
duction et des notes par Ernest Boysse (Paris: Paul Ollendorff, 1887), and a more recent reprint
of the text of the journal itself: Papillon de La Ferté, Journal des Menus plaisirs du Roi
1756–1780 (Paris: Paléo/Sources de l’histoire de France, 2002); Adolphe Jullien, Un
Potentat musical: Papillon de la Ferté. Son règne à l’Opéra de 1780 à 1790 d’après ses lettres et ses
papiers manuscrits conservés aux archives de l’état et à la Bibliothèque de la Ville de Paris (Paris:
A. Detaille, 1876); René Farge, Autour d’une salle d’opéra: Un haut fonctionnaire de l’ancien
régime, Papillon de la Ferté (Paris: E. Leroux, 1912); Armand Bourgeois, Le Châlonnais Papillon
de la Ferté, intendant des Menus-Plaisirs du Roi et le théâtre au XVIIIe siècle (Châlons-sur-
Marne: Imp. A. Robat, 1910). La Ferté’s own manuscript autobiographical text written in
self-defense in 1794, the year of his execution after trial before the Revolutionary tribunal,
is reprinted by Jullien, Potentat musical, pp. 13–27 (the original is held by BHVP: ms.
CP4418 #3). Arthur Pougin, Un Directeur d’Opéra au 18e siècle (Paris: n.pub., 1914), p. 8,
describes la Ferté as “a sly, ambitious man, who soon became the true Master of the
Opéra.”

with the Opéra.62 To summarize the legal status of the Opéra, the institution
was part of the “royal domain” from 1780; the buildings and contents were
crown property, and as such were inalienable.63 This means that juridically, the
periods of entrepreneur-governance such as that of 1778–80 were licensing
arrangements that transferred control of the building and chattels by virtue of
emphyteusis [a bail emphitéotique], as well as transferring the privilège to the
entrepreneur. Such baux emphitéotiques were long leases, usually granted for a
period of up to ninety-nine years, but more normally twenty or thirty in the
case of institutions such as the Opéra, in return for a deposit [bail ], held by the
treasury at a fixed rate of annual interest.64 This situation was in marked con-
tradistinction with that of London, where theaters were privately built and
owned, and where permission to perform was regulated either by patents or by
licences,65 or the original foundation of the Académie Royale, where Perrin
built his own theater, and was accorded the exclusive right to perform music
drama [ privilège].
The original specificity of emphyteusis, compared with other types of lease,
was that the deposit was set low in recognition that such leases were intended
to improve or increase the value of the property, which was often held over
several generations. (According to the Encyclopédie, however, this distinction
was breaking down in eighteenth-century France.) 66 One other important
point is that in emphyteusis, although property is retained by the bailleur, an
unusual degree of rights and obligations passes to the lessee [l’emphytéote]. In
other words, to all intents and purposes, lessees would act as if they were
owners, as they were obliged to maintain the property, “cultivate” or improve
62 Arrêt du Conseil d’Etat du Roi, concernant l’Opéra. Du 17 Mars 1780. Extrait des
Registres du Conseil d’état du Roi (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1780).
63 As provided for by the Edict of Moulins (1566). Article 1 declared that the royal
domain could not be alienated. “Royal domain” was defined in article 2. I am grateful to
Dr. Ian Williams for his advice concerning this and related questions. Jeffrey Ravel also
points to several sources which demonstrate that the Opéra was thought of as the King’s
property in Contested Parterre, p. 144, though he makes this point in the context of a com-
parison of the status, within the royal domain, of the Académie Royale and the Comédie-
Française.
64 See “Emphytéose,” Encyclopédie, v.580; and “Bail,” ibid., ii.16.
65 For a definition of these, see Curtis Price, Judith Milhous, and Robert D. Hume,
Italian Opera in Late Eighteenth-Century London, Vol. 1: The King’s Theatre, Haymarket 1778–
1791 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 7. See also Robert Hume, “Theatre as property
in eighteenth-century London,” Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies [henceforward JECS],
31.1 (March 2008), 17–46.
66 “Emphytéose,” v.580.

it, run it, and assume all financial obligations unless otherwise provided for in
the original contract. This included, crucially, unlimited liability in the case of
debts incurred by the institution, although in practice the crown bailed out
entrepreneurs who found themselves in such a situation, as happened in 1780,
and therefore the debt of the institution continued to accrue.
6. After the de Vismes season, 1780–1789

Consequently, the arrêt of 17 March 1780, which placed the Opéra once again
within the royal domain as part of the Menus-Plaisirs, simply terminated the
emphyteusis created in 1778.67 The legacy of the short-lived de Vismes season
was mixed. On the positive side, it successfully introduced the criterion of
generic variety into programming at the Opéra, one of de Vismes’s main
aims,68 since the season included a second series of Italian works performed
by artists hired from abroad and a breaking down of the almost exclusive
dominion of lyric tragedy: both aspects had long-term, salutory effects on the
repertory. From a financial and managerial point of view, the season was ulti-
mately a failure, however, and de Vismes’s attempt to extend the Opéra’s
monopoly over the lyric genres at the expense of the Comédie-Italienne led to
his alienation of potentially powerful Italophile supporters such as Framery
and Marmontel just when he needed all the public support he could get.69
De Vismes’s ultimate resignation was almost certainly forced by a public cam-
paign orchestrated from within by the principals of the Opéra70 and had
far-reaching effects on the managerial dimension of the theater as well, since it
determined the artists never again to submit to private enterprise, a hostility
which ran through the debates over governance in 1789–92. The pamphlet
entitled Instruction du procès, probably ghostwritten by another Italophile,
Pierre-Louis Ginguené, is an example. Composed partly of letters and partly
of dialogue, it imagines a trial of de Vismes by the principals before the
67 “La joüissance d’un bail emphytéotique peut être saisie & vendue, comme les
immeubles, à la requête des créanciers.” ibid.
68 Fabiano, Histoire de l’opéra italien, pp. 71–103. On generic variety, see pp. 74–75, 78.
69 Histoire de l’opéra italien, pp. 99–100. Although de Vismes lost their support, only
Framery remained hostile to the Opéra as an institution; Marmontel continued to produce
libretti in French for the Opéra throughout the 1780s.
70 Histoire de l’opéra italien, pp. 97–103.

“tribunal” of the public.71 Framed by a “patriot” conceptualization of the public
sphere as consubstantial with the “nation” (pp. 3–4), the text attacks de Vismes
for being both authoritarian and profiteering. Attacking him as an authoritar-
ian director, the text introduces a rhetorical binary of slavery and despotism:
as a “farmer” of their talents (a play on the title of his other post, as tax farmer),
de Vismes “who, not content to become rich at our expense by creaming off a
tenth of the money earned by our talents and our work, also wants the respect
of his betters, and who no sooner has he set up this precarious administration,
has turned against him all those who collaborate to provide public entertain-
ment (and his profits) by his dishonest proceedings” (p. 12). Combining these
two issues, the bulk of the pamphlet is devoted to setting out what would
become the logic of the arrêt of 1780: that in order to encourage the zeal of the
artists, they should be financially rewarded (p. 7), and that they have an
inalienable right to profit from their own work (pp. 12–13). This does not just
mean payment or profit sharing, however, but a stake in the governance of the
institution as well, conflating the financial and the managerial (pp. 13–14). In
establishing a rhetorical alliance between the public and those artists who have
a right to profit from their work against the “despotism” of court or govern-
ment, this pamphlet sets out the rhetorical position of the artists that remains
fairly constant until their wish to self-govern prevails during the Terror.
Whether it was instrumental in the 1780 experiment in instituting limited
profit sharing (though emphatically not self-governance, as they were later dis-
ingenuously to claim) is difficult to determine. But the need to encourage
“emulation” is explicitly part of the arrêt of 17 March 1780, which at first
placed the Opéra under the directorship of Pierre-Montan Berton and remains
a central issue thereafter.72 And in order to make sense of the institution’s tra-
jectory in the 1790s, we need to bear in mind that “patriot” rhetoric is part of
the principals’ self-definition against the royal household, from 1780 onward,
and hence that an antagonism between the two is entrenched even before the
Revolution begins.
71 Instruction du procès, entre les premiers sujets de l’Académie Royale de musique & de danse.
Et le Sr. de Vismes, entrepreneur, jadis public, aujourd’hui clandestin, & Directeur de ce spectacle.
Pardevant la tournelle du public. Extrait de quelques papiers qui n’ont pas cours en France (n.p.:
n.pub., [1779]), 44p. On authorship, see Paolo Grossi, Pierre-Louis Ginguené, historien de la
littérature italienne (Berne: Peter Lang, 2006), p. 336n4.
72 Arrêt du Conseil d’Etat du Roi, concernant l’Opéra. Du 17 mars 1780 (Paris: Imprimerie
Royale, 1780), p. 5, naming “le sieur Leberton.” Berton however died on 14 May 1780 and
was replaced almost immediately by Dauvergne, accompanied by Gossec as a sop to the
artists who had asked that no director be appointed (Serre, p. 73).

7. The Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin, 1781–1794
The general sense of optimism of 1780 was upset by the disastrous fire during
the night of 8 June 1781 on the Opéra’s premises, the Théâtre du Palais-
Royal. The fire claimed eleven lives and decimated the building, destroying
much of the theater’s property, including 2,000 costumes.73 A new theater at
the Porte-Saint-Martin was constructed in record time over the summer of
1781.74 Commissioned from architect Samson-Nicolas Lenoir, the theater was
a timber structure; designed as a temporary edifice, it was to serve until the
ending of hostilities between Britain, France, and the United States, which
came with the signing of the peace treaty at Versailles in 1783. Although not
of stone construction, the building held up well and was elegantly propor-
tioned, with good acoustics in the auditorium.75 Illustration 1 is taken from
the Architectonographie des Théâtres76 and shows layout. The auditorium was
composed of four rows of boxes, the stage was of similar size to that of the
Palais-Royal, and the décor was neoclassical. It seated an audience of 1,800 and
was the first such theater in Paris to be constructed with a seated stalls area
[parterre]. It was further extended in 1782.77 It burned down during the trou-
bles of 1871 and was replaced in 1872–73 on the same site by the current
Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin.
Apart from the qualities of the auditorium, the rather spartan frontage was
criticized, partly because it lacked covered archways allowing coaches to deposit
patrons at the door in inclement weather. But more important, the location of
the new Opéra was itself unpopular, and many claimed that the institution
would not attract audiences since it was literally on the outskirts of the city.
The Portes had been constructed under Louis XIV as gateways to Paris as well
as tax barriers (the Porte Saint-Denis in 1672, the Porte Saint-Martin in 1675);
and although the following century had seen Paris expand to be surrounded by
73 AN: O/1/617 #15, f.2r. See also “8 juin 1781: Procès-verbal de l’incendie de
l’Opéra,” in Campardon, L’Opéra au XVIIIe siècle, ii.365–89.
74 Construction supposedly took sixty-five days (the figure of forty days, now discred-
ited, is also often cited), starting on 2 August 1781. The theatre opened on 27 October
with a free performance honoring the birth of the dauphin. For a discussion, see Albert de
Lasalle, Les Treize Salles de l’Opéra (Paris: Librairie Sartorius, 1875), pp. 135–36, who cites
eighty-six days.
75 Theatre and State in France, p. 66.
76 On the salle Saint-Martin, see Serre, pp. 229–37; Lasalle, Treize Salles, pp. 136–37,
and Bernard Destors, Le Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin (1804–2004) (Privately printed,
2004).
77 Lasalle, Treize Salles, p. 139.

illustration 1. “Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin,” in Alexis Donnet, Orgiazzi
[continued by Jacques-Auguste Kaufmann], Architectonographie des Théâtres: ou
Parallèle historique et critique de ces édifices considérés sous le rapport de l’architecture et de la
décoration, 2 vols. (Paris: L. Mathias, 1837–40), vol.1, plate 8 [Cambridge University
Library, Rare books department: 8400.a.29]
outlying districts such as the Faubourg du Temple and the Faubourg Saint-
Martin, the Portes still marked what were considered the limits of the city
center. They were moreover quite remote from the areas where theaters were
traditionally constructed: typically, around the Palais-Royal and (on the left
bank) in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. For instance, the Comédie-Française
was at that time housed at the Salle des Machines at the Tuileries, shortly to
move to the Odéon (also 1781); the Comédie-Italienne was in the Hôtel de
Bourgogne on rue Mauconseil (now rue Etienne Marcel), shortly to move to
the salle Favart (in 1783). The minor Parisian theaters were more remote from
the city center and were in fact quite near the Porte Saint-Martin, being
arranged along the Boulevard du Temple which radiated east from that spot,

and snobs were unimpressed by the Opéra moving to such an area of the city.
Critics asked rhetorically whether people indifferent to the music and ballet
and who attended the Opéra only to meet each other would be prepared to
stray so far from home to do so. It was therefore a wholly unlikely choice of
location: a brief account of the decision is given by Serre. As she shows, the
architect Nicolas Lenoir himself had suggested the plot; situated just north of
the Porte Saint-Martin and reaching to the rue de Bondy, it covered both the
land on which the Opéra’s store houses [magasins] were situated and part of a
Protestant cemetary which the city of Paris was moving to a new location fur-
ther from the city center. This composite site had greater potential for access
(notably, several different exits) and lay lower than the Boulevard, a fact which
would allow for the foundations of the new theater to be constructed quickly.78
On 14 June, Amelot consulted Maurepas (Minister of State) and Joly de Fleury
(Controller-general of finances) and on 18 June instructed Lenoir to draw up
plans. On 20 June, Lenoir along with Boullet (a specialist in stage machinery
[machiniste]) and Francastel (carpenter) sent in their estimate: it totaled 367,000
livres, including 100,000 livres for machines that could be reused in any subse-
quent and more permanent theater.79
There was varied opposition to this plan. On 5 July, La Ferté learned of an
anonymous memorandum addressed to the queen and to the King’s brother,
Monsieur, criticizing Lenoir’s plan: according to Stern and Etienne, this was by
the rival architect François-Joseph Bélanger. Just at this moment, another
financially attractive possibility arose, for around 26 June 1781, the architects
Peyre and de Wailly declared that the newly constructed Odéon theater on the
left bank would be ready the following January, implying therefore that the
existing site of the Comédie-Française would become free when the Comédiens
moved into their new premises. Likely out of fear of expense, Amelot is reported
to have been in favor of this solution. But La Ferté argued strenuously against
moving the Opéra to this theater (situated at the Tuileries), claiming that the
renovation costs would be equal to those of building from scratch at the Porte
Saint-Martin and that the Comédie-Française would not move in time for the
Opéra to open. Several days later La Ferté asked Amelot to consider a new
78 René Farge, “Autour d’une salle d’Opéra: Un haut fonctionnaire de l’ancien régime,
Papillon de la Ferté,” Annales révolutionnaires, 1 (1912), separately published (Paris: Ernest
Leroux, 1912), 24pp. Farge, p. 14, also cites a letter from La Ferté to Amelot of 13 July,
encouraging him to visit the site, which he favors: AN: O/1/641.
79 My account is based upon Farge, “Autour d’une salle d’Opéra”; Serre, pp. 229–33;
and Jean Stern, A l’ombre de Sophie Arnould: François-Joseph Bélanger, architecte des Menus
plaisirs, 2 vols. (Paris: Plon, 1930), p. 123ff.

project by Lenoir: his revised estimates were 200,000 livres, and sixty-five days:
bargain terms, which won him the contract. Part of the conditions were that
ownership of the building and land should revert to Lenoir once the Opéra had
moved to new premises, which was due to happen within ten years; that he
have the right to give performances therein, citing the model of the Vauxhall;
and that he should be paid for the machinery that would accompany the
Opéra to its new premises, on the basis of market-rate valuations prevailing
at the time of the move.80 On 19 July, Amelot sent the plan to Maurepas
and Joly de Fleury; and on 21 July, Lenoir signed a soumission,81 offering to
complete the construction by 30 October, which Louis XVI approved the
following day.82
Construction work began on 2 August, and despite interruptions caused by
various public complaints, the work was completed for opening on 27 October.
Public opposition to the site continued, however, as Lenoir’s plan was sup-
ported personally by La Ferté, who had a personal interest in the site, since he
was a member of a shareholding company, of which the architect Lenoir, his
father-in-law the notary Henri Riboutté,83 and the banker Frédéric-Pierre
Kornmann were also members: this company owned the land and had a finan-
cial interest in developing it.84 In fact La Ferté had lent Lenoir a deposit of
48,000 livres on 1 August 1780 for the purchase of the land.85 La Ferté himself
acknowledges his financial interest in the Réplique à un écrit and claims to have
advised Amelot of the averse features of the site. He said the space was too
cramped, since one of the buildings situated on the plot was currently leased
and could therefore not be demolished, reducing the amount of land available
for construction.86 Yet it is clear that his advice to Amelot was instrumental
in allowing the transaction. Furthermore, as Farge notes, the site previously
80 Stern, A l’ombre de Sophie Arnould, pp. 126–27; MS, xvii.314 (2 August 1781). For
the financial details of the operation, Serre, p. 232.
81 AJ/13/7. “Soumission pour la construction d’une salle d’Opéra à la Porte Saint-
Martin par Lenoir, architecte.”
82 Dates in Stern, p. 127. Sequence, without dates, in Réplique, p. 17.
83 On Lenoir’s marriage to Riboutté’s daughter Marguerite Louise, see Etienne, Le
Faubourg Poissonnière, pp. 162–63.
84 Farge, p. 10; Serre, p. 232. BHVP: C.P.4418 #1: “Conventions” signed Papillon de
La Ferté and others on 8 August 1780 before Me. Maigret. See also Stern, A l’ombre de
Sophie Arnould, i.123–29. On the acquisition of the site by the company, see Farge, p. 11,
Serre, pp. 231–32. The acquisition took place in two tranches, signed before notary Me.
Maigret on 24 December 1779 and 13 March 1781.
85 Farge, p. 19, citing a contract signed before Me. Maigret.
86 Réplique, p. 16.

mentioned at rue du Faubourg Poisonnière, which housed the outbuildings of
the Menus-Plaisirs,87 was also owned by the company, and was to become the
new home of the Ecole Royale de chant in 1784, independently of the bad press
the 1781 decision had received, and under the same minister and intendant.
Amelot’s support of La Ferté to this extent is extraordinary and led Farge to
speculate that the minister himself had some interest in the developments;
this has however remained unproven. But the conflict of interest was by no
means unknown to contemporaries. The Mémoires secrets of 28 September 1781
grumbled about “private interest,”88 as did a letter to Amelot from the Provost
of Merchants, Le Fèvre de Caumartin, dated 29 August.89 The Opéra,
then, was a contested project from the start, and as we shall see, by 1789, the
location had been proven to be problematic and caused worry throughout
the period of this study.
8. 1789: Moving the Opéra (I)

Looking back over the theater’s first decade, a report from July 1791 recog-
nized how damaging the location had proven to the institution’s prosperity
and prestige: the critics of 1781 seemed to have been proven right.90 A near-
contemporary report on desiderata for a possible new theater also concluded
that the auditorium, though its maximum capacity was equivalent to gate
receipts of approximately 5,500 livres, had hardly ever attracted an audience
large enough to gross 5,000 livres at the door, and that even on Fridays
(traditionally, the Opéra’s “best” day), it only reached between 3,000 and 4,000
at the most.91
It is also clear that there were ongoing worries, at the beginning of the
Revolution, about the safety of the theater, perhaps encouraged by those who
had most to gain from a move, and these were almost certainly lent credence
by the fact that the architect had guaranteed his building for only five years!92
On 17 January 1789 a safety visit was arranged: the officials gave the theater a
87 Elisabeth Dunan, Archives Nationales: Inventaire de la Série AJ 37 (Paris: Imp.

Nationale, 1971), p. ix.
88 MS, xviii.66.
89 Cited by Farge; untraced.
90 J-J Leroux, Rapport sur l’Opéra, p. 51n1.
91 “Observations particulieres sur la construction d’une salle destinée pour l’Opéra,”
AN: O/1/617 #16, f.8r. Draft copy of the same at O/1/616 #100.
92 Po: Arch.18 [26]: “Histoire de l’Opéra jusqu’en 1793,” f.46.

clean bill of health. The report, dated the same day, was triumphantly pub-
lished in the press, with Villedeuil’s approval.93 The following year, the build-
ing was attacked by the principals’ Mémoire justificatif: it claimed that the
Opéra had been constructed with such haste that it was not rectangular, and
that squaring one of the corners meant impingement on the rue de Bondy,
which had required special permission from the Bureau des Finances eighteen
months after the beginning of construction, and supplementary expense.94
Moreover, evidence also survives to suggest that by the end of our period, the
theater had become unsafe. A report on a structural survey undertaken on 27
Messidor An II [15 July 1794], suggested material degradation of the circle
and the potential danger to its structure on busy evenings, and concluded that
it would be far better to hurry the work on a new theater than to try to reno-
vate the existing one. More worrying still, it recommended that performances
should be avoided in the old theater until the move.95
As well as general criticisms of the site, an undated printed report claims
that the only way to increase income would be to move the Opéra to the center
of the capital as soon as possible, and recommends either the Palais-Royal or
the Carrousel as potential sites.96 The text also discusses a contemporary plan
to move the Opéra to the Place Louis XV, the current place de la Concorde,
which it rejects for fear of flooding from the Seine and for fear of overcrowding
the vista from the Tuileries up the Champs-Elysées (an urban axis still
protected today). Drafts by La Ferté also indicate that there had previously
been plans (all rejected) to move the Opéra closer to the Champs-Elysées, later
modified to place it near the Orangerie.97 But in spite of this wave of plans,
there was little chance of finding money for the construction of a new theater,
and by the beginning of the Revolution the preferred solution was to move the
Opéra company into an existing theater.98 Even so, it seems the issue was never
finally resolved; while there is evidence from as late as Easter 1790 that there
was pressure from the artists to move the Opéra back to the Palais-Royal,99
93 Po: Arch.18 [26]: “Histoire de l’Opéra jusqu’en 1793,” f.47. For Villedeuil’s approval,
AN: O/1/615 #654 (seemingly dated later: 29 January 1789?). JdP, 1789, 121–22.
94 Mémoire justificatif, p. 11.
95 AN: AJ/13/47.III.: “Visite du 26 Messidor”.
96 Mémoire sur la construction d’une salle pour l’Opéra (n.p.: n.pub., n.d.), 7p. AN: O/1/614
#13, pp. 1–2. See also La Ferté’s draft memos at O/1/616 #103–4, and more detailed
objections at #110.
97 AN: O/1/616 #105.
98 Hemmings, Theatre and State, p. 66.
99 AN: O/1/617 #43, f.2r-v.

progress was also made in 1789 on plans for a new theater in the center of
the city.
The idea of reconstructing a national opera house was central to urbaniza-
tion projects in the last two decades of the century: Daniel Rabreau has discov-
ered evidence of no fewer than thirty-five projects produced between 1781 and
1797, approximately two-thirds of which date from the year of the fire, 1781.100
It is difficult to date many of these, and several were re-presented at different
moments. Three plans presented for the first time in 1789 are, however, worth
brief discussion, as they illustrate some of the issues faced by those who wished
to rehouse the Opéra throughout the Revolution. They are respectively, by
Pâris, Poyet, and Corbet.
The Bibliothèque municipale of Besançon contains a series of plans in
Pierre-Adrien Pâris’s hand;101 annotations to several suggest that they were
commissioned by Villedeuil in January 1789, although there is very scant
independent evidence.102 As Illustration 2 shows, the site selected was the
“Petit Carrousel,” north of the Louvre and close to the Palais-Royal, with new
roads surrounding the sides of the theater, and reaching to the Rue du Dauphin
at the back of the theater. The plan is one of a series of attempts to house the
Opéra at the Carrousel, part of a wider urban plan to unite the two royal palaces
of the Louvre and the Tuileries which had been ongoing for half a century (the
latter no longer survives: see Illustration 3, from the so-called “plan Turgot”).
Noverre had suggested the location for a new Opéra in 1781, but the idea
failed for lack of funds.103 Pâris’s plan would have placed the Opéra on the site
100 “Le théâtre et l’“embellissement” des villes de France au XVIIIe siècle,” Thèse,
doctorat d’Etat, Université Paris-IV, Art et archéologie, 1977, 4 vols.
101 BMB: Fonds P-A Pâris, 483.314, 315, 319, 321, 322–35. For a description see
Auguste Castan, Bibliothèque de la ville de Besançon: Inventaire des richesses d’art de cet établisse-
ment (Paris: E. Plon, Nourrit et cie., 1886), p. 248/36: “Projet d’une salle d’opéra, fait sur la
demande du ministre, au mois de janvier 1789, par PARIS (Pierre-Adrien): sept plans au
lavis et sept au trait; une coupe de charpente, au trait; façade principale et coupe d’intérieur,
à l’acquarelle. L’avant-dernier de ces dessins est signé PARIS, dessinateur du Roi.” These
plans are not discussed in Pierre Pinon, Pierre-Adrien Pâris (1745–1819), architecte, et les
monuments antiques de Rome et de la Campanie (Rome: Ecole française de Rome, 2007); a brief
discussion may be found in his thesis: “Pierre-Adrien Pâris, ou L’archéologie malgré soi”
(Doctorat d’Etat, Lettres, Université Paris-IV, 1998), pp. 562–63.
102 These are reproduced in Rabreau, “Le théâtre et l’embellissement,” fig. 710–15,
but are not discussed.
103 Observations sur la construction d’une nouvelle salle de l’Opéra (Amsterdam: Changuion;
Paris: P. de Lormel, 1781) [pp. 33–34 suggest the place du Carrousel]; review in JdP,
8 October 1781, pp. 1131–33; Daniel Rabreau, Théâtre et embellissement, p. 254.

illustration 2. Pierre-Adrien Pâris, “Plan d’un Théâtre d’Opéra,” ms, color
ink and wash. [Bibliothèque municipale, Besançon. Fonds Pierre-Adrien Pâris
V.483 #330]
of the royal stables. The front elevation sketch suggests a collonaded frontage
with balcony above, considerably grander in design than the Porte Saint-
Martin, but without obvious sheltering for carriages, although the location, on
the Carrousel, would certainly have been accessible (Illustration 4). The design
was also spatially more generous. Complaints about the Porte Saint-Martin
had included the lack of on-site storage; as the ground plan published in

illustration 3. Plan de Paris dessiné et gravé sous les ordres de Messire M. E. Turgot,
Henri Millon, Levé et dessiné par Louis Bretez, gravé par Claude Lucas (“Plan Turgot”):
detail from plan 15, showing Palais-Royal area. [Cambridge University Library,
Maps department: Atlas.2.73.4]
the Architectonographie shows, there was an atrium to the east side of the audi-
torium and a courtyard behind, but relatively little space given over to closed
storage.
By contrast, Pâris’s plan foresaw space for scene painters’ workshops and
storage of décors, instruments and (sheet?) music, as well as dressing rooms
and offices for officials, a cafe and other public rooms, and a more generous
public vestibule area (Illustration 5). In total, the plan suggests a floor area of
745 toises (for the auditorium) and 533 toises for the dressing rooms, storerooms,
and so on.104 Pâris’s total projected budget was 5,324,000 livres, and
took account of the fact that the entirety of the land was already owned by the
King. This, however, was still a substantial budget: by way of comparison,
104 A toise was a measure of length, roughly equivalent to 1.949m. In this context it
was clearly being used to measure area (the usual term, as defined by the Encyclopédie,
xvi.383, was toise quarrée or toise superficielle). By today’s measurements, 745 toises carrées
would be equivalent to 2830.26 m2. 533 toises carrées would be equivalent to 2024.87 m2.

ink and wash. [Bibliothèque municipale, Besançon. Fonds Pierre-Adrien Pâris V.483
#335]
in 1799, the Porte Saint-Martin theater was to be sold for just 277,000 francs
(including the land); and Lenoir had built the theater in 1781 for 200,000
livres. Lenoir’s original proposal for an Opera house at the Palais-Royal had
cited a total budget of 6.6 million livres over eight years, but this project was
refused for budgetary reasons;105 this may explain why Pâris’s project was also
rejected.
There are several other plans from 1789 that were also unsuccessful but for
which less information has survived. An anonymous pamphlet also mentions
that Lenoir had presented a plan for the Carrousel, which would have con-
structed an Opera house on the site of the Hôtel du premier Ecuyer: details
have not been traced, however.106 A second plan, that of Bernard Poyet (also
finally rejected, but re-presented in 1798), was also first formulated in 1789,
105 Serre, pp. 231–32.

106 Réflexions sur le projet qu’a la Commune de s’emparer de l’Opéra (n.p.: n.pub., n.d.), p. 6.

ink and wash. [Bibliothèque municipale, Besançon. Fonds Pierre-Adrien Pâris
V.483 #332]
and proposed an Opera house as part of a remodeled Place Louis XV (current

Place de la Concorde): it was presented to the Académie d’Architecture on 16
February 1789.107 As the legend to a surviving illustration demonstrates, this
107 Henry Lemonnier (ed.), Procès-verbaux de l’Académie Royale d’architecture, 10 vols.

(Paris: Schemit/Champion/Colin, 1911–29), ix.242. Cp. AN: F/17/1244A #20–25.
See Vue perspective de la place Louis XV et des quatre colonnades, dans l’une desquelles une

was part of a larger urbanization project presented in the name of an unspeci-
fied group, to construct four buildings, including an opera house, around the
square, at its own expense and financial risk, and boasting that it could save
the royal budget in excess of 12 million livres (Illustration 6). Although the
proceedings of the Académie d’Architecture show that the project was pre-
sented on Poyet’s behalf by Michel-Jean Sedaine, no record appears to have
survived of any discussion, and the plan seems to have been rejected—possibly
because it would have placed the opera house in the hands of entrepreneurs, an
action to which the crown was currently unfavorable. In 1790 Mangin pre-
sented a wider urban plan stretching from the Champs-Elysées to the rue
Saint-Antoine to the east,108 which contained space for an opera house, among
other edifices. Finally, rival plans by Bélanger (originally presented against
Lenoir’s in 1781) resurfaced later in 1789 but were again rejected. Bélanger’s
original plan, dated 24 June 1781, had also placed the Opéra at the place du
Carrousel, opposite the Tuileries: the original exists as an engraving by
Berthault, but revised plans from 1789 have not been traced. Anecdotal evi-
dence suggests that the plan had one major drawback in terms of perspective,
which was used by the duc de Chartres to sink the project, determined as he
was that the Opéra should be rebuilt at the Palais-Royal.109 Although these
projects were all unsuccessful, the idea of reconstructing near the Tuileries
would constantly resurface over the course of the 1790s, as we shall see in
future chapters.
9. Internal Reforms
I have elsewhere attempted to show that the crown had embarked on a tenta-
tive reform program before the troubles of 1789 but that the uncertainty
brought by 1789 meant that these reforms were never successfully carried
through.110 To summarize that process briefly, the Opéra recognized a need to
increase the turnover of new works since the advent of Gluck had rendered
compagnie offre au gouvernement de construire, à ses frais, risques et périls, la salle de l’Opéra, et les
trois autres bâtiments correspondants (Bibliothèque de l’ENS des Beaux-Arts: Estampe 3775).
108 “Plan d’une partie de la ville de Paris, depuis les Champs-Elysées jusqu’à la rue
Saint-Antoine, et sur lequel sont projetés différentes places et monuments publics relatifs
à la nouvelle Constitution française,” BN-Est: Vs.217; Rabreau, “L’opéra au centre de
l’urbanisme,” p. 368.
109 Stern, p. 129.
110 Darlow, “Repertory reforms.”

illustration 6. Bernard Poyet, Vue perspective de la place Louis XV et des quatre colonnades, dans l’une desquelles une Compagnie offre au Gouvernement
de construire . . . la salle de l’Opéra ([1789]) [École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris: Estampe 3775]
much of the classic repertory unusable;111 and to that end encourage new sub-
missions by improving payment to authors and maintaining the concours for
new libretto instituted in 1784,112 and by streamlining the production process
to render it more efficient. Empirically, it appears that the Opéra was con-
cerned with offering an appropriate level of new productions per season and
retaining a controlled level of variety while retaining classic repertory works,
suggesting tentative reform, not wholescale rupture. Indeed the arrêt of March
1789 explicitly called for an increase in turnover and enhanced variety in
programming, revising procedures for new works in its articles 12, 14, 15
and 16.113 Article 12 required that new works that had been accepted and were
on the books should be performed in rotation once every six weeks, starting
with the one first accepted with a complete score, and that the dress rehearsal
should be used to decide whether to perform publicly: this was to start from
the beginning of the following season. Article 14 placed responsibility for
performance and rotation squarely within the purview of the comité; it explic-
itly stated that the aim was to diversify genres as much as possible and to avoid
excessive performance of tragedies. Article 15 required that works end with
fêtes and ballets (“one of the main aims of the Opéra” [!]), and Article 16
allowed for financial rewards to be made to composers who would rework
old libretti (such as Candeille’s revision of Castor et Pollux).114 The Opéra
deliberately kept, standing by, a stock of well-worn works that were easy
and cheap to perform at the last minute; and the arrêt of March 1784 had
insisted upon the need to have a second work waiting in the wings to replace
a production that flopped.115 So repertory policy was two-track in nature,
111 “The current repertory of the Opéra is almost exhausted, because since Gluck’s
first operas performed in 1774, only Piccinni, Sacchini, Salieri and Grétry have had sure
success.” La Ferté, Précis sur l’opéra et son administration: Et Réponses à différentes objections
(n.p.: n.pub., n.d.), p. 82. Cp. JdP, 1789, p. 569: “The widely acknowledged superiority of
Gluck’s works consists less in the number and nature of beauties they contain, than in the
particular quality which they alone possess: not to age and to continue to feed the enthu-
siasm of spectators. For that reason, they are and shall long be the cornerstone of the
Opéra’s repertory.”
112 The concours continued to run during the Revolution: The Duchesne almanac
for 1790 claimed that there had been twenty-two entries that year, and announced the
winner as Guillard’s Elfrida. (SdP-Duchesne, 1790, p. 8.) JdP, 1789, p. 741 confirmed that
the concours was to continue in like fashion the following year, and that entries should be
submitted to Suard by 1 February 1790.
113 La Ferté, Précis, p. 31.
114 CER, 28 March 1789, pp. 6–7.
115 AN: O/1/617 #36, f.1v.

consisting of a quick production of revised classics and a longer-term injection
of funds into more thoroughgoing repertory renewal, with security and conti-
nuity provided by the maintenance of existing repertory. It seems that these
reforms were instituted under crown management and before the troubles
of 1789, although evidence also suggests that the implementation of the
policy was deliberately delayed: a letter from La Ferté explicitly recommends
delaying any new productions until the Opéra has been removed from the
crown [trésor royal ].116
Several other mitigating factors should be noted. To begin with, the pro-
duction of new works was frequently disrupted by managerial and disciplinary
problems: judging from internal correspondence this was due above all to the
behavior of the principals and to grave delays in production due to performers
not learning their roles quickly and scenery being unavailable. This induced
a high level of last-minute cancellations of performances and obliged the
committee to patch up the programming with substitutions from the classic
repertory (Le Devin du village, La Caravane du Caire, Panurge, and various works
by Gluck were frequently used). Dauvergne speaks at length about such issues
in his correspondence. Also relevant here was La Ferté’s continuing wish to
consider the institution as a repertory theater.117 For if La Ferté categorically
stated that the theater’s stock of works needed regular renewal, he also insisted
that the selection and production of new works must be tentative and careful,
because these were far more expensive than performances of classic works;
they required not only new scenery and costumes but also a substantial invest-
ment of resources in rehearsal, copying of parts, and so on. He explains that a
new production could typically cost between 50,000 and 60,000 livres,
and that even works likely to achieve a not inconsiderable twenty performances
each grossing 2,500 livres would fail to break even, once overheads were
taken into account. Only after a run of forty such performances would a work
become profitable.118 We need to bear this statistic in mind when considering
the repertory, because of the fifteen new productions brought to the stage
between 1789 and 1792, only two were performed more than forty times.
Yet controversy over Nephté suggests that the Opéra had a supplementary
reason for preferring long runs: honoraria were not due after the thirty-ninth
performance.
116 AN: O/1/617 #380.

117 This is the aspect insisted upon by Elizabeth Bartlet in her discussion of droits
d’auteur: Méhul, i.19.
118 Précis sur l’Opéra, pp. 32–33.

A futher mitigating factor is the projected cost of productions of particular
works. Financial concerns caused the postponement of productions considered
too expensive; for instance, a series of controversies between Dauvergne and
the ballet corps over the cost of costumes prevented timely performance of
Aspasie on 17 November 1788;119 or that of Nadir (music by Lemoyne), which
never got to the stage, for purely financial reasons.120 To the contrary, Dauvergne
did not hesitate to press for quick production of works when he felt that success
was assured, such as Marmontel and Cherubini’s Démophoon,121 where public
acclamation at the dress rehearsal suggested likely success as long as some cuts
were made to the score; and money was literally thrown at the new production
of Tarare in the (correct) estimation that it would be a hit. The committee may
have been careful not to let this influence their judgment of libretti (or perhaps
they were simply careful not to record such considerations in the minutes), and
the evidence is that the issue came into play at the moment when new works,
already accepted, were being selected for production. Some success was achieved
in diversifying the repertory, as statistics in the second half of Chapter 5
demonstrate; yet material problems dogged the institution, and the ideal of
repertory reform ultimately foundered.
A second issue for reform was the quality of performance. Evidence
suggests that the quality of singers and of singing was considered weaker than
before.122 This did not preclude a recognition of the qualities of the individual
singers (for instance, the Almanach général de tous les spectacles stated that Lays,
Chardini, and Lainez had taste, Mlle. Maillard had soul, Mme. Chéron had an
attractive voice, Chéron had wonderful tone and Rousseau good technique),
but by implication none had that combination of a good voice, technique, and
musicianship that made for fine singing.123 The orchestra at the Opéra, as John
Spitzer and Neal Zaslaw have shown, was the most prestigious in Europe. Its
standing remained high throughout the century and until the Revolution,
although critics argued that it was conservative in its instrumentation
and performance practice and it tended to act as a locus for particuarly harsh
119 AN: O/1/619 #399.

120 Procès-verbal de réunion du comité, 19 octobre 1789, AN: AJ/13/2.II.
121 O/1/619 #393.
122 AGTS, 1791, p. 16.
123 ibid., p. 17–18. A comic version was also published anonymously: Le Petit Almanach
des grands spectacles de Paris (Paris: Chez Maret/Tous les marchands de nouveautés, 1792)
attributed by Barbier to Antoine Rivarol. See pp. 7–57 for a list of performers, officials,
librettists, and composers of the Opéra with a brief commentary and satirical address for
each, most in ironic mode.

criticism.124 By 1792, it was claimed that the orchestra was less good than that
of the Théâtre de Monsieur for ensemble, although it was the best for instru-
mental music (“concertos et symphonies”), save for the composite orchestra of the
Concert spirituel.125 The great strength of the Théâtre de Monsieur’s orchestra
was, it was claimed, its discretion, never drowning out but always supporting
action on stage. By contrast, it was impossible to hear the words at the Opéra,
even if (the columnist argued) the libretti were often so poorly written that
this was no bad thing (pp. 108–9)! A later claim that instruments covered the
voices, probably dating from 1790, suggests that there were unresolved prob-
lems with dynamics.126 In terms of stage performance, there were likewise
several aspects needing reform. In order to obviate poor singing, a series of
financial rewards were considered, to improve the recruitment of teachers.127
On the question of deportment, La Ferté complains about the chorus and dance
corps rushing from the stage at the end of ensembles, and the chorus’s untidy
and dirty appearance. And the Almanach général de tous les spectacles for
1792 suggests the rather wooden appearance of performers.128 Third, this
appearance is doubled by some anachronistic and some purely inappropriate
costuming.129 And finally, it is clear that doubles did not know their parts
soon enough, and that they had hardly any stage experience!130
Reforms were also made to procedures for the selection of new works, adju-
dicating try-out rehearsals [répétitions d’essai] seemingly being used to weed out
obvious flops at an early stage,131 reserving acceptance of works until a certain
number of “répétitions” had taken place: normally one, but sometimes two.132
Undated drafts suggest that practice was not following the rules—for instance,
124 The Birth of the Orchestra: History of an Institution, 1650–1815 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2004), chapter 6, esp. pp. 184–90 (185).
125 AGTS, 1792, pp. 107–8.
126 AN: O/1/617, #45, f.2v.
127 AN: O/1/617 #2 [undated]. AN: O/1/621 #132 (“fautes contre la prosodie”) gives
a scanned example of a passage as it would be sung at the Opéra, in order to demonstrate
that there is consistent confusion between short and long vowels, and that more widely
current practice does not respect the three characteristics of individual syllables (accent,
aspiration, quantity); in terms of melody, dynamics are “en général très négligées.” This
text, which refers to [Pierre-Montan] Berton probably dates from the early 1780s.
128 AN: O/1/617 #7, f.1r.; #13, f.4v., f.5r.; AGTS, 1792, p. 18.
129 AN: AJ/13/44 #57, f.1r. This may be why Mlle Gavaudon was disciplined for not
sticking to her costume: 15? 8bre [October] 1792: AN: AJ/13/56.I.
130 AN: O/1/617 #9; #13, f.4v.
131 La Ferté, Précis, pp. 32–33.
132 Darlow, “Repertory reforms.”

the requirement that the copying of score and parts should be complete before
rehearsals were scheduled:133 this is almost certainly a response to the long-
standing complaint in Dauvergne’s correspondence about delays caused by
material aspects such as copying and scene painting. La Ferté also suggests
individual rehearsals with a few instruments first, in a rare discussion of
rehearsal procedure that is worth quoting in full:
First, hold one or two sectional rehearsals accompanied by several
instruments, both for the chorus and for the principals to rehearse the
major scenes. Thereafter, a general rehearsal with as much care as
possible, noting all the passages which are difficult in performance or
which require particular precision and accuracy. Then another with the
whole orchestra, just for the tricky movements, but practised until they
no longer hold up the rest of the action; if necessary then hold a second
sectional rehearsal for these same movements, and then go back to gen-
eral rehearsals of the whole work. Following this method, which experts
have approved, I have no doubt that we shall spare much unnecessary
strain on the performers, and shall moreover speed up the production
process, making it easier to replace a failing production.134
The Règlement of 1784 had provided that the Inspecteur général was responsible
for singing masters ensuring that performers learned and rehearsed the
choruses, whereas the maître du théâtre was to be available every morning for
individual rehearsals and to ensure that performers were ready to go onstage,
both for rehearsals and performances. The maîtres were also expected to report
on attendance at rehearsal as well as performance (1784: VII.2), check
on deportment and costume (.3), promptness of dress (.4), general stage man-
agement (.5), and auditioning of potential chorus members graduating from
the Ecole (.6). The role in the production process of “authors” (librettists and
composers) was also recognized: for newly accepted works, authors were to
prepare their requirements [programmes] for décor and costume (1784, III.6).
Newly accepted works then went to the maître des ballets who was to decide on
the ballet program, in consultation with librettist and composer (1784: IX.4).
Most of these provisions had been in effect since 1784; at stake was how the
institution complied with its own rules, since complaints by La Ferté around
1789 were that the institution merely needed to observe its own procedures
more stringently. But the achievement in getting a vastly increased number of
133 AN: O/1/621 #146–7; O/1/617 #36, f.5r.

134 ibid, f.5r-v.

new productions to the stage is testimony that the Opéra was managing to
reform in several areas, despite financial difficulty, around 1789, as we shall see
in Chapter 5.
A study of the paperwork left by the Opéra suggests widespread recogni-
tion of a need for reform from crown officials in the 1780s. Bringing down the
annual deficit while stimulating new submissions and taking on a hesitant
process of repertory renewal formed the major aim of the 1780s, organized
around the twin requirements of generic variety and increased turnover. Yet as
we shall see, the Opéra never really came to grips with the crisis that La Ferté
and Dauvergne diagnosed, both because the handover to the municipality in
1790 quickly took precedence over serious reform and because the program
itself was postulated on the assumption that the Opéra was a national reper-
tory theater that should continue to present major works in consecrated genres,
a conception increasingly behind the times. Rather than speaking of 1789 as
watershed moment, it seems more realistic to say that the problem facing the
Opéra was that its managers never resolved the paradox of how a clear balance
between innovation and maintenance of a cultural tradition could be compat-
ible with a period of revolution that repudiated its Old Regime roots. It is
against this material and administrative fragility that the Opéra entered the
Revolution, when a new rhetoric of individual rights and of national culture
allowed these tensions to explode.

2 From Crown to Town
Governance of the Opéra, March 1789–April 1790
From the beginning of the Revolution the Opéra’s managerial instability was
compounded by doubts over the fundamental question of who had the right to
govern a national theater, debated in the context of the succession of sover-
eignty from the crown to the nation. The debate concerned the relative merits
of private entrepreneurship, municipal regulation, continued authority of the
Maison du roi, or self-governance by the principals of the company itself, along
the lines of the Comédie-Française and Comédie-Italienne. The administrative
chaos that characterized the Opéra in the later part of the century has led crit-
ics either to prefer the comparatively more straightforward period of its history
following Napoleon’s reforms of 1806–7, or to consider the Opéra’s operation
during the Revolution as something of a shambles.1 Yet the issue of its admin-
istration is crucial to understanding the institution’s place and role in
Revolutionary culture, and the wider ways in which theatrical culture in the
1790s is perceived, judged, and understood. Victoria Johnson has briefly
discussed the early years of the Revolution.2 As she demonstrates, despite a
disagreement over governance and management, it was widely accepted that
the Opéra should be conserved and financially protected. Yet because her
account centers upon the artists and does not consider rival bids to manage
the institution, it is unable to explore the full implications of the notion of
property, of the various modes of governance considered, or of the Opéra’s place
1 David Chaillou, Napoléon et l’Opéra: La Politique sur la scène 1810–1815 (Paris: Fayard,
2004), p. 23.
2 Backstage at the Revolution, chapters 1 and 2.
in nascent Revolutionary culture, my focus here. This chapter considers the
debates over who should run the Opéra and according to what principles,
from the beginning of the Revolution until the Opéra’s adoption by the munic-
ipality (April 1790). Debates in the early Revolution are characterized by
competing discourses on liberty, variously mobilized to support calls for free-
market organization, the self-determination of the company, or the right of
the municipality to regulate culture “by and for the people.” Not only will its
discussion allow me to set the works performed at the Opéra within an insti-
tutional context (and one that explains the balance between “traditionalism”
and innovation), but the various bids for governance of the Opéra were central
to the wider organization of culture in a period of political transition, and as
such are a fundamental indicator of competing models of liberty, education,
and publicity.3
1. Viotti’s Bid for the Opéra, March–April 1789

The first bid for governance of the Opéra was made as early as spring 1789 by
the violin virtuoso Giovanni Battista Viotti (born 1755). He had made his
début at the Concert spirituel on 17 March 1782 and had entered the service
of Marie-Antoinette at Versailles in January 1784; he was also a participant in
several prestigious salons and, from April 1789, ran his own matinées musicales.4
He was already involved in the Théâtre de Monsieur and hence had experience
of theatrical management, and was clearly keen to extend his influence (board
members of the Théâtre de Monsieur had for some time seen themselves as
rivals of the Opéra and desired to gain control over it).5 Viotti’s bid to take
charge of the Opéra as an entrepreneur at the head of a group of (unnamed)
financiers was ultimately doomed to failure, since the decree [arrêt] of 17 March
1780 had expressly stated that the king had no intention of allowing further
3 I use the term “publicity” in preference to the print-centered Habermasian term

“public sphere”; for a discussion of Habermas’s Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere
in the context of Revolutionary theater, see Susan Maslan, Revolutionary Acts: Theater,
Democracy and the French Revolution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005),
pp. 12–14.
4 Inter alia, Arthur Pougin, Viotti et l’école moderne de violon (Paris: Schott, 1888); Remo
Giazotto, Giovan [sic] Battista Viotti (Milan: Edizioni Curci, 1956), pp. 95–104; Giovanni
Battista Viotti: A Composer between the Two Revolutions, ed. Massimiliano Sala (Bologna: UT
Orpheus, 2006), esp. chapters by Alessandro di Profio and Warwick Lister.
5 Alessandro di Profio, La Révolution des Bouffons, pp. 87–91.

entrepreneurship of the Opéra. It has been discussed before, but its effects on
the wider history of the Opéra have rarely been considered, nor has due weight
been given to the role of La Ferté in its discussion. What is interesting about
Viotti’s intervention is not so much that it failed but rather that it catalyzed a
rival bid from the artists, that it demonstrates the sensitive position in which
crown officials find themselves with respect both to the monarch’s wishes and
to the artists’ intransigence, and that the terms of the debate and the artists’
responses provide essential indications of the crown’s wider position on theater.
As such, it is a template for debates on theatrical governance for the early
Revolution as a whole.
The earliest known text in this affair is Viotti’s letter of 23 March 1789 to
Necker (the controller-general of finances), in which he offered to take over
the Opéra as an entrepreneur “à ses risques, périls et fortunes,” in return for a
deposit of 3 million livres to be held by the treasury for a period of thirty years
at a rate of 5 percent annual interest. He also claims that he has already con-
ferred with an unnamed individual and insinuates that this individual had
made a provisional response in Necker’s name.6 He finishes by pointing out that
he requires a quick response in order to maintain the confidence of his financial
partners [ faisant-fonds]. Advised by Necker on 26 March that he needed to
address this to the minister, Laurent de Villedeuil, Viotti’s submission to
Villedeuil of 28 March restated his offer and gave a lengthier series of under-
takings and conditions, including a submission from the financial partners.7
Viotti’s offer, set out in his later published Mémoire au roi and in the letters
mentioned above, was to to take over the Opéra, including all movable and
immovable property, for a period of thirty years; he was to retain all rights over
its administration and to retain its privilège over all vocal music and dance,
both French and Italian, including opéra-comique and all areas covered by the
Letters patent of 1672. In return, he offered the deposit mentioned and under-
took to maintain and repair the material of the Opéra and properties, insure
the theater, pay all pensions (though only grant new pensions at his own
discretion), and pay extra amounts to artists for performances over and above
their allotted number, in order to encourage “emulation.” He also undertook to
name two or three partners to share the administration, with the ministry’s
approval. As well as suggesting that there would be some administrative
6 Original untraced. Viotti, however, reproduces it in his later Mémoire au roi,

Concernant l’exploitation du privilège de l’Opéra, demandé par le sieur Viotti (n.p.: n.pub.,
[1789]), pp. 6–7.
7 Necker to Viotti, 26 March 1789: untraced. Transcribed in Mémoire au roi, pp. 8–9.
Viotti to Villedeuil, 28 March 1789: untraced. Transcribed in Mémoire au roi, pp. 9–18.
from crown to town | 65

continuity, he also foregrounded what he perceived to be the financial advan-
tage to the crown of relinquishing responsibility for the institution. It was well
known that the Opéra was running at a deficit, but Viotti went further, imply-
ing that the Opéra could break even, as he claimed in both texts that
his proposal would save the crown some 250,000 livres in subsidy per year.
Villedeuil’s immediate reaction to the offer was clearly mixed, for in response
to questions about certain financial and administrative details, Viotti wrote
again to Villedeuil on 30 March to offer a number of reassurances and to
restate his position. Yet Villedeuil clearly remained unconvinced, writing on 7
April to a third party (on the evidence of related correspondence, the Marquise
de Rouget) and attaching a list of observations on the bid, most of them
negative.8 In particular, he disputed any great financial advantage for the
crown and claimed the change would be risky for the institution. He further
expressed skepticism at Viotti’s capacity to run such a complicated theater. For
reasons that are unclear, this text came to Viotti’s attention,9 and on 12 April
he rebutted the objections,10 reasserting with some indignation that on the
contrary his offer saves the crown a great deal of money, particularly at a time
of national stringency; he also states that there is no danger for the future
security of the institution because he proposes a good deal of administrative
continuity, including retaining Desentelles and La Ferté as commissaires with
the minister’s own approval. (In a rather unfortunate passage, he adds that
however complex the Opéra currently is, he is surely better placed to run the
Opéra than Morel [de Chédeville] and Dauvergne, both of whom had
been directors in the 1780s, given his previous career as violin virtuoso which
has afforded him the opportunity to see many European houses from the
inside.) And provocatively, he claims that the minister’s sole concern should be
with saving money for the crown.11 In the absence of a reply, Viotti then wrote
again on 18 April, stressing that he needed to keep his financial partners
informed, noting that copies of the entire correspondence had been sent to
8 AN: O/1/613 #124. Viotti’s copy of these observations, with his own responses.
9 The role of the Marquise de Rouget in this matter has not been determined, but it
is certain that she was in contact both with Villedeuil and with Viotti himself. Viotti to
“Monseigneur” [Villedeuil], 12 April 1789, AN: O/1/613 #123.
10 “Objections contenues dans la Lettre du Ministre, à Mad. la Marquise de Rouget,
avec les Réponses du Sr. Viotti,” AN: O/1/613 #124. See also Mémoire au roi, pp. 26–33,
which obscures the name of Villedeuil’s earlier correspondent (la Marquise de Rouget) but
is otherwise an accurate transcription of these documents.
11 AN: O/1/613 #124, f.3r; Mémoire au roi, p. 32.

Necker and threatening to address the king directly should a reponse not be
forthcoming.12
Clearly there was some hesitation on Villedeuil’s part, although Viotti’s
conduct was impatient from the outset; moreover, Villedeuil was unwell in
mid-April and hence unable to respond as quickly as he might have wished.
Viotti’s subsequent account in the Mémoire au roi of 29 April is that in the
absence of a response from Villedeuil and in the light of a hostile open letter
from the committee of the Opéra to the Journal de Paris (19 April), he was
forced into a different strategy, namely publication, to defend himself against
the committee’s public attack, and to influence public opinion in his favor.13
However, it is also clear that he had circulated a printed memorandum prior to
this final appeal to Villedeuil of 18 April, as shown by correspondence from La
Ferté and Villedeuil himself, and only four days after his original resubmission
of 12 April. This memorandum provoked angry responses within the royal
household.14 It was not merely his pre-empting their decision that angered the
intendant and minister but his making the affair public: a serious breach of
protocol,15 and one which in its turn caused chaos among the principals of the
Opéra, afraid of any threatened change of regime.
Whatever the effect on public opinion, it clearly predisposed crown officials
against Viotti; expressions of indignation can be found throughout the corre-
spondence. However, there were also substantive objections to the bid and its
premises, which were examined in detail by La Ferté.16 The claimed deficit was
the most problematic, and the majority of responses claimed that Viotti’s
estimate of the Opéra’s financial situation was exaggerated. The committee’s
open letter of 19 April claimed, correctly, that the average annual deficit since
12 Viotti to Villedeuil, 18 April 1789, AN: O/1/613 #122. [Cf. Mémoire au roi,
pp. 33–38.] Covering letter to Necker at AN: O/1/613 #120. [Cf. Mémoire au roi,
pp. 38–39.]
13 JdP, 19 April 1789, pp. 497–98. The principals wrote to Villedeuil the following
day to briefly justify their conduct, and promising a lengthier memorandum: AN: AJ/13/2.
This was subsequently printed, without changes, as Réclamation des principaux sujets de
l’Académie Royale de Musique.
14 La Révolution des Bouffons, p. 89. La Ferté sent a copy to Villedeuil on 16 April 1789
(AN: O/1/613 #125). The text in question is the anonymous and undated Extrait des
propositions de la compagnie du Sieur Viotti, Concernant l’exploitation du Privilége de l’Académie
Royale de Musique, etc. etc. (4 pp.), annotated in La Ferté’s hand (AN: O/1/613 #126).
15 AN: O/1/615 #676.
16 Viotti’s conditions are set out both in the early submissions by letter to Villedeuil,
in the published Mémoire au roi of 29 April, and in the printed Extraits de la compagnie
(undated), which was circulated and came to La Ferté’s attention around 16 April.

1780 was 58,289 livres 2s. 6d., rather than the 250,000 livres Viotti mentions,
and further pointed out that Viotti’s claim to innovation in offering profits to
the artists as a motor for emulation was in fact long-standing practice.17 In
fact, a prior article, dated 31 March, had put the deficit at no more than 50,000
livres, as a clarifying response to his own Considérations sur l’Opéra;18 250,000
livres was the total annual amount of state subsidy to the institution, not the
deficit, a fact which he did actually acknowledge.19
These two points were crucial. First, the committee was keen to increase
its own managerial autonomy beyond the limited control it had acquired
in the 1780s as an experiment instituted by La Ferté. Correcting the record
about deficit was to defend the committee’s record and thereby to weaken
the argument for the Opéra to be taken over. Second, the point about financial
profit sharing was to constitute one of the pillars of the principals’ own bid
in the months that followed. (There never had been profits to share in the
1780s, save for a small surplus in 1780–81 of 4.5 percent;20 but several periods
in that decade had officially allowed for the possibility, placing a greater
administrative burden on the principals when the directorship was vacant,
and having provisions in place to share any profit among them, presumably
to encourage their zeal.) The committee also claimed that such a deficit
compared favorably with the two years of de Vismes’s entrepreneurship
(1778–80), an argument clearly aimed against opening the Opéra to a new
entrepreneur such as Viotti and intending to defend the committee’s record,
but which was also to enrage de Vismes himself when the point was restated
in September.
La Ferté’s own internal observations also consider Viotti’s figures to be
overestimated and point out that such inaccuracy augurs ill for any private
entrepreneur who wishes to run as complex a financial operation as the Opéra.21
17 “The committee will simply point out that M. Viotti is probably unaware of the
Arrêt du Conseil of 1780, in which the king, in order to enhance public enjoyment by
stimulating the zeal and emulation of the principals, accorded them all profits which
might result from their efforts; and indeed in the first year they shared approximately
40,000 livres.” JdP, 109 (19 April 1789), pp. 497–98. Undated manuscript draft? at
AN: O/1/616 #99.
18 JdP, 1789, 437.
19 Mémoire au roi, p. 8.
20 Serre, Politique culturelle, chapter 3, esp. pp. 115–21, where she notes a chronic
deficit, but by no means the disastrous situation evoked by the scaremongering Leroux
in 1791.
21 AN: O/1/613 #117: draft undated letter without signature or name of recipient.

There is clearly some hostility in this letter, which insinuates that Viotti has
deliberately exaggerated; elsewhere La Ferté claims that Viotti has simply been
misinformed, having had to rely on fragmentary inside information from
employees because accounts are not public.22 Manuscript comments on
an Extrait des propositions, in La Ferté’s hand, as well as disputing Viotti’s esti-
mation of the deficit of the Opéra also take issue with certain managerial
proposals, such as increasing appointements and sharing profits (already tried
theoretically in the 1780s), and with the idea of insurance (too expensive, La
Ferté asserts).23 Manuscript comments on a transcribed copy of the letter to the
Journal de Paris claim that the text that Viotti disavows is at least by his com-
pany and known to him, so he carries responsibility. Finally, La Ferté also
accuses Viotti of dishonesty in basing his figures on the period before 1780
(which, as the principals had pointed out, was characterized by a much less
healthy financial situation).24
The controversy was intensified when Viotti published a rebuttal of the
committee’s letter on 20 April. The rhetorical strategy was to deny authorship
of the Extrait des propositions while taking the opportunity to respond to a cer-
tain number of points made by the committee,25 and this continued publica-
tion by Viotti while awaiting an official response further irritated crown
officials. The rebuttal was published in pamphlet form without date or name
of printer, and it would seem that Viotti had originally approached the Journal
de Paris, which refused to accept his text. In response to a query from the Privy
seal (Barentin), Villedeuil confirmed that he had not personally forbidden the
text to be printed, although he pointed out that any such publication nonethe-
less breached protocol, which prohibited individuals from discussing crown
administration in print without the relevant minister’s permission, and that
the Journal had probably felt it appropriate to refuse permission in the light
of this.26 And La Ferté’s letter to an unidentified recipient (almost certainly
22 “Observations sur le mémoire au Roi concernant l’exploitation du privilège de

l’Opéra demandé par le sieur Viotti,” in La Ferté’s hand, AN: O/1/613 #138.
23 AN: O/1/613 #126.
24 AN: O/1/613 #135.
25 Lettre du Sieur Viotti au comité de l’Opéra: Paris, le 20 avril 1789 (n.p.: n.pub., n.d.),
4 pp.
26 Barentin to Villedeuil, 7 May 1789, AN: O/1/613 #114; see also a draft letter from
“Le Ministre” [Villedeuil, signed V] to Garde des Sceaux, dated 9 avril [recte May] 1789,
AN: O/1/613 #113. The letter to which Barentin refers has not been traced, but it is prob-
ably the one, now in an unidentified private collection, alluded to by Pougin, Viotti et l’école
moderne de violon, p. 56n1, dated 22 April 1789, 2 pp. in-fol. For details, see Catalogue d’une

Villedeuil) suggests that Suard, as censor, had also contacted him for advice on
this text before proceeding with publication permission.27 A further letter
advises caution in this regard and makes reference to Viotti’s “protectors,”
which may explain why the pamphlet was approved in the first place, even
though the Journal de Paris refused to print it.28 Yet as well as irritating the
Privy seal, the minister, and the intendant over protocol, Viotti’s Mémoire au roi
makes a number of substantive points about the disadvantages of the different
alternative types of direction for the Opéra, which includes a condemnation of
the current regulation of the Opéra by the Maison du roi.
La Ferté’s “Observations,” as I have shown, were skeptical about the
company’s capacity to pay the deposit mentioned and dismissive of the advan-
tage that a loan of 3 million livres would present to the royal purse. But more
fundamentally, he had pointed to the great difficulty of running the Opéra,
including the artists’ willfulness and the difficulty of breaking even despite
recent accounting reforms. He also claimed that Viotti’s company did not have
intimate knowledge of the Opéra, and had not even declared the identity of all
company associates.29 In response, Viotti went on the offensive. First he con-
demns “author direction,” by which governance by Dauvergne and Berton
(who were musicians as well as directors of the Opéra) is presumably meant,
because these composers have musical prejudices and their own self-interest.
(He even insinuates that these two directors have blocked innovative compos-
ers in the past to guard their own position.) Second, governance by a commit-
tee of performers is also suspect, since it runs the risk of similar favoritism, this
time born of a wish to block up-and-coming junior performers out of jealousy
of their own position. Unlike these groups, both too self-interested, Viotti
presents himself as disinterested servant of the regeneration of the Opéra. That
is, the decadence of the theater is linked directly not to occasional abuses of its
administrative structure as the crown claimed but to its very managerial struc-
ture. By this, he means that previous incumbents had not been held financially
liable for their management as he would be; directors simply borrowed money
intéressante collection de lettres autographes provenant de deux cabinets connus (Paris: J. Charavay/
Londres: H. Labussière, 1871), p. 24.
27 La Ferté to [Villedeuil?], 8 May 1789, AN: O/1/613 #115. My italics. For attribu-
tion, cf. the following document, referenced by this letter and written by Villedeuil.
28 Unknown to unknown, undated draft, AN: O/1/613, #117. It is difficult to deter-
mine the identity of this or these “protector(s),” though Sigismond Lacroix (I.iv.517n2)
suggests it is Philippe de Noailles.
29 “Observations sur le mémoire au Roi concernant l’exploitation du privilège de
l’Opéra demandé par le sieur Viotti,” AN: O/1/613 #138.

to apply for the post and were paid off when they departed, thereby adding to
the debt of the institution:
[Since the Opéra was] managed on behalf of the king, or the city of
Paris, by individuals who could only profit from it, because they had made no
deposit as guarantee for their management, this mode of governance was
bound to become rotten.30
The implication is that the sole manner of assuring disinterested and healthy
regulation of the theater is to place it in the hands of individuals who have no
private interest in the internal workings of the institution but are personally
motivated to ensure success for their own pecuniary advantage, because they
have provided a hefty deposit. This would not be surprising today but was a
novel position on a crown theater in 1789. Lully’s private lease of the Opéra
was always protected by royal subsidy because it would run at a loss: the sug-
gestion that it should create a private profit was breaking substantially new
ground. On 8 May 1789, Villedeuil wrote to Louis XVI, presenting a brief
history of the different regimes of the Opéra and of Viotti’s bid, and asked for
a final decision, although in leading terms.31 Louis’s decision is given at the
foot of the letter in a different hand: “je ne suis pas,” he wrote, “dans l’intention
de donner a l’entreprise et de changer le regime de l’opéra” [I have no intention
to change the managerial regime of the Opéra by giving it to entrepreneurs.]
(Illustration 7). Letters followed on 9 May, informing the various individuals
concerned of the decision.32
We might assume that the king had never had any intention of allowing
the Opéra to be run by private enterprise after disastrous previous experiences
and as stipulated clearly by the arrêt of 17 March 1780; this is demonstrated
in an early letter from Villedeuil to an unnamed recipient33 and reiterated in
30 Mémoire au roi, p. 45 (Viotti’s italics).

31 “Since in 1780 your Majesty formally stated that it did not wish to cede the privilège
of the Opéra to any private individual, and confirmed this in response to subsequent
enquiries, I assume it continues to be of like opinion. Indeed M. Viotti inspires no greater
confidence than his predecessors.” [Villedeuil] to Louis XVI, 8 May 1789, with manu-
script response. AN: O/1/613, #118.
32 On 9 May Villedeuil informs Viotti (AN: O/1/613 #119), La Ferté (#128),
Dauvergne, who is in turn instructed to inform the artists (#129), the Marquise de Rouget
(#130), and Necker (#134).
33 Villedeuil to [unnamed recipient], 17 January 1789 [AN: O/1/613 #116], almost
certainly to La Ferté, who references the letter in his own letter of 8 May 1789 [AN:
O/1/613 #115].

illustration 7. Louis XVI signed refusal to lease the Opéra, ms. ink [Archives
Nationales de France, O/1/613 #118]
the arrêt of 2 April 1789.34 There is, however, at least some ambiguity about
this position, as a further draft arrêt and a memorandum entitled “Conditions
auxquelles le Roi pourrait consentir de confier l’administration de son Académie
Royale de Musique a des Entrepreneurs” also exist and likely date from the
same period.35 What is also clear from the internal correspondence is that the
managerial difficulties of the Opéra and the intransigence of the artists had
begun seriously to worry crown officials, who were contemplating washing
their hands of the whole issue. Several texts refer explicitly to a fear of further
antagonizing the artists: a letter from La Ferté to Villedeuil of 16 April points
to the panic spread among them by Viotti’s printed text, and Villedeuil’s letter
to him of 7 May also refers to the need to keep them happy.36 La Ferté also
34 Extrait des registres du conseil d’état du roi Concernant l’administration de l’Opéra, Du 2

Avril 1789, 8 pp. (p. 1).
35 AN: O/1/613, respectively #152 and #151. Both documents undated. The condi-
tions are also different from one text to the other. See also O/1/617 #58 (a duplicate of
O/1/613 #151).
36 La Ferté to [unnamed recipient], AN O/1/613 #125. The imprimé by Viotti is not
identified in La Ferté’s letter, but the following document in the series is a printed Extrait
des propositions de la compagnie du sieur Viotti concernant l’exploitation du Privilége de l’Académie
Royale de Musique, etc. etc. (n.p.: n.pub., n.d.), 4 pp. with manuscript comments in La Ferté’s
hand (#126), itself followed by manuscript “Observations au Mémoire présenté pour

drafted a letter to Necker on 26 April in which he raises the problem of Viotti’s
publications and their impact on morale of the principals and appeals for an
early decision in terms which suggest, incidentally, that the decision was far
from clear-cut.37 It is unclear whether a fair copy of this letter was prepared
and sent; but there follows a long passage, very difficult to decipher, in a
different hand, which appears to be Necker’s reponse. Indeed, one of the major
problems, which continued to plague the institution, was that this radical
shake-up of management was supposed not to disrupt continual service of the
institution as a whole: since this was the case, the artists were able to bring
some pressure to bear on their superiors, since they were needed for regular
performance.
It remains unclear why the need was felt to publish, on 10 May, a pamphlet
entitled Franches et Courtes réflexions which responds to Viotti’s Mémoire au roi:
di Profio suggests convincingly that it may have been written by La Ferté;
yet it is strange that he would write such a text and further fan the flames of
controversy after the king had decided to reject Viotti’s bid. The affair had
been a public embarrassment and La Ferté and Villedeuil were clearly unhappy
in particular with the inaccurate information about the Opéra’s deficit that
had circulated; but this text is by no means an objective account written to set
the record straight. Instead it is a provocative and ironic rejoinder that expresses
disdain for the “speculator mentality” and petty financial interests of the
company:
And why this proscription? because people with money conceived a
plan, on their own terms and for their own advantage, of reforming a
public enterprise, unique in the kingdom, whose splendor and luxury
are essential to Paris; and that the plan was not accepted quickly enough
for the success of their speculations, or for speculators to fake their
signatures. . . . Above all, I find it excessively disrespectful to misrepre-
sent and give malign interpretation to the wise reflections the
Government took time to make before accrediting the petty interests of
a financial company.38
obtenir l’Entreprise de l’Opéra” (#127), also in La Ferté’s hand. For similar worries, see
Villedeuil to La Ferté, 7 May 1789, AN: O/1/615 #673. The worry was first expressed in
Villedeuil to La Ferté, 15 January 1789, O/1/615 #653.
37 La Ferté: draft letter to Necker?, 26 April 1789, AN: O/1/613 #121.
38 Franches et Courtes réflexions sur un mémoire au roi, publié nouvellement par M. Viotti, 10
Mai 1789, p. 9.

By contrast, Villedeuil’s refusal is presented as one that protects the rights of
the theatergoing public. By this account, the Opéra is clearly established as a
public institution, unworthy of being opened to private profiteering:
Private enterprise would impinge upon the usufruct and possession of
matters which belong without question to the Public. . . . To allow this
project is incompatible with the constitution which the Royal Academy
of Music must have; it would be ruinous for all other theaters in Paris
and throughout France; it would be injurious to Music, and fatal to
Dramatic Art which has already taken such heavy blows; . . . the fur-
ther a management plan took us away from the mode of governance
followed until now, the more impracticable it would be. (pp. 10–11)
As a coda to the affair, Viotti, clearly unhappy with the final decision that was
communicated to him on 9 May, and perhaps in response to these Franches et
Courtes réflexions, appears to have penned a further brochure, which, despite
Villedeuil’s professed indifference, the Lieutenant de police Thiroux de Crosne
decided to suppress.39 Viotti’s involvement was over (although he was to
become director of the Opéra much later during the Restoration),40 but the
affair had brought out and clarified a number of positions on the Opéra, as
well as crystallizing the respective positions of the crown and the principals.
First, the debate had rendered public sometimes divergent but consistently
embarrassing details of the Opéra’s finances, and in a period when the finances
of the crown, and of the state more widely, were a matter of continuing public
attention.41 Since the prestige of the Opéra was a crucial component of state
cultural policy, the debate must have suggested that the crown had lost its grip
on the pre-eminent theater of the nation, both in terms of finances and of gov-
ernance. Second, doubts were explicitly raised about whether it continued to be
appropriate for the royal household to regulate the theaters, in a period when
39 Villedeuil to unnamed, 12 May 1789, AN: O/1/615 #678; and Crosne to Villedeuil,
14 May 1789, AN: O/1/615 #679. A postscript to the letter claims that the bookseller in
question had sold only two copies at the time of writing, and no copy of the pamphlet has
been traced by me. Louis Thiroux de Crosne was, in 1789, Maître des requêtes honoraire
(since 1761) and Lieutenant général de police, having replaced Jean-Charles Lenoir in 1785
(Almanach Royal, 1789, p. 259).
40 Viotti was to become “régisseur général de la scène et du personnel” on 13
November 1819, under inspection of the new Maison du Roi. See Wild, Dictionnaire,
p. 305.
41 For an introduction, Colin Jones, The Great Nation: France from Louis XV to Napoleon
(London: Penguin, 2002), chapter 8D, pp. 378–94.

public opinion, particularly as targeted by radical playwrights, was increas-
ingly aware of the competing call for individuals to themselves manage and
profit from their own individual “industry,” an issue that was only to escalate
in the years that followed. Third, and equally important for what was to follow,
attention was focused on whether a “speculator mentality” (the term used by
La Ferté) was an appropriate type of governance for a national institution. This
was particularly so since, as di Profio notes, Viotti clearly intended, as entre-
preneur, to renegotiate conditions with the Comédie-Italienne and Comédie-
Française: the bid had thus threatened to destabilize Parisian theatrical
organization as a whole.42 And it was now a matter of public record that the
Opéra belonged to the public and was there to serve an urban audience, a
matter discussed at some length by the municipality the following year. These
respective positions, which had not yet acquired the clarity nor the political
underpinning they would after the Declaration of the Rights of Man, had been
sketched in print, and they form the first template for debates over the
Opéra, the terms of which were to vary surprisingly little throughout the
Revolution.
2. Reactions of the Principals: Liberty and Self-Governance

Part of the effect was to mobilize the principals into making their own bid, as
early as April 1789, to take overall control of the institution and run it as a
profit-sharing managerial board of performers [société ] along the lines of the
Comédie-Française and Comédie-Italienne. The bid had an important prece-
dent in the 1780 experiment that consisted in redrawing the management
structure and allowed, in theory, the sharing of any profits among the princi-
pals to encourage “emulation,” although profits were rarely made, and this was
not strictly speaking a period of self-governance, as the subjects were later to
claim. (For one thing, the institution remained under the scrutiny of the royal
household, as the principals conveniently forgot.)
The principals’ text of 20 April was first sent to Villedeuil, then printed; it
is attributed to ballet-master Gardel as the first of sixteen signatories, and
ostensibly written to disclaim authorship of the open letter published in the
Journal de Paris on 19 April. In the text, the principals refuse to submit to
42 La Révolution des Bouffons, p. 90. On the tension between the interests of a

National theater and “spectator mentalities,” see Lettre d’un amateur de l’opéra (n.p.: n.pub.,
1789), p. 14.

private enterprise, calling instead for self-governance under crown authority,
following the preliminary text and article 6 of the arrêt of 17 March 1780,
which had alluded to the financial involvement of the principals of the
company as a motor for emulation:43
Renouncing at least for now, the form of private enterprise for the Royal
Academy of Music, His Majesty has approved the suggestions put to
him to associate the Directors and Principals in the success and profits,
in order to excite ever more their zeal and their industry.44
On 2 May, a letter from Villedeuil to La Ferté encloses a further memorandum
submitted by the principals and asks for a report. The enclosure is no longer
attached, but La Ferté’s papers include an undated “Mémoire des sujets de
l’Opéra qui demandent l’Entreprise de ce Spectacle” and his own list of
observations on that text.45 There were clearly several texts submitted by the
artists, which seem not to have survived. One manuscript report on the artists’
meetings makes reference to a rumored third such memorandum (which was
supposedly to attack La Ferté directly).46
The surviving principals’ memorandum offers a deposit of 300,000 livres
(compare with Viotti’s 3 million livres) in return for the privilège of the institu-
tion, its mobilier and immobilier, free of any subsidy or financial assistance—very
similar terms to those proposed by Viotti. But the crux of the claim is that the
1780 arrêt, in alluding to a share in any profits, had instituted a temporary
system of self-governance, since it consisted both of the establishment of a
committee on which the artists were represented, and a financial stake for
those artists in the institution’s affairs. This, it hardly needs stating, is not the
same thing as running the Opéra without the benefit of any subsidy and
at one’s own risk; and La Ferté’s observations point out that the committee
structure, although it had varied over the course of the 1780s, had always
been subordinate to the ministry and included provisions for a director, not
necessarily to be drawn from the ranks of the artists (for instance, in March
43 Réclamation des principaux sujets de l’Académie Royale de Musique ([Paris]: n.pub,

[1789]), p. 5.
44 Arrêt du Conseil d’état du Roi, Concernant l’Opéra. Du 17 Mars 1780 (Paris: Imprimerie
Royale, 1780), p. 3. Cf. p. 5.
45 AN: O/1/615 #672, O/1/613 #153, O/1/613 #147, respectively. According to a
report submitted to La Ferté (see next footnote), this memorandum was prepared by
La Salle.
46 “Précis de ce qui s’est passé aux Assemblées particulieres.” (Anon., n.d.) AN:
O/1/613 #148.

1780, the Opéra was placed in the charge of Berton). These conditions were
stipulated in the arrêt and do not institute self-governance, merely representa-
tion, the Opéra remaining under the inspection and regulation of the crown.
His conclusion is that the Opéra is only financially viable in royal hands.
Although there is no extant evidence of a formal refusal of this bid at this
stage, La Ferté’s hostility to the proposal is clear. Shortly after the appearance
of the Réclamation, a meeting was called; the terms of the internal memo
suggest that the decision to change the governance of the Opéra had not
yet been taken in late April, and that the 19 April Journal de Paris article had
been officially approved by the minister. Otherwise the text sets the record
straight and insists upon the role the artists already played in the management
of the institution.47
It is almost certainly in the light of La Ferté’s hostility to the bid that the
tone became more acrimonious in the autumn of 1789. By then, the process of
Revolution was well underway: The 26 August had seen the publication of
the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, so patriots now had a
nationally sanctioned template for their claims; furthermore, the month of
September 1789 was to see the launch of Marat’s radical paper L’Ami du peuple,
and October the forced move of the royal family into the Tuileries in Paris, and
the opening of the Société des Amis de la Constitution (the forerunner of the
Jacobin club). Just as radical revolutionary politics were intensified, so too were
the terms of the debate, which used the terms “liberty” and “despotism”:
a binary very much in the air as an interpretive dialectic used to describe the
Revolutionary rupture with Old Regime structures of patronage and control.
An undated Mémoire justificatif des sujets was published shortly after 4 September
1789 in response to an anonymous Lettre à Messieurs les premiers sujets de l’Opéra.48
Authorship of neither pamphlet is clear; certainly one or more of the principals
wrote the response, which was signed by the majority of them, and it is also
more than likely that they produced the original Lettre, which itself attacks
crown administration. The Lettre berated the principals for allowing the Opéra
to languish and professed to jolt them out of their “lethargic sleep”; in particu-
lar it claims that the current deplorable state of the institution is due to bad
administration and repudiates the reporting structure to the crown according
47 AN: O/1/616 #98. Anonymous, undated, and without name of recipient, but
almost certainly written by La Ferté, and addressed to Dauvergne, since it refers to the
minister in the third person and is clearly addressed to the current director by a crown
official.
48 Lettre à Messieurs les premiers sujets de l’Opéra. “Tu dors, Brutus, et Rome est dans les fers”
(n.p.: n.pub., n.d.).

to the same binary of aristocracy and despotism as used toward the end of
the Viotti affair, describing the subjects as “docile slaves” and their superiors
(the intendant and minister?) as an “aristocracy of commissars,” which consists
of “petty despots” who attempt to “constrain liberty” (pp. 1–2). By linking
the Opéra’s decadence to “aristocracy” the pamphlet aligned a conception of
Revolution as regeneration with cultural progress: now was the time, it seemed
to say, for proper Revolutionaries to throw off the shackles of crown adminis-
tration and rejuvenate the Opéra to make it worthy of the nation.49 In response,
the pamphlet is framed by a historical account that valorizes the 1780 experi-
ment in profit sharing and its financial success; it borrows the language of the
recent Declaration of Rights to call for the free exercise of talent, and property
and patrimonial rights over the pecuniary rewards of that industry.50 And
since both “ignorance” (presumably meaning external direction by individuals
who do not themselves perform) and “cupidity” both devour the profits of any
such enterprise, accordingly, claim the authors, the most profitable periods
of governance in the Opéra’s recent history were those when there was
no director—such as the period between Morel’s resignation (1783) and
Dauvergne’s appointment (1785) when a committee of principal artists gov-
erned. Hence liberty, for the authors of this pamphlet, is not just freedom of
expression and the right to publish their demands, nor a disinterested wish to
preserve a public institution (as for Viotti), but the fundamental right to defend
what is their own property, the fruit of their own individual industry. No longer
are the principals subjects of the crown, but they are private individuals having
property rights, sanctioned by the nation; and debate over the Opéra is increas-
ingly tied to wider issues of rupture with the past and the ethical repudiation
of crown control and feudal privilège.51
49 In particular, it calls upon them to reform the Opéra “in the form of a true acad-
emy capable of combining perfection and economies” (p. 4).
50 Mémoire justificatif des sujets de l’Académie Royale de Musique, En réponse à la Lettre
anonyme qui leur a été adressée le 4 Septembre 1789, avec l’épigraphe: Tu dors, Brutus, et Rome est
dans les fers ([Paris]: n.pub., 1789), 18p. (pp. 4–6). This same logic underlies the later
Mémoire pour les Sieur et Dame Chéron, premiers Sujets du Chant à l’Académie Royale de Musique,
contre l’Administration de ladite Académie (Paris: Imp. de Grangé, 1790), pp. 10–12. This
latter pamphlet also attacks the “discipline” imposed by crown officials on the artists,
which I discussed in Chapter 1.
51 On these issues, see particularly Edouard Pommier, L’Art de la liberté: Doctrines
et débats de la Révolution française (Paris: Gallimard/nrf, 1991). As he puts it, p. 18, “This
fundamental tension between regeneration and history is at the heart of the ambiguity of
[Revolutionary] discourses on art. The future is promising in the sense that the spirit of

The second aim of the pamphlet is to discredit the period of tutelage to the
Menus-Plaisirs as one consisting of grave financial wastage that would be easily
avoided. This was a point La Ferté had always refuted, the crux of his opposi-
tion to Viotti having always been the extreme complexity of administration
which the institution presented.52 Personal opprobrium is moreover heaped
upon La Ferté himself who, it is claimed, ignored the comité’s opposition to
moving the Opéra to the Porte Saint-Martin in 1781, for reasons of private
interest, as discussed in the previous chapter. Moreover, La Ferté and the direc-
tors are accused of favoritism in procedures pertaining to repertory and the
rotation of works, as well as disproportionate investment in productions of a
minority of favored operas. Examples cited are Morel de Chédeville and Grétry’s
Aspasie, premiered on 17 March 1789 (which, they further claim, had not been
approved by the comité), and Alexandre, which doubtless refers to the same
librettist’s Alexandre aux Indes (music by Nicolas Jean Le Froid de Méreaux),
premiered on 26 August 1783.53 Morel de Chédeville was the brother-in-law
of La Ferté, a personal connection that may explain why the work was pushed
through, if the claim was true: committee minutes for the relevant period have
not survived. Finally, they claim, similar favoritism influences appointments.
In sum, crown administration of the theaters under the Menus-Plaisirs is
stigmatized in this text as being characterized by private interest, a lack of
transparency in programming and administration, and governance inimical to
the rights of the performers themselves, whose individual industry should give
them rights over the profits and heritage of the theater.
Naturally, de Vismes and La Ferté counter-attacked. De Vismes’s Réponse à
un écrit takes issue with one particular paragraph of the Mémoire which
had claimed that the seasons of 1778–79 (under de Vismes) were excessively
expensive.54 La Ferté also penned a response to the Mémoire in which he charges
that the anonymous letter was itself written by the principals as a pretext for
publishing the Mémoire justificatif, giving extra evidence for the comparative
the arts is identified with liberty. But the past can be both exemplary, in the sense that it
provides valuable models, and menacing, because it is tainted by servitude.”
52 He also consistently claims that the institution could break even if it were
managed in conformity with the rules, and if practice were improved; see, for example,
Précis, p. 34.
53 Unless Noverre’s ballet-pantomime Apelle et Campaspe: ou La Générosité d’Alexandre
of 1 October 1776 is meant; but the context suggests a vocal work, and the later Réplique
specifically refers to Alexandre aux Indes (p. 8). On Aspasie, see Chapter 7 of this volume.
54 [Anne-Pierre-Jacques de Vismes du Valgay], Réponse à un écrit qui a pour titre:
Mémoire justificatif des sujets de l’Opéra (Paris: Gattey, 1789).

lack of success of management by the comité in the 1780s and the lack of
crown interference in the period of that management (1782–85), and defend-
ing his own record.55 More interesting, he disputes the claim that performers
have a stake in the institution, taking the line that ownership of the institu-
tion, its buildings and chattels was inalienable, and making a legally accurate
but culturally reactionary division between a stake in the finances and
management, and property of the institution (still held by the crown). For all
their hot air about rights, he seemed to say, the thinking of the principals was
legally muddle-headed.
In September 1789, a series of meetings of the staff of the Opéra took place,
and a report has survived covering four of these.56 By a self-styled “arrêt” of
13 September 1789, the artists of the Opéra appointed six commissaires,57 who
called a first meeting for the following day; the report suggests that Lainez,
Gardel, and Rey were behind the bid and that the meetings were kept secret
from the royal administration as well as from the public (indeed, the decision
to postpone the meeting of 15 September to the following day was precisely
because the public were still on the premises and the members feared “spies”
of Viotti, de Vismes, and others).58 On 16 September, a long discussion
concluded that the Opéra should belong to all artists (that is, not just the
principals) as long as salaries [appointements] were maintained at their current
rates and the principals retained the lion’s share of any eventual profits. In the
discussion, one member in particular, Chéron, spoke with great bitterness,
55 Réplique à un Ecrit intitulé: Mémoire justificatif des Sujets de l’Académie Royale de Musique
(n.p.: n.pub., n.d.), 75p. [BN: 4-FM-35327]. I date this text to late November–early
December 1789 on the basis of its reference (p. 24) to the publication of La Ferté’s Précis
two months previous (on internal evidence, I date the Précis to between 4 September and
18 October 1789; see note 71, below). Drafts of the Réplique survive in La Ferté’s papers:
for instance, the conclusion is at O/1/617 #46.
56 AN: O/1/620 #292-294: “Assemblée générale des artistes pour prendre l’Opéra à
leur compte,” 14–28 September 1789. Anonymous. #292 covers meetings on 14, 15 (post-
poned), and 16 September; #293 covers meetings on 28 and 30 September 1789. #294 is
a signed petition to Villedeuil (undated). Certain segments of this text were printed as
Journal Académique, devant servir de suite à la Révolution mémorable de 1789 (n.p.: n.pub.,
n.d.). Although this publication is anonymous, the notes show hostility to several of the
principals, especially La Salle and Rey, whom it characterizes as untrustworthy and vain
“aristocrats” (p. 5), irony at the expense of Chéron and Vestris (pp. 15–16), and support of
Amelot, the erstwhile minister of the royal household.
57 Rochefort (Double-Bass), Adrien (Principal singer), Martin (Principal singer),
Lumière? (Alto), Richard (Bassoon), Dacer (unidentified).
58 AN: O/1/620 #292, f.1v.

which shows how the discussion clearly turned against royal administration of
the institution:
Royal administration, he said, is truly a parasitic worm, curling around
us and feeding off us, leading to our very entrails. . . . [T]he Directors
are just the same, and so we must swear to be rid of them. Gentlemen,
who knows if all these discussions and controversies have perhaps been
fomented by them in order to consolidate power in their own hands?
In that case we are lost, for they shall obtain a royal order which
will authorize them or give them a pretext to command us even more
stringently than ever.59
We shall encounter Chéron and his wife again, as the authors of a seventy-page
pamphlet of early 1790 against the royal administration of the Opéra.60
Minutes of the two later meetings show that overtures had already been made
to the city of Paris, to Necker as controller-general of finances, and to Saint-
Priest, the minister who had replaced Laurent de Villedeuil on 19 July 1789;
presumably the principals had given up on La Ferté and taken matters into
their own hands. Indeed, the Chronique de Paris claimed that the artists had
applied to the municipality on 8 September, and that they were due to make
further applications at Court on the ninth.61 According to a text in the archives
of the Comédie-Française, the principals also drafted a petition to the Assemblée
Nationale denouncing Saint-Priest in late 1789, although this was never pre-
sented, and the manuscript is of uncertain authenticity.62 Further overtures
were made on 30 September to the Duc d’Orléans, who refused to become
involved, and to the entrepreneurs of the Variétés Amusantes, Gaillard and
Dorfeuille, which were inconclusive. No further reports seem to have survived.
But what this text confirms is that an approach to Dorfeuille and Gaillard
was if not instigated at least supported by the principals themselves,63 out of
hostility to Viotti’s bid and continued royal administration. The reason the
majority of performers favored Dorfeuille and Gaillard is that they would have
allowed the artists to form a société, along the lines of the Comédie-Française.
59 Mercredi 16 [September 1789], AN: O/1/620 #292, f.1v-2r.

60 Mémoire pour les sieur et dame Chéron, premiers sujets du chant à l’Académie Royale de
Musique. Contre l’administration de ladite académie (Paris: Imprimerie de Grangé, 1790).
61 CdP, 17 (9 September 1789), p. 68.
62 BCF: 2 AG 1789.27.
63 Compte-rendu au public des conditions auxquelles les Administrateurs du Théâtre du
Palais Royal acceptent de se charger de l’entreprise de l’Opéra ([Paris]: Imprimerie Cailleau,
n.d.), p. 2.

Some of the artists were clearly uneasy, however, with the ways in which
the principals spoke in the name of the entire institution with minimal
consultation among their colleagues. The haute-contre Lebrun’s speech of
14 September is an example; it accuses the principals of wishing to instigate
an “aristocratic” mode of self-governance, at odds with the equality of rights
subsisting among all members of the company:
They are wrong, if they consider their private decisions as the expression
of our general will, and if they believe they can decide about our
existence without having allowed us to discuss the advantages or disad-
vantages of a new managerial regime. . . . Given that we have rejected
all financial speculations which have been made on the product of our
talents, and given that we are trying to escape ministerial despotism, do
they truly believe that we will bow to an even less acceptable and more
dishonoring form of aristocracy, that of our peers? and give up the
secure and honourable positions we have as royal pensioners, to become
the employees of some or other of our colleagues?64
What is noteworthy in this rival argument is that the tutelage of the Opéra by
the Maison du Roi is considered preferable to the principle of a société, since this
is aristocratic and dishonoring. Presumably, crown control was preferred
because it considered all artists as equals. However, although royal administra-
tion was the status quo and remained the preferred solution of the majority of
those in power throughout the summer, the response of Dorfeuille and Gaillard
reopened the decision never to let the Opéra out to private enterprise.
As Dorfeuille and Gaillard’s Compte-rendu shows, they were initially
approached both by the principals of the Opéra and later by the minister and
the Bureau des établissements publics to take over the Opéra, before making a
bid themselves.65 Although they originally offered to constitute a société, the
minister and Department of Public Establishments, wished for Dorfeuille and
Gaillard to run the theater as entrepreneurs: this would have squarely placed
64 “Discours prononcé à l’Assemblée de tous les Sujets de l’Académie Royale de

Musique Par M. Lebrun, Haute-Contre, Le Lundi 14 Septembre 1789,” in Journal
Académique, devant servir de suite à la Révolution mémorable de 1789, pp. 4–15 (pp. 5–6). See
also de Vismes’s assertion in the Réponse à un écrit, that the artists had tried to buy him out
in 1778, and that a letter from the orchestra of 6 December 1778 (untraced) disavowed
actions taken by the principals (p. 14.)
65 Compte-rendu au public Des Conditions auxquelles les Administrateurs du Théâtre du
Palais Royal acceptent de se charger de l’entreprise de l’Opera ([Paris]: Imprimerie Cailleau,
[1789?]), p. 2. This is discussed in CdP, 79 (20 March 1790), pp. 314–15.

the artists in the subordinate position of employees without a financial stake in
the institution, nor indeed necessarily in any profits it might make. Dorfeuille
and Gaillard’s text accepted this compromise, while presenting a seemingly
disinterested statement of their conditions, despite their own professed misgiv-
ings. Their conditions were the by now classic entrepreneur package, not at all
unlike Viotti’s conditions, namely, (1) property [sic] over the Opéra and all
mobilier and immobilier for thirty years, with existing debts paid off; (2) use of
the auditorium and dependencies at the Porte Saint-Martin for the same period;
(3) use of the magasin on rue Saint-Nicaise (where they intended to construct a
new theater for the Variétés amusantes, of which they were the managers).66
In February 1790, the submission was discussed by the King’s Conseil
d’Etat, and La Ferté was asked to examine the bid.67 La Ferté had originally
met with Gaillard in October 1789 and reported to the minister that the
entrepreneur’s demands were unreasonable; it is unclear to what extent (if any)
the bid had been revised in the meantime.68 His February report is positive in
the abstract but pessimistic about the concrete feasibility of such a deal, par-
ticularly concerning four issues. First, Dorfeuille and Gaillard demanded that
the Opéra be released not only from debts but also from existing pensions, and
moreover that the Variétés be as well: the cost to the crown was likely to be
substantial. Moreover, they had failed to place a value on the transaction (which
could only be a bail emphithéotique, rather than a sale, since crown property
remained inalienable); third, La Ferté was doutbtful at the idea of handing
over the atelier of the Menus-Plaisirs, and also pointed to issues of access to the
rue Saint-Nicaise where this atelier was housed; and finally, he claimed that
the bid also raised questions of authors’ rights.69 Most serious seems to be the
objection that, in the absence of any value attached to the bail, this would
constitute a transfer of considerable value (La Ferté estimated the land at
200,000 livres), and one likely to rise, particularly if the court were to return
to Paris. More widely, in the summary toward the end of the document,
66 This may be related to La Ferté’s hostility to the idea of moving the Opéra into the
premises of the Variétés, Précis, p. 39. On that, see the end of Chapter 3.
67 AN: O/1/615 #691. Saint-Priest to La Ferté, 15 February 1790.
68 Lacroix, I.iv.565, citing AN: O/1/625 (La Ferté to Saint-Priest, 29 October 1789).
69 AN: O/1/613 #146. Summary of Dorfeuille and Gaillard’s conditions, with La
Ferté’s “observations” alongside. From the “Résumé des observations,” f.5v-7r, it is clear
that this document dates from later than 1 February 1790. There is another document
entitled “Observations au Mémoire presenté pour obtenir l’entreprise de l’Opéra,” which
is different from both this bid and those of Viotti and the principals, but which does not
name any of the individuals nor give much information on their terms: O/1/616 #97.

La Ferté refers to the conditions he has set out in the past to ensure the stabil-
ity of the Opéra: removal of the droit des pauvres, payment of pensions by the
government; retention of the Opéra’s privilège. La Ferté is also skeptical as to
whether the subjects will accept financial sacrifices under private enterprise,
and he is attentive to the issue of authors’ rights. So although Dorfeuille and
Gaillard may have seemed to be a safe pair of hands, in that they were existing
entrepreneurs who had experience of running a successful commercial theater
(and one moreover that had presented some competition to the Opéra in the
1780s), the concrete details of the handover remained problematic. For this
reason, it remained on hold for several months, and in the meantime other
issues superseded the deal.
Over the course of 1789, the Conseil du roi discussed the case of the Opéra
and reversed the decision from 1780, agreeing that the crown should support
the Opéra during the winter of 1789–90 but not beyond: by the late autumn
a longer-term solution was becoming pressing.70 In the light of this, the crown
pursued a double strategy: to ensure continuity and the future survival of the
Opéra as long as it could, yet passing authority to the municipality of Paris
while urgently considering bids from entrepreneurs. Once the handover to the
municipality had been agreed, the concrete involvement of crown officials,
including La Ferté, was complete. La Ferté’s response to Viotti’s bid, in par-
ticular, had deplored the inaccuracy of the speculator’s financial information;
while the tone of this later text is much less hostile to entrepreneurs, since it
was clear that this was the optimum solution, it continued to call for factual
accuracy, in order that entrepreneurs understand the size of the undertaking.
This is the reason La Ferté printed, during the 1789–90 season, his ninety-
two-page “Précis” on the Opéra, which refers to the artists’ bid for self-
governance (p. 21) and claims that it is intended to inform potential speculators
of the facts (pp. [1], 42).71 The text explicitly invites new submissions
70 Villedeuil, in his letter to La Ferté of 26 November 1789, reports that the “Conseil”
had decided to “soutenir ce spectacle au moins cet hiver” (my italics). AN: O/1/500, p. 575.
The “Histoire de l’Opéra jusqu’en 1793” suggests, pp. 51–52, that the deficit for 1790–91
was more than 300,000 livres, and that this was paid from a crown reserve/contingency
fund usually drawn on to pay individual artists gratifications and currently in surplus: little
wonder that the royal household wished to relinquish the responsibility!
71 The Précis can be dated to between 4 September and 18 October 1789, since it
cites, dismissively, the pamphlet with the epigraph Tu dors, Brutus (which itself dates from
after 4 September), on p. 72n.; it was also clearly in circulation by the end of 1789, as it is
reviewed favorably in the Chronique de Paris for 18 October 1789 (no. 56, p. 221). It also
gives, in an appendix, a list of “new operas,” by which it means those approved but not yet

from entrepreneurs that are more realistic than those already made.72 For the
historian it is also an invaluable compendium on the institution’s manage-
ment, and I shall return to it in Chapter 5. But before we discuss the new
round of bids by entrepreneurs, we need to turn to the role of the municipality,
which took over from the royal household in April.
3. Handover to the Municipality

The Opéra had been under municipal control between 1749 and 1780,73 in the
sense that it fell under the control of the minister for the city of Paris and was
financially dependent upon it; at other times fermiers-régisseurs, such as de
Vismes, had run the institution by license. The situation was reversed in 1780
when the Opéra reverted to the crown and the authority of the Menus-Plaisirs.
As early as April 1789, an electional cahier for the Filles Saint-Thomas district
included the demand that the administration of the Opéra revert to the city of
Paris and that it be freed from the inspection of the Menus-Plaisirs (signed
Carra): at this stage, the demand was an isolated case and seems to have
been ignored.74 Yet as part of the controversy over Viotti’s bid, the Opéra
itself tried to initiate municipal control by approaching the Commune on 7
September 1789.75 Eventually, this solution was to prevail. But the Commune’s
control over theaters was no foregone conclusion, for late 1789 and early 1790
are plagued by uncertainty over the jurisdiction of the city of Paris. The debates
over municipal control are particularly important, because the municipality
already had authority over theaters in general. But the nature of that authority
was unclear, once the principle of freedom of speech was adopted.
The old municipal authority in Paris had crumbled with the fall of the
Bastille in July 1789. Yet the sixty electoral districts created back in April
1789 as temporary electoral circonscriptions for the Third Estate were to
in rehearsal (pp. 85–86), and this dating will be used to establish the acceptance of these
works by the Opéra in part 2.
72 Précis, p. 42.
73 The following information on the period 1749–81 is derived from Lacroix, I.i.502n
and Fabiano, Histoire. The text of the arrêt of 26 August 1749 is partially reproduced in
the Leroux report of July 1791, pp. 68–69.
74 Chassin, Les Élections et les Cahiers de Paris en 1789, 4 vols. (Paris: Jouaust et Sigaux/
Charles Noblet/Maison Quantin, 1888–89), iii.217, also partially cit. in Lacroix,
I.i.503n2.
75 “Histoire de l’Opéra jusqu’en 1793,” f.51.

become the forerunners of a new municipal government, first acting as “centres
de ralliement” as Lacroix puts it, during the writing of electoral cahiers, then,
from 12 July when fear and violence swept Paris, the districts were charged
with keeping the peace and defending the city. The sixty districts organized
elections to the Estates-General by a process of electoral college: a total of
11,706 members of the Parisian Third Estate voted (between 40,000 and
50,000 were eligible), and elected a total of 407 “electors” for Paris. (A number
of deputies from the other two estates then joined their Third Estate colleagues,
taking the number to 451.) These 451 electors formed a General Assembly,
meeting at the Hôtel de Ville from early July; they progressively adopted a
mandate as temporary municipal government on behalf of all citizens of Paris
(la Commune), which was due to be reorganized the following year by a Plan de
municipalité.76 From 18 July, the districts also designated a “comité provisoire”
of, at first, twenty-two members, which soon took the title of city council
[Conseil de ville]. It is this first provisional municipal government of Paris that
was to take temporary control of the theaters, and discussion of their regula-
tion can be found in the proceedings both of the General Assembly and of the
smaller city council. The control was complex because the new municipality
took over responsibilities previously delegated to the lieutenant general
of police; and he had an ambiguous position in the judicial hierarchy of
the Old Regime, being subordinate to both the Parlement of Paris and to the
crown, and simultaneously responsible to six royal ministers and the king, and
himself responsible for policing the theaters.77 The debates thus centered upon
the fundamental question of what kind of control over theater was appropriate
in the vacuum of authority and in the context of an “era of liberty” which
prided itself on the abolition of censorship while remaining justifiably
concerned about public order in spaces such as theater auditoria.
As I stated in Chapter 1, print censorship had begun breaking down at the
end of the Old Regime and was considered all but defunct by 1789 as it had
been superseded by the principle of press freedom. Likewise pre-performance
censorship of playtexts was banned; only the repressive banning of plays (that
is: suppression, after their first performance, of plays proven to have disturbed
public order) was legally permissible, and even this was contested. Ensuing
debates in 1789, particularly that led by Marie-Joseph Chénier over Charles IX,
76 This brief summary is taken from the introduction to Lacroix, I.i.v–xx.

77 Under d’Argenson, theaters were included in one of five departments of the police,
named “police générale,” which was responsible for subsistance, fire, flooding, highways,
theaters. Histoire et dictionnaire de la Police, du Moyen-âge à nos jours, ed. Michel Aubouin,
Arnaud Teyssier, and Jean Tulard (Paris: Robert Laffont/Bouquins, 2005), p. 190.

establish a distinction between “legicentric” censorship and that hitherto
exerted by the crown.78 The Charles IX affair was the first significant test case
for the preventive censorship of plays: after Charles IX had been accepted by
the Comédie-Française on 2 September 1788, Chénier was told informally that
the work would probably be banned; instead, he had it performed privately in
January 1789, subsequently penning a brochure entitled De la liberté du théâtre
en France, published in July. Here he violently attacked “tyranny” and “fanati-
cism,” by which he meant control over theater, whereas the press had been
declared free. During the performance of 19 August at the Comédie-Française,
handbills were thrown into the auditorium, demanding the performance of
Charles IX, rather than Molière’s Ecole des maris, which was scheduled. The
actors refused to perform without the permission of the municipality, which
Bailly, the mayor, refused to give, sparking off a widespread controversy over
theater censorship.
Regardless of the provisions of the Declaration of Rights, the Revolutionaries
were generally wary of allowing complete freedom to the theater, placing
its surveillance in the hands of the municipalities. The question was how to
establish appropriate bounds for freedom of expression while simultaneously
safeguarding public order: should one step up the surveillance of public spaces,
such as theater auditoria, or exercise “preventive” (pre-performance) censor-
ship? Or should this be repressive (post-performance)?79 There were also
questions about the distinction between freedom of expression in print and
freedom in embodied forms such as theater. The mayor, Bailly, had himself
made this distinction in his Memoirs, almost certainly retrospectively justify-
ing his rather timorous stance on problematic plays by referring to that
“electricity” discussed in chapter 1:
I believe that press freedom is the basis of public liberty, but the same
cannot be said of theater. I believe that in the theater, where many men
assemble and are mutually inspired [s’électrisent], one must exclude
everything which tends to corrupt morals or the spirit of government.
Theater is one component of public instruction which must not be given
78 Sean McMeekin, “From Beaumarchais to Chénier: the droits d’auteur and the fall of
the Comédie-Française, 1777–1791,” SVEC, 373 (1999), 235–371. See also Nicholas
Harrison, “Colluding with the censor: Theatre censorship in France after the Revolution,”
Romance Studies, 25 (Spring 1995), 7–18.
79 Les Pièces de théâtre soumises à la censure (1800–1830): Inventaire des manuscrits des
pièces . . . et des procès-verbaux des censeurs . . . par Odile Krakovitch (Paris: Archives Nationales,
1982), p. 11.

over to everybody, and which the authorities must watch over. It is easy
to operate censorship in a form which guards against arbitrary authority
and which makes it perpetually fair: to do so is not an encroachment on
individual liberties, but rather a way of respecting the liberty and moral
security of everybody else.80
He had also noted the duty of administrators to foresee and to forestall civic
commotion, the awkward issue I discussed earlier about the most problematic
play of 1789, Chénier’s Charles IX:
With hindsight people will say that the performance did no harm;
but an administrator who is obliged to judge before the event, can only
think about potential problems, and in case of doubt, he must
play safe.81
In principle, the control to which Bailly alluded, fell within the purview of the
police. Yet Crosne had abandoned his post as lieutenant general of police on
14 July and left for England the following day,82 and the revised municipal
authority dodged the thorny question of theaters, passing the buck back to
the mayor. This created jurisdictional conflicts not to be fully resolved until
Napoleon, since plays causing disturbance (or, in one extreme view, those likely
to do so) caused conflicts between freedom of expression and legitimate
public authority.
After Crosne’s flight, a provisional police committee was established, headed
by Pitra, which from October 1789 took the name of Département de police:
it was one of three bureaus of the provisional municipal administration (along
with the Bureau des subsistances and the National Guard).83 The department
was headed by a mayor’s lieutenant, was elected by an absolute majority of the
Assemblée générale, and had six members.84 The draft Plan de municipalité,
80 Mémoires de Bailly, avec une notice sur sa vie, des notes et des éclaircissemens historiques,
par MM. Berville et Barrière, 3 vols. (Paris: Baudouin frères, 1821–22), ii.286 [20 August
1790], also cit. in Hallays-Dabot, Histoire de la censure, p. 145.
81 ibid., ii.284 [20 August 1790].
82 Histoire et dictionnaire de la police, p. 189.
83 Histoire et dictionnaire de la police, p. 224.
84 Histoire et dictionnaire de la police, p. 225. These include Manuel, a Jacobin, soon to
become procurator of the commune and best known today as author of La Police de Paris
dévoilée; and Jacques Peuchet, who was to become archivist at the prefecture and who
wrote Mémoires tirés des archives de la police, as well as texts for the Moniteur. (On Peuchet,
see Boncompain, La Révolution des auteurs, p. 248; Robiquet, Personnel, pp. 257, 681).

presented to the Assemblée générale by Fondeur on 12 August 1789,85 gave it
responsibility for inspection and policing of various public spaces, such as fairs
and markets, and including theaters (art. 8.3, “Des départements,” pp. 21–22).
The problem was that the plan gave no indication of who should hold author-
ity over other aspects, such as pre-performance censorship and permission to
perform; these had traditionally devolved to the lieutenant general of police
during the Old Regime, and here they were unspecified. Pre-performance cen-
sorship had become a political hot potato after the banning of Charles IX, and
it seemed that nobody was ready to tackle the issue. The nineteenth-century
historian Victor Hallays-Dabot, who had seen the relevant documents before
their destruction during the Commune of 1871, has claimed that the erstwhile
royal censor Jean-Baptiste Suard continued to read plays and to approve them,
then passing the decision to a municipal administrator for ratification, which
is itself evidence of a confused approach to jurisdiction.86
In December 1789, a controversy over public order saw the police’s
spokesman, Lescène des Maisons, lobby for the police to assume authority over
all theaters in the capital in the context of a dispute with the mayor, Bailly.87
The police were finally embarrassed into retracting their complaint, but the
debate opened up some fundamental lines of argument surrounding theaters
as public establishments. Lescène des Maisons claimed that theaters were
devolved to him, as police administrator, but he had been prevented from
85 Lacroix, I.i.185, 198. The text was published as Projet du plan de Municipalité de la
Ville de Paris, présenté à l’assemblée générale des représentants de la Commune, par ses commissaires,
le 12 août 1789 ([Paris]: Lottin l’aîné & Lottin de S. Germain, 1789). See also J. P. Brissot
de Warville, Observations sur le plan de la municipalité . . . (Paris: Au Bureau du Patriote
françois, 15 novembre 1789). The Décret de l’Assemblée Nationale, Portant Règlement provisoire
sur la police de la ville de Paris, Du 5 novembre 1789 (Paris: Baudouin, 1789), makes no
mention of theaters or any other kinds of public establishment.
86 Histoire de la censure théâtrale, p. 149. The municipal administrators he names are
Bailly himself, Thorillon, Lescène des Maisons. He also points to manuscripts held by the
Préfecture de police and “la collection du Théâtre manuscrit à la Bibliothèque Impériale.”
Manuel is added to the list of censors for early 1791; the more severe Joly, “chef de division
à la municipalité,” is added in 1791 (p. 160.) Suard is listed as censor for “belles-lettres”
and history in the royal almanacs up to and including 1789 (p. 497). On Joly, see Robiquet,
Personnel, pp. 236–37. Of particular note are the fact that Joly was lieutenant de Maire
and secrétaire-greffier of the municipality, and was to become minister of justice in
June 1792.
87 Lescène des Maisons was a member of the commune provisoire, and “conseiller
administrateur de la police”: Robiquet, Personnel, p. 678.

exerting this role by interventions from the mayor.88 The catalyst for this
debate was probably the performance of Charles Georges Fenouillot de Falbaire
de Quingey’s L’Honnête criminel (written back in 1768), which had been person-
ally authorized by Bailly, even though the police had already banned it.89 To
complicate matters further, there was also an ongoing conflict of jurisdiction
between the police and the Département des établissements publics (DEP),
which had been created by the municipality but which was separate from the
police: consequently, the debate was seemingly endlessly deferred, as it was
difficult to determine which of these three bodies—the Mayor, the police, or
the DEP—should prevail.90
The crux of the debate was whether the Opéra, and theaters in general,
should be considered as Etablissements publics. As we have seen, the municipal
plan had failed to resolve this question. In his discussion, Brousse-Desfaucherets
made a distinction between the public domain, which concerns all citizens
(and is subject to the police), and the internal administration of an organiza-
tion such as a theater, which concerns a “horizontal” relationship between citi-
zens involved in a particular institution and their “vertical” relationship with
the municipality as guarantor of the laws. The executive function of the police
should not be confused therefore with the legislative role of the municipality
88 Lacroix, I.iii.130–31 and 135–37.

89 Lacroix, I.iii.261–62. This play, as Hemmings notes, “attack[ed] the persecution of
Protestants, . . . had been banned by the Paris censorship in 1768 but was occasionally
shown in the provinces under its subtitle L’Amour filial.” Theatre and State, p. 49. It also led
to a dispute when the Comédie-Française claimed it had fallen “dans les règles”: see
Mémoire De l’Auteur de l’Honnête criminel, Contre les Comédiens François ordinaires du Roi; Suivi
de la Délibération du Comité des Auteurs Dramatiques (Paris: Imp. Demonville, 13 August
1790), 51p. [Po: P.A.3. (53.)] Fenouillot de Falbaire claims the work dates from 1766, the
year of its original refusal by the Comédie-Française (p. 36).
90 Brousse Desfaucherets responded on behalf of the DEP, but in the absence of
the head of the police (Lescène des Maisons was merely an administrator), the discussion
was adjourned until 9 December 1789. On that date Lescène des Maisons read a statement
responding to Brousse Desfaucherets’s observations of the previous meeting: “Réponse
à M. Desfaucherets” in Extrait du registre des délibérations du district de Saint-Joseph
(10 décembre 1789) (Paris: n.pub., 1789). The Réponse was forwarded to the DEP, which
then responded in print: Réponse du Département des Etablissements Publics, au Mémoire présenté
par le Département de la Police, à la Commune & aux soixante Districts, au sujet des Spectacles
([Paris]: n.pub., [1789]), 10p. The matter was finally debated on 24 December. Lacroix,
I.iii.130, 135–6, 207–8, 240. Brousse Desfaucherets was a member of the Assemblée des
Electeurs de 1789 and later secretary of the commune provisoire and then head of the DEP
from 8 October 1789 (Robiquet, Personnel, pp. 255, 667). The District Saint-Joseph had
named Lescène des Maisons as its representative.

(p. 5); the police should not be involved with the internal administration of the
theaters, any more than they should with other public institutions, such as
hospitals or schools; indeed this separation (and the “harmony” between the
two different powers) is what will preserve municipal administration from the
abuses that characterized the “era of privilège” (pp. 8, 9). Brousse-Desfaucherets
also leaves censorship in the hands of the police, pre-empting the debate upon
which Chénier later draws in defending Charles IX:
The DEP has no wish to question or to usurp the Police’s authority to
examine playscripts. This is a public duty which belongs to them. It is
not only fair but also necessary that the Police, as guarantor of public
order, should know in advance what is likely to cause disturbance, and
that it should be empowered to suppress anything which offends decency
or morality, or anything which in contemporary circumstances may be
dangerous. (p. 8)
In this account, pre-performance censorship was so intrinsic to the preserva-
tion of public order that it should remain in the hands of the police, and the
internal administration of the theaters belonged to the municipality as a whole.
Whilst clarifying matters of principle, we can also note here that the debate
failed to distinguish between control over public order and over the “moral”
dimension of theater, which was to become crucial. And the account still
begged the question of how the municipality should, in practice, exercise its
authority: what its power over the institution should be, which individuals
should exert that power, and according to what principles. In short, the vacuum
of authority left by crown administration had yet to be filled.91
Accordingly, Brousse-Desfaucherets was mandated to head a committee to
study this issue and to report on the optimum mode of governance of Paris
theaters on behalf of the Commune as a whole,92 and on 8 February he reported
91 At some point during the months that followed, a pamphlet, dated 1790, spoke
out against the DEP’s assumption of policing powers and asks rhetorically why these
powers would not reside with the relevant district. Figaro aux parisiens, amateurs du bon
goût, des arts, des spectacles, et de la liberté (Paris: Chez Goujon, Marchand de nouveautés,
1790), pp. 7–8. It also called for an increase, not a reduction, in the number of Parisian
theaters, which it claims the DEP wished to fix at four (p. 11). Hence for this author,
policing public order is one thing; restricting industry quite another. These terms were to
return later that year.
92 There is a rare anticipation of his report by Fissour, an administrator of the DEP,
who appeared before the Assemblée générale on 3 February 1790, to discuss theater in
general, with particular reference to the Comédie-Italienne and its debts. According to the

on the present state of public institutions under his jurisdiction.93 The account
was published and discussed by the Moniteur and the Journal de la Municipalité
et des districts.94 It is clear that this increased scrutiny by the DEP caused some
concern throughout the Parisian theatrical establishment and led to a number
of spontaneous solicitations in meetings of the Assemblée générale. For instance,
on 8 February, a deputation from the Comédie-Française asked that nothing be
legislated before it could complete and present a memorandum to the Assembly
(this was presented on 20 February). In this first intervention, the authors
point to what with hindsight can be seen as a tension between the logic of
rupture and insecurity which the early Revolution brought, and the need for
state subsidy to conserve this institution, one of the “monuments” of France’s
cultural system.95 The Comédie-Française was, of course, under increasing
pressure from radical playwrights campaigning for the removal of its monop-
oly rights over spoken French theater and the establishment of a second troupe.
Here, the argument aligns the conservation of an institution that forms part of
France’s cultural heritage with the maintenance of privilège which is in the
public interest because it supports a national theater that works for the national
good. The alignment is one identified elsewhere as the cornerstone of thinking
in 1790 on the tension between the ethical repudiation of privilège (which ran
the risk of destroying such “monuments” and precipitating a cultural descent
into barbarism) and the demands of liberty (which would require the removal
of structures, such as monopolies, that would constrain the rights of individual
report in the Journal de la municipalité et des districts (8 Feburary), Fissour was in charge
of the bank [la caisse d’escompte], the national lottery and the Théâtre-Italien. Robiquet
lists him as a member of the commune provisoire and a conseiller administrateur des établisse-
ments publics (Personnel, p. 673). The Opéra is not mentioned in this context, but his inter-
vention sets the agenda for discussion of theater in the context of their role as public
institutions and their ability to self-finance. The text of his intervention is inextant.
Lacroix, I.iii.683.
93 Lacroix, I.iv.20–23 (p. 20).
94 Compte rendu à l’Assemblée générale des Représentants de la Commune de Paris, le 8 février
1790, par M. Brousse-Desfaucherets, lieutenant de maire au Département des établissements pub-
lics. See also Moniteur, 71 (12 March 1790), iii.582; for an account of the debates, see JMD,
lxxii (Séance du 27 mars), 581–83; (Séance du 30 mars), 586–88; lxxiii (Séance du
1 avril), 592–94; lxxiv (Séance du 2 avril), 597–600.
95 Lacroix, I.iv.24. The presentation, first adjourned “à huitaine,” was again post-
poned from 13 February to 20 February (Lacroix, I.iv.103). The final presentation was
accompanied by a gift (presented by Molé) of 1,200 livres for the poor. (I.iv.170) For the
text, see Adresse présentée à l’Assemblée générale de la Municipalité de Paris, par les Comédiens
François ordinaires du Roi. Février 1790 ([Paris]: Imprimerie de L. Potier de Lille, [1790]).

creators to profit from their talents and would stifle an artistic progress
whose prerequisite was freedom of activity and expression).96 The presentation
was, in sum, a call for the maintenance of the Comédie-Française’s monopoly
when the municipality came to legislate. It sparked off a violent reaction
by Quatremère de Quincy in the Moniteur,97 the first of many interventions on
this issue, which will be discussed in more detail in the following chapter,
which deals with the Le Chapelier law.
In the light of the controversy over a similarly irreconcilable tension between
policing while guaranteeing freedom of performance, and conserving cultural
“monuments” while rejecting the ethically tainted structures of absolutism,
the Assemblée générale debated authority over theaters more widely on
23 February. Alongside a call by an unnamed individual for the Opéra to be
run by the municipality, a general arrêt was issued, providing that the right to
administer theaters belongs to the municipality, and naming six commissaires
to report at greater length with a view to formulating a new règlement.98
According to the brief summary of this debate of 23 February by the Journal
de la Municipalité et des Districts on 1 March, the Opéra was singled out as being
particularly worthy of conservation.99 The final report was to take one month:
it was presented on 27 March 1790100 and enshrined communal authority over
the theaters for the first time.
The R APPORT DES COMMISSAIRES
The commissaires’ long report asked the basic question of whether theater is
private or communal property and establishes that theater, though a private
enterprise, has public interest and that this justifies municipal regulation;
moreover, its public effects make it the property of all “Citoyens réunis” (i.e.,
the Commune), not of private individuals. Theater is also described as a “dépôt”
96 Edouard Pommier, L’Art de la liberté: Doctrines et débats de la Révolution française

(Paris: Gallimard, 1991), esp. chapter 3 (“De l’iconoclasme au patrimoine”).
97 Moniteur, 53 (22 February 1790), iii.428–29.
98 Lacroix, I.iv.184–85. The six named commissaires were de la Rivière, Pia de
Grandchamp, de Sauguet, comte d’Espagnac, Bonlin, Moretin de Chabrillon, and Thuriot
de la Rozière. Each took responsibility for a number of named theaters; Bonlin had respon-
sibility for the Opéra (Lacroix, I.iv.189). See also JMD, lix.477–78 (Suite de la Séance du
Mardi 23 Février 1790).
99 Lacroix, I.iv.184n7. See also previous note.
100 Rapport de MM. les Commissaires nommés par la Commune, relativement aux spectacles
(Paris: Lottin l’aîné and Lottin de S.-Germain, 1790). Henceforward cited as Rapport, in
the text. See also Lacroix, I.iv.515–19.

(by which the authors seem to mean that it has a patrimonial dimension,
in that it conserves a cultural heritage), which is why it needs to be subject to
the laws. (Rapport, p. 8.)101 Because it protects an object of common interest,
the conservation of a national theater is distinct from privilège, since privilège
consists of the protection of matters pertaining to the interest of private
individuals.
So much for the principles. To reinvigorate the theater industry, the report
advocates controlled diversity and competition but is not in favor of complete
deregulation: for instance, it is particularly hostile to deregulating the number
of “petits spectacles” for moral reasons. Indeed, the authors see a tension
between market forces and the moral purpose of theater, and we should
note that it is particularly the popular classes that are described as needing
instruction (Rapport, p. 16). It is in favor of a second spoken French theater (but
not, incidentally, of a second Opera company) and advocates the reunion of
the Comédie-Italienne and the Théâtre de Monsieur. On the question of gov-
ernance, the report surveys three possibilities. The first possibility, direction
by “régisseurs” (such as the regime in force at the Opéra between 1785 and
1789) is rejected, mainly because the régisseur is isolated from events (presum-
ably meaning he is not governing at his own financial risk), needs constant
surveillance, and depends greatly on individuals. Mixed liability companies
[sociétés en commandite] are considered worse still and also rejected. The mode of
governance the report advocates is private enterprise, since only here does the
person in charge have a personal reason to strive for public satisfaction (Rapport,
pp. 18–19). The principals’ argument is therefore passed over, as is the view
long espoused by the crown.
While favoring private enterprise to an unprecedented degree, the report in
many ways swam against the tide of current opinion, which was moving
increasingly toward deregulation. In the meeting of 27 March, one of the
commissaires presented the report and proposed an arrêt, which would limit
the number of Paris theaters to eight: four large (the Opéra, two French
theaters, and an amalgamated theater uniting the “Bouffons” and the Comédie-
Italienne), and four small, all of which would be given to private enterprise for
an (unspecified) fixed period. The arrêt also provided that the Commune would
levy a license fee [bail ] for each theater and would replace the much-criticized
quart des pauvres by a number of benefit performances by each theater. On the
Opéra, singled out in article 8, it was proposed that the mayor and the DEP
101 Cp. p. 10, which describes Paris as a “depositary of masterpieces which can serve
as models for foreigners.”

confer and apply to the king for permission for the Opéra to move (a process
oddly named la translation de l’Opéra, to which I shall return). Finally, the proj-
ect and report were to be widely circulated among the sixty districts for feed-
back.102 Discussion of the Opéra alone (seemingly the most urgent of the issues
raised) was tabled for 30 March; it had bulked large in the report, which had
devoted four pages to the examination of five separate submissions for gover-
nance of the Opéra, of which the commissaires explicitly favored that of
Gaillard and Dorfeuille, already mentioned.103 The first two submissions are
anonymous. A third was presented by Mlle. Montansier. The fourth was made
by de Vismes;104 Dorfeuille and Gaillard were the fifth. At the same time
these bids were being made, a view remained that the Opéra should stay in
royal hands, but this was clearly a minority view and was ignored.105
On a material level, the Rapport des commissaires paved the way for the Opéra
and other theaters to be leased to entrepreneurs. But more important, it repre-
sented a further discussion of the ideals of theater administration in the
Revolution and revealed a contradiction never to be resolved. For the princi-
pals, self-determination as constituent members of the institution followed
naturally from liberty (because a concomitant of liberty was rights over the
fruit of one’s own industry); yet for the municipality, liberty could only be
safeguarded by clear lines of authority. Theater was communal property, yet to
be run by private enterprise. The legal paradox here is clear, which may explain
why the lease never took satisfactory form.
4. Moving the Opéra (II)

On 30 March, a plan was presented in the Commune for new premises for the
Opéra; but the minutes simply state that no decision was reached.106 As we
saw in Chapter 1, the Duc de Chartres failed to gain an assurance that the
Opéra would be rebuilt on his land at the Palais-Royal after the fire of 1781.
Eager to increase the value of his land, he therefore agreed for a new theater to
102 Lacroix, I.iv.512–13.

103 In general, theirs is the bid that seems to be the most widely discussed and in the
most positive terms. Cf. AN: O/1/617 #20, which gives reasons for favoring them.
104 Evidence for attribution of one of the bids to de Vismes may be found in AN:
O/1/617 #14, f.2r.; and O/1/617 #30 (dated December 1789).
105 Inter alia AN: O/1/617 #20, “Mémoire relatif à l’opera et aux varietes,” undated;
#53 “Notice,” undated [before the end of the 1788–89 season]; #57 “Notice,” undated.
106 Lacroix, I.iv.553.

be built for the Variétés-Amusantes instead. By 1790, this theater was under-
going renovation works. Part of the submission of Gaillard and Dorfeuille for
the Opéra was an offer to build a new theater on the site of the magasins to
house the Variétés; although it is not explicit in the proceedings of 27 March,
it seems that a concomitant suggestion was that the Opéra should move into
the old site of the Variétés after renovation was complete.107 The Chronique de
Paris was in favor of the idea, although it seemed to be unaware that this was
Dorfeuille and Gaillard’s idea; as it opined “The Palais-Royal theater would
certainly be perfect for the Opéra, but there is surely no legal or fair means of
acquiring that theater, which belongs to the existing entrepreneurs of that
theater.”108 However, several other individuals felt that the theater was inap-
propriate to house the opera company. A letter in the Moniteur of 19 April
reviews proposals for the Opéra’s new premises and argues against moving it
to the Palais-Royal for reasons of space, preferring a new construction on the
land of the Capucins on rue Saint-Honoré. (This had been part of the first two
of the five plans, which were both anonymous.109) To discuss the suitability of
the Palais-Royal for the Opéra was implicitly to debate which of the five sub-
missions should prevail, and accordingly a public debate began over the edifice.
Victor Louis, the architect of the new Palais-Royal theater, protested in an
open letter to the Journal de Paris that his detractors had circulated misleading
statistics and that the theater was more spacious both than the Opéra’s current
theater at the Porte Saint-Martin and the old opera house of the Palais-Royal
which had burned in 1781. He gave measurements of length and breadth for
each of the three houses, asserting that the total seating capacity was 2,023
(1,299 seated; 724 in the orchestre and parterre), or 2,423, if the parterre
benches were to be removed and for that part of the audience to be standing—
more than enough for the company, he claimed.110 He further asserted that
Dauberval (the Opéra’s ballet master) had visited the theater the previous week
and personally confirmed its suitability for the company. The letter led to a
pamphlet exchange in May 1790 between him and the machiniste of the Opéra,
Pierre Boullet (not to be confused with the neoclassical architect Etienne-Louis
Boullée). In essence, Boullet disputed the figures; he claimed that the useful
space was much smaller than stated and that the theater had inadequate
107 AN: O/1/617 #20.

108 CdP, 79 (20 March 1790), pp. 314–15.
109 Lacroix, I.v.557–58.
110 “Lettre de M. Louis, Architecte de la nouvelle Salle du Palais-Royal,” JdP:
Supplément no, 21 (2p.), 30 April 1790 [I am quoting from BHVP: 102445; BnF copy of
JdP is missing this specific number], p. 2.

storage for an opera company and the décors it would require. He also said that
Dauberval had been given a false impression of space by seeing the theater
empty.111 Boullet had a rival project for the Opéra, as Louis counter-claimed;112
and there was certainly a longer-standing hostility, if Louis’s claim that he had
refused to employ Boullet back in 1788 is true.113 But his Réponse also claims
that he had been approached by Opéra administrators to elaborate a plan for
moving the Opéra, or rebuilding, at his own discretion.114 This would put the
approach at February–March 1790, precisely the time when the Rapport des
commissaires was being prepared. Once again, the plan to move the Opéra failed,
perhaps in part because of the final flourish of what was to be the last word
in the debate, where Boullet summed up his arguments by claiming that
to move the Opéra to the Palais-Royal would necessitate economies in all
aspects of what was supposed to be a magnificent, luxurious genre, as well as
new storage, new décors, and changes to the surrounding thoroughfares.115
The Opéra remained without location as the 1789–90 theatrical season came
to a close.
During this series of debates, the role of the state authority had shifted toward
favoring entrepreneurship of the theaters under national surveillance. Public
opinion was increasingly in favor of complete deregulation, which would still
see theaters run by individuals and companies but the state would not retain
control over their number, nor would it levy a license fee [bail ]. Also the the-
aters would be subject to free-market competition rather than each holding a
monopoly over a defined share of the repertory. It was the latter view, in favor
of deregulation, which was to prevail, of course, with the Le Chapelier bill, and
the following chapter traces the succeding debate and the process by which the
state relinquished control over the Paris theaters. It differs from previous
accounts by suggesting that Le Chapelier’s law—though undeniably bringing
“freedom” in its removal of monopoly systems and state control over repertory
111 [Boullet], Réponse à la lettre de M. Louis insérée dans le supplément du “Journal de

Paris” du 30 avril dernier (n.p.: n.pub., n.d.).
112 Lettre de Monsieur Louis, Architecte de la nouvelle Salle du Palais-Royal (n.p.: n.pub.,
n.d.). Reproducing letter from Dauberval (“which I have just received”), dated 9 May
1790. Louis’s counter-claim is on pp. 1–2. Boullet then replied: Réponse de M. Boullet aux
Lettres de MM. Louis et d’Auberval (n.p.: n.pub., n.d.). He also published a Seconde lettre de
M. Boullet, Sur le théâtre du Palais-Royal (n.p.: n.pub., n.d.).
113 Seconde lettre de M. Boullet, p. 1.
114 Réponse de M. Boullet, p. 4.
115 Réponse de M. Boullet, pp. 7–8.

and the balance of the Parisian theatrical world—lost any ability to intervene
to support institutions considered to be of national importance. As we will see,
the state continued nevertheless to recognize a limited role in supporting the-
atrical culture by continuing to support theaters financially, including the
Opéra in particular, and did so selectively, according to its perception of that
theater’s “utility.” In so doing, I shall suggest, it laid the foundations for finan-
cial coercion of cultural institutions and a different relation between state and
citizens at the very moment it proclaimed the “freedom” of those institutions.

3 Control by the Municipality
April 1790–April 1792
Chapter 2 traced the evolution of the Opéra’s management from crown

control to the formal handover to the municipality in April 1790. Municipal
governance was intended as a temporary measure, however, and governance
was transferred relatively quickly to an internal member of the Opéra’s
management—Louis-Joseph Francœur—in partnership with the architect
Jacques Cellerier.1 This chapter traces that evolution and concludes with the
installation of Francœur and Cellerier in April 1792 as entrepreneurs. Since
the evolution was consonant with the deregulation of the Parisian theater
world as a whole, and in part grew out of similar debates, this chapter also
gives weight to the internal contradictions and contestations that befell the
Le Chapelier bill of January 1791. In particular, it points to the uneasy finan-
cial and cultural dimensions of deregulation, including the dangers of collapse
to the major theaters due to increased competition. As a consequence, the
Opéra and other major theaters found themselves remaining financially
beholden to the state and the municipality.
1 Cellerier was born on 11 November 1743 in Dijon; he was a pupil of Nicolas Lenoir,
a pensionnaire in Rome, member of the Académie Royale d’architecture, and Ingénieur de
la généralité de Paris: see Michel Gallet, Les Architectes parisiens au XVIIIe siècle: Dictionnaire
biographique et critique (Paris: Mengès, 1995), pp. 107–9; and ibid., Demeures parisiennes à
l’époque de Louis XVI (Paris: le Temps, 1964), pp. 176–67.
1. Liberty of Theater and Municipal Regulation:
The Stalemate of April 1790
The primary effect of the report of Brousse-Desfaucherets and the commis-
saires of the Commune of 27 March 1790 was to spark a debate in the
Assemblée générale about the future of the Opéra. The report had explicitly
favored private enterprise and had referenced five submissions made to the
Département des établissements publics (DEP) while singling out that of
Gaillard and Dorfeuille as the most promising of these. But not only was
opinion divided in the Assemblée, but the principals remained intransigent in
their hostility to this solution and continued to call for a committee structure
under the authority of the municipality, the opposite path to that advised
by the report. April 1790 thus saw a stalemate between these irreconcilable
positions, although the debate which took place clarified the principles
according to which the theaters more widely, and the Opéra in particular,
should be run.2
On 31 March or 1 April (the record is unclear),3 several individuals spoke
in favor of private enterprise for the Opéra, yet the majority spoke against the
report of the commissaires, calling for the unlimited freedom of the theaters.
A third group wanted the matter sent to the definitive municipal government,
but left the city council [Conseil de ville] to decide in the meantime on provi-
sional measures to ensure continuity of the institution. The Assemblée finally
decided to adjourn the wider question of unlimited freedom until the final
organization of the municipality, but referred the specific question of the
immediate future of the Opéra to the city council, since this issue needed a
more urgent solution, in order to ensure continuity of service: the Opéra had
closed for the Easter recess and it was unclear when, and how, it could reopen.4
The debate, analyzed in some detail in the Journal de la Municipalité et des
Districts, constitutes the first debate on the “freedom of the theaters,” foreshad-
owing the terms of Le Chapelier’s bill, yet from which discussions of authors’
rights (generally taken as the main impetus behind the law of 13 January
1791) are absent. The record is fragmentary, but the Journal cites interventions
2 The debate began on 30 March, continued on 31 March and 2 April, and was handed
to the Conseil de Ville who discussed the issue on 7, 9, and 10 April. Sources are, as before,
Lacroix’s edition of the acta of the Commune, the JMD, and the Moniteur.
3 As Lacroix points out, the JMD and the acta of the Commune diverge in dating
these debates.
4 Lacroix, I.iv.593–94. Robiquet, pp. 262–68.

by Bosquillon, Moreau, Godard, Benoît, and unnamed others, and quotes
from several of them. These inconclusive and fragmentary debates are impor-
tant indicators of the tentative moves by the municipality toward the same
deregulation later effected by the state.5
The first discussion is over the question of property and uses a rhetoric and
lexis inspired by the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which had been
approved the previous August. For instance, an unnamed intervention distin-
guishes between “material rights” over the theater (that is, as a building) and
rights of performance, claiming that material rights belong to the nation,
while rights of performance are inalienable and personal and belong to
performers. This distinction had the advantage of allowing one to describe a
theater as a national institution while at the same time protecting the pecuni-
ary and patrimonial rights of individual performers—in essence, the position
previously set forth by the police. A second speaker (Jacques Alexandre Thuriot
de la Rosière) then suggested approaching the Assemblée Nationale, defining
freedom of the theaters as the right of an individual to establish a theater
(building) and organize performance without external control over genre, any
censorship, or payment of the droit des pauvres.6 A third (Honoré Nicolas Marie
Duveyrier) noted that the crown had decided no longer to take responsibility
for the Opera after the winter of 1789–90 and affirmed that the municipality
had no authority to regulate the theater. The responsibility, in his view, should
be given over to private enterprise.7 This left open the possibility of the
Commune retaining overall authority over the theaters, merely licensing them
to named entrepreneurs, and as such begged the larger question of what “free-
dom of theaters” might ultimately mean. The debate was postponed until the
following day, when more significant interventions were made by Antoine
Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy and by Antoine Laurent de Jussieu.
debates over privilège and “liberté des théâtres”

Quatremère de Quincy immediately poured scorn on the notion that the
Commune had any right over the theaters. Quatremère had already published
on this subject in the Moniteur (22 February 1790) in response to pleas
from the Comédie-Française and the Comédie-Italienne that their monopoly
5 JMD, lxxiii.592–94 (Séance du Jeudi 1er avril 1790.)

6 This is the logic that underlies article 1 of Le Chapelier’s bill, which provides: “Any
citizen shall be able to construct a public theater and have performed plays of any genre,
provided he make a prior declaration to the municipality.”
control by the municipality | 101

be preserved, and his speech of 2 April was also subsequently published.8
Taken together, these texts constitute the most far-reaching intervention on
the freedom of the theaters and make no reference to the demands of the
Société des auteurs dramatiques, even though the SAD’s claims have until now
dominated discussions of theatrical control, suggesting that the two questions
deserve to be dissociated. As the first principled repudiation of theatrical
privilège, Quatremère’s intervention deserves discussion in its own right.
The question of privilège had been revived in several pamphlets calling for
the maintenance of the rights of the protected crown theaters, especially
the Comédie-Française and the Opéra. One such, entitled Observations sur les
spectacles de Paris, calls for a reduction in the number of Parisian theaters and
an improvement in the internal administration of those chosen to remain; it
justifies this call by the probable savings that would be made by the crown.
Of particular interest is the claim, which was also later to be developed by
Nicolas-Etienne Framery, that one result of the multiplicity of theaters was
dissipation and distraction, with a resulting moral decadence of the Parisian
stage (presumably because it is impossible to regulate such a large range of
establishments, whereas a small number of royally protected troupes can be
overseen).9 In this account, deregulation of the theater world is seen as having
implications for the morality of the lower urban orders, borrowing from the
critique of theater’s moral effects made by Rousseau in the Lettre à d’Alembert
sur les spectacles. This and other texts therefore raise the problem of the quality
control of theater if the bar on a number of institutions is lifted, a point picked
up in the report of the commissaires of the Commune.10 For this reason, the
pamphlet calls for the strict regulation of the number of “petits spectacles”
(a distinction also made by the commissaires back in March): two should be
provided for the peuple, and should be subject to rigorous censorship. Censorship
is also recommended for the two “principal” theaters (the Opéra, which is
named; and one un-named theater, presumably the Comédie-Française).
Reforms to the Opéra are required to improve its financial situation: the
removal of the quart des pauvres (here called the droit des hôpitaux) and increased
8 Moniteur, 53 (22 February 1790), iii.428–29; Antoine Quatremère de Quincy,

Discours prononcé à l’assemblée des représentans de la Commune, le Vendredi 2 avril 1790, sur la
liberté des théâtres, et le rapport des commissaires (n.p.: n.pub., n.d.).
9 Anonymous, (n.p.: n.pub., n.d.), pp. 3–4.
10 Cf. also “Observations [sur la multiplicité des petits spectacles],” AN: O/1/617 #1, f.1r.

dues from the other theaters, which should provide for increased salaries for
principals and the cost of running the Ecole Royale de chant.11
On 22 February, Quatremère had reacted violently against interventions
from the Comédie-Française and Comédie-Italienne for the maintenance of
their privilèges, which he had described as a block [entrave] to industry and
antithetical to liberty. The specific issue as regarded the Comédie-Italienne
was the placing of the Théâtre de Monsieur and plans for it to move away from
the Comédie-Italienne—and does not directly concern the Opéra.12 But more
widely, Quatremère retains the distinction made by Brousse-Desfaucherets
between the municipality’s authority over theaters in respect of public order
(policing) and the question of controlling “public taste” (that is, regulating the
internal administration of the theaters and their repertory and performance).
He approves of censoring theaters that corrupt mores but does not otherwise
allow for intervention in the theatrical offering of the capital: public opinion
should, he argues, be the sole arbiter over the respective success of different
theaters and plays. In other words, Quatremère advocates a free-market situa-
tion where theaters’ survival should depend solely upon public success.13 This
principle extends to refusing to support theaters unable to succeed on their
own, as such artificial propping-up goes against the essential stimulant to
artistic progress and the development of urban taste, which is the principle of
emulation in a situation of free competition.14 Of course, the Opéra had for
some years been in precisely the position of a theater needing “propping up,”
via crown subsidy. For the same reason, any limit on the number of theaters
constitutes an unwarranted intervention in this ideal free-market situation.
Emulation was defined by Jaucourt in the Encyclopédie as “a noble, generous
passion which, whilst admiring the merit, possessions and actions of others,
11 La Ferté was also categorical in stating that the only way to save the Opéra and to
bring its finances under control was to do away with the hospitals tax, which he estimated
at 72,000 livres in a period when the Opéra’s annual deficit was in the region of 60,000
livres, and suggests finding a different way to raise revenue for poor relief. He also suggests
that the treasury pay the Opéra’s pensions, given the wider economic benefit to the state
of the Opéra’s attraction of foreigners. (Precisely this was to happen in 1791–92, albeit for
different reasons.) See “Notice,” s.d., O/1/617 #57, f.2r.
12 See pp. 428–29 of the article of 22 February; for background see 11 Feburary 1790,
Lacroix, I.iv.66, 73–74.
13 In the Année littéraire, Fréron’s review of the pamphlet Discours et motions sur les
spectacles also takes issue with the idea that the municipality should administer theaters
and claims it should just oversee them; as he puts it, France is not Athens, where “theaters
were linked to the government, and run by the state.” (AL, vi.480).
14 Moniteur, 53 (22 February 1790), iii.428.

attempts to imitate or even surpass them, through courageous effort and
honorable virtuous principles.” It was diametrically opposed to jealousy and
envy as a “competitive striving between individuals to determine some rank
order or hierarchy based on merit.”15 It was a cornerstone of Revolutionary
thinking, especially that of the libertarians, and was a conceptualization of
progress as provoked by generous emotions such as admiration and imitation;
this idea was later to become central to the Terror’s use of great men as moral
exempla, as we shall see.16 Quatremère’s arguments sound straightforward to
the modern reader, but they overturn what had seemed axiomatic in early
1790: in a nutshell, they reject the argument that major theaters might well
by necessity run at a loss, but that the state should make good the deficit
for reasons of national cultural prestige; and they refuse to accept that these
theaters belonged to the state, whatever their national importance.
The commissaires, in their report of 27 March, had concluded that the
Commune has property rights over the theaters because theaters are public
establishments and that they are of general interest. Their terminology is vague
and difficult to interpret: the question asked at the beginning of their text is
as follows: “le droit des spectacles est-il une propriété particulière, dont chacun
peut s’emparer, ou une propriété commune, dont la Commune seule doit
disposer?” [Is the right to perform, private property, of which any individual
may avail himself, or rather communal property, of which [the representatives
of] the Commune alone may dispose?] The term propriété seems to be used by
the commissaires to refer to authority, rather than implying genuine owner-
ship. The commissaires had also claimed that the right to perform that the
Commune granted to certain establishments was not a privilège, because it
defined privilège as the exclusive gift, to an individual, of a right that should
15 Encyclopédie, v.601–2. The English phrase is Dale Van Kley’s summary in The French
Idea of Freedom, p. 27. André Chénier, Essai sur les causes et les effets de la perfection et de la
décadence des lettres et des arts, described it as “a source of a thousand good things in a well-
ordered society, because it encourages each man to show himself to be of irreproachable
virtue.” Œuvres complètes, ed. Gérard Walter (Paris: Gallimard/Pléiade, 1958), p. 621. For a
stimulating exploration of the concept as structuring principle for David’s salon, see
Thomas Crow, Emulation: David, Drouais, Girodet in the Art of Revolutionary France
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006 [1994]).
16 For compelling discussions of the concept within the political and commercial
spheres and its intellectual underpinning as a conceptual partner to the concept of envy,
see John Shovlin, “Emulation in eighteenth-century French economic thought,” Eighteenth-
Century Studies, 36.2 (Winter 2003), 224–30; Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International
Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge MA: Harvard University
Press, 2005), pp. 115–22.

belong to all. Central to this understanding was the idea that Old Regime
privilège, seen with Revolutionary hindsight, was arbitrary, and that royal
monopolies over theaters usurped the pre-existing property rights over theatri-
cal culture of the nation. It is an interesting argument because it delves into
the nature of the Commune as a moral entity and foreshadows the ways
in which utilité publique would be conceptualized, but these points were not
developed, nor is the distinction between privilège and property completely
convincing in the way it is formulated. Instead, the commissaires argued, the
commonality of citizens owned the theatres, and this fact gave the Commune
the right to accord permission to perform to any individual, because as a moral
entity it could dispose of that “property” as it judged fit:
Is this injustice comparable to the exercise of property? If the Commune
is and must be the proprietor of the theaters, in view of their influence
on commerce, the advantages it derives from their magnificence, its
need to sustain them financially, and the damage which would be
done if they were to disappear, surely it has the right to administer
them as it sees fit and to maximize their usefulness, just like any other
proprietor.17
Quatremère’s speech of 2 April however borrowed contemporary rhetoric
to assimilate the Commune’s putative authority over theaters to the feudal
privilège from which the commissaires had sought to distance themselves. The
Constituent Assembly had abolished “feudalism” in the famous nocturnal
session of 4 August 1789, so any reference to feudalism was, by April 1790,
implicitly a reference to the abuses of the Old Regime. He also rejects the idea,
debated previously by the police, that theaters should be considered as public
establishments [établissements publics], which he defines as public amenities run
by enterprise (he mentions, as examples, cafés and tennis courts). Attacking
the commissaires’ rather odd definition of property, Quatremère expresses the
view that property is acquired by a purchase, by work, or by inheritance: each
theater is thus private property, whatever its public importance. Nor are the-
aters public institutions for Quatremère because they are not state financed,
and they are not amenities freely accessible to all since private individuals pay
for admittance. This point was to be taken up by Jacques Peuchet in the
Moniteur of 16 April, where he reiterated the argument that theaters could not
constitute the property of the Commune, adding that the wider question of the
17 Rapport, pp. 8–9.

regulation of theaters was the business of the national legislature, not of a
municipal assembly.18
Contemporary debates on authors’ rights dissociated work from institution,
in the sense that plays were now seen as the inalienable property of authors
and eventually reverted to a public domain, irrespective of the institution in
which they had been performed. The refusal to concede that theaters were the
property of the Commune but were instead by definition private institutions
seems to make the very notion of a national theater problematic: does that
term not suppose ownership on the part either of the state or the commonality
of citizens? Moreover, Quatremère defined privilège as an arrangement that
constricts the inalienable rights of individuals, such as the rights of a public to
judge and choose theatrical offerings for itself. In this account, the Commune
is not qualified to intervene in what should be a matter of public judgement:
How can we decide on matters of public taste? How can we foresee what
this city will become, and proscribe what entertainment shall be offered?
Do we know how taste will evolve in the different arts, or will we have
the temerity to subject those changes to our own whims? (pp. 13–14)
These were two rival views of the matter: one placed property over culture in
the purview of the commonality of citizens (the Commune), which (seen as
a moral entity) had ownership over culture and disposed of that for the
good of the public, whereas the other view accorded that ownership to private
individuals. Either could have led to the abolition of monopolies, but they
would have done so in diametrically opposed ways.
Quatremère also attacks the underlying argument that privilège is a neces-
sary means to protect an Opéra that would otherwise be financially untenable
because it would be unable to compete in a free-market situation; he points to
the situation of widespread competition in most Italian cities, claiming that
competition awakens “les ressources de l’Industrie.” The protectionist policy
that has prevailed with respect to the Opéra has stifled progress and misses
the point that an institution is only worthy of support if it is independently
successful. In other words, Quatremère takes the by-now widely accepted
view of the public as supreme arbiters in matters of taste and aligns it with the
question of progress. The value of institutions such as the Opéra is therefore
measurable by their success before such a public; subsidy and protection
are likewise unnecessary to the institution in question and unfair to the com-
petitors they remove. As a consequence, the opening of a second such theater
18 Moniteur, 106 (16 April 1790), iv.122–23.

is rejected as missing the point, for it would simply divide and redistribute
privilège, not abolish it. Here, approximately one year before Le Chapelier, is
a principled call for the complete abolition of privilège in the theaters, on
the basis of free-market competition (“the system of Liberty” p. 18) and the
incompatibility of liberty and privilège. It is worth stressing that Quatremère is
more concerned with the production of works than the maintenance of institu-
tions because municipal interest simply demands a supply of good tragedies
and comedies, of music and performers, irrespective of the institution that
produces them. For that reason, a free-market situation where theaters are
obliged to close when they cannot compete, and others open, is unproblematic
(p. 19). No national theaters for Quatremère!
Quatremère’s speeches have general appeal and rarely discuss the practical
specificities of administration. But his latter point was taken up by Millin de
Grandmaison in his pamphlet Sur la liberté du théatre which, although it does
not cite Quatremère, is contemporary with these debates (it cannot be dated
precisely), and goes into detail about those specificities.19 Millin claims that
competition will regulate the industry in the absence of state control, includ-
ing such aspects as the topographical distribution of the theaters, excessive
competition between neighboring theaters, and the distribution of genres
across Paris. Indeed, Millin’s general point is that because of free-market
competition’s capacity to regulate such issues, the fears expressed about dereg-
ulation are unfounded. In fact, Millin may in many ways be considered
an important, but hitherto neglected, forerunner of Le Chapelier, for the
following reasons.
First, in his Sur la liberté du théâtre, Millin de Grandmaison expressed his
opposition to privilège, which is based on a “negative” understanding of law and
consists in conflating liberty with a free market, in the sense that it is despotic
to refuse permission to an individual to open a theater, even to protect that
entrepreneur from ruin.20 It is that logic which leads to his conclusion to §3,
and this turns up almost verbatim in Le Chapelier’s bill: “Every theater
entrepreneur must have the right to establish a theater when and where he
wishes, solely by declaring it to the municipality who shall not be able to
oppose it, save in circumstances laid down by the law” (p. 32). On the question
19 Cf. Millin de Grandmaison: “To create a second theater is to give a second privilège,
not to abolish monopoly; this is all very well for the second entrepreneur or company,
but does little for liberty, and nothing for dramatic art; for there is no art without liberty.
To create a second theater is to share out monopoly, not to break its chains.” Sur la liberté
du théatre (Paris: Lagrange/chez les Marchands de Nouveautés, 1790), p. 18.
20 Millin de Grandmaison, Sur la liberté du théâtre, p. 30, 25.

of published plays, Millin’s position is also close to that of Le Chapelier21
and establishes a patrimonial dimension to theater; it refuses the Comédie-
Française’s argument that financial arrangements with authors gave them
property over plays: this aspect has been discussed at length elsewhere.22 So
has his view of censorship, which allows only for control over works in the
confines of the law, while respecting article 11 of the Declaration of Rights,
which declared the freedom of expression. On the specific question of the
“petits spectacles,” Millin turns on its head the familiar argument about
the dissipation [ paresse] of the lower classes and suggests that to occupy such
people at performances of good plays is far preferable to leaving them unoc-
cupied. The same argument was made by Rousseau in the Lettre à d’Alembert:
at the very best, theater was morally neutral because it distracted, but it would
not reform customs [mœurs] (pp. 19–20). Most important, Millin points toward
Le Chapelier in one paragraph that conflates instruction and liberty:
Since it is impossible to force the dissipated to work, there is no cause to
close the theaters to the common people. Instead we should try to make
them into a site of public instruction, without them noticing. This is
the only way to make theaters useful, instead of dangerous. To do so, we
need to give theaters complete freedom, and remove licentiousness not
by censorship and prohibitions, but by wise and stringent laws. (p. 22)
Millin de Grandmaison, of all writers on this issue, came the closest to the
position that would finally prevail; his is the sole text that combines consider-
ations of censorship, economics, and privilège over repertory and the existence
of theaters in the same text, and under the same heading. It is, in short,
the closest to a general discussion of what liberty might mean. In practice,
however, the municipality was at precisely this moment applying the brakes to
allowing new theaters, as demonstrated by an aside in a contemporary text
on the banning of a proposed new theater on the rue Saint Antoine.23 This
reluctance of the mayor and the police to allow an unchecked proliferation of
21 “A printed play must not be subject to different laws from a printed book. It should
therefore belong to the public a certain number of years after the death of its author. . . .
If plays do not become national property after a certain time, they should belong to the
author’s heirs, not to the actors” (pp. 33–34).
22 “Our masterpieces constitute the national theater, wherever they are read or per-
formed. To use that term for the institution in which they are performed, is to confuse the
container with the contents” (pp. 34–35).
23 [Nicolas-Etienne Framery], De l’organisation des spectacles de Paris, ou Essai sur leur
forme actuelle . . . (Paris: Buisson/Debray, 1790), pp. 259–60.

theaters was to lead to at least one angry response, on 29 May, from a theater
director named Leroy, who pointed to the ambiguous legal situation which
prevailed. Leroy had become owner of a “spectacle bourgeois” and had reno-
vated the building in response to popular demands that the theater be reopened,
only to receive a refusal from Bailly and Lescène des Maisons. Leroy’s point was
that since theater was not forbidden by the law, and that the Declaration of the
Rights of Man allowed for any action not forbidden by law, owning and operat-
ing a theater should not be arbitrarily allowed or, conversely, forbidden.24
He would be vindicated by Le Chapelier’s bill, and his calls were in line with
the debates I have described, but his claim seems to have fallen on deaf ears.
At this moment in 1790, debates over theater in Paris conflate moral improve-
ment with economic deregulation and point toward Le Chapelier, if not beyond.
What were the consequences for the Opéra?
the opéra in the “era of liberty”

One of the most substantial texts on theater administration of the early
Revolution, Framery’s De l’organisation des spectacles de Paris (1790) considers
the question of the Opéra in the context of this recent debate. Framery’s text is
difficult to date with precision: in a previous discussion, I noted that it was
written before the report of 27 March 1790, given that its supplement refers to
that report, still pending when the main body of the text was prepared; but it
was published between 27 March 1790 and 26 February 1791, the date of its
review in the Mercure.25 In addition, a passage on page 248 refers to the arrêt of
10 April 1790, which allows us to date the supplement, and hence the publica-
tion of the whole, from after that date. Framery’s discussion is different from
that of Quatremère and others, as he discusses specific theaters under different
headings and is more concerned with the financial and managerial dimensions
of the Opéra itself; his text is therefore less an argument from principle.
Although he also differs from Quatremère—for instance, in his belief that the
Commune could legitimately consider the Opéra its material property—his
conclusions converge with Quatremère’s that the Opéra should be run
by enterprise. Framery was hostile to the Opéra for personal reasons, and his
24 Réclamation contre un nouvel abus du pouvoir et de l’autorité: A MM. les Représentants de

la Commune. On this text, see Lacroix, II.vi.633–34.
25 See my previous discussion in Nicolas-Etienne Framery and Lyric Theatre in Eighteenth-
Century France (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2003), pp. 255–65. I discuss the dating of
this work on p. 255.

discussion not only attacks privilège per se but also the Opéra’s past abuse
of its privilèges with respect to the subordinate theaters of Paris. He had
had direct experience of this as the librettist of L’Olympiade and champion of
parodies of Italian opera, prepared for the Comédie-Italienne but outlawed by
the Opéra in 1779. More important, he contests the argument that the conser-
vation of the Opéra is relevant to national cultural prestige or that national
subsidy is either fair or necessary (pp. 10–12). Of particular note is his claim
that the burden of subsidy should not fall upon taxpayers unconcerned with
the institution itself.26
If his conclusion is similar to that of Quatremère and Peuchet, his remarks
on the respective merits of enterprise and committee direction are original, for
he points out that committee direction had been disastrous in the 1780s,
and this further strengthens the growing view that the optimum mode of
governance is private enterprise. He argues that the 1780 experiment was self-
contradictory and therefore self-defeating because it placed the director in a
position of total responsibility but limited authority, citing the March 1780
arrêt that contains the following provision in article V: “the Opéra shall be
managed by a Director-general, with full and absolute freedom, under the orders of
the Secretary of State for Paris, and the inspection of the Secretary of State’s
representative.”27 This discussion allows Framery to conclude that the Opéra
should be run by entrepreneurs and protected but not propped up by the
government, particularly since he claims that it should be possible to find ways
of reducing the annual bill of the institution by the amount of its deficit, which
he estimates quite accurately at 60,000 livres. His supplement, clearly written
shortly after 10 April, insisted that the temporary compromise which the
Assemblée générale had reached must be temporary, and that delays in finding
a definitive solution would be fatal [ funeste]. He suggests that one of the
current submissions from prospective entrepreneurs should be accepted or that
the new, definitive municipality should make a final decision immediately.
The anonymous public pamphlets from April diverge, but they show that
the question of whether the Commune should “conserve” the Opéra was
paramount.28 It is clear, therefore, that the municipality was continuing to
dither between deregulation and the continuing protection of a small number
of individual institutions, which perhaps explains the rather impatient tone of
26 De l’organisation, p. 12.
27 De l’organisation, p. 15. Italics in original. See also p. 16n1, a note strongly
sympathetic to Dauvergne’s predicament as such a director from 1780 onward.
28 Réflexions sur le projet qu’a la Commune de s’emparer de l’Opéra, undated.

Millin’s text. Yet whatever their differences of principle, the various texts
and speeches seemed to agree that in practice the optimum mode of governance
for the Opéra was management by entrepreneurs. Quatremère’s intervention,
although reopening the question of privilège, still implicitly agreed with the
Rapport des commissaires, that the optimum future for the Opéra was enterprise,
since the report had rejected any notion that the Commune was competent
to run an individual theater itself. Henceforward, this solution prevailed;
and the question became how. The Conseil de Ville decided first to consult
the crown to confirm that the Commune was indeed now in overall legal
control of the theaters: a deputation consulted Minister Saint-Priest on
8 April.29 At the same time, the directors of the Opéra were asked to call an
extraordinary general meeting of all performers to elect representatives who
would be invited to the Conseil de Ville on 9 April to discuss the Opéra’s
future.30 Peuchet’s article of 18 April in the Moniteur also points to the munic-
ipality’s unwillingness to run the Opéra,31 as well as the view, held by some,
that the crown should again be approached to take the institution back.32
However, the principals persisted in their hostility to the idea of an entrepre-
neur, reiterating their wish that the Opéra remain under the authority of the
municipality and be run by committee; this stance should hardly have sur-
prised the authorities, as it had been their position for over a year, expressed
both in print and in private. As a temporary measure, the 10 April meeting of
the Conseil de Ville approved an arrêt that provisionally retained the status
29 Lacroix, I.v.627–29; Robiquet, Personnel municipal, pp. 262–68. Saint-Priest replied

on 8 April to the effect that the crown ceded the Opéra to the municipality, giving up for
one year the land and buildings at the Porte Saint-Martin site, the use of the magasins on
rue Saint-Nicaise, the painters’ workshop for one year, all décors and costumes; the city of
Paris was to pay all pensions, including those already contracted. This response was
reported to the Conseil de Ville on 9 April (Lacroix, I.v.651–53). Discussions between the
representatives of the Conseil de Ville and Saint-Priest over certain material details of the
handover continued; see Lacroix, I.v.662–65. See also Saint-Priest’s letter to the mayor,
reprinted in Leroux’s July 1791 report (discussed later), pp. 97–98, also reprinted in
Pougin, Un Directeur, pp. 75–76. An undated “Notice” gives a longer list of issues to be
tied up in the context of this handover—particularly what movable property would
be included and whether the magasin would be part of the transaction—and seems to be
directly preparatory for Saint-Priest’s response: see AN: O/1/616 #178. See also #177:
“Premieres decisions qu’il seroit necessaire de donner.”
30 Lacroix, I.v.627–29.
31 Moniteur, 108 (18 April 1790), iv.139.
32 Lacroix, I.v.671–72. Cf. Réflexions sur le projet, in favor of royal administration
for reasons of continuity, and hostile to Dorfeuille and Gaillard (“fairground theater
directors,” p. 4).

quo in terms of administration: The municipality was to take on provisional
administration of the Opéra, and its management was to be handed to a
committee of performers and municipal officers, under the surveillance of the
four municipal departments concerned (namely of national property [domaine],
public establishments [établissements publics], police, and civil engineering
[travaux publics]);33 on 16 April, this was reported to the Assemblée générale.34
Brousse-Desfaucherets and his colleagues were mandated, in the meantime
(12 April), to consult the constitutional committee about the constitutional
position of the theaters, but this consultation was inconclusive.35
In April 1790, Louis-Joseph Francœur was appointed administrator of the
Opéra (one source describes him as a sous-directeur, the other as semainier
annuel).36 Francœur had run the public balls held at the Opéra by lease (along
with Simonneau and Denesle) since 1788 for 30,000 livres per year; also, he was
a member of the Opéra’s management committee.37 This was a new post,
which carried 4,000 livres in salary, and its incumbent headed a committee of
principals, sectional representatives, and an unspecified number of commis-
saires elected by the artists as a whole.38 It is surely in the context of that
appointment that Francœur drafted a 105-page plan for the management of
the Opéra in 1790.39 Its twenty-five chapters mainly cover staffing, internal
organization, and salary, much of it restating provisions from the 1789
Regulations. It bears manuscript revisions, suppressions, and annotations
and was probably never put into practice. But its diagnosis and solution
with respect to staffing are worth briefly mentioning: pp. 2–3 promise three
revisions of the salary structure and cutting of overheads, and the comparative
table, pp. 4–5, shows that staff numbers had risen from 300 in 1785–86 to
33 Lacroix, I.iv.663–64 and II.iv.74–76; manuscript copy in AJ/13/2.I. See also

Moniteur, 108 (18 April 1790), iv.138–39. On 26 April, it was decided that the DEP alone
should oversee the comité, and that it should merely consult with the other three over
specific issues (I.v.138–39). On 3 May, La Rivière complained about this position, but his
intervention was “écartée par la question préalable” (I.v.220).
34 Lacroix, I.iv.663–64. See also Lacroix, I.i.503.
35 Lacroix, I.v.59, 137.
36 AJ/13/2.I.: “Extrait du Registre des délibérations du Comité d’administration
Composé dans les quatre departements de la Municipalité delegués a Cet effet par le
Conseil de Ville du 18 avril 1790.” [Francœur’s appointment as semainier annuel ]; O/1/617
#43, f.2r.
37 Castil-Blaze, L’Académie impériale de musique, i.509.
38 AN: AJ/13/2.II.: “Commissaires.”
39 AN: AJ/13/2. “Extrait du nouveau plan pour l’Académie Royale de musique fait
[+en 1790] par L. J. Francœur cy devant Directeur de l’Opera.”

331 in 1788–89, if all artists, préposés, and commis are counted; the biggest
increase was in stage hands [ouvriers et artistes], and the last year had seen the
beginnings of cuts, lowering staff to 319. The major preoccupation of the plan
was economy, via staffing reductions. This may explain the growing tension
between Francœur and the artists in the following months. In fact, according
to his own manuscript account of the history of the institution, he resigned as
early as 7 May and left management to the committee, refusing requests from
the mayor to return to his post. The text also shows, however, that he advised
the four representatives of the Commune who took over from him40 and that
he again became régissseur général of the Opéra under Leroux after 30 April
1791. It seems therefore there was more administrative continuity to the Opéra
throughout the Revolution than once thought, even though Francœur’s formal
status was variable.
2. The Address to the Districts

The Assemblée générale was clearly uneasy with the temporary solution
adopted because, as previously agreed, it appointed commissaires on 10 April
to write a consultation memo to the sixty districts of Paris, asking each to give
an opinion on the future of the Opéra, a text approved on 12 April.41 The text
repeats that the Opéra should be retained and that continuous service should
be assured (one fear was that in the absence of a rapid solution, it would fold
for the coming year, and there was also a fear that the artists would be attracted
by other theaters if they were not quickly reassured about their future or that
of the Opéra);42 the Opéra is variously described as “essentiel” and “utile”
because of (1) its commercial value to the city of Paris; (2) its propensity to
attract foreign visitors; and (3) its ability to enhance local (other sources say
national) artistic glory: a standard argument that hardly anyone contested.
40 Po: Rés.591: “Essai historique sur l’Etablissement de l’Opéra en France,” pp. 26–27.
AN: AJ/13/2.I.: Arrêt du Comité d’administration à propos du paiement des appointe-
ments des sujets de l’Opéra, dated 1 May, suggests the jurisdiction of four such commis-
saires: Brousse Desfaucherets, Champion de Villeneuve, Delassousse?, and [1 illegible
name], who signed an arrêt authorizing Francœur to pay the artists on 1 May 1790.
41 Lacroix, I.iv.664, 685. Adresse du Conseil de Ville aux citoyens, réunis dans les LX.
Sections, composant la Commune de Paris (12 avril 1790): Lacroix, I.iv.696–99.
42 Hence, I surmise, the “Notice,” s.d.: AN: O/1/617 #57, f.1r, asking for an urgent
decision on the future of the Opéra. The address also makes reference to the urgency of the
situation (p. 3).

The address presented three possible modes of governance among which the
sixty sections were asked to choose, as follows: management by employees
[préposés], at the financial risk of the owner [ propriétaire]; private enterprise;
management by the performers, who would share profits or losses. In the
meeting that discussed this address, opinion was clearly divided and turned
upon the Opéra’s capacity to survive financially without national or municipal
subsidy, as Peuchet pointed out, in a passage where he continued to suggest
that the crown could still be persuaded to take the Opéra back if the very
future of the institution were demonstrably at stake.43 This debate was still
characterized by an ambivalence between viewing the Opéra as a patrimonial
monument useful for the progress of the arts, and conversely as a working
theater that provides entertainment and should survive because entertainment
logic entails confidence in public taste and opinion, which allows for a free-
market situation. Clearly the debate over privilège had not yet prevailed within
the Commune.
There were few responses to this address, and those that have survived were
submitted late, suggesting that the sections did not consider this a priority; at
least one text shows that partisans of representative government were opposed
to the address having been made at all.44 Of those responses known (three
published, and traces of a further eight),45 there is no consensus over the right
solution, and the responses show a fundamental disagreement on the role of
theaters in the nation.
The surviving printed responses tend to contradict one another. That of
the Récollets (30 April) 46 calls for the issue to be postponed until a defini-
tive municipal council has been established whereas the Saint-Nicolas du
43 Moniteur, 108 (18 April 1790), iv.139.

44 On the total number of responses traced, see Lacroix, I.iv.700, 705–6. On Peuchet’s
objections, see Lacroix I.iv.699–700, and Moniteur, 116 (26 April 1790), iv.202–3.
45 Responses from the Cordeliers (29 April), the Récollets (30 April), and Saint-
Nicolas du Chardonnet (25 June) were published and are discussed later. Aside from these
printed responses, reference is made in subsequent meetings to responses from Saint-Louis
en l’Isle (20 April; Lacroix, I.v.85), the Trinité (3 May; Lacroix, I.v.215), and St-Etienne du
Mont (21 May; Lacroix I.v.498), although these all appear to be inextant. Lacroix’s éclair-
cissements also show, citing Beffara, that a further five responses were made, although there
is no trace of them in the acta of the Commune: those of the districts des Minimes, de
Popincourt, des Carmes Déchaussés (all 19 April), Saint-Jacques de l’Hôpital (21 April),
and des Capucins de la Chaussée d’Antin (29 April). Lacroix, I.iv.706.
46 District des Récollets: Rapport relatif au mode d’existence de l’Opéra En la Séance extraor-
dinaire du Vendredi 30 Avril 1790 . . . (Paris: Imprimerie de Potier de Lille, 1790), 4 pp.
signed: Cally, Dufresne, Robin, Lecrosnier, de Mondot, Kornmann; p. 4 consists of an

Chardonnet district claimed (25 June) that the Opéra should remain in the
hands of the municipality and be run by a committee comprising municipal
officers and artists from the Opéra47 (including painters, architects, decorators,
and composers).48 The Commune’s call for the conservation of a public theater
useful to the state49 made an explicit analogy with commerce and saw the
Opéra as an “établissement public,” the very issue at the root of the previous
year’s controversy between Lescène des Maisons and Bailly. Quatremère de
Quincy had already combated this view, claiming that for the Commune to
claim any authority over a public establishment was tantamount to feudal
privilège, and supporting instead the free industry of individual citizens. Marie-
Joseph Chénier, by now well known for his role as author of Charles IX, went
further in penning the report that heads the response made by the District des
Cordeliers, published subsequent to that district’s meeting of 29 April.50 In it,
Chénier expands concepts already expounded in paratexts to Charles IX.51
From the same premise, that theatrical performance was the fruit of individual
industry and as such could not constitute the property of the Commune,
Chénier denounced what he perceived as the ideological basis of theatrical
culture during the Old Regime:
[T]heaters belonged to the agents of executive power, such as the
Minister for Paris in the case of the Opéra, or the First Gentlemen, in
the case of the other theaters. They considered these establishments as
their inheritance, and handed out the money paid by the public, not to
the individual performers whose talents were so valuable to the public,
but to their mistresses and their valets. . . . Gentlemen, is it not right
that performers who act, sing or dance in public should only recognize
“Extrait du procès-verbal,” signed Locré, Libert. BN: Lb40.1549. This copy also carries, on
p. 1, an annotation in ink which reads “Reçu le 16 . . . 1790.”
47 Rapport fait à l’assemblée générale du district de Saint-Nicolas du Chardonnet, relative-
ment à l’Opéra, le 25 juin 1790, par M. Lessore ([Paris]: Impr. de Cailleau, n.d.).
49 The letters patent of 29 March 1672 began by noting that “Les sciences et les arts
[sont] les ornemens les plus considérables des Etats”; see transcription of this document in
Recueil pour la commission spéciale des théâtres royaux (n.p.: n.pub., n.d.), p. 1. For a late eigh-
teenth-century attribution to Colbert of this economic argument, see “Notice,” O/1/617
#57, f.3r.
50 Extrait du registre des délibérations du district des Cordeliers le 29 avril 1790 ([Paris]:
Didot le jeu[ne], 1790).
51 Extrait, pp. 1–2.

the authority of the National Assembly in matters of law, and the
Municipality in matters of police? (pp. 2–3)
Bracketing the rather absurd image of the first gentlemen distributing shares
of the profits of the Opéra to their mistresses, Chénier makes an important
connection between public money and individual talent, limits the authority
of the municipality to policing (consonant with the Plan de la municipalité of 12
August 1789, and Quatremère de Quincy’s early interventions), and insists
that the freedom of individual citizens be constrained only by the law (similar
“legicentric” bases to censorship can be found in paratexts to Charles IX).52 But
Chénier then discusses the annual deficit of the Opéra, claiming (speciously)
that the subsidy provided by the king was public money (because, he claims,
“l’argent du roi c’est l’argent du peuple”). He attacks what he describes as pri-
vate subsidy by virtue of the point developed just before, that the theaters are
the home of individual talent and industry. Just as these are inalienable, so
should they also be both self-supporting (i.e., not bailed-out in case of deficit)
and self-gratifying (i.e., they should share profits of their own industry):
Quatremère had not mentioned this (p. 4). The anonymous Discours et motions
of 1789 and Fréron’s review had concurred: “It is truly ridiculous,” Fréron
cried, “that any theater should fail to be self-supporting, and that it should be
a burden on the Nation.”53 Moreover, by virtue of the principle that citizens
should be free to perform and to enjoy the profits of that industry, so payment
of dues [bail ] to a major theatre is condemned because it constrains that free-
dom by charging citizens for the right to exercise their “industry” in public.
Along with Quatremère, Chénier then takes issue with the long-standing
notion that the Opéra is the first theater of the nation, because he favors
morally improving and patriotic works, and stigmatizes lyric theater and bal-
lets as frivolous. His conclusion is that the Opéra should be subject to the
municipality only in the matter of policing and that it should otherwise be a
self-supporting theater among others, run by private enterprise and subject to
the law. The text is followed up by a second pamphlet from the Cordeliers, this
time signed by Fabre d’Eglantine, Paré, and Duplain, which rails against the
confusion of lines of authority currently in force and calls for the theaters to
be administered solely by the administrators of the mayor, not the Commune
as a whole, or the DEP, nor indeed the police.54
the Comédie-Française, 1777–1791,” in SVEC, 373 (1999), pp. 235–371.
53 AL, vi.478.
54 Arrêté du district des Cordeliers.

3. Temporary Regulation of the Opéra by the Municipality
The Opéra was only one of a range of institutions that were under temporary
municipal control and which awaited definitive municipal regulation. In the
meantime, discussion of a bill on judicial order continued sporadically in the
National Assembly throughout July and August. The police’s responsibility
over public order in the theaters was restated on 9 July.55 The relevant section
(Titre XI) was adopted on 11 August and confirmed that control over public
order in the theaters was under the jurisdiction of the police.56 The décret as
a whole was finally adopted on 16 August.57 In addition, on 31 August, the
Commune restated the Opéra’s recent internal règlements while awaiting a
report from the commissaires nominated on 10 April to take temporary
control over the institution.58
While the legal and managerial position was slowly being clarified, the
institution faced an increasingly acute financial crisis. The minutes of the
Commune’s meeting of 10 April show that certain other Parisian theaters were
refusing to pay their annual dues to the Opéra at the same time the Hôpital-
Général was calling for the Opéra to pay the quart des pauvres.59 For instance,
the Comédie-Italienne reacted to the prospect of Mlle. Montansier’s troupe
taking over the erstwhile Théâtre des Beaujolais at the Palais-Royal in April
1790 by questioning, not unreasonably, why it should continue to pay money
to the Opéra when this new theater was allowed to open, stating rhetorically,
“either liberty exists, or it does not.”60 Yet the Comédiens were overruled,
and Mlle. Montansier was to prevail because she was able to invoke her
royal privilège as Directrice des spectacles de la cour. That is, the municipality was
55 Viguier-Curny, Rapport fait au Conseil général de la Commune sur l’organisation des

bureaux de l’administration de la Municipalité, conformément aux arrêtés du Corps Municipal
(Paris: Imp. Lottin, 1791), 48 pp., cited by Lacroix, II.v.313.
56 Art. 3, 3o: AP, xvii.724.
57 AP, xviii.89–90. See appendix to the session of 16 August, which reproduces the
Décret sur l’organisation judiciaire, du 16 août 1790 (AP, xviii.104–10). For a printed version,
see [Ars: 8-H-9058 (27,9)]: Décret sur l’organisation judiciaire, du 16 août 1790, sanctionné
par lettres-patentes du 24 du même mois ([Paris]: Baudouin, [1790]), 38 pp.
58 Lacroix, I.vii.58–59, 63. The Règlements in question are those of 30 March 1776, 27
February 1778, and 13 March 1784.
59 There is evidence of the Ambigu-comique asking for a rebate in March 1789
(AN: O/1/615 #661).
60 AN: AJ.13.3.II.D. “Protestation des Comédiens-Italiens contre l’ouverture d’un
spectacle de chant et de danse par Mlle Montansier,” 8 April 1790, cited in Letzter and
Adelson, Women Writing Opera, pp. 105–6 and 266 (note 144).

beginning to relax privilège before discussions of theatrical freedom began,
even though it had not yet dismantled the system of dues.61 Discussion of the
report of 27 March had already suggested that the droit des pauvres should be
replaced by a series of benefit performances, yet this had not happened.62 But
as early as 24 July it had been pointed out that although the constitutional
committee had explicitly decided that existing laws should be maintained
until their repeal, the dues might nonetheless be reduced.63 The Opéra was
thus stuck between a rock and a hard place, unable to count on part of its fixed
income at a moment of financial crisis while remaining liable for a bill that
should have been abolished.64 The Le Chapelier law was to solve this problem,
in the sense that its suppression of privilège also by definition suppressed such
dues from the subordinate theaters. But as late as 8 November 1790, we can
trace a protest from the Opéra showing that the issue was yet to be resolved.65
Indeed, despite the unprecedented success of receipts for the theatrical year, the
authors called for the Commune to “protect” the Opéra from the increasing
competition of the petits spectacles and their refusal to pay dues which, the
authors claim, has lost the institution some 400,000 livres, and without which
the institution could have produced a profit in excess of 100,000 livres. The
implication of the petition is that with such help the Opéra can be efficiently
managed by a committee of artists: the request was phrased in terms of protec-
tion rather than subsidy. The petition also makes reference to a plan to
continue to vary the repertory and to offer more new productions, and to
61 Michèle Root-Bernstein, Boulevard Theater and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Paris

(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press, 1984), passim, and particularly
pp. 29, 55, and 57, where she writes: “It is significant that the Boulevard’s artistic
expansion in the early 1770s was largely at the expense of the Opéra.”
62 Lacroix, I.iv.512; see also AN: O/1/500, pp. 556 (21 November 1789 to Necker,
enclosing request from the administrators of the Hôpital général), 560 (19 November to
La Ferté, enclosing the same), and 570 (Response to the administrators of 22 November).
My thanks are due to Pierre Jugie, curator at the Archives Nationales, for allowing me
to consult this document. Villedeuil’s response is sympathetic to the Opéra, asks the
administrators to waive the debt, and promises to write to the treasury on their behalf.
63 Report by Champion on 24 July (Lacroix, I.vi.574–75). La Ferté had suggested
lightening these dues in his “Notice,” AN: O/1/617 #57, f.3r.
64 See also the “Histoire de l’opéra jusqu’en 1793,” which insists upon the financial
difficulties encountered in 1789–90 (f. 48).
65 Adresse présentée à la Municipalité de Paris par les membres du comité de régie de l’Opéra
(Paris: Prault, 1790), 8p [AN: AD.VIII.44]. See also Lacroix II.iv.74–76. The Bureau de
ville had mandated a comité de régie to chase outstanding debts of this type back on
31 August 1790 (“Histoire de l’opéra jusqu’en 1793,” p. 60).

reform the finances without changing governance, as long as the institution
is protected and pensions maintained.66 (An ancillary demand is for a new
règlement.) No formal response to the petition has been traced, but important
decisions were made about the Opéra throughout November, and it is likely
that this petition formed part of the evidence considered.
As stated, commissaires had been appointed on 10 October to report on the
divisions of the municipality, and their reports were discussed in early
November. On 12 November, the Opéra was placed under the authority of the
DEP, and commissaires were asked to produce a report.67 This was the Leroux
report, only presented in August 1791; in the meantime, however, the National
Assembly was debating a separate series of laws that profoundly modified the
course of the Opéra and superseded the municipality’s debates.
4. The Le Chapelier Report, January 1791

As a response to the various pressures discussed, as well as to petitions from a
society of playwrights originally established by Beaumarchais, a plan for the
removal of the Comédie-Française’s privilège was formed by Isaac-René-Gui Le
Chapelier in a bill read before the Constituent Assembly on 13 January 1791:
when ratified on 19 January, the law allowed for any citizen to open a theater
as long as she or he informed the municipality.68 As is well known, this decree
removed monopoly rights from the royally protected theaters while leaving
the municipality some limited authority over such theaters, abolished the
property rights of theaters over plays that had been acquired by private finan-
cial arrangement, and confirmed that the police were responsible only for
controlling public order.
Le Chapelier’s bill has been described by critics as the vindication of the
dramatic authors and the moment of establishment of “freedom of the the-
aters,” which is the way in which Le Chapelier himself spoke in his speech of
13 January. Yet the speech clearly also saw the bill as the necessary means for
66 Compare, below, the deficit quoted by Leroux in August 1791 and Lasalle’s claim
in the Analyse du rapport that the committee had presented a plan for cost cutting, which
Leroux had ignored.
67 Lacroix, II.i.266 (art. 11).
68 Rapport fait par M. Le Chapelier, Au nom du Comité de Constitution, sur la Pétition des
Auteurs dramatiques, dans la Séance du Jeudi 13 Janvier 1791, avec le Décret rendu dans cette
Séance. Imprimé par ordre de l’Assemblée Nationale (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1791). For
the text of the debate in the chamber, see AP, xxii.210–16.

the regeneration of French theater, based on the key principles of liberty
and free competition. Drawing on previous legislation and upon the Dec-
laration of the Rights of Man, Le Chapelier subsumes what he calls the art of
comedy under “industry” (as had discussions of publishing the previous year),
and considers privilège as consubstantial with the “despotism” of the Old
Regime (indeed, some slippage is also observable toward the related term
“préjugé ”):
This talent, long condemned by prejudice, has at long last taken its
meaningful place in society thanks to reason and law: may all be allowed
to exercise that talent. . . . We now recognize that all may make use of
their talents without restraint, that only privilege constrains this human
faculty, and that certain people have used arguments about the progress
of the arts and the conservation of morality to support this abuse of
authority. (AP, xxii.211)
By virtue of the Declaration of Rights, then, the exercice of “industrie” must
not be constricted nor restricted. Moreover competition has positive effects on
the “perfectibility” of the art, as it excites emulation, develops talent, fosters
notions of glory, and unites interest with pride (ibid.). By contrast, privilège
constrains the imagination of authors, because, says Le Chapelier, by the very
nature of things, privilege is despotic. By virtue of an unquestioned equation
between privilège and despotism—two key terms constantly applied to the Old
Regime—the system of royal tutelage over the erstwhile Comédie-Française
is condemned as antithetical to the progress of the art, ideological conflations
we have already observed in the interventions of Quatremère, Millin, and
Framery.
Yet this passage does not quite make Le Chapelier a libertarian, for although
his bill effectively deregulated the theater establishment, his views on theatri-
cal quality are explicitly given; and in answer to the fourth question, dealing
with policing, he claims:
Theaters must purify mores, give lessons in civic virtue, and become a
school for patriotism, virtue, and all these affectionate feelings which
bind families together and give them their charm; for although these
are only private virtues, they are still the basis and guarantee of public
virtues. (ibid.)
Private virtue as the basis for civic virtue, theater as purifier of mores, and
school of patriotism: this view of theater is not only in line with René Tarin’s
conceptualization of the theater of the Constituent Assembly as school but also
looks forward to the educative principles of the Comité d’Instruction Publique

some three years later.69 Whereas previous interventions were confident that
public opinion would distinguish good works, and competition would regu-
late quality, Le Chapelier believes that theater should direct—not follow—
public taste. Indeed, article VI placed such theaters under local control, albeit
limited, pending further legislation on public instruction (an aspect that crit-
ics, eager to trumpet the “freedom of the theaters” generally forget).70 Although
Le Chapelier sidesteps the issue of legislation in regard to such educational
policy, expressing the hope that a “wise ruling” will regulate this part of public
education, he nonetheless leaves the door open for legislation that would regu-
late plays. Moreover, as Hemmings has shown, the press of 1791 pointed to
what it saw as a dangerous loophole in the same article, where it stated that
municipal officers could neither stop nor suppress a play, “sauf la responsibilité
des auteurs & des comédiens.” Hemmings notes:
The vital phrase here was “saving the responsibility of the authors and
actors.” The press at the time, or part of it at least, regarded this as
constituting a dangerous loophole. “Has it not been demonstrated,”
wrote a contributor to the widely read Révolutions de Paris, “and do we
not have the proof daily, that the soundest ideas being by their very
nature the strangest to a nation only just emerging from servitude, are
precisely those which, when given publicity, cause the greatest efferves-
cence?” In other words, it is possible that a play putting forward very
advanced but nevertheless tenable opinions might cause a considerable
uproar in the theater, for which “the actors and authors” would be held
responsible.71
(We shall see later that exactly this problem was frequently to arise.) In this
respect, Quatremère and Millin were much more liberal. Le Chapelier, by
contrast, hesitates between the Jacobin position that will prevail during the
Terror and the liberal principle we have already seen. According to this latter
view, the duty of the lawmaker is to remove privilège and unfair restrictions on
man’s faculties. Such is the faith in liberté that it can be trusted, unfettered, to
allow for the development of the dramatic arts. Liberté can, almost by defini-
tion, create an evolution toward grandeur. By contrast, monopoly is ethically
tainted and patronage is its partner because it creates unnatural relationships
69 René Tarin, Le Théâtre de la Constituante, ou l’Ecole du peuple (Paris: Champion,

1998).
70 Rapport fait par M. Le Chapelier, p. 23.
71 Theater and State, p. 54.

between men. Under Louis XIV, actors were merely subaltern courtiers, more
concerned with the favor of court superiors than with the applause of the public
(AP, xxii.212). Such constraints on liberty have the concomitant effect of con-
stricting genius. And in answer to the objection that the reign of Louis XIV
saw the creation of a not inconsiderable number of theatrical masterpieces,
Le Chapelier is obliged to concede that the plays of Corneille, Racine, and
Molière were excellent, as were those of Crébillon and Voltaire in the succeed-
ing century, but he points out, quite earnestly, that in a free society there
would have been many more examples. Yet throughout the speech is apparent
the opposite position, characterized not only by cultural and aesthetic elitism
but also by the view that theater is there to educate. According to this view,
the nation is guarantor of liberty, and liberty is guarantor of public order and
of morality. The freedom of culture in the nation will itself bring about prog-
ress in the dramatic arts. Moreover, in answer to the hypothetical objection
that such deregulation will bring about too many theaters, and a consequently
too great distraction for busy citizens, he said:
Leave it up to interest to create useful establishments; this certain guide
will temper the taste for theater and will privilege lucrative enterprises
over costly dissipations. If, once theaters have become free and have
been purified by a stringent regime, the public attends instructive
theaters, so much the better. (AP, xxii.212)
These were not comments made in cynical bad faith, nor were they an intel-
lectual pirouette. Instead, and on the evidence of similar comments in the art
world, they belie an earnest belief that liberté could only improve the condition
of arts and sciences in society because they would free that self-interest, or
social selfishness, which thinkers since Mandeville had seen as a useful motor
for social good, if properly channeled. The same went for the productions
of such authors that should, for the good of French society, become public
property. Voltaire is the example, and a particularly useful one, because his
genius seemed to point toward the Revolution (AP, xxii.212); hence, works in
which he spoke energetically in favor of liberty and against tyranny must
be conserved. In a coda to the debate, ironic with hindsight, Robespierre spoke
in favor of the freedom of the theaters, asking for the removal of article VI
(on municipal inspection) or the adjournment of the whole bill (a request
finally rejected). The bill was set aside for another date and finally ratified on
19 January 1791.
There are several consequences of the Le Chapelier law. First, because
surveillance was left in the hands of the municipalities, a distinction had to be
made between repressive and preventive censorship. Repressive censorship is

the stopping of performances once a run is under way; preventive censorship
regards the manuscript and either alters or suppresses a work before perfor-
mance.72 The situation after 1791 was that the state was obliged to tolerate
whatever a playwright chose to offer and a manager or company of actors
agreed to put on the stage; the most that could be done by those who might
view the work as politically reactionary or morally suspect was to make that
argument in print. It was incumbent upon the police to decide whether the
work was likely to cause public disorder; if so, they might legitimately forbid
performances in order to forestall civil commotion. Were this to happen, it
would amount to a form of censorship, but repressive rather than preventive.73
Second, we need to recognize that Le Chapelier’s bill was part of a wider
process—ideologically driven—of the suppression of corporations and the
bringing of men of letters as well as French citizens, to which latter category
Le Chapelier and others sought to assimilate them, under the more direct
tutelage of the state.74 However, proclaiming the “liberty of the theaters” was
all very well in principle, but it also meant forgoing a system of cultural con-
trols over what continued to be considered elite state culture and a source of
national pride. It is also clear that there were concerns, both before and after
the bill, about the deregulation of the theatrical world and its removal of the
ability effectively to police the auditorium.75 Hallays-Dabot has pointed to
some limited evidence that pre-performance censorship continued for at least
another month after the law.76
To speak of freedom of theaters after January 1791 is therefore problematic
on two counts: (1) it ignores the continuing state meddling in repertory, all the
more insidious for being sporadic; and (2) it forgets that popular surveillance
exerted control over performance that was every bit as stringent and was also
physically threatening.77 As such it opened up a series of debates that were to
culminate in the committees’ adoption of theatrical control: the period of
“propaganda” as it is usually considered. Particularly eloquent here is the
72 Odile Krakovitch, Hugo censuré – La Liberté au théâtre au XIXe siècle (Paris: Calmann-
Lévy, 1985), p. 79.
73 Theater and State, p. 93.
74 Steven Kaplan, La Fin des corporations (Paris: Fayard, 2001).
75 Réflexions sommaires, Sur quelques articles du Décret concernant les Spectacles (n.p.: n.
pub., n.d.).
76 Histoire de la censure théâtrale, pp. 163–64, discussing modifications to II.v of
Bélisaire, subsequently approved by Joly on 11 February 1791, and a police report on
Le Pont de Varennes.
77 A point made by the Chronique de Paris, cited by Hallays-Dabot, pp. 167–68.

Duchesne Almanach of 1793 (i.e., reviewing 1792), a long discussion of the
advantages of competition as a stimulant to artistic progress in the context of
Revolutionary regeneration, which ends:
The Government cannot do too much to animate and support the
theaters: we have learned with pleasure that the two theaters which
have particularly distinguished themselves by performing patriotic
works, had received subsidies. We must not stint on these subsidies; we
must distribute them fairly and with discernment. They must not
become protectionist or favoritist; those who receive them need to rec-
ognize that it is the nation itself which is encouraging them; and we
hope that the minor theaters, those attended by less fortunate citizens,
can also participate: this would excite a kind of emulation between the
different entrepreneurs that will make their theaters pure and useful.78
Subsidy, then, was explicitly seen as a means of ‘encouragement’, a concept to
which I return in chapter 4. Finally, it is worth noting that Le Chapelier’s law
was a contested ruling, not a foregone conclusion. Pamphleteers in 1789 were
frequently against the multiplicity of theaters for moral and social reasons.79 It
is worth noting that theater professionals were frequently against it too, just as
the Paris book guild’s members, while supporting reform, did not endorse the
suppression of the guild as such because they “were aware of the commercial
necessity of policing the publication of printed matter.”80 In short, the Assembly
in 1791 broke the link between freedom of commerce and protection of prop-
erty in the world of ideas. The proliferation of theatrical institutions after
19 January 1791 led to a chaotic system of ephemeral institutions and thereby
to the further weakening of the Opéra, no longer able to rely upon dues from
subordinate theaters and to protect monopoly rights over lyric theater, before
the reassertion of strong repertory control just eighteen months later, on
2 August 1793, and a situation where the state continued tacitly to fund those
theaters it found worthy of support.
78 Clearly though there were also voices in favor: SdP-Duchesne, 1793, pp. 41–45
(“Observations sur l’état actuel des Spectacles”).
79 See, among others, Coup d’œil rapide sur les spectacles de Paris (n.p.: n.pub., n.d.), the
petition presented to the Assembly (Lacroix, I.iii.157, 161–65), and the Comédie-Française’s
protest (AP, xxiv.281–82).
80 Carla Hesse, Printing, pp. 61–62.

5. Leroux’s Temporary Governance and Report (July 1791)
On 30 April 1791, Francœur was appointed temporary régisseur of the Opéra,
with an annual stipend of 6,000 livres: he was to report to Jean-Jacques Leroux
des Tillets, a former doctor and man of letters who had been commissioned by
the Conseil de Ville on 12 November 1790 to report on the Opéra as a member
of the DEP.81 Francœur’s own account of the period in question is unclear over
the reason(s) why he was nominated as régisseur in April 1791, as are the other
sources for the period in question,82 but it is clear that the municipality saw
this as a first step toward the Opéra being taken over by enterprise: the Adresse
of 8 November 1790 had asked that the Opéra remain in the hands of the
municipality, but the Bureau Municipal was clearly hostile to this solution.
Leroux’s later report was to claim that the Opéra must be run by an individual
who not only knew intimately the internal workings of the theater, but
who had an interest in the success of the enterprise (presumably, a financial
interest was meant: the passage is unclear). Appointing Francœur as temporary
director at least solved the first of the two problems. On 29 July 1791 the
Bureau Municipal ratified a series of new règlements for the Opéra that had been
prepared on 30 April: introduced by Leroux, the rather self-aggrandizing
preamble points to the great improvements that have been achieved in the
management of the institution. The long règlement itself is essentially a supple-
ment to and restatement of the principles of the règlement of 1784, revised for
the new context of municipal control,83 the majority of which concerns ques-
tions of internal order and discipline; it was clearly intended as a stopgap while
81 Pougin, Un Directeur, p. 6n, citing Grimod de la Reynière, Censeur dramatique,

30 Floréal An VI. BM, 30 April 1791. Lacroix, II.iv.70, 74–78. See also the “Extrait du
registre des délibérations du Comité d’administration” of 18 April 1790, which appointed
Francœur to the earlier post but which cites a stipend of 4,000 livres AN: AJ/13/2 #
unnumbered. Internal correspondence relating to this appointment is scarce. Six letters by
Francœur may be consulted in BNM: Vb-Bob-20370 (1 letter) and Rés-L.A. Francoeur,
Louis-Joseph (5 letters), but these date from later. On Leroux, see Robiquet, Personnel,
pp. 529–30.
82 “Histoire de l’opéra jusqu’en 1793.”
83 Arrêt du Conseil d’Etat du Roi. Contenant Règlement pour l’Académie Royale de Musique.
Du 13 Mars 1784 (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1784). BM, 29 July 1791. Lacroix II.v.553–58;
also published as Extrait du registre des délibérations du Bureau Municipal. Dans la séance du
vendredi 29 juillet 1791. M. J. J. Leroux, au nom des Administrateurs au Département des
Etablissemens publics ayant dit: . . . (Paris: Imp. Journal des Clubs, 1791).

a new règlement was being written (indeed, one followed on 1 April 1792).84
The document does, however, restate the composition of the comité of the Opéra
(Table 3.1), and demonstrates that as well as “external” authority via his report,
Leroux was also assuming authority over the internal regulation of the institu-
tion in place of the crown officials who prepared the arrêt of 1784 for the
Conseil d’Etat.
Note that the orchestra is not represented in this structure, as it was under
the municipality, where the performers elected representatives of singers,
dancers, and for the orchestra; nor is there any representation of the adminis-
trative staff (in contradistinction, for example, with the situation of the
Comédie-Francaise, whose board included lawyers). In addition, the three
named municipal administrators for the DEP were Cousin, Le Camus, and
Leroux.85 A separate affiche dated 15 July also shows that Leroux decreed that
no admittance was to be given to the Opéra to those not currently on duty in
some way.86 This structure remained in place for the remainder of 1791: a
final decision from the municipality on the Opéra’s future was delayed, since
Table 3.1. Composition of the comité de l’opéra, July 1791

Régisseur (président du comité) Francœur
Maître de théâtre La Suze
Maître de danse Gardel
Maître de musique Rey
Adjoint au maître de musique Rochefort
Premiers sujets (basse taille, alternativement) Chéron
Lays
Premiers sujets (haute-contre, alternativement) Lainez
Rousseau
Premiers sujets de la danse Vestris
Nivelon
Dessinateur Pâris
Maître des costumes Berthélemy
Chargé des rapports Watteville
84 Règlemens pour l’Académie Royale de Musique Du 1er. Avril 1792 (Paris: Imprimerie de
l’Opéra, 1792); Règlemens pour l’Académie Royale de Musique Concernant le Théatre
(n.p.: n.pub., n.d.).
85 Lacroix, II.v.554–55; Extrait, p. 3.
86 Po: Opéra.Arch.18.1791.

discussion of Leroux’s final report, although available and presented to the
Corps Municipal on 17 August, was frequently adjourned before finally being
discussed on 14 November.87 The Bureau municipal’s temporary regulation
also adds provisions that strengthen existing rules, especially those pertaining
to the discipline of individual subjects, and articles 7–8, which set out more
stringent rules for understudies and suggests that the issue had hitherto been
problematic.
In his report, Leroux refers to some of the difficulties that temporary gov-
ernance has caused: the number of different interested parties and the time
taken to reach decisions; potential conflicts between different jurisdictions,
particularly over the approval of expenditure; and the difficulty of obtaining
sufficient discussion time in meetings of the Bureau municipal, which approved
major expenditure, given the number of competing issues for the agenda
(p. 43). Although there is little substantive discussion of the decree of
13 January in this report, Le Chapelier’s bill is referred to, in a passage advising
caution with respect to the ever-growing number of minor theaters in Paris.
(pp. 51–52) Given that deregulation, Leroux’s report is conservative in
continuing to argue for municipal subsidy for the Opéra. But it is in line both
with the tenor of Le Chapelier’s bill and also the previous Rapport des commis-
saires, not to mention recent discussions in the Commune (especially in April)
in advocating entrepreneur governance of the theater, leaving the municipality
only a right of inspection and surveillance. In his text, it is considered axiom-
atic, as always, that the Opéra should be conserved, and several passages come
close to adopting a “monumental” view of the institution, as a long-standing
establishment that has been central to Parisian cultural life for over a century,
against other more ephemeral theaters. Another originality of his work is the
argument that because opera is a spectacle characterized by enchantment
[magie], it needs particularly careful production. In other respects, however,
the discussion has much in common with previous accounts. Leroux presents
devastating figures, on the basis of which he claims that the Opéra cannot
break even, but that careful economies can reduce that deficit. For instance, he
claims that the deficit in 1790 is 435,845 livres 3s 5d. These figures are wildly
different from those of La Ferté’s Précis because the basis of calculation is
different, seemingly incorporating all subsidy into the debit column. A year-
by-year comparison of finances then leads him to the conclusion that the Opéra
87 Lacroix II.vi.124, 131–35, 151. The report was forwarded to the Corps Municipal
on 16 November: it called for further reports before making final decisions: Lacroix, II.
vii.196, Robiquet, p. 642–43.

cannot be self- supporting, and to the foresighted observation that the Opéra
is more than usually vulnerable to the depredations of state meddling because
of its continued need for subsidy. However, the real novelty of Leroux’s report
is the political rupture it contains, refusing the traditional argument of national
glory in favor of a newly conceived political relation, where the Opéra is the
emblem of liberty, in a passage worth quoting in full:
We shall not say, like so many, that the Opéra is the most magnificent
theater of Europe, and consequently of the whole universe; that it
attracts an abundance of foreigners to Paris; or that however expensive
it is, national glory requires that it be supported. All these arguments
admittedly have some foundation, and may have had currency during
the epoch of abuse, when vanity was a living insult to the poor, and
when it was considered politic to adorn our chains with flowers to make
our servitude seem, if not lighter, at least more brilliant and attractive.
But under the Constitution, now that the fatherland is ours again, the
very spectacle of a free people protected by the laws, where abundance
is about to return, is enough to attract admirers from all over the world;
and the only expense we need to make is that which benefits all citizens.
(pp. 26–27)
The economic argument is also reconfigured. In the absence of this claimed
political utility, the Opéra is merely a costly amusement: a tax on the people
of Paris. Instead, Leroux’s argument for conservation is economic: the Opéra
should be encouraged if it creates work for the urban people out of the enter-
tainment of the rich (p. 27). In short, the institution makes money circulate
around Paris by attracting “des curieux.”
On the issue of whether the Commune has property rights over the Opéra,
Leroux answers in the affirmative. He lists all relevant laws and arrêts at the
end of his report, stating that the crown had property rights over the institu-
tion by virtue of the original letters-patent of 1672, and that this property was
transferred to the Commune in 1790 (p. 36). But the municipality should not
retain the Opéra, says Leroux, because its running is enormous and complex,
because that role needs complete freedom, because municipal authority slows
decision making, and because the municipality cannot inspect all employees
[préposés]. Instead, the Opéra should be run by an individual personally con-
cerned with its success over a long period and who can learn from his own
mistakes. For this reason, a director [régisseur] answerable to the municipality
is not what is needed either; the institution must be given over to entrepre-
neurs, with the municipality retaining overall property of the institution and
a right of surveillance.

However, Leroux also insists that the city of Paris should make pecuniary
sacrifices to help the Opéra (in its own interest). This should give entrepreneurs
the financial freedom to avoid over-hasty economies, because such penny-
pinching militates against the necessary magnificence that even Leroux is
unable to forget (p. 53). There follows a list of conditions that entrepreneurs
should be bound by and which in Leroux’s estimation could save half of the
current annual deficit. These include freeing the Opéra of all existing debts,
paying all pensions, providing the entrepreneurs with a long enough lease to
finally draw some profit, giving them access to the storerooms and other out-
buildings on the rue Saint-Nicaise as well as to the auditorium, free use of the
repertory and materials for the duration of the lease, and a free hand in
the internal administration. The municipality should simply approve new
règlements and scrutinize the entrepreneurs’ financial position (this latter
includes taking a deposit [caution]). These are very similar conditions to those
set out by La Ferté in late 1789.
Leroux’s paper was attacked by Lasalle (secretary of the comité ) in a printed
Analyse (undated) for going against the principals’ calls for comité-governance.
Lasalle insinuates that nepotism is at stake and claims that Leroux has delib-
erately highlighted certain aspects of the finances in order to exaggerate
the Opéra’s deficit and show entrepreneurship to be necessary; in fact, comité
governance could be financially successful, particularly in view of a plan for
savings prepared by the principals which Leroux, it is claimed, has ignored.
Leroux defended himself in a memorandum the following year.88
The attack on this report was clearly aimed at keeping the Opéra in the
hands of a committee of artists and avoiding enterprise, as it claims that Leroux’s
own temporary administration has increased the deficit.89 The report also
spawned another pamphlet on the future of the institution,90 whose justification
for the institution has tipped over into Republican rhetoric, which I discuss in
88 A Monsieur le Procureur-général-syndic du département de Paris (Paris: De l’imprimerie

civique, 1792). Much of this responds to points of detail on salaries, accounting proce-
dures, and the loan of costumes and scenery from the Menus-Plaisirs. It states that Leroux’s
accounts have been lodged with the Bureau des Etablissements publics, which may explain
why they have not survived in their entirety.
89 Analyse du rapport de M. J-J Le Roue [sic], administrateur des établissements publics,
concernant l’Opéra, présentée à M. le procureur-général syndic par le sieur de la Salle, secrétaire
perpétuel de l’ARM, breveté du roi (n.p.: n.pub., n.d.). On this text, see Lacroix II.vi.135.
90 Albert Leducq, Examen de ces deux questions: L’Opéra est-il nécessaire à la ville de Paris?
Faut-il en confier l’Administration ou l’entreprise à une société ([Paris]: Imprimerie de F. V.
Poncillon, rue Tiquetonne, [1791]).

the following chapter as a background to the policy of the Terror, and which
concludes that the institution needs support from the municipality and should
be run by it for several reasons: to hand the theater to enterprise is to place
private interest before public [ général]; the theater by necessity would run at a
loss (hence would need municipal subsidy even if ran privately); and the public
advantages outweigh the cost both of subsidizing and managing the theater.
The problem with private management, for the author of this pamphlet, is that
it will be inclined to cut costs.91 As for retaining and supporting the institution,
these reasons include emulation as a motor for artistic progress and the civic
advantages of the reciprocal relationship between liberty and artistic progress.
The cosmopolitan argument has taken a back seat, as has the economic one.
Ideology outweighs municipal economics in this pamphlet from late 1791.
6. The Financial Situation of the Opéra, 1791:

A New Relationship with the Municipality
Leroux’s report was clearly sensible in its estimation that the Opéra, whoever
ran it, would need regular subsidy; and history was to prove him right. It is
also clear with hindsight that deregulation did nothing to solve the financial
difficulties of the major theaters, quite the reverse. Although deregulation does
not seem to have been conceived to in any way punish these theaters or to put
them out of business, the specificity of the Opéra could perforce not be consid-
ered in the context of a bill whose entire point was the strict equality of treat-
ment accorded to theaters in the capital. It is also clear that the law received a
mixed reception. Pamphlets attacking it were published in the following
year;92 and the Opéra’s finances became heavily dependent upon subsidy, which
continued to be paid when necessary. There are three aspects to this policy of
subsidy, which do not concern the Opéra alone. First, theaters were frequently
“invited” to give poor-relief benefit performances, which seems to be the
immediate way the municipality decided to compensate for the abolition of
the droit des pauvres.93 This was not in itself a new practice—it happened before
91 Ibid., pp. 16–17.

92 See also the play premiered at the Théâtre du Vaudeville on 14 February 1792, Les
Mille et un théâtres (Paris: Salle du Vaudeville, rue de Chartres, 1792), attributed by Barbier
to François Fouques-Deshayes, dit Desfontaines de la Vallée.
93 For instance, on 21 December, theaters were “invited” by the Corps municipal to
give three such performances; Lacroix II.i.xlvi, 570, 573–77. The monies were then

1789 as well—but it slanted progressively toward “patriotic” causes.94 The
Opéra had participated in the ceremonies for Voltaire’s “Pantheonization” of
July 1791, for instance, and also gave a free performance in honor of Louis
XVI’s acceptance of the Constitution in September 1791 and participated in
further festivities to mark that event.95 Second, subsidy was given on a case-by-
case basis, meaning that theaters needed to apply; and the patriotic rhetoric of
their submissions to the municipality suggests selective support for political-
ideological, rather than cultural, reasons. In this respect, the template for the
rhetoric of such submissions is given in the request for subsidy by François
Boursault, who had been director of the Grand Théâtre of Marseille and was
now director of the Théâtre de Molière:
He has always considered it his duty only to perform those plays which
can direct public opinion, enlighten men’s minds, excite patriotism and
propagate those principles of liberty and equality which alone can serve
the happiness of France and assure the success of her Revolution.96
Similar rhetoric pervades most theaters’ approaches. From 1790 onward, most
made patriotic donations to fashion themselves as Revolutionary institutions;
equally important are the numerous benefit performances made for worthy
causes. Indeed, as André Tissier has pointed out, this “exterior” participation
in the civic life of Paris is one of the most noteworthy aspects of the 1789–90
theatrical season.97 The wording of theaters’ representations to the municipal-
ity suggests that they were reciprocal actions made in the expectation that the
distributed by the Bureau Municipal: see Po: Arch.Div.13.1 “Droit des pauvres,” a typed
document dated 9 April 1791 relating to the distribution of profits from two benefit
performances in the amount of 30,872 livres, 12 sous. It is not clear exactly when the
droits des hopitaux or droits des pauvres were finally stopped. As late as 30 April 1791 a
pamphlet was printed in favor of their maintenance by a certain Fortin, “homme de loi,
électeur de 1789,” arguing that the provision of the Le Chapelier decree for any citizen to
open a theater, although it suppressed theatrical monopolies, did not stop this tax from
being payable, that the Municipal plan (XI.6) confirmed it, and that it was right that
an industry that created certain social ills should collectively make financial amends:
Hopitaux et spectacles. Question. Les droits des Hôpitaux sur les Spectacles, doivent-ils être conservés
ou supprimés? ([Paris]: Imprimerie de la rue Notre-Dame des Victoires, [1791]).
94 AN: O/1/619 #373, 374, 375, 381.
95 Lacroix, respectively I.v.338–39, vi.323–25, vi.345–54. Cp. AN: F/21/1051 #1
(16 September 1791).
96 F/17/1069 #2: request from Boursault, 1792: f1r. For other examples, see CSP,
i.70–73, 357–59.
97 Les Spectacles à Paris pendant la révolution, i.26.

body concerned would “afford support, goodwill and protection,” as expressed
in the Comédie-Française’s submission on 12 January 1790.98
A third feature of municipal subsidy is that the DEP remained abreast of
the theaters’ financial situation and provided sporadic (but substantial) sub-
sidy. According to figures kept by that department, the Opéra’s debt increased
massively over the early Revolution. We have seen in the previous chapter that
its annual deficit in the 1780s averaged at 60,000 livres, plus 250,000 livres in
royal subsidy. The financial statement of municipal accounts of 28 July 1790
lists the Opéra’s deficit at 400,000 livres (under the DEP).99 Yet Anson’s report
of 28 November 1789 on behalf of the finance committee suggests that
projected expenses for the next two months included 430,000 livres per month
in subsidy for the Opéra,100 the composer Piccinni also receiving a subsidy
from the city of Paris, which it could ill afford.101 Municipal subsidies have
been traced between 3 December 1790 and July 1791102 and seem to have
become regular around May 1791 when it became clear that the Opéra needed
constant support (i.e., around the time of Leroux’s report). This support seems
to have consisted of regular sums of money, over and above regular salary pay-
ments, which the municipality also made. Finally, a later submission from
Langlois to the minister of the interior Jean-Marie Roland (22 January 1793)
claimed that the Constituent Assembly had also decreed that “établissements
utiles” would be given “encouragements.”103
7. “Concession”: The Appointment of Francœur

and Cellerier (April 1792)
On 16 November 1791, as a final effect of Leroux’s report, the municipality
finally decided that the Opéra would be transferred to private enterprise, and
it nominated commissaires to consult with interested parties; discussion
98 Aside from the Opéra’s self-fashioning, such dons patriotiques have also been traced
by the Comédie-Française (Lacroix, I.iii.425, 654–55; I.iv.162), the Comédie-Italienne
(Lacroix, I.iii.446, 508; I.iv.497, 525), the Variétés (Lacroix, I.iv.525), the Théâtre Feydeau
(AP, l.132), the Théâtre de Molière (AP, l.177–78), and the Théâtre du Marais (idem).
99 Lacroix II.v.547.
100 AP, x.322–23; Lacroix, I.ii.555.
101 Lacroix, I.vii.408, 417–8. 6 October 1790.
102 Lacroix, II.i.435, ii.338, 708, iii.267, 311–2, 602, iv.77n3, 280, 492, v.118–9, 272,
323, 464, 551–52; vi.260, 356. Cp. AN: F/21/1051 #1 (letter of 3 December 1790).
103 AN: F/17/1069 #3.

explicitly noted the need for continuing subsidy even when the Opéra would
be run by private entrepreneurs. This was a clear difference from previous
discussions which had claimed that the institution could, in private hands,
break even.104 A decision was also made that the institution should find new
premises in the center of Paris, a long-standing claim; and final reports on the
funding, location, and regulations for the handover were commissioned.105
The Almanach Froullé for 1792 states that the crown and the municipality
were collaborating on a new location and had chosen the Place du Carrousel.106
This prospect had long been considered, and it is worth noting that this
project precedes any involvement by entrepreneurs. (The account may be
mistaken in its claim that the king had agreed to support the Opéra
financially: this is clearly contradicted by the provisions of the April 1790
handover.)
I have been unable to trace material supporting Francœur and Cellerier’s
subsequent claim that the municipality then printed a memorandum explain-
ing the arrêt of 16 November 1791, inviting submissions for the Opéra.107
There was controversy over the very fact of receiving such submissions: on
9 February a coalition of the Opéra’s creditors made formal representation to
the Bureau de Ville that no deal be made with private entrepreneurs without
their consent, a representation the Commune ignored.108 We do know, how-
ever, that five written submissions from potential entrepreneurs, including
that of Francœur and Cellerier (Mémoire, p. 3) were submitted to the Commune;
theirs was selected and commissaires were authorized to negotiate with
them from 13 February 1792.109 Francœur was already known to municipal
officers as temporary régisseur of the Opéra and therefore offered continuity of
management. Cellerier was closely implicated in municipal bureaucracy as
well as Revolutionary architecture: he was president of the Commune’s expenses
committee in 1791 and one of the eight lieutenants of the mayor, Jean-Sylvain
Bailly, responsible for civil engineering. He was also one of the deputation sent
to Saint-Priest on 8 April 1790, and one of the authors of the address to the
104 Lacroix, II.viii.73–74. (16 November 1791.)

105 Anson and Brousse Desfaucherets were appointed on 25 November for the
Département, cf. AN: O/1/629 #89. These finally reported on 21 January 1792. Lacroix,
II.viii.74n1.
106 AGSPP-1792, p. 124.
107 Mémoire pour Francœur et Cellerier, pp. 2–3.
108 “Histoire de l’opéra jusqu’en 1793,” p. 61.
109 Mémoire pour Francœur et Cellerier, p. 6.

districts concerning the future of the Opéra.110 Francœur and Cellerier, in their
submission, agreed that the main financial problem of the Opéra was its loca-
tion; and much of the negotiation concerned a necessary move when the Opéra
was ceded to entrepreneurs.111 Accordingly, Leroux wrote to the intendant of
the civil list, La Porte, suggesting that they exchange buildings on the rue
St-Nicaise, which housed the Opéra’s storerooms [magasins], for the Stables on
rue St-Honoré: an official request was subsequently addressed to Louis XVI,112
and the exchange was approved.113 It is also clear, although Francœur and
Cellerier are not named in these documents, that they were already favored by
the negotiations, and that this had become known, as witness Dorfeuille’s last-
ditch attempt to stop the transfer (presumably with a view to taking over the
Opéra himself).114 Francœur and Cellerier’s other conditions, summarized in
their later Mémoire were these: a lease, fixed at twenty-four years in the original
submission, and thirty years in all subsequent documents; freeing the Opéra
from all debts before the transfer; use [jouissance] of the auditorium at the
Porte St-Martin, the magasins on rue St-Nicaise, all costumes, decorations,
and machines, and all other mobilier; and a subsidy from the municipality of
150,000 livres per year (pp. 3–4). They note that a brevet was accorded on
110 On Cellerier, see Robiquet, Personnel municipal, pp. 264–68.

111 Lacroix, II.viii.118. Sources for these negotiations, which began (presumably
before Francœur and Cellerier’s selection) on 5 December 1791 and were completed on 29
February 1792, are as follows: AN: O/1/629 #88-90 (“Nouveaux projets de la munici-
palité de Paris; arrêté du corps municipal”); 91–100 (“Arrêtés et correspondance au sujet
de l’échange de terrains de la rue St-Nicaise et des Ecuries du Roy”); 101 (“Bon du roi pour
ledit échange qui attribue les terrains de la rue St-Nicaise au Roi, pour une salle d’Opéra”);
102–7 (“Correspondance relative au projet, minutes et originaux”).
112 AN: O/1/629 # 88 (Leroux’s first letter to La Chapelle of 5 December 1791); and
# 98 (Untitled 3-page official request, dated 29 January 1792 and signed Leroux, Cousin,
Le Camus, Anson, Brousse [Desfaucherets] and [illegible]).
113 The rue Saint-Nicaise, subsequently demolished, prolonged rue de Richelieu in a
southerly direction toward the river (current rue de l’Echelle). The stables were to the west
side of rue Saint-Nicaise. The Grande Ecurie du roi was bound between the intersection of
what is now rue Saint-Honoré and rue des Pyramides (north side), and extended to the
passage linking the Grande Ecurie du roi (current place des Pyramides) and the Salle du
Manège (rue de Rivoli). The two sites were one single block apart. Hillairet, Dictionnaire
(1963), ii.427.
114 AN: O/1/629 #97 “Copie de la lettre que j’ai adressée a M. Anson Président du
Directoire le 24 1er [1792].”

29 February 1792115 and that the process was ratified on 6 March (p. 4).116 On
8 March 1792 (and not 6, as they claim) the handover [cession] was formalized
by notarized act, registered on 12 March, signed before Maître Jean-Nicolas
Giard, by Francœur and Cellerier, Pétion, three representatives from the DEP,
and three further municipal officers.117 The cession was for thirty years, to start
from 1 April 1792,118 and gave them authority over the Opéra, with all out-
standing debts, pensions, and “engagements” paid, property over all mobilier
and immobilier, costumes and scenery, against an unspecified deposit. A second
deposit of 300,000 livres was also paid. Among their agreements, they were to
construct a new, larger auditorium on the site of the royal stables on rue
St-Honoré.119 To pay for these obligations, Francœur and Cellerier took out a
loan of 1,500,000 livres in a notarized act also signed before Me Giard on
29 March 1792.120 This loan created sixty shares of 25,000 livres: shareholders
115 This presumably refers to the king’s official approval of the transfer, of which a
manuscript fair copy, dated 29 February 1792, is held at AN: O/1/629 #106.
116 A concession was defined by Boucher d’Argis in the Encyclopédie as “ou ce qui est
accordé par grace, comme sont les brevets & priviléges accordés par le prince; ou une
certaine étendue de terrein que le Roi accorde à quelqu’un dans les colonies Francoises,
à la charge de le faire défricher; ou un abenevis, c’est - à - dire la faculté de prendre une
certaine quantité d’eau d’un étang, ou d’une riviere ou ruisseau, pour faire tourner un
moulin ou autre artifice, ou pour arroser un pré; ou la distribution que le bureau de la ville
fait aux particuliers qui ont acheté de l’eau. Voyez Privilége.” iii.804.
117 MC: ET/XVIII/900: “Cession de l’Entreprise de l’Opéra; La Municipalité de Paris
à MM.rs francœur et Cellerier, 8 Mars 1792.” The Mémoire pour les sieurs Francœur et Cellerier
Concessionnaires de l’entreprise de l’Opéra (n.p: n.pub., n.d.) analyses the act on p. 5ff.
118 And not on 10 August 1792, as stated by Paul d’Estrée, Le Théâtre sous la
Terreur, p. 81.
119 Nicole Wild, Dictionnaire des théâtres parisiens, lists Francœur and Jacques Cellerier
as “dir[ecteurs] entrepreneurs” from 1 April 1792 (p. 304), but primarily concerned as it
is with the nineteenth century, it gives no information on this abortive building project,
listing only the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin (27 October 1781–August 1794) for the
period in question (p. 299). A requirement of the Conseil général (31 March 1792) was
that the new theater include free seats for the poorest citizens: “Histoire de l’opéra jusqu’en
1793,” pp. 61–62.
120 MC: ET/XVIII/900: “29. Mars 1792. Prospectus de l’Emprunt de l’Opéra,” ms.
12 pp. [3 pp. blank]; printed copy correcting orthography and removing deleted words
and expressions at AN: AJ/13/44 #446 (8 pp.). The printed act is undated; the notarized
manuscript is dated 29 March 1792. On the handover, see also two later texts written in
self-defense: Francœur et Cellerier, concessionnaires de l’Opéra aux citoyens composant la commis-
sion nommée par le Corps Municipal, pour les affaires relatives à l’Opéra (n.p.: n.pub., n.d.), 15
pp. (p. 1); Mémoire pour les Sieurs Francœur & Cellerier Concessionnaires de l’entreprise de l’Opéra
(n.p.: n.pub., n.d.), pp. 4–10.

would have free entries to the theater, and page 8 of the printed act
(not attached to the notarized manuscript copy) gives a sample shareholder
agreement.121
the règlement of 1 april 1792

One of their first acts was to firm up the regulations of the institution. The
règlement they provided on 1 April 1792 described itself (as had that of Leroux
in July 1791) as a modified version of the major royal règlement of March 1784.
Such modifications as there were had been made, it was claimed, in the context
of private enterprise, although no references are made either to Francœur and
Cellerier themselves, nor indeed of their role.122
The first change was to the comité, renamed the comité d’administration, which
now also included lawyers, a secretary, and an inspecteur général.123 The règlement
explicitly stated that this committee was responsible not only for reading
libretti (as it always had been) but also for making decisions over adjudicating
rehearsals, and that it was to meet no fewer than five times per week. (Compare
with the weekly meetings stipulated in 1784.) The text also established a
second tier of authority, nominating a “Directeur du théâtre,” who was a gen-
eral manager responsible for the smooth running of the company, such as
ensuring that costumes were correctly distributed, that internal discipline was
respected, or that performers were in place before a performance was to start.
As such, he was clearly expected to work closely with the “Inspecteur général.”
The secretary’s role was essentially unchanged. Chapter II [Titre] of the règle-
ment covered librettists and composers and restated the reception process for
new works; here the changes are more substantial, firming up and accelerating
the adjudication process. A separation continued to be made between existing
Opéra librettists and “new” writers (whose work would pass though a prelimi-
nary approval stage in the form of a paper adjudication by the committee; II.2,
pp. 9–10); the subsequent practice of selection was also maintained: when the
score was complete, the work was to be judged by the committee along with a
number of “artists and connoisseurs”; only after this could the work be given
121 These shares were fixed at 4 percent interest: AN: AJ/13/44 #61, f.3r.
122 Règlemens pour l’Académie Royale de Musique Du 1er. Avril 1792 (Paris: Imprimerie
de l’Opéra, 1792); Règlemens pour l’Académie Royale de Musique Concernant le Théatre (n.p.:
n.pub., n.d.). Lacroix notes (II.vii.223–24 [17 October 1791]) that a certain Beaunier sent
a “soumission relativement à l’administration de l’Opéra” to the mayor of Paris, which was
sent on to the DEP for a report. The text is inextant.
123 Spectacles de Paris, 1792, pp. 33 (committee members) 36 (personnel).

an adjudicating rehearsal [répétition d’essai], “sur le grand théâtre.” As far as
I have been able to determine, this split the existing practice into two separate
stages; the first, one assumes, was a partial run-though, for example, at the
keyboard.124 A répétition générale still took place, to which authors each had
the right to invite up to thirty people (and the administration 120); so these
were very much public affairs, albeit with a maximum audience of 180. Authors
also had the right to demand that works which had satisfied all of these stages
and were accepted be not just produced but performed within six months of
acceptance, a speeding-up with respect to prior practice, where production
often took a calendar year, if not more. Honoraria remained unchanged from
1784 (although the rights of authors’ heirs were recognized, and honoraria were
payable to heirs for five years from the death of the author). Rotation proce-
dures were modified, however. An interesting genre division was established
(II.12, p. 12), separating works into tragedy, opéra de genre, and opéra comique;
for every two works performed in each group, one would have to follow
strict rotation (i.e., be top of the list in terms of ancienneté ); the choice of
the second was free.125 This was presumably adopted in order to establish a
degree of freedom in programming and to allow more recently written works
to jump the queue (such as, one assumes, pièces de circonstance). The rights
of authors to delay performance, pick days of performance, or remove their
work, were severely curtailed (II.12–13, p. 13); the comité retained absolute
discretion over the removal of an unsuccessful work, without formalized
principles regulating a fall dans les règles, although compensation of 2,000 livres
was due to authors if the administration failed to perform a work once
the production process was under way (we shall see later that the Opéra was
often to renege on this). For the first time, there is also mention of a legal
contract to be signed by the Opéra and authors (II.15, p. 13), although no copy
has been found.
In terms of performers, the règlement formalizes performance schedules to a
considerable extent, insisting on four performances per week (III.preamble,
p. 14); overtime was payable to performers for any extra performances. It also
rationalized staffing (III.1: “Nombre des sujets,” pp. 15–16); although the
wording was rather vague, it was clear that a raft of redundancies was on its
way. The committee retained the right to use understudies, on the grounds
124 On rehearsal and the production process, see my discussion in “Repertory reforms
at the Paris Opéra on the eve of the Revolution” in La Vie Théâtrale en France au XVIIIe
siècle, ed. John Golder: special number of Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies, 32.4
(December 2009), 563–76.
125 I return to this issue of genre division in Chapter 5.

that these would derive benefit from the experience; and it was stated that no
feux were payable to principals for performances in which their understudies
were performing (p. 20). Pensions were calculated from the fixed portion
of salaries [appointements] and recipients were required to have a minimum of
fifteen years’ prior service. However one novelty is that those dismissed after as
little as eight years were also henceforth to receive a pension, unless they were
dismissed for disciplinary reasons. Rules also covered pensions to be paid to
those injured at work, something never previously discussed (III.IV.4–5,
p. 21). Finally, some degree of discipline was delegated to the three categories
of maîtres (respectively responsible for: singing, ballet, and the orchestra), in
that they were to be informed of illnesses and had the power to give short
congés of up to three days; they also had responsibility over levying disciplinary
fines; they were also to act on the performers’ behalf in securing gratifications
and reporting on performance and progress. Disciplinary fines remained in
force, but their level was reduced to make them a deterrent rather than a
resented punishment (III.X.preamble, p. 29). Subsequent offenses were taxed
more highly than first offenses, and fines were generally expressed as a fraction
of a month’s traitement. Clearly, then, the internal organization of the Opéra
was reformed at the beginning of Francoeur and Cellerier’s tenure and along
lines that had been set out at the end of the 1780s: reforming discipline, staff-
ing, and reception and rotation of works. In spite of these aspirations, there is
evidence that practice continued to be erratic, especially in terms of accounting
and repertory.
In the next chapter we shall see that Francœur and Cellerier’s period of gover-
nance was short-lived, as they fell foul of the policy of the Terror over reper-
tory. But this handover, in theory, concluded the period of municipal
involvement in the Opéra, save for external inspection and for the police’s
authority over matters of public order. As such it was the culmination
of a process whereby successive authorities tried to wash their hands of the
institution while ensuring that it remained open. As a result, public policy was
theoretically blind to the specificities of theaters and had relinquished any
legal authority to intervene in repertory. Deregulation and the maintenance of
a national cultural institution were strictly incompatible, and practice was for
a patched-together policy where sporadic subsidy was offered to tide theaters
over, even though they were supposed to stand alone. Arguably this was the
worst of both worlds, for as it removed the financial security that crown pro-
tection had afforded, it nonetheless bought subservience and the subordination
of artistic standards to rapidly written works aiming at political-ideological
manipulation. These latter works are fascinating to a cultural historian for

what they tell us of the intersection of aesthetics and ideology, but they are a
far cry from the operas of Gluck and have disappeared from the repertory
without a trace. We shall see the full implications of this contradictory policy
in the following chapter, which traces the trajectory of the institution down to
the end of the Terror.

4 The Opéra during the Terror
The period spent by Francœur and Cellerier as directors of the Opéra coincided
with the most politically fraught segment of the Revolutionary decade and
lasted only slightly more than eighteen months. During this period, although
the theater industry remained officially “deregulated,” official censorship
returned under several guises: municipal scrutiny over repertory was intensi-
fied, the Legislative Assembly began the establishment of executive commit-
tees which were to take over much of the regulation of culture during the
Terror, legislative authority shifted from that Assembly to the Convention
with the abolition of the monarchy and the declaration of the Republic,
and the law of 2 August 1793 was voted. Most important, the period saw
jurisdictional disputes between the Convention and the Commune concerning
a range of issues, most notably the king’s trial (10 December 1792–14 January
1793) and subsequent execution (21 January 1793), but also cultural regula-
tion, particularly as concerned performance of theater and opera.1 A full analy-
sis of the Terror’s policy on theater is beyond the scope of this study; but the
issues affecting the Opéra were, as before, relevant to many other institutions,
and I will discuss examples of other theaters in order to sketch the context in
which the Opéra was working. Sources are less complete than for previous
periods. In particular, the absence of archives of the Commune and of the
police means that we have only partial records pertaining to such aspects as
censorship and municipal scrutiny of repertory. But I believe that enough
1 Martin Nadeau, “La politique culturelle de l’An II: Les infortunes de la propagande
révolutionnaire au théâtre,” AHRF, 327 (January–March 2002), 57–74.
material has survived to examine samples of most aspects of repertory choice
and control in this period and that remaining sources do not support
the hypothesis of univocal state control, making theaters into instruments of
propaganda.
The classic account of the Terror, is that the state attempted to impose
Republican repertory upon the theaters, such as in the law of 2 August 1793,
which insisted that all theaters give weekly performance of three patriotic
plays (Brutus, La Mort de César, Guillaume Tell), and that theaters and audiences
were unfavorable to such control but were ultimately forced to comply. This is
explicit in the subtitle of d’Estrée’s classic work on the theater of the Terror,
which glosses the period’s production as “un théâtre de la peur” but similarly
informed most subsequent studies until repertory statistics such as those of
Kennedy and Tissier forced scholars to reexamine the evidence. Although
archival accounts indeed show sudden compliance of theaters in the form of a
sudden change in their repertory, the specific provision of 2 August that the-
aters perform the three works mentioned seems to have been generally ignored,
and no penalties were imposed. Although the record is fragmentary, there is
much evidence of confusion among Convention, committees, and Commune
over the right of the state to censor plays and to ban performances.2
Disproportionate attention to the closure of the Comédie-Française for per-
forming Paméla has, in most accounts, bolstered a view of the Terror as cultur-
ally repressive. But the record shows that state attempts to impose and control
repertory were infrequent and often unsuccessful, in reason of such disputes.
Instead, the Terror sees theaters appealing to a tri-partite audience: popular
scrutiny, press criticism, and state surveillance. In the case of state surveillance,
financial incentives created coercive measures, yet the frequent confusion
between the policies of different committees or between state committee and
Commune, or between either of these and the press, meant that there was no
clear direction nor policy. The Terror saw a repressive situation, but it was far
from the simple “propaganda” model normally construed.
2 An exception must be made for Victor Hallays-Dabot, himself a censor in the late
nineteenth century, whose Histoire de la censure théâtrale en France (Paris: E. Dentu, 1862) is
fully cognizant of this fragmentation of authority (e.g., p. 147); d’Estrée, Théâtre sous la
Terreur, also recognizes an ensuing confusion of authority (p. 11).

1. Moving the Opéra (III): The Crisis of April 1792
The new management was hamstrung from the outset, because the Opéra
remained at the Porte Saint-Martin and, as it turned out, was unable to move
for the entire duration of Francœur’s and Cellerier’s tenure. They should have
had access to the royal stables (which had been exchanged for the Opéra’s store-
rooms on the rue Saint-Nicaise) from 1 April 1792, and their plan was to
demolish existing buildings and reconstruct a theater on that site within two
years, keeping the auditorium open at the Porte Saint-Martin as a temporary
home for the institution while the new one was being built.3 A Mémoire which
they had printed in that month asked the minister of the Interior and other
unnamed authorities to honor the contract signed in March, pointing to the
sums they had already spent4 and referring not only to their legal rights as
citizens but also to the national importance of the theater and the financial
urgency of the situation. As they pointed out, the preparatory work for a trans-
fer was complete: experts had surveyed the stables, plans for rebuilding had
been prepared, building materials had been acquired and barriers erected
around the land—yet the site remained inaccessible.5 They claimed that the
institution was rapidly losing money because of its current location, and the
longer the Opéra stayed put, the less likely it was to survive. As they pointed
out, their original terms had included a demand for 150,000 livres in annual
subsidy in recognition of the Opéra’s projected annual deficit, and this had
only been waived when a move to the center of Paris was agreed on.6 On the
evidence of the accounts for that year, they were not exaggerating. It is also
worth noting here that the frequency of performances reached an all-time low
in the second quarter of 1792, evidence that the institution was struggling just
to keep going. And plans were clearly well advanced, for a note in the Moniteur
of 24 April informs current subscribers to boxes that they have a choice of
which box will be attributed to them in the new auditorium.7 On 21 May,
Francœur and Cellerier wrote to the municipality and followed up again in
3 New Règlemens pour l’Académie Royale de Musique were also issued on that date (Paris:
Imp. de l’Opéra, 1792). There was also a requirement that free seats for the poorest be
provided, according to the “Histoire de l’Opéra jusqu’en 1793,” ff. 61–62, referring to an
arrêté of the Conseil Général of 31 March 1792, untraced.
4 Memoire Pour les Sieurs Francœur et Cellerier, p. 9. They also refer to ground plans
lodged with the municipality, untraced.
5 Ibid., p. 10.
6 Ibid., pp. 3–4.
7 Moniteur, 115 (24 April 1792), xii.204.
the opéra during the terror | 143

July: still no progress was possible.8 Part of the reason, we learn from their July
letter, was that the inhabitants of the royal buildings, stables, and adjoining
shops remained in place throughout the summer and had been given no notice
to vacate. On 31 August, Francœur and Cellerier were forced to reimburse
shareholders by offering them free boxes at the Porte Saint-Martin in exchange
for the free entries they would have enjoyed in the new theater, claiming
that the project was postponed until the following spring (1793).9 No further
progress was made.
Why did the handover not take place? Castil-Blaze claims, without
evidence, that the riding academy [manège], which housed the stables, was
confiscated by the Assemblée Nationale for its own profit.10 But no document
has been found to corroborate this assertion. A later file relating to the liquida-
tion of Francœur and Cellerier’s debts makes reference to legal obstacles to the
contract of March 1792; it declares that the land had never correctly been
transferred to the municipality in the first place and remained the inalienable
property of the crown.11 It is unclear whether that was known in 1792. But a
retrospective history of the Opéra, written during the Empire, also claims that
the Department of Paris had asked the Assemblée Nationale to ratify this
handover on 14 April, and implies that this never happened:12 certainly, no
such décret has been traced. Legislative ratification of the exchange was indeed
requisite, as memos from early 1792 had pointed out,13 and this may explain
why the land could, in the end, never be released to Francœur and Cellerier.
Moreover, the entrepreneurs’ own letters from the summer point to a further
obstacle in the form of a legal contest over property, from a certain M. de
Biencourt (ci-devant Poutrincourt), who claimed to own 797 toises [3027.8 m2]
of the land.14 As a consequence, the directors were obliged to remain at
the Porte Saint-Martin and patched up the theater as best they could to
assure continuous service, since the 1792–93 season had recently begun.
Officially, the internal running of the theater was their sole responsibility,
although they remained obliged to report to commissaires of the Commune.15
8 Po: AD.26, p. 71 ff.

9 Po: AD.26, pp. 73–74.
10 L’Académie impériale de musique, ii.7–8.
11 AN: AJ/13/44 #61 (5 Frimaire An VII).
12 “Histoire de l’Opéra jusqu’en 1793,” Po: Arch.18.26, f.62.
13 A condition stipulated in AN: O/1/629 # 94, f.1r; 101, f.1r; and 106, f.1v.
14 Po: AD.26, p. 72.
15 L’Académie impériale de musique, ii.11, names Henriot, Chaumette, Leroux, and
Hébert.

Their committee made most decisions over matters of internal management,
yet the committee’s own “instability” was noted the following year.16 Moreover,
as early as 25 September 1792, a raft of forced redundancies was imposed,
seemingly for financial reasons, and these were due to take effect from the fol-
lowing Easter: thinning down the staff had been on the agenda since 1789.17
In other words, 1792 was clearly a bad year for the institution: repertory was
composed of adaptations and the lowest level of new productions in the entire
Revolutionary decade, audience figures were poor, and finances were disastrous.
Despite this financial crisis, however, there seems to have been no external
intervention in the repertory for several months, and the poor level of performances
and unimaginative character of the programming may be put down to finances
rather than to external policy. However, as the Opéra struggled to reestablish a
measure of stability, the theater world was beginning to be reconceptualized.
2. “Negative Censorship,” 1792–1793

Implicit in most studies of theater as propaganda is the belief that it was part
of educational policy. The reorganization of public instruction was one of the
important reforms brought by the Revolution, yet there was no specific com-
mittee devoted to it during the early phase: that role was originally devolved
to the Constituent Assembly’s constitutional committee.18 The first such spe-
cific committee, the Comité d’instruction publique (CIP) was created by the
Legislative Assembly on 14 October 179119 and was succeeded (on 13 October
1792) by a similar committee of the Convention.20 At first the CIP’s objectives
were inspired by Condorcet’s five-stage project for public instruction.21 Yet
this organ was practically uninvolved with the Parisian theaters, since these
16 AN: AJ/13/47.II. [illegible] to [?], 25 August 1793.

17 AN: AJ/13/56: “Lettre aux Personnes qui sont dans le cas de recevoir leur congé,”
25 September 1792.
18 My summary in the following paragraph is based upon the introductory material
in CIPa.
19 CIPa, i.xvii. Of the twenty-four members originally nominated, Quatremère de
Quincy was the only one to have previously intervened in contemporary debates on the
theater but is never named in succeeding debates over theater and opera.
20 Vivien, Etudes administratives, pp. 443–44.
21 Condorcet, Cinq Mémoires sur l’instruction publique, ed. Charles Coutel and Catherine
Kintzler (Paris: Flammarion/GF, 1994). The editors note that by July 1793, Robespierre
rejected the Condorcet model for a more patriotic, Spartan ideal of education, elaborated
by Lepeletier de Saint-Fargeau (p. 13). Its relevance for the theater is therefore doubtful.

remained under the surveillance and control of the municipality of Paris
as regarded policing, and were deregulated, as concerned monopoly and
repertory.22 Nor was the Opéra included within the Constituent Assembly’s
decree of 20 August 1790 on the academies: it was not considered as
one, despite its formal title, as the Encyclopédie méthodique goes some way to
explaining.23 Indeed, until October 1793 the CIP was only concerned, in the
context of the theaters, with legislation and disputes involving the dramatic
authors and theater directors, which, although it gave rise to legislation
affecting all theaters in France, did not otherwise concern the Opéra directly.
Theater, then, was not regulated by the state at all, until the very end of
our period.
As shown above, the Le Chapelier law, ratified on 19 January 1791,
outlawed preventive censorship of plays, but left a loophole in article 6.
Historians have tended to neglect the fact that this article left intact the idea
that playwrights might be held responsible for the uproar their plays might
create. That article also left repressive censorship (stopping performances of
plays proven to have produced commotion) in the hands of the municipalities.
It was now that this issue was to come to the fore, particularly in the form of
spontaneous solicitations from individuals to the National Assembly. The first
of these seems to have been made by the member for Calvados, Pierre François
Joachim Henry-Larivière,24 whose call, on 25 February 1792, for a purge of
22 The Constituent Assembly’s decree of 3 August 1790 on “pensions, gratifications

et récompenses nationales” gives minimal weight to the arts, merely a mention under II.6,
of “artistes savants [et] gens de lettres”: AP, xvii.572–77 (574). It did, however, cancel royal
pensions dating from before 1 January 1790 and was therefore to have implications for
the Opéra.
23 AP, xviii.91–92, 173–76. Encyclopédie méthodique: musique, ed. Nicolas-Etienne
Framery and Pierre-Louis Ginguené, 2 vols. (Paris: Panckoucke, 1791–1818), i.3–5:
“Académie Royale de Musique.” “It is generally thought that the Royal Academy of Music
in Paris is an establishment broadly similar to our Royal Academies of Painting or
Architecture. We were of like belief; but going back to the establishment, we see that the
term Academy was given [to the Opéra] in the sense that this term has in Italy” (entry by
Suard). The imitation of Italian academies was explicit in the Letters patent of 1669, and
was centered upon the non-derogative status of singing, compared with acting. Durey de
Noinville, Histoire, reproduces the privilèges of 1669 and 1672 on i.77–81 and 82–87,
respectively. Serre discusses the term on pp. 10–11. Victoria Johnson does not discuss this
passage of the Encyclopédie méthodique in Backstage at the Revolution.
24 b. 1761; d. 1838. Member for Calvados of the Legislative assembly and the
Convention. Sat with the Girondins, member of the “Commission des douze” from 21 May
to 2 June 1793, outlawed on 2 June 1793, but reintegrated into the Convention after
Thermidor and elected to the CSP on 15 Prairial An III [3 June 1795]. See Edna Hindie

the theaters was motivated, in his own words, by his experience of “uncivic”
performances in various Parisian theaters, and particularly that of the previous
evening at the Théâtre du Vaudeville.25 The play was L’Auteur d’un moment,
which had “precipitated a riot.”26 He noted that individual lines or short
passages served as pretexts for manifestations from the auditorium and for
politically motivated emphasis or interpretation from performers, and thereby
acquired supplementary topical resonances [applications]. This was one reason
they were so difficult to control, since pre-performance censorship could only
concern the text and not those political allusions introduced or emphasized
by actors and picked up only in performance; however, censors were clearly
attentive to the problem and attempted to remove such lines as might lend
themselves to these applications. Henry-Larivière pointed to what he saw as
the seemingly deliberately provocative stance of certain theaters as institutions,
which served as rallying-points for an already constituted body of opinion
(which he glossed as “uncivic”). For him, what was needed, over and above the
municipality’s authority over public order, was a law that would repress
attempts to “poison public opinion”: he called for the CIP to prepare a report
citing the means by which theater could be “purged” of these immoral works,
which divided citizens and continuously troubled morality and public opinion.
His speech also pointed to the abuse heaped on the “patriot” minority of the
audience who protested against such applications; this was a reminder that the
auditorium, far from being an empty vessel for the delivery of propaganda to
a passive public, was a rowdy, contested space that saw factional aggression, not
the absorbed spectatorship or political consensus idealized by theorists in the
period.27 Also noteworthy in his account is the way in which it set out the
problem which was to plague public policy: that censorship intersected with
public order, and that moral and political criteria were frequently superposed
in any judgement over plays. How, then, to police public spaces while allowing
for freedom of expression?
Lemay and Mona Ozouf, Dictionnaire des législateurs, 2 vols. (Ferney-Voltaire: CIEDS,
2007), pp. 391–93; A. Kuscinski, Dictionnaire des Conventionnels (Brueil-en-Vexin: Eds. du
Vexin français, 1973), p. 328. Both works mention this intervention on the theaters.
25 AP, xxxix.76.
26 Maslan, Revolutionary Acts, pp. 57–58. Discussed in a section entitled “The drama
of popular judgement”; I will return to this issue.
27 “Several good citizens were abused for having disapproved of these platitudes
spoken with affectation and applauded enthusiastically by the lackeys of the court
[royalists].”

Following Henry-Larivière’s speech, Bon-Claude Cahier de Gerville,
minister of the Interior, wrote a public letter to the directorate [directoire] of
the département de Paris expressing concern at such provocative plays and
stressing the need to reestablish order in the theaters. This letter was printed
in the Journal de Paris of 27 February;28 the mayor and municipal officers wrote
to administrators of their departement [of Paris] on the same day.29 Their
response to Gerville claimed, with some justification, that his letter indirectly
criticized them since policing the theaters was their responsibility, and they
were indignant that he had not contacted them directly. They also questioned
whether simple police measures would be enough to contain what they saw as
widespread counter-Revolutionary activity in the public sphere, since this was
all the more dangerous for being insidious (p. 103). At the same time, the
authors Barré and Léger took it upon themselves to present the offending play
to the National Assembly on 29 February, since this was the only way of pub-
licly clearing it of the stigma of implied “counter-Revolutionary” intent. The
play was forwarded to the CIP for consideration, since the examination of
play scripts was agreed to fall outside the competence of the legislature, as a
form of pre-performance censorship; this censorship had previously devolved
to the police (now a subordinate part of the municipality) and now in any case
was defunct.30
For the first time the National Assembly was faced with an issue that would
escalate over the following year: How should it deal with such solicitations
against specific works? Who should judge those works, and against what
criteria? What action could legally be taken? The earliest policy formulated
with respect to theater I shall describe as “negative”—removing allusions
that offended patriotism rather than (as would happen later) positively rewrit-
ing or commissioning particular works. As a result, playwrights, for their own
security, would need to avoid positive reference to any aspect that could be
considered in line with counter-Revolutionary sentiment, or even lend itself to
such applications. Critics have complained about the morally Manichean char-
acter of Revolutionary theater, but one can hardly blame writers for painting
in black and white in such a context. This policy, because essentially negative,
is comparable to censorship undertaken during the Old Regime: offending
aspects of works were removed. The widespread rewriting of plays dating from
28 JdP, 58 (27 February 1792), p. 238 (“Administration”): “I am unaware of the

details, but apparently plays are being deliberately written to allude to the authors’ political
opponents and to provoke them” (my italics).
29 AP, xxxix.76, 102–3.
30 AP, xxxix.190–91.

before 1789 was undertaken by Joly, censor for the municipality, who insisted
on the replacement of even apparently innocuous details such as the term
Monsieur by that of Citoyen. As Antonino Sergi has shown, this led to the
complete bowdlerization of older works, including, for instance, the removal of
any reference to royalty or aristocracy in Racine’s tragedies.31 The Opéra had
likewise been doctoring its libretti for a while. For instance, the Chronique de
Paris reports that the revival of Gluck’s Iphigénie en Aulide in October 1792 cut
the chorus “chantons, célébrons notre Reine.”32 The reason for this was almost
certainly that one of the last performances of the work in 1790 had led to
factional squabbles in the auditorium over precisely this chorus, Lainez in
particular serving as a focus for “aristocratic” applications.33 This policy of
suspension or correction of the existing repertoire could only function on a
case-by-case basis, and only caught works that had already been performed
and to which individuals had explicitly objected, by which time the harm had
arguably been done. Indeed, forced removal of Charles IX had been sensitive
precisely because the work had become a rallying point for bodies of opinion,
after which its removal was bound to offend as many people as it satisfied.
Clearly a more systematic policy was required, but for the remainder of 1792,
policy was unstated, and practice unsystematic.
censorship at the opéra: the controversy

over adrien
The first serious test for the preventive (i.e., pre-performance) banning of
theatrical works was the case of Méhul’s opera Adrien (libretto by Hoffman),
which was canceled in March 1792 by the Commune, with the Opéra’s
reluctant support. The case of Adrien has already been discussed in detail by
Bartlet in her study of Méhul, which also included the major sources concern-
ing the controversy.34 Banning Adrien before any performance had taken place
clearly set the Commune’s action within the sphere of foreseeing potential for
31 Sergi (Antonino), “Phèdre corrigée sous la Révolution,” Dix-Huitième Siècle, 6 (1974),

153–65. Cf. Hemmings, pp. 95–100.
32 CdP, 1792–308 (28 October 1792), p. 1206.
33 RdP, lxxiv.527. Lainez had already been fined on 13 January 1790 for stepping
out of role and addressing the audience when it asked that a line be repeated; evidence
that the directors were attempting to avoid these applications: AN: F/21/1051 #1
(13 January 1790).
34 Etienne-Nicolas Méhul, pp. 228–53, 695–748. The narrative account in the next two
paragraphs is based upon her discussion and appendix of documents.

commotion rather than controlling existing trouble. However accurate its
assessment of potential disturbance may have been, supporters of Adrien would
claim that such action was unlawful by the terms of the Le Chapelier law.
The premiere had been set for 6 March, but opposition came from the
Commune on the evening before. Bartlet explains that the work fell foul of
mounting French hostility toward Austria, which was to culminate in the
declaration of war one month later on 20 April. Hoffman’s libretto was based
on an original by Metastasio (Adriano in Siria) which had made flattering
parallels between the Roman emperor of classical history and the Holy Roman
Emperor (who was, in Metastasio’s day, also the ruler of Austria). Levacher de
Charnois read the work as a celebration of the Emperor Hadrian’s victory
over the city of Antioch and noted that it ended with a scene of triumph: this
reading of Adrien as an imperial (rather than royalist) work was particularly
problematic. Given the uneasy situation of France with respect to Austria, the
work’s timing was disastrous, and a campaign in the radical press attacked the
planned work by early March, leading the Opéra administration to take fright
and postpone the premiere, hoping to win over public opinion in the mean-
time. (D’Estrée suggests they could not afford to take the work off, as they had
invested huge sums in the production: little evidence has survived, but the
suggestion is plausible.)35 Hoffman justified the work in an open letter but
refused to make changes to it, and opinion was not appeased. The Commune
banned the work on 12 March, and the text of its decree was published in
the Journal de Paris. Having been implicitly criticized the month before over
L’Auteur d’un moment, the Commune here sought to justify its action by claim-
ing the law was not strong enough to support public order and by shifting
responsibility onto authors for indirectly causing potential civic disturbance.
The controversy only intensified thereafter, leading supporters of the Commune
to justify the ban by pointing to the Commune’s role, on behalf of the city of
Paris, as administrator of the Opéra—an argument that finally prevailed.
But the case also opened up a theoretical problem: even supposing the
Commune had the legal right to operate preventive censorship, how should
it interpret the works and infer authorial intention? That is, was an opera
counter-Revolutionary, because it treated imperial subject matter sympatheti-
cally, or did the intention to create a parallel with contemporary France need
to be demonstrable? As the Chronique de Paris put it, “We are happy to concede
that the author was not trying to make a point, but this does not stop sly and
unintended readings; in which case it is those who make anti-civic applications
35 Théâtre sous la Terreur, p. 128.

who are guilty. We believe the authors of this work to be both too civic-minded
and too careful not to remove those words to which counter-revolutionaries
would give a different meaning to the one they intended.”36 So the columnist
seemed to suggest that because authorial intention could not be second-
guessed, and because theatrical works could indeed cause disturbances, not
least because ideology was projected onto them by individuals of different
political persuasions, the authorities had the duty to operate “negative censor-
ship” in the sense of removing any aspect even susceptible of such construal, in
spite of such material’s dramatic context.
The ban set a legal precedent for further repression in other theaters.
Notably, Jean-Louis Laya’s comedy L’Ami des lois was the object of disputes
between the Convention and the Commune when the latter attempted to ban
it at the Théâtre de la Nation in January 1793.37 A second banning of the play,
on 30 March 1793, led, according to d’Estrée, to the Commune’s call for a
purge of the theaters,38 in what seems to have been a problematic month
in general. Indeed, a rowdy performance of L’Honnête criminel in Orléans was
also reported to the Committee of public safety on 26 March,39 and Fréron
and Barra reported “counter-Revolutionary activity” in the Grand Théâtre
of Marseilles.40 Further reports were also commissioned after Génissieu
intervened in the Convention on 31 March 1793 regarding a performance of
Voltaire’s Mérope; the play’s allusions to a queen in mourning were particularly
awkward, given that the Convention had just tried and executed Louis XVI.
This intervention called for a décret on theater surveillance to be prepared by
the CIP41 and the banning of Mérope by the municipality: on this occasion the
Convention indeed gave permission for the municipality to ban performances
of Mérope, even though it would later object to such interference: perhaps it
was unusually sensitive to the particular topical allusions. The intervention
also explicitly raised the vexed question of whether it was the job of the
36 CdP, 1792–69 (9 March 1792), p. 274.

37 On this, see Laya, L’Ami des lois, ed. Mark Darlow and Yann Robert (London:
Modern Humanities Research Association, 2011).
39 CSP, ii.528.
40 CSP, vii.535.
41 This took longer than expected. On 24 October 1793, in the course of a discussion
of the Comédie-Française and rumors that the CIP was planning to reduce the number of
Parisian theaters, the president noted that the question of theaters would be dealt with in
the CIP’s “Plan de l’éducation”; this however was never prepared. CIP, ii.684, 687–88.

municipality, responsible for policing the theaters, to regulate the repertory,
or whether the Convention should be responsible.
the law of 2 august 1793

The degree of freedom of theaters in Paris in early 1793 is questionable: it
would be more accurate to say that practice was unsystematic and depended on
individuals complaining about existing works. But on 2 August 1793 the
Convention took further action, by passing a law that aimed to “progressively
instill Frenchmen with Republican characteristics and feelings”;42 this has
been seen as a watershed moment that removed the “freedom” previously
declared by Le Chapelier only two-and-a-half years before and which (in my
terminology) introduces positive censorship, in the sense of concrete interven-
tions to inflect repertory toward defined types of works.43 Presented by Couthon
on behalf of the CSP, the law’s immediate context was actually the forthcom-
ing celebrations for the first anniversary of the storming of the Tuileries palace,
which had taken place on 10 August 1792; it aimed to suppress plays such as
Mérope and L’Ami des lois that might serve as pretexts for counter-Revolutionary
manifestations at this time of Republican celebration. The law, however, went
one step further in imposing repertory on certain theaters.44 The final decree
contained three clauses, as follows:
1. From the 4th of this month until 1 September, the tragedies Brutus,
Guillaume Tell, Caïus Gracchus and other plays which retrace the glo-
rious events of the Revolution and which celebrate the virtues of the
defenders of liberty, shall be performed three times per week at those
theaters which the municipality shall designate; one of these weekly
performances shall be given gratis, at the expense of the Republic.
2. Any theater performing plays that tend to corrupt public opinion
and reawaken the shameful superstition of royalty shall be closed
and its directors arrested and punished with the full severity of
the law.
3. The Municipality of Paris is responsible for the implementation of
the present decree.45
42 CIP, ii.688; AP, lxx.134–35. Subsequent quotations taken from AP.

43 d’Estrée, Théâtre sous la Terreur, p. 73.
44 AP, lxx.134. This requirement was finally to be lifted by the decree of 14 February
1795.
45 AP, lxx.134–35.

One might note that the early version of the text contained a fourth article
(which was subsequently removed) ordering closure of the Théâtre du
Vaudeville.46 The principle of gratis performances, required by article 1, was
important to Convention and Commune alike; on 18 June, the Conseil général
had complained that not enough such performances were given in Paris, and
in response the Opéra protested to the Moniteur and Chronique de Paris that it
was financially unable to give as many free performances as seemed to be
required.47 It may be that the decree was the culmination of a process of con-
sultation: the Journal des hommes libres of 3 August pointed to a widely pub-
lished text dated 31 July inviting theater directors to confer with the CSP over
repertory and noted with satisfaction that this had been complied with.48
A few months later, a further bill, prepared by Lombard La Chaux, planned
to offer pecuniary rewards to those theaters that complied with the order.
These were primarily intended to reimburse theaters for the material damage
resulting from the overcrowding at such performances:49 although this sounds
suspiciously like spin, the performances were given free and may well have
attracted an unusual number of spectators (figures are unavailable because
audience figures are only usually available through ticket sales). The total
available was 100,000 livres and was to be distributed among twenty theaters,
missing only some of the most minor theaters, presumably considered beneath
notice. There is a marked disparity in funds distributed, with the erstwhile
privileged theaters receiving the most (the Opéra received 8,500 livres): the policy
of the Convention was not, therefore, unfavorable to these “major” institutions.
This financial incentive to perform the intended repertory was the extent
of control: no penalties seem to have been imposed for non-compliance
with the order; and although this is also a clear form of coercion, particularly
in the new context of competition which made theater directors financially
vulnerable, it is worth stating that only two of the theaters actually performed
all three of the works in question. Moreover, only the Théâtre de la
République and the Théâtre patriotique performed Caius Gracchus at all
(Tissier, II, nos. 238, 2361). The Opéra was itself invited to prepare Brutus
46 AP, lxx.135n1. Cp. d’Estrée, Théâtre sous la Terreur, p. 3.

48 Journal des hommes libres de tous les pays, ou Le Républicain, 275 (3 August 1793),
p. 1174.
49 Convention nationale: Projet de décret relatif à l’indemnité à accorder aux vingt Spectacles
de Paris qui, en conformité du décret du 2 août (vieux style) ont donné quatre représentations pour
& par le peuple ([Paris]: Imp. Nationale, [1793]), p. 2. Cp. AP, lxxxiii.560–61 [3 Pluviôse
An II, 22 January 1794].

on 17 February 1794, but nothing came of this invitation.50 More performed
Brutus and Guillaume Tell, but with nothing like the frequency originally
intended (these two plays received, respectively, 87 and 55 performances for
the whole period covered in Tissier’s volume 2).
Press responses to the decree were mixed. It was noted that the free perfor-
mances had created many disputes in the auditorium and had done nothing to
improve “esprit public”; hence presumably explaining why the plan was never
tried again.51 Conversely, Aristide Valcour wrote, in the Journal de la Montagne,
that these measures did not go far enough: the state should create a new
national theater devoted to “revolutionary works,” with a weekly gratis perfor-
mance subsidized by ticket sales from the other six days; further, recognized
classics should be banned for a defined period—he suggests at least ten years—
until patriotism was sufficiently entrenched for Old Regime works to be
bearable. In the meantime, he suggested:
Daily, of every two plays performed in this theater, one would be
devoted to propagating true principles: one day it might be a drame, or
a republican tragedy, another an opéra-vaudeville. Ridicule can be a
suprisingly efficient weapon: a vaudeville is sung, and perpetuated, and
the lesson is pleasurable. But of the two, the other work, even if not
relevant to the Revolution, must not give any reminder of the era of
servitude.52
The plan was not carried out but shows how the law of 2 August fell between
two poles: too weak for radicals and impossible to enforce, yet offering insuf-
ficient rewards to induce theaters to perform as they wished. The first policy,
“encouragement,” had been a failure.53
the arrest of francœur and cellerier

(september 1793)
Although the law of 2 August constituted the first systematic attempt at
control, popular surveillance by the Commune and individual sections had
been a constant feature of the Revolutionary situation. Municipal control was
50 CSP, xi.214; AN: AF.II.67.

51 CIP, ii.684 and n2 [24 October 1793].
52 Journal de la montagne, 66 (6 August 1793), pp. 422–23. Cf. Journal de la montagne,
97 (7 September 1793), pp. 673–74.
53 d’Estrée, Théâtre sous la Terreur, p. 38, points to “the little enthusiasm for the
Revolutionary repertory,” without evidence, but surely accurately.

the subject of clause 3 of the law and was reasserted in a decree of 14 August,
which confirmed that municipal councils were authorized to “direct” theater
and to arrange to be performed those works most suitable for shaping public
opinion and developing “republican energy.”54 While intervening in repertory,
then, the state continued to leave a similar role, over and above policing, in the
hands of the municipality. The Opéra was an obvious candidate for such scru-
tiny and for popular suspicion, not only because it was a major, even arguably
the pre-eminent, theater of Paris, but also because its ties to the court were
especially strong. Considering the harsh treatment they sometimes gave the
Comédie-Française, state authorities seem to have been loath to intervene in
matters concerning the Opéra, perhaps because the Académie Royale had tra-
ditionally also had strong ties to the city of Paris. As is well known, the CSP
ordered the closure of the Théâtre de la Nation (the more conservative wing of
the erstwhile Comédie-Française) and the incarceration of its entire troupe on
2 September 1793; it is clear that the main reason was objections not only to
what were perceived as reactionary passages in one text, but also applications:
particular emphasis given to passages susceptible of topical interpretation, or
particular audience reactions to such passages.55 The Paméla affair has been
much discussed and demonstrates how a work could, in spite of its author’s
impeccable “Revolutionary” credentials, generate ideological projections and
factional demonstrations; as such, it was the logical culmination of the Ami des
lois controversy of January.56 Francœur and Cellerier fell foul of such scrutiny,
although whether this scrutiny was a matter of terrorist cultural policy or
popular surveillance deserves consideration.
Evidence from 1792 suggests that the Opéra was beginning to be attacked
by patriot papers. The Courier français accused the Opéra of having sold tickets
in advance to émigrés for a special performance planned for 15 August, which
54 Décret de la Convention Nationale, Du 14 Août 1793, l’an second de la république

Françoise, une & indivisible, Portant que les Conseils des Communes sont autorisés à diriger les
Spectacles (Paris: Imp. Nationale exécutive du Louvre, 1793).
55 Nicolas François de Neufchâteau, Paméla, ou La Vertu récompensée, ed. Martial
Poirson (SVEC 2007: 04), especially pp. 43–51. Cf. CSP, vi.164 [29 August 1793], vi.185
[30 August 1793], vi.236 [2 September 1793]; AP, lxxiii.353–54, 360; and Dominique
Margairaz, François de Neufchâteau: biographie intellectuelle (Paris: Publications de la
Sorbonne, 2005). The following pamphlet, regrettably ignored by both Poirson and
Margairaz, also contains essential material: N. François (de Neufchâteau), auteur de Paméla,
à la Convention Nationale ([Paris]: Imp. de C.-F. Patris, 21 septembre 1793).
56 Hemmings also mentions a “decree of 2 September that enjoins the Paris police to
keep a closer eye on the theaters.” Theater and State, pp. 94–95, quoting Hallays-Dabot,
Histoire de la censure, p. 189. Untraced.

the King of Prussia, the Duke of Brunswick, and the comte d’Artois were to
attend: the Opéra angrily rebutted such slander, pointing to its patriotic dona-
tions, offering to show its account books upon demand, and even offering a
reward of 12,000 livres to anybody who could prove the absurd accusations!57
In 1793, the pressure seems to have intensified, with rumors circulating that
the company was beginning to break up. Accordingly, on 29 July, the artists
issued a press notice, refuting the rumor that several of them were about to
leave for different theaters and claiming to have signed (29 June) a text
described as follows:
an act of union (deposited with citizen Raguideau, notary public)
obliging each of them to remain united with the Opéra and to oppose
all dismantling which could only destroy the most magnificent theater
in Europe, and only to move to other entrepreneurs if the current
ones failed to fulfill their obligations or came to stand down from their
rights.58
There is no record of any such notarized document in the archives of Me
Raguideau, and any such document would surely be of dubious legal validity
in any case.59 It is more likely that this is a rhetorical strategy, aligning the
“union” of the artists on the cultural precedent of the Tennis Court Oath of
June 1789, where members of the Third Estate swore never to disband until
they had given France a constitution! But it is clear that the Opéra was becom-
ing a target of popular animosity and that the artists were defining themselves
as patriots, against the directors to whose appointment they had always been
hostile.
Most sources, although they differ on the date, agree that the main
catalyst for Francœur and Cellerier’s arrest was their reticence to perform an
anti-clerical work entitled La Passion du Christ, now inextant, on which Fabre
d’Eglantine had collaborated.60 Comte Beugnot was an intimate of Danton
who had been elected to the Legislative Assembly but gave up his seat
57 Moniteur, 253 (9 September 1792), xiii.643; CdP, 1792–264 (9 September 1792),

pp. 1011–12.
58 JdesS, 32 (1 August 1793), 256; JdP, 1793, p. 858.
59 MC: ET/LXVIII/632–714 (papers of Me Maurice-Jean Raguideau de la Fosse):
inventory consulted for March 1789–August 1794.
60 d’Estrée, Théâtre sous la Terreur, pp. 82–83, gives 16 October 1793 as the date of the
arrest. Francœur, Essai historique, p. 29, gives 16 September 1793. Arthur Pougin, L’Opéra-
Comique pendant la Révolution, p. 100, gives 17 July 1793, but gives a date of 16 September
in Un Directeur, p. 77, and mentions that the arrest was decreed in session of the Commune.

after 10 August and was also in La Force at the time (only to be released after
Thermidor); he clearly knew Francœur and Cellerier. In his memoirs, he gives
the following description:
The opera was in three acts: accusation, judgement, execution. The
terrible final scene of Calvary was there in its entirety. It was impossible
not to be profoundly affected by this, given how our religious beliefs
could be, as in Greece, the most powerful mainspring of dramatic art.
The government committees disagreed about the appropriateness of the
production. Fabre d’Eglantine had had a hand in the libretto, which was
enough for Collot d’Herbois, his rival in more than one way, to oppose
it. While the authorities sought consensus, Francœur who had expressed
some distaste for the production in the name of public decency, was sent
to La Force.61
I have not found a trace of this work, and other sources mention different
details, although all agree that the Opéra’s refusal to perform a radical
work was at stake. (In addition, Paul d’Estrée notes that Francœur had already
upset the Revolutionary committee of the Bon-Conseil section of Paris
by refusing to make a donation to their funds.) 62 Castil-Blaze does not
name La Passion du Christ but claims that Francœur and Cellerier had refused
to give a benefit performance of Le Siège de Thionville back in June: in his
account it is unclear whether they were objecting to the work itself or to
having to perform it free at a moment of stringency.63 But his account appears
to be confirmed by Hallays-Dabot, who claims that a petition against the
Opéra’s refusal to perform Le Siège de Thionville was sent to the Commune at
some point in June.64 Indeed, the Commune issued the following arrêté on
For self-evident reasons, I tend to trust Francœur; his date is corroborated by other
sources, as I show below.
61 Mémoires du Comte Beugnot, ancien ministre (1783–1815), publiés par le comte Albert
Beugnot, son petit-fils, 2 vols. (Paris: Beugnot, 1866), i.247–48. Also quoted in Pougin, Un
Directeur, p. 83n1. On La Passion du christ, see also d’Estrée, Théâtre sous la Terreur, p. 82.
63 L’Académie impériale de musique, ii.20. Lasalle, Treize Salles, p. 173, also cites Le Siège
de Thionville; Hallays-Dabot agrees that the work was Le Siège (Histoire de la censure, p. 179),
but claims that although they refused to perform it for free, they escaped immediate sanc-
tion by submitting their repertory to the Commune, and thereby gained “a few months’
peace.”
64 Pougin’s dating of the arrest to 17 June (see above, n. 90) may be explained by
this fact.

18/19 June, requiring not only that the work be performed, but that it be
performed for free:
Considering that aristocracy has long been protected by the administra-
tors of various theaters;
And given that they have a harmful influence on the Revolution;
Decrees that Le Siège de Thionville shall be represented gratis uniquely
for the entertainment of sans-culottes who to date have been the true
defenders of liberty and the supporters of democracy.65
The Opéra’s administrators subsequently appealed to the Conseil général on
20 June, claiming that they had performed several patriotic works and had
indeed performed the Siège for free. As a result the arrêté was repealed. At
the same time, the Opéra sent a note to the press for publication, which the
Moniteur printed immediately after its report of the 20 June session.66
Was Le Siège de Thionville performed gratis, as the Commune required, and
as the Opéra claimed had happened by 20 June 1793? Not according to the
Journal de l’Opéra, which cites a total of eighteen (paying) performances in
that second half of 1793 (and 26 in total up to the end of the Convention). The
Journal notes that the performance on 11 August 1793 was given “de par et
pour le peuple”; moreover, that of 11 June may be presumed to be a gratis
performance as it does not cite receipts. But neither of these evenings included
Le Siège, all of whose performances are listed therein with a total gate receipt
(except for those having taken place in September: receipts for all performances
in that month are missing from the Journal). But I deduce the following:
Francœur and Cellerier refused to give a benefit performance of Le Siège early
in the work’s history; complaints from the sections ensued, and although the
Commune then forced them to perform the work, via the arrêté of 19 June,
the Commune remained predisposed against the two; hence, they were
subsequently arrested for refusing to perform La Passion in September, after
the precedent of the Paméla affair had strengthened the Commune’s claim to
intervene in theatrical matters.
Documents surrounding the arrest itself are scarce, but those that do exist
suggest that the event is an example of the ways in which popular action, via
65 L’Académie impériale de musique, ii.20 gives the date of 19 June, but 18 June is the
date in the Moniteur, 172 (21 June 1793), xvi.682. However, a subsequent report in the
Moniteur suggests that it is indeed 19 June: see 174 (23 June 1793), xvi.701. The wording
of JdP, 1793, p. 689, suggests that the arrêté was first passed on the 18th, then restated on
the 19th.
66 Moniteur, 174 (23 June 1793), xvi.701.

the sections of Paris, overrode state policy. A text written after Thermidor by
Robert Lindet, dated 12 August 1794 [25 Thermidor An II] and in support
of Francœur and Cellerier, claims that they were accused by their political
opponents of squandering money, breaking the terms of their lease, and refus-
ing to perform certain works.67 Lindet was still a member of the CSP at this
point, and his text implicitly supports Francœur and Cellerier against Hébert
and his allies, demonstrating the gulf that had opened up between the execu-
tive committees of the Convention and the Commune over theater. This text
suggests, with the benefit of post-Thermidorian hindsight, that the Commune’s
program was in line with the “Hebertism” elsewhere stigmatized by the state
authorities for its radicalism and its atheism. Both of these were becoming
notorious throughout 1793–94, as witness Robespierre’s distaste for the atheist
Fête de la Raison enacted at Notre-Dame.68 In such a confused cultural con-
text, where conflicting demands were placed on theaters, and where the Opéra’s
directors were arrested for refusing to perform the type of work that was later
to be banned by the CSP, the notion of state propaganda so often used to
explain away the Opéra’s repertory in 1793–94, mentioned by Mongrédien,
Place, and Kennedy, is nonsense. On the contrary, the state had, at this moment,
lost the initiative.
Just as the Convention decreed that Terror was the order of the day, and
shifted its attention to counter-Revolutionary domestic activity by stepping up
the powers of the executive committees, so a gulf was left in cultural control.
September 1793 was the month of the Commune’s reassertion of authority over
not only public order in the theaters but also over pre-performance censorship.
Baudrais and Froidure had just been appointed from within the Commune for
the scrutiny of play manuscripts on 1 September.69 That week also saw popular
demonstrations against the Opéra, with several individuals calling for its
closure. On 7 September 1793 the Opéra’s artists defended themselves against
accusations that they had refused to perform patriotic works.70 It is at this
point that the Commune promised to henceforth “defend” and to “encourage”
the institution, according to the Moniteur.71 Yet defense in this context meant
the control which the Commune had been itching to take ever since 1789.
67 AN: AJ/13/44 #61.

68 Marie-Hélène Huet, “Le sacre du printemps: Essai sur le sublime et la Terreur,”
Modern Language Notes, 103.4 (September 1988), 782–99.
69 d’Estrée, Théâtre sous la terreur, p. 7.
70 JdP, 1793, p. 1013. AN: F/21/1051 #1 (7 September 1793).
71 Moniteur, 253 (10 September 1793), xviii.545–46. Cf. Castil-Blaze, L’Académie
impériale de musique, ii.20.

Francœur and Cellerier’s intransigence, in sparking off the popular manifesta-
tions that allowed the Commune to step in was opportune. (Was it provoked?)72
Nicole Wild has claimed that management was passed, on 8 October 1793, to
a committee of artists under Bralle as inspector.73 However, according to acta
of the CIP, the Commune not only stopped administrators from closing the
Opéra but allowed the artists self-governance of the institution as early as the
day of the arrest (16 September).74 Indeed, the account of that day’s debate in
the Conseil général, published in the Moniteur, shows that the artists presented
a “plan d’organisation,” upon which, at Hébert’s behest, an arrêté was voted,
giving the artists (art. 1) control over the building, (art. 2) provisional admin-
istrative control, pending a report by the DEP, (art. 3) control over the
storerooms, (art. 5) providing for the DEP to approach the CSP, calling for the
Convention to “protect” the Opéra, (art. 6) allowing for the arrest of Francœur
and Cellerier, and (art. 8) distributing the existing receipts among the artists.75
External authority remained unresolved, although the decree of 1 September
that extended literary and artistic property to playwrights restated that police
powers remained in the hands of the municipality.
In any event, Cellerier evaded arrest, and only Francœur was incarcerated
(in La Force).76 Their memorandum of self-defense, signed by Cellerier,
although questionable strategically in criticizing previous management by the
municipality in 1790, responds to the six points of the previous petition by
insisting on three related issues: financial efficiency, encouragement of patri-
otic repertory, and personal financial engagement in the success of a useful
institution. It was probably printed in that same month (September 1793),
72 The repertory did not change overnight, and complaints continued. By 27

September, left-wing papers such as the Journal des hommes libres de tous les pays were
complaining about the continuing presence, in the repertory, of works such as Iphigénie en
Aulide because they contained aspects offensive to patriots, and alleging that the Opéra
thought itself above the laws because it was “protected” by the municipality. Journal
des hommes libres de tous les pays, ou Le Républicain, 330 (27 September 1793), p. 1396;
reproduced in JdesS, 91 (1 October 1793), p. 725.
73 Wild, Dictionnaire, pp. 304, 299, respectively.
74 CIP, ii.861n. See also Castil-Blaze, L’Académie impériale de musique, ii.21. Lasalle,
Treize Salles, p. 174, also notes this “engagement” and Lays’s personal friendship with
Hébert.
75 Moniteur, 262 (19 September 1793), xviii.677, JdesS, 84 (20 September 1793),
pp. 647–48.
76 Pougin, Un Directeur, p. 83, quotes in support the JdP of 24 September, which
lists Francœur as an inmate of La Force from 17 September. Untraced, but quoted in
Castil-Blaze, L’Académie impériale de musique, ii.21.

since it affirms “we have supported the Opéra for nearly 18 months,” but it
seems to have been ignored.77 Francœur was to be released from La Force on
14 August 1794 by order of the CSP,78 but his arrest signals the definitive end
of private entrepreneurship as a possible solution for the Opera, which was not
to occur again until 1831.79
3. “Protection” and Patronage: Artist Governance during

the Terror (September 1793–July 1794)
The arrest of Francœur and Cellerier was followed on 30 September by the
notorious autodafé of the Opéra’s papers by selected members of the commit-
tee of artists that had taken over management of the institution. As well as
denying the historian invaluable resources, this was also a symbolic watershed
in the history of the institution in this period because it constituted a public
repudiation of the institution’s Old Regime heritage, as well as the adoption of
a new patriotic image by the new commmittee. The police commissioner’s
manuscript account describes the bonfire, which destroyed all papers carrying
“emblems” of the “era of royalty”: fleurs de lis, mentions of the monarchy, and
so on.80 The committee also recalled all remaining tickets for boxes that had
royal “emblems” printed upon them, via an announcement inserted into a
range of journals.81 The committee was composed of the more left-wing mem-
bers of the personnel: Lays, Rey, Rochefort, La Suze.82 These more radical
members of the artists’ committee had been in contact with the Commune
since late 1790, and it is possible that they had been complicit in the arrest of
Francœur and Cellerier, since this gave them the final control over the institu-
tion for which they had been clamoring since 1780 (although this is, of course,
77 Francœur et Cellerier, Concessionnaires de l’Opéra, Aux Citoyens composant la commission

nommée par le corps municipal, pour les affaires relatives à l’Opéra (n.p.: n.pub., n.d.).
78 Essai historique, p. 31.
79 Wild, Dictionnaire, p. 306.
80 AN: AJ/13/60.I. On the autodafé, see also JdesS, 95 (5 October 1793), 756–57.
81 Feuille du salut public, 95 (3 October 1793), p. 4.
82 Lasalle, Treize Salles, p. 174. Lasalle also claims (p. 173) that internal discipline was
regulated by fear during the Terror, the same explanation given by d’Estrée about theater
in general. Castil-Blaze agrees: L’Académie impériale de musique, ii.11. Lasalle does not state
from when these members ran the Opéra, but an election took place on 7 Frimaire
(27 November 1793) electing Cavaillé, Gardel, La Suze, Lays, Nivelon, Rochefort, Rey,
Rochefort, and Lebel. AJ/13/47.III.: “Dépouillement du scrutin destiné à nommer les
nouveaux membres du comité de l’opéra National.”

impossible to prove).83 It is clear, however, that the petition issued to the
Commune accusing Francœur and Cellerier of mismanagement was signed by
a selection of artists themselves, which suggests internal strife and very prob-
ably self-interested denunciation.84 Indeed, the “Histoire de l’Opéra jusqu’en
1793” claims that a coalition of artists who had been unpaid acted against
Francœur and Cellerier on 29 June 1793.85
With the removal of Francœur and Cellerier, the third type of management
structure was attempted: self-government by the artists of the Opéra under
the surveillance of an outside authority. The artists were much more ready to
demonstrate “patriotism” than the directors had been. On 10 September, art-
ists made representations to the Commune rebutting claims that they were
unfavorable to patriotic works and admitting that in the past the institution
had been a locus for counter-Revolution. They blamed this bias upon Francœur
and Cellerier and called for renewed protection of the institution, by insisting
upon their own patriotism.86 For instance the Opéra participated indirectly in
the unveiling of busts of the two Republican martyrs Marat and Le Peletier de
Saint-Fargeau, in a festival designed by Gardel that incorporated the march
of priestesses from Alceste.87 And on 2 October, Le Batave, ou le Sans-culotte
observateur observed that the artists of the Opéra were now worthy Revolutionaries
à la hauteur de la Révolution. Toward the end of the month, on 27 October, Lays,
Chéron, and Renaud performed a trio from Le Siège de Thionville (here referred
to by its subtitle, Le Camp de Grandpré ) as a patriotic end to performance of
Sylvain Maréchal’s notorious play Le Jugement dernier des rois at the Théâtre de
la République (the radical wing of the erstwhile Comédie-Française).88 Even
this behavior has a degree of continuity with Old Regime practice in the sense
that it was commonplace for the artists of the Opéra, like the other two pro-
tected theaters, to perform for state occasions (mostly court performances, but
sometimes also performances related to specific occasions, such as royal
weddings and coronations). Adopting similar “civic” practices by participating
in festivities was the means of autonomously placing themselves under the
83 Pougin, Un Directeur, p. 80, was of this view.

84 Francœur et Cellerier, Concessionnaires de l’Opéra, pp. 1–2.
85 f.63.
86 Moniteur, 253 (10 September 1793), xvii.545–46.
87 Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Histoire de la société française pendant la Révolution
(Paris: Maison Quantin, 1889), pp. 249–50. On this, see also SdP-Duchesne, 1794, p. 100f,
which gives a lengthy account and (pp. 102–3) the lyrics of the hymn sung by the children
as well as the words of a further chorus set to music from Philidor’s Ernelinde.
88 JdesS, 120 (30 October 1793), p. 948.

protection of a body in authority. Indeed, on 8 October, the CSP took charge
of funding the Opéra, seemingly in response to pressure from the Commune.89
The record is incomplete, but the arrêt explicitly handed subsidy to the
institution for the twin purposes of supporting an institution upon which
1,200 families depended, and recognizing the theater’s national importance.
According to the CSP’s records, 6 million livres had been granted the Conseil
exécutif on 16 April for the support of national institutions; and from this
fund, 150,000 livres were given to the Opéra. The following strings were
attached:
1. The administration of the Opéra will be reformed according to economy
and patriotic aims;
2. It shall acquire Republican works;
3. It shall only perform patriotic works;
4. Its repertory shall be purified;
5. One weekly patriotic performance shall be given gratis by and for the
people;
6. Low-ranking positions in the Opéra shall be given to relatives of
volunteers at the front.90
The editor of the proceedings of the CSP notes that the two petitions referred
to in this arrêt (from the Commune, and from the artists) are lost. However, an
undated request for subsidy from the artists to the CSP has survived in manu-
script, detailing finances of the institution and requesting subsidy on the basis
of the institution’s good record in performing patriotic works.91 There are few
concrete traces of external control over the repertory; although this undeniably
moved toward the more obviously political it seems to have been a decision
taken by the Opéra’s committee itself.92 Evidently, then, with “protection”
of the institution came the kind of selective funding that exercised implicit
coercion over repertory, even before the reinstatement of formal censorship.
The committee seems to have been proactive in commissioning appropriate
works, instituting a prize of 1,200 livres for the most Republican libretto
89 The very end of the act makes reference to an (inextant) petition from the Commune,
which suggests that the CSP was responding to a request for assistance. CSP, vii.296.
90 CSP, vii.295–96.
91 AN: AJ/13/44.[undated].
92 As an isolated counter-example, one might note that the CIP’s response to Romme’s
presentation of La Réunion du 10 août on 20 October was to order compulsory perfor-
mances of it in three theaters: the Opéra, the Opéra-Comique, and the Théâtre de Molière,
dit des sans-culottes (and the Opéra did comply). CIP, ii.650–51.

in three acts in late 1793,93 and changing rotation procedures to favor
pièces de circonstance.94
la fête de la raison, ou la rosière républicaine

By the end of 1793 with a planned production of La Fête de la Raison, the state
objection to the radical atheism of the Commune finally produced a split
between those two bodies. The libretto (unusually, printed prior to perfor-
mance) dates the premiere to 6 Nivôse An II [26 December 1793], but
performance was postponed to 31 December, and then stopped by the CSP,95
supposedly because of the anti-clerical nature of the work. In support, the
Journal des spectacles pointed to the necessity of forgetting reminders of the Old
Regime and guarding against potential disturbances.96 Yet the work had the
full support of the popular sections. A letter from the section de la Montagne
thanks the Opéra for their participation in a recent unspecified event.97 It is
dated “septidi Frimaire an II” [= 27 November 1793], that is, several weeks
before La Rosière was due to be performed but shortly after the ceremony of
the Fête de la Raison in Notre-Dame itself, and it is presumably the participa-
tion of artists of the Opéra in that festival which is meant.98 The Fête de la
Raison was an atheistic ceremony instigated by Hébert and his associates
and represented the continued de-christianization of society. However, it was a
93 Hallays-Dabot, Histoire de la censure théâtrale, p. 184. Moniteur, 256 (13 September

1793), xvii.636; JdesS, 72 (12 September 1793), 583–84.
94 See, on this issue, the very interesting internal memo demonstrating that an
unnamed work by Candeille and Leboeuf was passed over despite being in rehearsal,
seemingly because the Opéra was obliged, among other things, to “devote the artists’
talent . . . to patriotic and revolutionary works,” and that authors were demanding com-
pensation for non-performance of their works, which the comité refused to pay, claiming
to be bound by its higher duty to the municipality and the Comité de Salut Public:
AJ/13/47.III.: incipit: “Représenter à la Municipalité.”
95 Truchet, Spectacles, ii.60n9; JdesS, 3 January 1794; Journal des théâtres, 3 September
1794; and Petites Affiches, 5 September 1794. The Journal de l’Opéra does not list the work
for 26 December 1793 (on that date, Miltiade à Marathon, L’Offrande à la liberté, and Le
Jugement de Pâris were performed), but does list it for 31 December 1793, along with
Fabius.
96 JdesS, 185 (14 Nivôse An II [= 3 January 1794]), 1472.
97 AN: AJ/13/47 # unnumbered (10 November; the session alluded to would be that
of 20 November if the décadi before the date of the letter is meant).
98 On the work, see Maurice Dommanget, Sylvain Maréchal, l’égalitaire, “l’homme sans
Dieu”: Sa vie, son œuvre, 1750–1803 (Paris: R. Lefeuvre, 1950), pp. 274–83.

contested policy and identified with the radicals. It was condemned by
Robespierre, who at this point was pursuing a different strategy, and so the
Opéra’s participation demonstrates that its artists had moved toward the radi-
calism of the sections, away from the position of the state. This also explains
why, on 22 December 1793, the CSP forbade the Opéra to perform Le Tombeau
des Imposteurs, et l’inauguration du temple de la Vérité and similar anti-clerical
works, seemingly both to avoid public disturbances and to respect the
Convention’s decree of 16 Frimaire [6 December 1793], safeguarding the free-
dom of worship.99 The decree of 22 December claims that Le Tombeau des
imposteurs contained a satire of the Pater noster and a staged Mass. Yet the
Commune was against the work’s suppression. Baudrais and Froidure had
approved this work on behalf of the police just ten days before,100 and the
Commune opposed the CSP’s attempt to suppress the work; so the Opéra was
at the center of a controversy over jurisdiction.
“rendre les théâtres nationaux”

While the Commune was strengthening its grip on the Opéra, on 15 November
[25 Brumaire An II], the Convention also debated the situation of the theaters.
The immediate catalyst was the vacancy of the premises of the Théâtre de la
Nation (the more conservative wing of the Comédie-Française) after the actors’
arrest following performances of Paméla, and a suggestion made by Chaumette
that the Opéra be moved to those vacant premises, which would have solved
the problem of the current location of the Opéra at the Porte Saint-Martin. In
that same session, the CIP was instructed to formulate a plan to “rendre les
théâtres nationaux” [render the theaters nationally useful.]101 The question
had first been raised on 24 October in the CIP, when a police administrator
had called for the reestablishment of the Comédie-Française and had claimed
that the law of 2 August calling for free performances had been divisive and
had done little to improve esprit public.102
In a session of the CIP on 17 November [27 Brumaire An II], Anne-Joseph-
Arnould Valdruche and Jean-Baptiste Anacharsis Cloots were elected as
99 CSP, ix.582; JdesS, 178 (7 Nivôse An II [= 27 December 1793]), 1413–14.

100 AJ/13/47.III.: “Copie de la lettre des administrateurs de Police, chargés de la
surveillance des spectacles.” Manuscript copy made by Hainault, secretary of the Opéra.
On this work, d’Estrée, Théâtre sous la Terreur, pp. 21–22, and JdesS, 7 Pluviôse An II.
101 AP, lxxix.277–78; CIP, ii.836n.
102 His intervention was then followed up on 13 November (but the proceedings of
the CIP do not give any details). CIP, ii.684, 814.

commissioners (out of preference to Marie-Joseph Chénier among others).103
However, Cloots was excluded from the Jacobin club five days later as a
foreigner and then from the Convention as well (5–6 Nivôse An II), before
being placed under arrest by the Committee of general security [CSG] on 7
Nivôse, and his report was postponed, first to 7 December 1793 [17 Frimaire
An II], and then indefinitely. Yet by then the report had been printed and was
distributed in the Convention on 6 Nivôse [26 December 1793], so it gained
some public airing, if no official discussion.104 It concluded that the only
establishments that deserved national funding were those that acted in the
good of all, and argued that the state should only pay for an institution that
would literally benefit all citizens—and this a theater, with limited seating
capacity, could not do!105 The report itself was therefore short-lived and inef-
fective, since it was not in tune either with the Commune, or with the radical
majority in the Convention who had been clamoring, since the beginning of
the year, for tighter national control over repertory; as such it seems to have
been politely filed away. Conversely, there is dispersed evidence that particu-
larly appropriate works were subsidized: on 2 February 1794, costs of perform-
ing La Réunion du 10 août were handed to the CSP,106 for instance; and this
selective subsidy continued into 1795 (when, on 17 January, the CSP provided
material for a performance of the ballet Mirza).107
Increasingly the backlash of the CSP against communal control had a
strong moral dimension. The surveillance committee issued a press statement
dated 26 Nivôse An II [15 January 1794] to make an example of the Boulevard
Théâtre de la Gaîté and insisting that theaters should be a school for virtue;
actors and directors could be held responsible for the “abuses” committed on
stage.108 The Moniteur of 13 Pluviôse An II [1 February 1794] also called for
a form of theater that could act as a school of morality and decency, and to
allow individual institutions to perform both “patriotic” works and those
where “private virtue” would be resplendent.109 As we shall see in Part Two,
the increasing willingness to render theater professionals responsible for
103 CIP, ii.835–6, 855.

104 CIP, iii.76–83. See also Convention Nationale, Opinion d’Anacharsis Cloots, Membre
du Comité d’Instruction publique. Imprimé par ordre de la Convention Nationale (Paris: Imp.
Nationale, An II).
105 Opinion, p. 9.
106 CSP, x.616–17.
107 CSP, xi.528.
108 Journal de la Montagne, 64 (27 Nivôse An II), p. 512.
109 Moniteur, xix.347.

“abuses” of behavior within the auditorium is part of a wider trend; in this
trend, the burden of responsibility to select and produce works that may be
judged appropriate to the context of moral and political reform is shifted to the
creator of the work (whether author, director, or actors), rather than being
imposed from outside, and the Opéra did not escape such scrutiny, nor such
responsibility.
“translating” the opéra (iv): november

1793–march 1794
The growing jurisdictional conflict between the municipality and the
executive over the theaters was also exacerbated by the problem of the “transla-
tion” of the Opéra, first formulated by the Conseil général of the Commune on
11 Brumaire An II [1 November 1793]. The resulting shakeup of Parisian
theaters was to be quite complex, as various conflicting plans were drawn up,
affecting several different institutions at the same time: the Opéra, the two
wings of the Comédie-Française, and the Théâtre Montansier. The situation of
these in November 1793, was as follows: (1) The Odéon, officially named
Théâtre du Faubourg Saint-Germain, was situated at the intersection of the
rue de Vaugirard, the rue de Condé, and the rue des Fossés-Monsieur-le-Prince.
It had been designed by Marie-Joseph Peyre and Charles de Wailly and built
in 1782. Occupied by the Comédie-Française from 9 April 1782 until its clo-
sure on 2 September 1793 pursuant to the “Paméla affair,” it had most recently
housed the “conservative” wing of that theater after its 1789 split: the so-called
Théâtre de la Nation, as it was renamed in July 1789 (and therefore not by the
CSP, as Wild claims).110 (2) The Théâtre National de la rue de la loi, situated
at the intersection of rue de la loi and rue Louvois, was newly built by Mlle.
Montansier and Honoré Bourdon (known as Neuville) and had opened on
15 August 1793.111 It was commonly nicknamed Théâtre des 3 millions, the
sum she was rumored to have spent on it.
Speaking on 1 November, Chaumette referred back to the arrêté taken by
the Conseil général on 16 September at the behest of Hébert, whereby the
110 The more radical section of the Comédie-Française moved to the Théâtre de la
République, rue de Richelieu (current n. 2, rue de Richelieu: Hillairet, Dictionnaire,
ii.341). Wild, Dictionnaire, p. 284–5.
111 This institution is not to be confused with the Théâtre Montansier, at the Palais-
Royal, also known as the Palais-Egalité. The Théâtre national, rue de la loi, was at current
n. 69, rue de Richelieu (Hillairet, Dictionnaire, ii.57–58).

Commune had prevented the forced closure of the Opéra.112 This, he claimed,
gave the Commune both a right and a responsibility to conserve and protect
the institution.113 Accordingly, Chaumette called for the Opéra to be moved to
the vacant theater of the Théâtre-Français (the Odéon) and sent the matter
to the Département des Travaux Publics for a report.114 Their report, inextant,
must have been favorable, because Chaumette headed a deputation from the
Commune to the Convention two weeks later on 25 Brumaire [15 November
1793], requesting that the Opéra be moved accordingly.115 He pointed to
the unsuitability of the Porte Saint-Martin, and to the wider urban interest of
placing the Opéra in a quarter which was in decline since the closure of the
Odéon. (A later report by Antoine-François Momoro was to confirm the point
about the quarter being in decline.) It is also clear from a passing reference in
the motion that there was a rival demand to move the Opéra to Montansier’s
theater, the Théâtre National on rue de la loi.116 In Chaumette’s view, this
option was less attractive because of the fire hazard such a plan would pose to
the neighboring national library. Nonetheless, at Thuriot’s suggestion, the
Comité des domaines was consulted.117
The CIP returned to the issue on 23 November [3 Frimaire An II], along
with the related issue of the organization of national festivals;118 it was decided
that commissioners previously elected to discuss these (separate) issues should
be united to form a single commission, composed of Gilbert Romme, Jacques-
Louis David, Antoine-François Fourcroy, Mathieu, Gabriel Bouquier, and
Cloots. Fourcroy and Bouquier are named here for the first time, and Valdruche’s
112 Moniteur, xviii.677.

113 CIP, ii.861n3. Guillaume is citing, in his appendix, from an arrêté of the Conseil
général de la Commune of 16 September 1793, untraced. This phrase does not turn up in
the acta of the CSP, the CIP, or in the AP.
114 Guillaume, CIP, ii.861, citing Moniteur, 44 (14 Brumaire An II [= 4 November
1793]), xviii.325.
115 CIP, ii.836n, 861.
116 AP, lxxix.277; CIP, ii.864–65, both quoting Moniteur, 56 (26 Brumaire An II
[= 16 November 1793]), xviii.430.
117 Moniteur, 56 (16 November 1793), xviii.430–31; AP, lxxix.278. A letter from a
Représentant en mission of 18 November also expressed satisfaction that the Convention was
going to treat the question of theaters, since the problems of “counter-Revolutionary”
manifestations in theater were also rife in the provinces (CSP, viii.544). The Comité des
domaines was established in 1792 and was chiefly responsible for the transfer of crown
property and the liquidation of crown finances, and for the demarcation of national
property.
118 CIP, iii.2.

name is absent, for reasons that are unclear. This group was subsequently
referred to as the “Commission des six.” It was only a temporary commission
with responsibility for theaters and festivals, and it was to be superseded sev-
eral months later in that role by the CIP. But during its tenure, it received
plans from the architect Charles de Wailly for the extension of the Odéon on
11 December [21 Frimaire An II] (presumably to make it suitable to house the
Opéra: the record is not explicit).119 On 4 January 1794 [15 Nivôse An II], it
received a petition from the section de Marat (via the CIP), which called for a
quick resolution to the problem of the Opéra, and presenting plans for the
institution’s move to the vacant premises of the Théâtre-Français: it is possible
that the Commune, not yet having received satisfaction, was stirring up
the sections.120 On 1 February [13 Pluviôse An II], plans by a certain Perrard
were sent to the municipality for comparison with those of Wailly.121 Perrard
was an architect who had also submitted a memorandum on cost cutting at the
Opéra, also sent from the CIP to the Commission des six on 19 December;122
Mathieu had been asked to prepare a report on it on 27 December.123
There is no subsequent mention of these plans, and it is not known if the
municipality discussed them. Clearly, though, the government was dragging
its feet, because the artists themselves presented a petition in person to the
Convention on 12 February. In it they returned to the accusation of conflict of
interest which had governed the original move to the Porte Saint-Martin in
1781;124 they claimed that the only way for the institution to break even was
to move to the center of Paris. However, they called for a move not to the
Odéon, which they claimed would cost over 1 million livres, but instead to
what they called the Théâtre de la République.125 Their reasons were financial:
the building would not need extending, unlike the Odéon, to house the Opéra,
so the move would only cost 100,000 livres; and the existing troupe could
move easily to the Odéon in their place. They further claimed that the move
119 CIP, iii.135.

120 CIP, iii.234–35n.
121 CIP, iii.389–90. Possibly François-Victor Perrard de Montreuil.
122 29 Frimaire An II. CIP, iii.197.
123 7 Nivôse An II. CIP, iii.214.
124 AP, lxxxiv.656–57 (656).
125 It is unclear to what theater they were referring. They make reference to the the-
ater being in the center of the city, which applies to both Montansier-Neuville’s theater
and the radical Comédie Française (normally named Théâtre de la République from 1793);
both were on rue de la Loi. But I have traced no evidence that the latter troupe were due
to vacate their building; and it is possible that there is a confusion with the former theater
in the artists’ petition.

would raise the receipts of the Opéra by 200,000 livres per year, so the plan was
clearly economically attractive, and was sent to the CIP for examination.
Before the CIP and Commune could make a decision between plans to
move the Opéra either to the Odéon or to Montansier’s theater, discussion was
sidetracked by alternative plans for the Odéon. Following petitions,126 the CSP
decreed, on 10 March 1794 [20 Ventôse An II] that the empty auditorium was
to be reopened as a “Théâtre du Peuple”: a national theater offering three state-
funded performances per décade, “by and for the people,” for which prospective
spectators had to wear a distinguishing symbol, which would be distributed
to patriots by the municipality. Performances were to be given by performers
in the area, on rotation, rather than by a particular troupe, and Paris theaters
were to submit their repertory for inspection, seemingly for works to be
selected for performance at this new institution.127 The Opéra indeed sent one
such repertory list to the police, presumably for this purpose, on 10 April [21
Germinal].128 Hallays-Dabot has stated that the preference was for classic Old
Regime theater, rewritten to remove references to monarchy and aristocracy.129
The plan did not come to fruition, but what is noteworthy is the unanimity of
the Commune and the CSP in proposing the plan, which superseded plans for
the move of the Opéra—since with the Odéon used for another project, there
was no available site for it. Accordingly, on 21 March [1 Germinal An II], the
Opéra prodded the CIP with a series of observations about its possible future
location, which were sent to Mathieu.130
On 16 April [27 Germinal] the CSP canceled its plan for the Théâtre
du Peuple and ordered the immediate transfer of the Opéra to the
126 In response to a petition made by four of the sections (Marat, Mutius-Scævola,

Bonnet, and Unité), a report was prepared by Momoro and subsequently published.
Rapport sur le Luxembourg et le Théâtre-Français. Section de Marat. Séance du cinq Ventôse an II.
de la république française ([Paris]: Imp. de Momoro, n.d.), 8p. [BN: Lb40-460]. Dated 21
Pluviôse An II [9 February 1794], it demonstrates that the plan was to move the Opéra to
the Odéon and to place the war department (currently dispersed over a series of different
locations in Paris) to a central home at the Luxembourg palace [Maison nationale]. It hardly
discusses the case of the Opéra and merely asks the CSP to present a report on the advan-
tages of the move (p. 8).
127 CSP, xi.626. Cp. CIP, iv.11–12, and Wild, Dictionnaire, p. 285.
128 AN: AJ/13/47.III. “Le comité de l’opera national aux administrateurs de police.”
129 Histoire de la censure théâtrale, p. 192. Hallays-Dabot dates the decree to 22 Ventôse,
which he mistakenly converts as February 1794 (22 Ventôse was 12 March 1794).
130 CIP, iv.7, 11–12. It is clear that the proposal was an attempt to stem a growing
exodus of artists to the provinces and abroad: Théâtre sous la Terreur, p. 35–36. Cf. FSP, 26
Pluviôse; JdP, 18 Germinal, pp. 1867–68; AP, l.51.

Théâtre-National, rue de la Loi.131 Barère, in his Memoirs, takes the credit for
this decision, as well as for the indemnity that Montansier received.132
Montansier herself had been denounced by the Commune on 14 November
1793 and arrested the following day,133 yet her theater had remained open as a
self-governing troupe of artists, exactly like the Opéra, and her troupe was to
move to the Odéon.134 The official reason for two theaters moving rather than
one was given in the artists’ petition: that the rue de la Loi was capable of
accommodating the Opéra without substantial renovation, unlike the Odéon.
It also appears that the Opéra was considered a priority, since 200,000 livres
were provided in subsidy to cover the expenses of this move.135 Additional
costs were also taken on by the state, and the CSP was closely involved with the
liquidation of Francœur and Cellerier’s affairs;136 this was demonstrated by the
report made to the CSP by the “commission des administrations civiles,” which
insisted upon the financial aspect of the move and the need to reform the
internal administration of the Opéra in the process.137 This included offering
reimbursements to help defray the costs of moving home for the 200 perform-
ers of the theater, which was set at 100,000 livres (of which 25,000 had already
been given), and as seem to have been provided for by point 4 of the arrêt,
quoted earlier; it also provided for reforming the internal administration to
allow financial involvement as an incentive for better performance:
The principal pitfall to be avoided is that the artists should come to rely
upon these subsidies and become complacent, ceasing to worry about
their subsistence and neglecting their talent. They must have a stake in
the takings . . . perhaps the artists of these two theaters should have
overall control.138
A coda points out that this new administration should be submitted either to
the Commission exécutive de l’instruction publique or the Commission des
131 CIP, iv.12; CSP, xii.614.

132 B. Barère, Mémoires, ed. Hippolyte Carnot and David, 4 vols. (Paris: Jules Labitte,
1842), ii.144.
133 Wild, Dictionnaire, p. 273; Pougin, Un Directeur, p. 86.
134 Essai historique, p. 30; CSP, xii.614 [27 Germinal An II / 16 April 1794]. See also
CIP, iv.12.
135 CIP, iv.12.
136 CSP, xii.614.
137 AN: F/17/1069 #7. See also F/17/1069 #25, a report from the Commission des
administrations civiles to the CSP.
138 ibid., f.2r.

administrations civiles for approval, and that a government-appointed “national
agent” should oversee the running of the theater. The report finishes with a
proposed arrêté, which does not figure in the proceedings of the CSP. By the
end of April 1794, then, the issue of placing had been completed, although
the Opéra was not to move until August.139 As early as 30 April 1794 a read-
ing of several works intended for the inauguration of the new building was
scheduled.140
the commission exécutive de l’instruction

publique (june 1794)
In terms of authority over the theaters, there were two remaining shortcom-
ings of the current situation: control over repertory remained piecemeal and
needed to be more systematic, and there was frequent disagreement between
the different institutions sharing that authority. Historians have considered the
reassertion of control over repertory, but the record is fragmentary, and there is
controversy over the dating, compounded by the fact that some of the docu-
ments seen by such critics as Vivien and Hallays-Dabot have since been
destroyed. At stake is the question of when the state reasserted control via
stringent censorship of play manuscripts, as it had before the Revolution. The
most recent discussion, that of Root-Bernstein, is categorical in stating that
censorship returned before the establishment of the Commission de l’instruction
publique, not after, as most prior historians had assumed;141 and evidence from
the Opéra which she had not seen, bears out her claim.
The struggle between the committees and the Commune over theater was
only part of a much wider antagonism between the deputies of the Convention,
and the radicals of the sections, of which Hébert had set himself up as a repre-
sentative. In early 1794, a tightening-up of the Jacobins’ hold over judicial
processes, such as in the so-called Ventôse decrees, allowed them to regain the
initiative, and the ensuing arrest and subsequent execution of Hébert and his
followers (the Hebertists) in March 1794 likewise allowed for cultural control
to be reorganized, superseding the police’s jurisdiction over public order,
139 Mémoire justificatif, Pour la citoyenne Montansier, dated 10 Frimaire An II

[30 November 1793] ([Paris]: Imp. Potier, [1793]). The question of Montansier’s
forced move was to return after Thermidor, as an “illegal” decree by the CSP requiring
compensation.
140 AJ/13/47.III. Untitled memo, incipit: “Le Cn Villette qui avoit jour de lecture
pour le 1er. Floréal.”
141 Boulevard Theater, p. 303 (note 40 to chapter 8).

which had been restated in the law of 2 August on repertory (article 3) and in
the decree of 1 September on literary property (article 3).142 Baudrais and
Froidure, the two police administrators specially in charge of the censorship of
plays, were imprisoned along with two other colleagues (on 9 Germinal/
29 March 1794) and were replaced by new administrators named Faro and
Lelièvre.143 Chaumette was also replaced as procurator of the Commune by
Claude-François Payan. These replacements both constituted a softening of
the Commune’s oppositional attitude to central government, since Payan in
particular was considered, in Colin Jones’s words, as having “worked to make
the Commune a docile instrument of the committees of government.”144 One
important aspect of this was Payan’s relaxation of the policy of expurgations to
the classic repertory which had been a central plank of the policy of his prede-
cessor, Chaumette. D’Estrée cites his letter to the CSP of 14 Floréal An II
[3 May 1794], reporting that he had ordered Faro and Lelièvre to repeal or
correct their recent circular to theater directors: it was ridiculous, he exclaimed,
to conflate Revolutionary modes with classical characters and to address Citizen
Cataline or to see Jupiter or Armida adorned with a tricolor cockade.145
Accordingly, directors were now allowed to leave unaltered pre-Revolutionary
tragedies or those clearly set in a different period; only new works had to use
citoyen/citoyenne in preference to Monsieur/Madame (the latter were only
allowed as insults!). Most curiously, “old” comedies had a different status from
“old” tragedies; these were left to directors’ discretion, for reasons not explained;
this may suggest that tragedy continued to be considered the more politicized
genre. We still know little about Payan, the linchpin of the CoIP,146 but we
do know that on 8 May, in his new capacity, Payan warned Robespierre
that Chénier’s play Timoléon was dangerous, because too moderate, and could
provide dangerous role models.147
142 Hallays-Dabot, Histoire de la censure théâtrale, p. 183; d’Estrée, Théâtre sous la

Terreur, states that this gives police powers to the Commune (p. 7) but it clearly already had
them, and the decree should be considered a restatement.
143 d’Estrée, Théâtre sous la Terreur, p. 11n; CIP, iv.550; AP, lxxxvii.602 [10 Germinal
An II / 30 March 1794]. Hallays-Dabot also notes that Baudrais had expressed his prefer-
ence, in print, for Louis XVI being simply deported, not executed. Histoire de la censure
théâtrale, p. 194.
144 Longman companion, p. 378.
146 Although I have found no document in which the author uses his first name,
Michèle Root-Bernstein claims that it is Joseph Payan, not his better-known brother,
Claude-François Payan.
147 CIP, iv.394–97 (394).

More organized control also began to be asserted over new works and over
repertory in general. The decree of 12 Germinal [1 April 1794] had created
twelve executive commissions to replace the old ministries, which were to
report daily to the CSP on their expenses.148 Among these, the Commission
exécutive de l’instruction publique, which was to be known after Thermidor as
the “commission Payan” after the name of its director, reported to the “instruc-
tion publique” section of the CSP. We do not know precisely when or how it
was established; but an arrêté of the CSP in Barère’s hand dated 18 Prairial
[6 June 1794] sets out much of its organization.149 The commission’s primary
function was to take charge of everything concerning the “regeneration of
dramatic art” and the “moral policing” of theater. Article 2 of the arrêté shows
that it took over the responsibilities for surveillance recently (and unofficially)
assumed by the Commune (and especially the police commissioners) and was
part of a self-conscious process whereby the CSP put paid to the Commune’s
interference.150 Article 3 leaves exclusive control over public order in the hands
of the police. Greater surveillance over the major theaters was also assured in
the person of an “agent” who would report to the CoIP, as well as the require-
ment that the committee of the theater in question submit material pertaining
to administration and finances.151 A reference in Barère’s memoirs suggests
that he was the individual in charge of the theater section of the CoIP but
gives little information on the workings of that section.152 We know, however,
that the commission was divided into three sections, each divided into differ-
ent bureaus.153 The first division was entitled “Partie morale” and was subdi-
vided into two sections: “Partie d’instruction – Ecoles. Enseignement”; and
“Mœurs publiques – Spectacles. Fêtes nationales.” Theater and music appear
not under an artistic rubric but directly under the first division, “morale pub-
lique,” referring to the pre-eminence of the moral responsibility of the work
over its aesthetic value, even in spite of the commission’s self-avowed concern
148 See CIP, iv.215–19, 234. See the summary derived from the table of the Instruction
sur la manière d’inventorier et de conserver, dans toute l’étendue de la République, tous les objets
qui peuvent servir aux arts, aux sciences et à l’enseignement, p. 7, in CIP, iii.549–50.
149 CIP, iv.216–17. Cp. CSP, xiv.169–70; Théâtre sous la Terreur, pp. 38–39.
150 Théâtre sous la Terreur, p. 39n1.
151 Commission d’instruction publique. Spectacles. Extrait des registres des arrêtés du comité de
Salut Public de la Convention nationale, 18 Prairial, 5 Messidor, An II (n.p.: n.pub., n.d.).
Reproduced: CIP, iv.216–17.
152 Barère, Mémoires, ii.138–39.
153 CIP, iv.218.

with “the regeneration of dramatic art.” Equally noteworthy is the importance
accorded to its public status, placing it alongside education and festivals.
It is difficult to reconstruct the activities of the CoIP, as so little documen-
tation has survived. James Guillaume has discovered two further documents:
an arrêté dated 24 or 25 Floréal [13/14 May], calling for theaters to submit
their repertories for approval;154 and a similar text dated 5 Prairial [24 May]
concerning the theaters of Bordeaux, which he attributes to a certain Marc-
Antoine Jullien fils. This second document also refers back to the same arrêté
of the CoIP dated 24 Floréal.155 Vivien, who had seen the relevant papers,
claims that 151 plays were censored in the space of three months by the CoIP:
thirty-three were rejected and twenty-five needed modifications.156 Most traces
of these have been lost, and only a statistically insignificant sample survive; one
example is a version of Voltaire’s La Mort de César, seemingly prepared by
Gohier, who was minister of justice.157 Among other surviving papers of the
commission is a decree on the removal of aristocratic titles, dated 8 Floréal
An II [27 April 1794].158
The question of chronology is crucial to the interpretation of these sources.
Vivien believes that the plays were censored as a cooperative effort between the
municipal police and the CoIP beginning in mid-May 1794. But other critics
place the process earlier. Guillaume, and following him Root-Bernstein, believe
that this censorship was undertaken by the municipal police before the
CoIP’s assumption of authority over theater. As an example, they cite Ducray-
Duminil’s L’Entrevue des patriotes en 1790, written for the Théâtre Feydeau in
154 Krakovitch, Pièces de théâtre, p. 17, also refers to an unpublished arrêté of 25 Floréal
An II that enjoins all theaters to submit their repertory, and suggests it is this text that
nominates Baudrais and Froidure.
155 CIP, iv.550–51. Cp. Vivien, Etudes administratives, p. 444.
156 Vivien, Etudes administratives, p. 445; on theater in general, see pp. 407–512.
Vivien, hostile to the deregulation of 1791, states categorically that theatrical control is
not incompatible with what he calls “le principe de la liberté industrielle” (pp. 432–33),
and I discuss his general stance above. He lists (p. 445) examples of plays respectively
banned, modified, and accepted; see also Kennedy’s transcription of that list: Theatre,
Opera and Audiences, pp. 390–91.
157 La Mort de César, tragédie en 3 actes, de Voltaire, avec les changemens fait[s] par le cit-
oyen Gohier, Ministre de la Justice; Représentée au Théâtre de la République, à Paris (Commune-
Affranchie: L. Cutty, An II), 37 pp. The copy held at BNF: Z-Beuchot-582 is bound
with a thirteen-page manuscript entitled “Nouveau dénouement de la mort de César”
[www.gallica.bnf.fr].
158 AN: F/17/1069 #7. d’Estrée dates this to 26 April: Théâtre sous la Terreur,
pp. 89–90.

1793 and refused by Faro and Lelièvre on 6 Floréal An II [25 April 1794].159
The archives of the Opéra do not contain anything relating to a formalized
process of censorship or play revision, but their papers do confirm that munic-
ipal officers were giving ad hoc approval for play performances in the spring of
1794. For instance, Faro and Lelièvre wrote to the Opéra on 1 Floréal An II [20
April 1794], enclosing identity cards for the officers whom they had appointed
to oversee esprit public and public order, so that they might be admitted to the
Opéra; two days later a letter asks the committee why certain such individuals
have not been admitted.160 A letter dated 19 Prairial An II [7 June 1794] also
allows the Opéra to continue with a performance of an unspecified work, “since
we are convinced that you will take care to choose only those works most
appropriate to the festivals being celebrated.”161 These souces suggest that the
police continued to assert control in the month following the creation of the
CoIP. Guillaume also cites a police decision from 6 Floréal [25 April] and their
approval of Timoléon, claiming that the police only reluctantly relinquished
control over pre-performance scrutiny.162 There is even existing evidence that
the police gave formal permission for performance as late as 19 Prairial an II
[7 June 1794], although this related to the specific context of an unnamed
festival (presumably the Fête de l’Etre suprême).163 This is the reason,
Guillaume states, that the CSP restated the CoIP’s exclusive jurisdiction over
censorship and police morale in the theaters, in its arrêté of 18 Prairial [6 June],
which further required the police to hand over all relevant paperwork to the
commission. More important, as Guillaume noted, the CoIP subsequently
reversed some of the Commune’s decisions over plays:164 I discuss the impor-
tant case of Castor et Pollux in Chapter 6, as an example of a work at first
modified and then banned by the Commune; a decision subsequently reversed
by the CoIP.165 In the light of these patchy sources, it does seem that the
159 Mentioned by d’Estrée, Théâtre sous la Terreur, p. 6. BnF-Mss: FF.9284, ff.228–65.

See f.229r, a letter from Faro and Lelièvre on Commune letterhead, which reads “We have
received the play, entitled L’Entrevue des Patriotes en 1790, but we cannot permit perfor-
mance, given that the play is full of dukes, duchesses, and priests, and that the National
guardsmen are presented as drunkards.” I am studying this manuscript, which contains
collettes and corrections to almost every page, in a separate article.
160 AN: AJ/13/44 #55 and 58, respectively.
161 AN: AJ/13/47.III.
162 CIP, iv.552.
163 AN: AJ/13/47.III., letter dated 19 Prairial on letterhead from Commune de Paris
and signed Tanchon? Jouquoy, Lelièvre, Bigant.
164 CIP, iv.552.
165 CIP, iv.714.

formalization of surveillance was instigated by the Commune before the advent
of the Commission; the two overlapped in April 1794, but (as Root-Bernstein
puts it) “this censorship did not extend beyond early May, when Joseph Payan,
head of the Commission . . ., began reversing the censorial policies of the
Commune.”166 If this is true, than it means that the Commission effectively
took back that same control and returned the role of the Commune to
that undertaken by the municipality during the period of the Constituent
Assembly: simple policing of public order. It would also mean, crucially, that
it was municipal control—not state regulation—that was the more culturally
repressive.
By June, it had become clear that the practice of the two bodies differed
radically. Accordingly, on 29 June, Noël-Gabriel-Luce Villar of the CIP, who
had received Paris’s Discours sur les spectacles on 24 May for a report (inextant),167
was instructed to confer with the CSP about the appropriate procedure to be
adopted in respect of plays submitted to the CIP for its approval.168 Until then,
the CIP had the plays read by one named rapporteur, who would then send the
play, with a report, to the CSP with a recommendation. But the recent creation
of the CoIP was potentially conflictual, hence this decision to confer with the
CSP. On 29 June the CoIP had, coincidentally, completed a report on the Fête
de l’Etre suprême, which it sent to the CSP for approval; in essence, the report
forbade the Parisian theaters from representing the festival on their stages.169
The festival was a deist ceremony of Robespierre’s devising, as he intended that
deism should become a new state religion after the Revolution was ended.
Formally announced before the Convention on 7 May 1794, the festival
was Robespierre’s alternative to the radical Festival of Reason, of which he
disapproved. Part of the essence of the Festival of the Supreme Being, as
Marie-Hélène Huet has shown, was its sublime “unrepresentability”; the
CSP felt that the ceremony was degraded if it was made an object of theatrical
representation.170
The CoIP’s report, signed by Payan and Fourcade and approved by the CSP
on 13 Messidor [1 July 1794], is interesting in that it seems to signal a change
of policy away from the ephemeral “pièce de circonstance” favored by the
166 Boulevard Theater, p. 303, n40.

167 CIP, iv.472.
168 CIP, iv.706.
169 Le Théâtre sous la Terreur, pp. 42–43.
170 “Le sacre du printemps: Essai sur le sublime et la Terreur,” Modern Language Notes,
103.4 (September 1988), 782–99 (783–84).

Commune and toward what it describes as “la pensée publique et éternelle”;171
the report deplores the triviality of what it shows to be a secondary repre-
sentation of a festival whose meaning depends precisely on its “sublime
unrepresentability.”172 This conflict had been brewing since January 1794,
when satires of the Mass were banned on Parisian stages in the context of the
Festival of Reason.173 The distinction between a “Hebertist” view of culture as
pièce de circonstance capable of “enflaming” a massed, popular audience and the
committees’ straining toward a more aesthetically challenging form of art has
been ignored by all previous commentators on “Jacobin” aesthetics, whether
those from Huet to Maslan, who have insisted upon “anti-theatricalism,” or
Ozouf, whose study of the festival similarly assumes a unified Jacobin aim. But
the sources suggest that the committees were just as aware, in theater as in
other areas, of the nefarious influence of the atheist policies of Hébert and
Chaumette and were pursuing an explicit policy of reaction before the end of
the Terror, which continued after Thermidor. To talk of propaganda is to
ignore this complex negotiation and the differences of policy espoused by the
different institutions, even at the very height of the Terror.
On 23 June 1794, the commission, on behalf of the CSP, sent a circular to
all Paris theaters whose veiled promises for the future left nobody in any doubt
of the committee’s aim:
Until now, theaters have been left to authors and to the petty interests
of individuals or groups and have therefore made only scant progress
toward the goal of public utility assigned to them by a better order. . . .
Soon, we shall root out the evil, pursue the principle, foresee the fatal
effects; but for now it is enough to prepare the moral regeneration which
will take place, fortify the preliminary intentions of the CSP, imbue the
theaters with the seeds of political life, which is the role assigned to
171 Commission d’Instruction Publique: Fêtes à l’être suprême. Pièces dramatiques

(Paris: Imp. de la commission d’instruction publique, 14 Messidor An II), 7 pp.
[BN: Le-38–833]
172 Marie-Hélène Huet briefly discusses this report in her “Le sacre du printemps”
(pp. 783–84); cf. her Rehearsing the Revolution: The Staging of Marat’s Death, 1793–1797,
trans. Robert Hurley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); “Performing Arts:
Theatricality and the Terror,” in Representing the French Revolution: Literature, Historiography
and Art, ed. James A. W. Heffernan (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England,
1992), pp. 135–49; “The Revolutionary sublime,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 28.1
(Autumn 1994), 51–64.
173 Hallays-Dabot, Histoire de la censure théâtrale, p. 186.

them in the vast plan which the Commission of public instruction will
agree with the CSP.
The theaters are still cluttered with the debris of the Old Regime,
feeble imitations of our Grand masters, where art and taste have
nothing to gain from interests which are alien to us, mores which are
no longer ours.
We must clear out this chaos of elements which are either alien to
the Revolution or unworthy of her sublime efforts; we must clear the
stage, so that reason can return, to speak the language of liberty,
to adorn the tomb of liberty’s martyrs, to celebrate heroism and virtue
in song, and encourage love of law and the fatherland.174
This circular then calls for all theaters to submit their repertory for examina-
tion. In a sense, it represents the kind of uni-directional positive intervention
in repertory that critics have tended to assume characterized the policy of
the Terror as a whole. But it was sent out just one month before Thermidor and
the close of the Terror and had little lasting impact on the Parisian theatrical
situation. Like the law of 2 August 1793, too often taken as representative, it
had no real impact.
4. Dismantling the Terror

The cultural sphere was as affected by the fall of Robespierre and his col-
leagues as any other; and the few months following 9 Thermidor saw the
dismantling of many of the mechanisms for cultural surveillance put into
place during the Terror. The CIP’s decree of 15 July was the first stage of this
process, referring explicitly to cultural regeneration using the lexis of the
early Revolution and following the same logic: that the removal of structures
and mechanisms of control that had previously constrained genius was a
prerequisite for the state of liberty needed for cultural rebirth.175 Instead of
the “servitude” of the Old Regime, however, this report repudiates what it
describes as the “Hebertism” of the arts; and it is interesting how quickly the
CIP rejects responsibility for the Terror’s policy onto the Commune. On
26 Thermidor [13 August 1794] the CSP sent a circular to theaters so as to
maintain order in the period of transition to a new regime, stating that it
174 CIP, iv.711. This is taken from the second arrêté of the CSP published by the
CoIP (see note 171).
175 Hallays-Dabot, Histoire de la censure, p. 196; discussed by d’Estrée, Théâtre sous la
Terreur, on p. 38 ff.

intended, once order had been restored, to return theaters to their “primary
function,” which was to act as “les écoles primaires de l’homme.”176
In this new context, many works forbidden during the Terror were quickly
staged, including the notorious Paméla and Timoléon, and mechanisms for
state surveillance and control were revised. On 8 September two projects on
surveillance of the Théâtre des Arts (now inextant) were sent to the section for
theater surveillance; it was moreover explicitly decided that the CoIP was no
longer to exert censorship while this section prepared a plan for legislation.
The following week, on 13 September, commissaires were instructed to pres-
ent a plan for the reconciliation of the ideals of art and those of the Republic,
and a debate on 24 September makes reference to the Commission temporaire
des arts (which had replaced the Commission des monuments in 1793).177 On
3 October, the CoIP was reorganized into three sections (Enseignement,
Sciences et Arts, Morale publique), each of which was composed of different
bureaus. The third section, “Morale publique,” was composed of three bureaus;
the first, headed by Lamarre, had authority over the administration and sur-
veillance of theaters, and laws regarding literary property.178 This document
setting out the new organization is undated, but it cites Garat, Ginguené, and
Clément de Ris as the three members of the commission. Ginguené, for
instance, was “premier adjoint” of the commission from 12 September 1794.179
However, the papers from the newly organized CoIP are inextant, and it has
been impossible to determine what its role was during the Thermidorian
period. The role of future ideologue Ginguené is however suggestive, and
deserves further study.
surveillance and moving the opéra (v)

In the meantime, plans for the “translation” of the Opéra continued, unaf-
fected by Thermidor, because continuity of service was paramount. On
6 August 1794, the Opéra received an indemnity for the move and for the
institution’s “good behavior.” The sum offered was 150,000 livres, out of
the total of 50 million livres which the CSP had available.180 On 10 August, an
176 BCF: 2 AG 1794.2.

177 CIP, v.32, 84, respectively.
178 Tableau des attributions de la Commission exécutive de l’instruction publique. AN:
D/XXXVIII.I.1, quoted by Guillaume in CIP, v.112.
179 Paolo Grossi, Pierre-Louis Ginguené, historien de la littérature italienne (Bern: Peter
Lang, 2006), p. 67.
180 CSP, xv.699.

additional six-month loan of 30,000 livres was also granted.181 Montansier’s
troupe only vacated the theater on rue de la Loi on 7 August, as it had contin-
ued to perform as a self-functioning troupe from her arrest on 14 November
1793 to 10 April.182 The imminent move clearly reawakened worries of fire
hazards, particularly since a fire had occurred in the abbey of Saint-Germain
des Prés during the night of 2–3 Fructidor [19–20 August 1794], as Guillaume
has demonstrated; the following day concerns were raised in the Convention,
and four days later, further worries were expressed by curators at the library.183
In spite of this the Opéra opened in the rue de la Loi on 20 Thermidor An II
[7 August 1794] with a performance of La Réunion du 10 août, preceded by
a prologue by Moline entitled L’Inauguration du Théâtre des Arts.184
181 CSP, xvi.5.

182 Hemmings, Theater and State, p. 67. Pougin, ‘Un Directeur,’ p. 88, says they gave
their last performance on 19 April: Wenzel, Le Retour du Mari, and La Journée de l’amour.
183 CIP, iv.960, 972n, respectively.
184 A “sans-culottide dramatique” by Bouquier and Moline (music: Porta; ballets:
Gardel), which had been premiered on 16 Germinal An II [5 avril 1794]. The date of the
theater’s inauguration is given in Wild, Dictionnaire, p. 273; Tissier, Spectacles, ii.57;
d’Estrée, Théâtre sous la Terreur, p. 33n1; Pougin, Un Directeur, p. 88. Francœur, “Essai
historique”, p. 30, gives 9 August. Cf. also Barère, Mémoires, ii.144; JdP, 14 August 1794.

5 Finances and Repertory
In the first part of this study I have traced the history of the institution in its
“external” dimension, considering its relationship with state and municipal
authorities and considering ownership and governance. In this second part my
attention shifts to the internal aspect, such as the establishment of repertory
insofar as surviving committee memos and internal paperwork allow us
to reconstruct it, the production process, and finally the works’ reception
and revision in the light of such reception. Chapters 6–8 study the works
themselves, focusing upon a number of case studies; this chapter presents
an overview of the selection, production, and performance of works; a statisti-
cal analysis of the repertory in terms of frequency and quantity of performances
and raw gate receipts; and an overview of the seasons in terms of raw takings
and the numbers of different types of productions.
Within the context of this study, a full analysis of finances and manage-
ment is impossible. Archival holdings for the finances of the Opéra are
incomplete and sources for particular seasons are sometimes contradictory.
Fortunately the series that is most important for my account—gate receipts for
performances—has survived in its entirety. Receipts provide a useful indica-
tion of the respective success of individual works and an important component
of the institution’s income over the period. Other items of income are more
complex, such as that derived from the boxes [loges], for which records are
incomplete, though substantial.1 The Opéra also had recourse at least twice to
1 AN: O/1/624 #196 (1788–1789); AJ/13/44 #418-440 (1791–1793).

substantial private loans, and the possibility of a lottery to fund it was also
proposed.2 Incomplete information exists regarding subsidy, as this took the
form of ad hoc payments of different sums according to individual requests
and productions, rather than a fixed periodic amount, as was to become
practice under Napoleon. The problem is further compounded by Francœur
and Cellerier’s inconsistent bookkeeping and the fragmentation of surviving
sources, and it is difficult to follow the overall financial position of the
Opéra during this period of its history. However, on the evidence of internal
correspondence concerning attempts to improve income and from the surviv-
ing accounts, it is clear that the institution faced a major financial crisis.
Habitually running at a loss, and moreover habituated to receiving a subsidy,
the institution was widely accepted as being unprofitable but deserving of
support. Yet while it is clear that emergency subsidy continued to be made
when absolutely necessary, it is also evident that the Opéra was sailing close to
the wind. Surviving committee deliberations and correspondence from 1792
show that requests for raises from principals were commonplace, as were
demands for payments from suppliers and employees, which suggest that the
institution was habitually in arrears for much of its expenditure.3 The problem
was further compounded by galloping inflation during the Terror, which
made expenses such as supplies increasingly ruinous and may also help explain
the drop-off in attendance, since the Opéra was a luxury product for Parisian
theatergoers.4 This is why studying the expenditure of the institution is
notoriously complex and would deserve a study of its own, far outside the scope
of this book. What makes the issue particularly awkward, and what only a
full-scale specific study could fully clarify, is that only patchy information has
survived concerning the expenses of the institution under the different rubrics
(making analysis over a time frame impossible), and too little detail is available
as to what actually got paid when. Worse, the inconsistent practice of noting
rentrées en caisse5 and the ad hoc payments disbursed mean that the accounts
often do not balance, and that surviving sources appear to contradict one
another (they probably do not, in fact, and rather reflect inconsistent notation
and reporting; but this is a matter for further research). Francœur and Cellerier
themselves were arrested in part on the basis of financial mismanagement, and
their accounts are incomplete. Moreover, the accounts of Le Camus, bursar
2 Loans: MC: ET/XVIII/900 (29 March 1792); CSP xvi.5 (10 August 1794).
3 e.g., AN: AJ/13/44 #202-24: “Pétitions et demandes diverses.”
4 On price inflation and popular calls for a maximum, see Doyle, Oxford History,
chapters 10 and 11.
5 For an example, see AN: AJ/13/56 #49, 53.

[caissier] of the Opéra under Francœur and Cellerier,6 were the object of an
internal enquiry covering the year after Francœur and Cellerier’s arrest. The
surviving report from that enquiry exonerated Le Camus but pointed to the
Opéra’s administrative confusion and overall difficult situation. It declared
the receipts “parfaitement en règle, d’après les registres de recette à la porte”
but was more circumspect concerning expenditure, especially the frequent
advance salary payments promised to the artists, and the receipts [quittances]
which, it remarked pithily, “ne sont point revêtues des formes [requises?] pour
une administration bien réglée.”7 Given the complexity of these sources, any-
thing other than an exhaustive study would risk substantial misinterpretation.
Some examples are given later in the chapter; but these are the reasons I have
decided to provide full accounts of recettes à la porte but not otherwise to enter
into the wider question of finances. Since the present study is concerned
above all with the relationship of the institution with the state and the reasons
governing the choice of works, it is this income stream, and the frequent
subsidies, that are the most significant segment of the accounts.
1. Statistical Analysis of Repertory

There are three main questions to ask concerning the repertory of the Opéra
in this period of change. First, how we can most appropriately periodize the
repertory, and to what extent are such micro-divisions appropriate? That is,
given the rapid change in political life and in the ownership and governance of
the institution, one might ask whether repertory policy shifts accordingly.
Second, given that one of the striking characteristics of the repertory of the
early Revolution is what seems to be its apolitical and traditional character,
one might ask whether there is any discernible fault line in 1789. Previous
studies of the Old Regime have often fixed their end point at 1789, implicitly
seeing 1789 as a year of rupture; yet it is worth separating out the different
strands that might imply: institutional constraints, internal managerial and
other practices, choice of repertory, performance of those works, and not least
reception. Finally, we also need to consider to what extent the breakdown of
6 It has not been possible to determine exactly when Le Camus was bursar.
AGTS-1791 lists Prieur as caissier (p. 26), but since the post was never included in the
committee, it is rarely listed in the published summaries.
7 “Rapport des Citoyens Nivelon, Le Bel et Rochefort sur la comptabilité du Cn. Le
Camus du 17 septembre [1793] (V. Stile) au 1er. G[ermin]al L’an 4.” AN: AJ/13/56 #73,
pp. 2, 2–3.
finances and repertory | 185

genres evident in the other Parisian theaters also affects the Opéra, and to ask
whether its repertory remains separate from other theaters’ production, or
whether there is a merging after the deregulation of January 1791, which
dissociated works from institutions.
questions of periodization
Within the period of this study, several chronological fault lines and different
ways of conceiving of the periods appear. From a managerial point of view, four
segments exist: management by the royal household; from April 1790 to April
1792 management by the city of Paris; from April 1792 to September 1793
private enterprise run by Francœur and Cellerier; and thereafter management
by the artists of the Opéra themselves. We shall see that these dates indeed
appear relevant to the proportion of new works performed, both of which
vary from one period to the next. However, the Le Chapelier law, which abol-
ishes theatrical privilège and places the Opéra in a situation of unprecedented
competition with other Parisian theaters, is arguably more important than
changes in managerial regime, although its effects can only be observed over a
medium term. However, it is not certain that the law affected the repertory
directly. As we shall see, genres certainly become more varied after the law,
but this does not constitute a direct causality. The law’s two important provi-
sions in terms of repertory were a recognition of authors’ and their heirs’ legal
ownership of theatrical works, or the public domain of works whose authors
had died since a defined period; and as a consequence, a de-coupling of
repertory and institution, in the sense that no theater owned individual plays.
This certainly allowed, in principle, any Parisian theater to perform operas
that had hitherto been the property of the Opéra—we shall see later that
(presumably in part for technical reasons), very few availed themselves of the
possibility. Theaters also acquired the right to perform what works they
wished, irrespective of genre, unlike the situation before 1791, where in theory
each privileged theater had a monopoly over a defined share of the repertory.
But the Opéra already had a monopoly over musical theater by the terms of
its privilège and so had nothing to gain in this respect from the deregulation
(and had much to lose), save for the right to perform spoken theater—which it
naturally had no interest in doing—and dialogue opera, which it was slow
to do; the only example of the latter was a production of Le Mariage de Figaro
in 1793, which adapted a large proportion of the arias of Mozart’s opera,
replacing his recitatives with dialogue from Beaumarchais’s original play.
There were doubtless several reasons that the institution did not avail itself
of the possibility, even when it became lawful: performance practice and

training (none of the Opéra’s singers had expertise in spoken theater) and genre
hierarchy being but the two most obvious. The question of legality is however
worth briefly exploring. The natural question that arises is that of competition
with the Comédie-Italienne, hitherto the home of opéra-comique, and whether
the Le Chapelier law has any influence on this development.
In order to answer this, we need to return to the question of privilège,
discussed in Chapter 1. As stated, by virtue of its privilège the Opéra possessed
the exclusive right to musical performance in France but routinely chose,
for financial reasons, to lease rights to certain types of musical theater to the
Comédie-Italienne. It did so by virtue of a lease [bail ], which according to
the Encyclopédie entailed renouncing the right to that type of theater itself:
an agreement whereby one transfers to another the benefit or use of a
heritage, a house, or other good, usually for a determined period of
time, in return for a regular payment due at certain moments of the
year as stipulated by the owner, to indemnify him for the benefit or use,
of which he is thereby deprived. (ii.16: my italics)
The system of redevances, whereby theaters paid the Opéra for their lease, was
breaking down as early as 1789 but was not formally lifted until the Le
Chapelier law. One might therefore ask whether the failure to present dialogue
operas before 1791 is due in part to this proscription. The most recent bail—
that signed in 1779 and starting in 1780 for thirty years—leased the rights
to “le spectacle de l’opéra-comique” in Paris. This might be seen to beg the
question, but clause 3.5 continued (as had prior baux, such as that of 1766) to
outlaw “des piéces en un ou plusieurs Actes, qui forment des Ouvrages de
Musique suivis, telles que les Troqueurs, & autres de pareille nature”: through-
composed opera.8 By leasing exclusive rights to this institution of the other
type of theater, the Opéra was forgoing it itself.
Were there indirect consequences? Certainly some of the Opéra’s works
were now legally fair game to other theaters, ratifying a practice already in
existence whereby the Boulevard theaters pirated the works of the privileged
institutions, and weakening the Opéra’s control over reception of its own works.
And we shall see during the Terror that the deregulation did allow for works
approved by the government to be passed from one theater to another—and
the Opéra performed several works already premiered elsewhere, albeit with
new musical scores. As for the question of literary property, it is difficult to
8 Arrêt du Conseil d’État du roi, Approbatif du Bail ou Concession du Privilége de l’Opéra-

Comique, faite par la Ville aux Comédiens, dits, Italiens, pour trente années, à commencer le 1er
Janvier 1780 (Paris: Imp. Lottin, 1779).

assess how the new financial provisions of literary property affected the institu-
tion. The situation regulating honoraria as set out in March 1784 was as fol-
lows: librettist and composer were each to be paid 200 livres for the first twenty
performances of a major (three-act) work, 150 livres for the next ten, and 100
thereafter, up to and including the fortieth performance. Beyond this a gratifi-
cation of 500 livres was payable. For one-act works, the fees were 80, 60, and 50
livres, respectively. Three-act works fell into the first case if all three acts were
newly composed but into the second case (where “new” acts would be rewarded
separately) if one or more were old. From 16 April 1781 (with effect from 1
May), lifelong honoraria of 60 livres per performance of a new work (or 20 livres
for works in one act) were payable per performance after the fortieth. Pensions
were also granted for those who had performed three “grands ouvrages”, by
which works in three acts or more were presumably meant (M1784, XIV.12–13).
What of the takings overall? Graphs 5.1 and 5.2 plot these, both gross and
by day, and these show that there are some noteworthy dips in takings: the first
year (that is, 1789–90, the last run by the royal household) was particularly
poor, with most months falling below the level of 30,000 livres. The apparent
rise in average daily takings toward 1792 is mitigated by the sharp drop-off in
frequency of performance, which is why gross takings under Francœur and
Cellerier were mediocre. Graph 5.3 plots the number of performances per
month. Dips in April are explained by the annual closure. These do not
show any clear trend, save for two factors: they demonstrate that the period
under Francœur and Cellerier was comparatively successful in terms of tak-
ings, whatever the truth of the accusations of financial mismanagement; and
they show that the troubles of summer 1789 seem to have taken a significant
toll on attendance (and thereby, takings). But it is not possible to draw further
conclusions, certainly not correlating takings to management period.
Nor is it clear that the organization of the theatrical week changed signifi-
cantly before the end of the period. When the frequency of performance is
plotted by day of the week, a noteworthy pattern emerges but does not sig-
nificantly vary (Graphs 5.4 and 5.5): Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday were the
most popular evenings throughout the period, although Monday performances
declined in frequency and Wednesday performances grew (but moderately).
The Théâtre de Monsieur performed on both, and so direct competition cannot
be the reason. However, the final segment of our period is more complicated.
From 1793, the Republican calendar replaced days of the Christian calendar
with numbered days of a ten-day week [décade]. The Republican calendar was
adopted on 22 September 1793 but antedated to the previous year. It num-
bered Republican years from the beginning of the first Republic and divided
each into twelve months, famously named after the seasons; each comprised

Gross takings (liv.)
0
10,000
20,000
30,000
40,000
50,000
60,000
70,000
80,000
April 1788
June 1788
Aug 1788
Oct 1788
Dec 1788
Feb 1789
Apr 1789
graph 5.1. Gross takings per month

June 1789
Aug 1789
Oct 1789
Dec 1789
Feb 1790
Apr 1790
June 1790
Aug 1790
Oct 1790
Dec 1790
Feb 1791
Apr 1791
June 1791
Month
Aug 1791
Oct 1791
Dec 1791
Feb 1792
Apr 1792
June 1792
Aug 1792
Oct 1792
Dec 1792
Feb 1793
Apr 1793
June 1793
Aug 1793
Oct 1793
Dec 1793
Feb 1794
Apr 1794
June 1794
Takings (liv.)
0
1,000
2,000
3,000
4,000
5,000
6,000
April 1788
June 1788
Aug 1788
Oct 1788
Dec 1788
Feb 1789
Apr 1789
June 1789
Aug 1789
Oct 1789
graph 5.2. Average daily takings per month

Dec 1789
Feb 1790
Apr 1790
June 1790
Aug 1790
Oct 1790
Dec 1790
Feb 1791
Apr 1791
June 1791
Month
Aug 1791
Oct 1791
Dec 1791
Feb 1792
Apr 1792
June 1792
Aug 1792
Oct 1792
Dec 1792
Feb 1793
Apr 1793
June 1793
Aug 1793
Oct 1793
Dec 1793
Feb 1794
Apr 1794
June 1794
No. of performances
0
5
10
15
20
25
Apr-88
Jun-88
Aug-88
Oct-88
Dec-88
Feb-89
Apr-89
June-89
Aug-89
Oct-89
Dec-89
Feb-90
graph 5.3. Number of performances per month

Apr-90
Jun-90
Aug-90
Oct-90
Dec-90
Feb-91
Apr-91
Jun-91
Month
Aug-91
Oct-91
Dec-91
Feb-92
Apr-92
Jun-92
Aug-92
Oct-92
Dec-92
Feb-93
Apr-93
Jun-93
Aug-93
Oct-93
Dec-93
Feb-94
Apr-94
Jun-94
60
50
40
Number of performances
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
30 Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday
20
10
0
1788–89 1789–90 1790–91 1791–92 1792–93 1793–94 1794
graph 5.4. Number of performances per day in each season
160,000
140,000
120,000
100,000 Monday
Tuesday
Takings (liv.)
Wednesday
80,000 Thursday
Friday
Saturday
60,000
Sunday
40,000
20,000
0
1788–89 1789–90 1790–91 1791–92 1792–93 1793–94 1794
graph 5.5. Gate receipts (liv.) per day in each season

three décades, and each year included a further five or six so-called comple-
mentary days at the end. The official adoption of the calendar did not change
cultural habits overnight, of course, and anecdotal evidence suggests that indi-
viduals continued to use the Gregorian calendar, or a combination of both, for
a short period: periodicals, for instance, continued to give alternative dates
for approximately one year before dropping Gregorian dates (the length is
variable according to the paper). Graph 5.6 suggests that the organization of
performances at the Opéra fell into a new pattern over the course of 1793–94.
From September 1792 until the end of that season (April 1793), no clear pat-
tern emerges in terms of numbers of performances, which fluctuate. By the
1793–94 season, in terms of frequency of performance, the ten days of each
decade were roughly equivalent within two groups: performances were fre-
quent on even-numbered days, but much less frequent on odd-numbered ones.
By 1794, there are no performances on odd-numbered days, and frequency of
performances on even-numbered days is even. In other words, the Opéra has
moved toward a pattern of five evenly spaced performances per décade, on alter-
nate days. The frequency of performance was no longer slanted toward particu-
lar evenings; this phenomenon would deserve to be considered for Paris as a
whole, since the entire point of performing on particular days was to attenuate
the effects of competition by allowing the theatergoing Parisian public to
attend each of the major theaters within the week. Whether any such informal
accommodation continued is unknown: these figures suggest the abandon-
ment of any such arrangement.
In terms of periodization and the overall shape of the period, takings and
frequency of performance show (1) diversification of repertory but finan-
cial trouble in the summer of 1789; (2) greater success under the entrepreneurs
than was claimed, or had been foreseen, despite the considerable difficulties
25
No. of performances
20
September 1792 – April 1793
15
10 April 1793 – April 1794
5
April – August 1794
0
i
di
ua i
di
i
id
id
id
id
id
id
id
ad
uo
rti
im
Tr
nt
xt
pt
ct
on
ec
Se
O
ui
Se
D
Pr
D
Q
Q
graph 5.6. No. of performances per season, by day

they faced; and (3) major structural reorganizations in the final season. Are
these trends borne out by the shape and success of the repertory itself?
2. Old and New Works

Previous studies of Revolutionary theater and of the Paris Opéra offer valuable
methodological models for the statistical study of the repertory. As Robert
Fajon’s study of the Opéra between Lully and 1730 states, the enormous
importance of revivals [reprises] is one of the major features of the institution’s
workings in the eighteenth century.9 The distinction between a new work
produced for the first time and the revival of a work that had already been
produced in the institution in a previous season is a self-evident and important
distinction to be made, both in terms of the material issues it implies (staging
a new work was different from reviving one) and the impact on the public of
novelty, as opposed to a classic work. In a study of the repertory over a long
duration, William Weber has shown that the respective proportions of these
categories change around certain fault lines, and he discusses the ways in which
“la musique ancienne,” such as revivals of Lully, has cultural value manifesting
“traditions of the State,” whatever other managerial and material factors
may also have influenced the repertory.10 We need to consider the revival of
existing works in the Revolution because that practice also manifested tradi-
tion, albeit with a different value (tradition increasingly became associated
with obsolescence and with a politically tainted cultural elitism associated
with the discredited Old Regime). It is particularly important in the case of
this study, because the research group headed by Emmet Kennedy, which
studied the entire theatrical repertory of Paris for the period of the Revolution,
also made a distinction between existing works (dating from before 1789)
and newly created works (first performed after), and calculated the respective
proportions of the two. The overall conclusion was that “old” works were
9 L’Opéra à Paris: du Roi Soleil à Louis le Bien-Aimé (Geneva/Paris: Slatkine, 1984),

p. 46. On the repertory during our period, see also Michel Noiray, “Les créations d’
opéra à Paris de 1790 à 1794: Chronologie et sources parisiennes,” in Orphée phrygien:
Les Musiques de la Révolution (Paris: Eds. du May, 1989), pp. 193–203; M. Elizabeth
C. Bartlet, “The new repertory at the Opéra during the Reign of Terror: Revolutionary
rhetoric and operatic consequences,” in Music and the French Revolution, ed. Malcolm
Boyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 107–56.
10 “La musique ancienne in the waning of the Ancien Régime,” Journal of Modern
History, 56.1 (March 1984), 58–88 (p. 64).

produced much more in the Revolution than had been assumed by scholars
who had tended to concentrate on the “new” and politically motivated works,
which were actually in the minority. Calculating on this basis for our period
will allow direct comparability with his statistics and thereby a comparison
rarely possible: between the Opéra and its direct competitors.
In the case of the Opéra, the categories of “old” and “new” works, though
valuable, deserve to be nuanced. The revival of an existing work, which may
update various production details (whether design of costume or staging, or
cast), is self-evidently different in status from the work that has been adapted
for a new context, either by cuts, or the composition of new music for part or
all of the work, or the modification of the libretto and concomitant revision of
music. Because this latter category can cover a range of different types, it
deserves to be considered on a case-by-case basis, where sources allow. This is
complicated, however, for at least three reasons. First, the source most often
used, the Journal de l’Opéra (the internal log of individual performances
reconstructed in the early twentieth century) does not distinguish between
these types, merely using the terminology reprise, with numbers (première
reprise, seconde/deuxième reprise, etc.). That these are numbered suggests that the
management thought of these as individual blocks of performances of an exist-
ing work rather than being “new productions” in the modern sense of the term,
and does not necessarily imply revision of any detail of the work from one
“block” to another. Second, the sources do not systematically allow us to deter-
mine to what extent the design of the performance (to avoid the term produc-
tion) differed; and practice was moreover to amend existing performance scores
rather than to create anew, making this harder to determine with certainty.
Third, there is inevitably a porous boundary between a “new work” and one
substantially rewritten: the best example for our period is Castor et Pollux, sub-
stantially but not completely recomposed by Candeille to a libretto that
remained relatively close to its antecedent versions. Is this a “new work” because
a different composer has substantially changed the score, or an “existing” work
because various numbers, not to mention the libretto, are retained? Thus,
commensurately, how to treat operas reduced from five acts to three by
Marmontel but which retained the original music? Inevitably, the way one clas-
sifies these works depends on one’s questions and priorities—for instance,
whether one chooses to foreground musical or textual novelty, or managerial
practice, or reception. In what follows, I deal with works in the following ways:
A “new work” is one performed for the first time after the beginning of the
1789–90 season, or one substantially revised thereafter (the only example of
this latter category being Candeille’s Castor et Pollux). To allow comparability
with Kennedy’s statistics, I designate as an “old work” one first performed

before that fault line where the libretto and score were not substantially revised
for performance in the Revolution. (Revivals that made substantial changes
often gave rise to newly published libretti to correspond with the revival: there
are no such cases between 1789 and 1794.) I count numbers of performances
of works, rather than “années-reprises” as used by Fajon, because the length of
my period is itself only five years, and I calculate by year.11 Because
“Marmontelized” works were already modified and performed before 1789,
they count as “revivals” when they are performed after 1789, even though they
differ from their very earliest form. La Ferté speaks in terms of the
Opéra having a dual track of productions, as I discuss below: new works, with
existing works waiting in the wings to replace them should that prove neces-
sary. The existing works, because part of the institution’s stock, and used to
fill gaps and shore up income, correspond most usefully to the concept of
“repertory work”; I use this term in that context, but I do not calculate statis-
tically on the basis of it, as it is impossible systematically to factor motivations
into the statistical calculation of the performance of revivals.
As is well known, after Gluck, an increased quantity of works was performed

in the 1780s; indeed, compared with the average of four or five works per-
formed per season before 1780, the period after 1780 saw sometimes as many
as fifteen productions within a single year.12 As Serre shows, however, the
number of new productions [créations] fluctuated between four and eight, bal-
lets included.13 For our period the annual average of five remains in line with
that trend. We have noted that stimulating the submission of more new works
was one of the major planks of La Ferté’s strategy, conscious as he was that the
Opéra could only survive, as he put it, “à la faveur des nouveautés.” La Ferté’s
manuscript observations preparatory to the Précis view the Opéra’s repertory
in terms of musical progress and see transformations of taste as ruptures, which
make certain segments unperformable. This is perhaps what explains the
concurrent policy of revivals of old libretti to new scores, rendering certain
existing works appropriate for performance. As La Ferté put it, “to make
11 Fajon’s term “année-reprise” (L’opéra à Paris, pp. 47–48) designates a reprise

per year, hence including the length of a run in the calculation (he counts the works
in decades). For instance, a reprise of Iphigénie en Aulide performed over two seasons, would
count as two “années-reprises.” Since I count per year anyway, this would be redundant
and has not been followed in this chapter.
12 Précis, pp. 32–33. See also William Weber, “La musique ancienne in the waning of
the Ancien Régime,” Journal of Modern History, 56.1 (March 1984), 58–88.
13 Serre, Politique culturelle.

full use of the libretti, they need to be reformed and recomposed by talented
composers, which will require several years.”14 That is, he subscribed to the
conception of the Opéra as a repertory theater, having a stock of works [ fonds],
while recognizing the difficulties with maintaining it. He then lists those
works he considers to still be performable after 1789; I tabulate them in
Table 5.1 with a tally of the performances each received per season from 1789
to the end of our period:
Table 5.1. Revivals of repertory works, 1789–1794 (counted by season)

1788–89 1789–90 1790–91 1791–92 1792–93 1793–94 1794
(Apr.–
Aug.)
Cherubini, 8 0 0 0 0 0 0
Démophon
Gluck, Alceste 3 10 13 14 5 0 0
Gluck, Armide 25 2 17 3 0 29 11
Gluck, Echo et – – – – – – –
Narcisse
Gluck, Iphigénie 3 9 9 0 10 11 0
en Aulide
Gluck, Iphigénie 21 9 7 15 18 14 0
en Tauride
Gluck, Orphée 5 12 6 0 7 9 3
Gossec, ‘Trois – – – – – – –
actes pour
différents sujets,
formant un
spectacle complet’
Gossec, La Fête – – – – – – –
de village
Gossec, Rosine – – – – – – –
Gossec, Sabinus – – – – – – –
Gossec, Thésée – – – – – – –
Grétry, 5 0 0 0 0 0 0
Amphitryon
Grétry, – – – – – – –
Andromaque
Grétry, Céphale – – – – – – –
et Procris
(Continued)
14 “Mémoire,” AN, O.1.617 #42, f.1r.

Table 5.1. Cont’d
1788–89 1789–90 1790–91 1791–92 1792–93 1793–94 1794
(Apr.–
Aug.)
Grétry, Colinette à – – – – – – –
la cour
Grétry, L’Embarras – – – – – – –
des richesses
Grétry, La 18 5 19 0 0 0 0
Caravane
Grétry, Panurge 16 7 7 1 0 0 0
Lemoyne, Electre – – – – – – –
Philidor, Ernelinde – – – – – – –
Philidor, Persée – – – – – – –
Philidor, – – – – – – –
Thémistocle
Piccinni, Adèle – – – – – – –
de Ponthieu
Piccinni, Atys 0 0 4 9 0 0 0
Piccinni, Diane 0 0 0 6 0 0 0
et Endymion
Piccinni, Didon 13 7 9 10 5 2 0
Piccinni, Iphigénie 0 0 2 0 0 0 0
en Tauride
Piccinni, Pénélope – – – – – – –
Piccinni, Roland 0 0 0 0 10 1 0
Sacchini, Arvire 10 6 7 0 0 0 0
et Evelina
Sacchini, Chimène 9 8 0 0 0 2 0
Sacchini, Dardanus – – – – – – –
Sacchini, Œdipe à 25 18 15 19 24 11 0
Colone
Sacchini, Renaud 7 3 7 0 15 8 0
Salieri, Les – – – – – – –
Danaïdes
Salieri, Les Horaces – – – – – – –
Salieri, Tarare – – 15 – 9 – –
199
Although no discernible pattern emerges from the yearly frequency of indi-
vidual works, what appears quite clearly is the continued importance of certain
works (especially those of Gluck, and to a lesser extent Piccinni and Sacchini)
throughout the period. Yet we must also note the relative neglect of many
works that were not performed at all between 1789 and 1794, even though La
Ferté listed them as being ripe for performance (19 out of 39 were ignored).
The Opéra was less reliant on stop-gap classics than detractors claimed.
Moreover, in a preliminary survey of the repertory during the period of the
Constituent Assembly, I showed that the Opéra was in line with the average of
Parisian theaters in the proportion of new works it produced, by season.15
Table 5.2 extends this survey to August 1794, listing the “old” and “new”
productions by season, giving raw numbers of performances and percentages of
the year/season’s performances as a whole.
Table 5.2 demonstrates that the quantity of new productions was at its
highest in the first year of the Revolution (under the crown); this was not sus-
tained under Francœur and Cellerier, but it was reintroduced by the artists
during the Terror, doubtless in part in response to extrinsic pressures to trun-
cate the repertory of those older works that were ideologically objectionable. It
is instructive in this regard to compare data for works composed before and
after the fault line of 1789 rather than new productions each season. This pro-
portion follows a linear progression, as one might expect, with “Old Régime
works” becoming steadily less frequent, as in Table 5.3.
What is noteworthy about these figures, is that they reach a parity as early
as the end of 1791, which also places them in line with the average of Parisian
theaters, as calculated by the statistics of Emmet Kennedy et al.16 (Table 5.4
recalculates these by calendar year, as did Kennedy’s team, in order to allow for
a more direct comparison.)
Similar to calculations for “old” works, the cliché of an Opéra disinclined
to present new works is inaccurate: it was in line with its peers throughout
the Revolution. In particular, the figures show a change during the Terror,
since the steepest climb in these figures is around 1793, a moment of cultural
rupture that we saw in Chapter 4. How can we account for this? Clearly,
during this most radical phase of the Revolution, revisions were always
open to ideological objection since they were composed during the Old
Regime and were hence redolent of the “era of slavery.” On 2 October 1793, the
15 “Le répertoire de l’Académie Royale de Musique pendant la Constituante.”

16 Theatre, Opera and Audiences in Revolutionary Paris, p. 381 (table 3), which only reach
parity between 1792 and 1793.

Table 5.2. Number and proportion of new productions by season
Year Number of % of Number of new Number of % of
performances of performances productions performances performances
repertory works
1789–90 176 66 5 89 34
1790–91 231 77 6 69 23
1791–92 195 75 3 64 25
1792–93 210 77 4 61 23
1793–94 246 70 6 105 30
1794–August 1794 69 74 1 24 26
Table 5.3. Number and proportion of pre- and post-1789 works by season
Season Pre-1789 Pre-1789 works: Post-1789 Post-1789 works:
works: no. of % of total works: no. of % of total
performances performances
1789–90 176 66 89 34
1790–91 166 56 128 44
1791–92 124 50 126 50
1792–93 113 42 158 58
1793–94 88 25 263 75
1794–August 14 15 79 85
Table 5.4. Number and proportion of pre- and post-1789 works by calendar year
Year Pre-1789 Pre-1789 works: Post-1789 Post-1789 works:
works: no. of % of total works: no. of % of total
performances performances
1789 195 79 53 21
1790 174 58 124 42
1791 128 50 126 50
1792 124 43 163 57
1793 113 35 211 65
1794 26 13 171 87
Journal des spectacles reported loud objections from a spectator that it was
shameful for Republicans to have to watch plays featuring monarchs, and that
it was time to forget these outdated works.17 Les Spectacles de Paris for 1794
claimed of several Old Regime tragedies that they had been rightly removed
from the repertory because they featured kings and were liable to offend
Republican audiences.18 There were some dissenting voices during the Terror,
individuals who insisted that musical and literary quality transcended ideologi-
cal objection. For instance, concerning the revision of Gluck’s Armide from 1793,
17 JdS, 92 (2 October 1793), p. 733. The following paragraph points to the fact that
these revisions were severely expurgated.
18 SdP-Duchesne, 1794, p. 119.

the Journal des spectacles made the conflation between Gluck and timeless
quality mentioned earlier:
To say that Gluck has surpassed himself in the music of this work, is
this not to say that he will be immortal? If we add that the work has
been produced with all the lavish care one expects from the artists of
the most imposing theater of the universe, this is surely an exhortation
to all lovers of the arts and people of taste in the capital, to hurry to see
this superb work. How comforting it shall be for them, witnessing this
most rare reunion of the finest talents, to realise how dubious is this
common claim that the arts are degenerating.19
Equally important, the columnist suggested that what was required was
the co-existence of revised classics whose value was indisputable and new
productions of new works. In this way, he said:
they shall render invaluable service to the arts, because as they attract
crowds to their theater, they will help inject necessary resources into
letters, music, dance, painting, stage machinery, architecture, in a word
all the arts, as well as helping the circulation of wealth in the capital;
and this at a moment when one could hardly blame those who worry
that these arts are close to extinction.20
In other words, there were two diametrically opposed views of the classic
repertory, and we shall see at the beginning of Chapter 6 that revisions and
reprises were subject to factionalism far more than were new works throughout
the period. But the Opéra was deliberately self-fashioning as patriotic for
financial reasons, as Chapter 4 showed, and this may explain why the manage-
ment tended toward the repudiation of classic works (only Armide and Orphée
continued to be performed throughout 1794).
Beyond the rather obvious polarity of “old” and “new” works, which were most
successful? To calculate raw data of numbers of performances is more instruc-
tive than numbers of productions, because the length of a run, itself evidence
of success, is built into the calculation. Yet the Opéra often played to thin
19 JdS, 81 (20 September 1793), p. 643.

20 JdS, 77 (16 September 1793), pp. 614–15. It is possible that this article is due to the
exhortation the journal received by a letter dated 12 September, which it printed on the
16th, not to neglect the Opéra in favor of the “petits spectacles,” and to review the produc-
tion of Armide, given its spectacular public success. The journal responded to the letter in
print, suggesting that it had a review of the production waiting to be printed.

audiences, and those figures alone do not give a sufficiently fine-grained means
of calculating success. Table 5.5 compares the takings of all works, the number
of performances, and average takings.21
As Table 5.5 shows, the new works that grossed the largest takings in the
first two seasons were comedies: Les Prétendus in the first season, Tarare in the
second. The revised Castor et Pollux was most successful in the third, thereafter
the largest takings were for L’Offrande à la liberté, Le Siège de Thionville, and La
Réunion du 10 août. Based upon this alone, it is impossible to draw conclusions
about whether apparently “apolitical” works were more popular: Kennedy’s
conclusion seems unhelpfully schematic.22 Two of the latter (political) works
Table 5.5. Gross takings and average day’s takings for each new work and for
average of old works1
Season Title Total gross Number of Average day’s
takings2 performances takings
1789 Aspasie 38 427 14 2 745

Les Prétendus 155 676 65 2 395
Démophon 65 586 24 2 733
Nephté 102 486 39 2 628
Les Pommiers et le moulin 33 352 24 1 390
1790 Antigone 4 512 2 2 256
Louis IX en Egypte 30 513 10 3 051
Tarare 68 025 24 2 834
Le Portrait, ou la divinité du 13 443 7 1 920
sauvage
Cora 9 542 5 1 908
Corisandre 60 521 25 2 421
1791 Castor et Pollux 140 794 50 2 816
L’Heureux Stratagème 9 654 3 3 218
Œdipe à Thèbes 27 501 7 3 929
(Continued)
21 Calculations concerning takings are subject to the following caveat: works were
generally combined in double, very occasionally triple bills, and takings are for an
evening, not for a particular work. Nevertheless, evenings containing new works tended
to draw larger crowds, and the takings for an evening as a whole do seem to tail off when
the constituent works have lost their novelty appeal.
22 Theatre, Opera and Audiences, p. 90.

Table 5.5. Cont’d
Season Title Total gross Number of Average day’s
takings2 performances takings
1792 L’Offrande à la liberté 145 905 102 2 806

Le Triomphe de la République 22 163 10 2 216
L’Apothéose de Beaurepaire 6 441 3 2 147
Le Mariage de Figaro 9 390 6 1 565
1793 Le Siège de Thionville 21 439 24 2 382
Fabius 7 904 16 3 952
Miltiade à Marathon 13 483 36 1 226
Toute la Grèce 17 275 30 1 919
Horatius Coclès 11 186 15 1 598
Toulon soumis 12 822 17 986
1794 La Réunion du 10 août 64 446 24 2 802
Old works 2 161 124 927 2 331

(average)
Notes: 1 certain evenings in 1792–93 are missing receipts; the average calculation is based only upon
those evenings where receipts are available.
2 Takings =recette à la porte as given in JO, itself reconstructed from Po: CD/24–29, with which figures
have been cross-checked. All sums are in livres and are rounded to the nearest integer.
were festivals more than they were music dramas and grew out of the showy
type of celebratory divertissement, which may explain their success. Tragedies
tended to be less successful than mixed and comic works, although Les Pommiers
and Le Portrait (also comedies) were comparative failures too, meaning that we
cannot draw very conclusive lessons about the respective success of different
genres. If we look at average takings, the picture is not clearer: contrary to
legend, Tarare was no more successful than several other works such as Louis
IX; even Aspasie came close. Most instructive is surely the length of a run, since
this is decided by officials who are concerned with avoiding financial disaster;
the end of a work’s run is surely explained, in general, by its poor success.
According to this criterion, the great successes of the period, bearing in mind
La Ferté’s ideal of forty performances, were Les Prétendus (Berlioz’s favorite),
Nephté, Castor et Pollux, L’Offrande à la liberté, and Miltiade à Marathon. Notable
failures (Antigone, Le Portrait, Cora, L’Heureux Stratagème, Œdipe à Thèbes,
L’Apothéose de Beaurepaire, Mozart’s Mariage de Figaro, bowdlerized in ways
I shall discuss) were expensive mistakes. Both groups are mixed in terms of
both genre and explicit political content, and defy easy generalizations.

2. The Question of Genres
There has been a rich body of recent work addressing the breakdown of genres
in the mid- to late- eighteenth century. Particularly useful is Philippe Bourdin
and Gérard Loubinoux’s collection of essays dealing specifically with theater,
which locates a particular inflection to the issue in the Revolutionary decade
specifically.23 Indeed, given the sheer proliferation of generic labels and exper-
imental forms that the Revolution encourages, the admitted increase in generic
variety in the repertory of the Opéra seems conservative. Their volume also
reminds us that studying genre combines attention to the institutional dimen-
sion (whereby creation is modeled) with an attention to the categories by means
of which reception operated. One of the interests in genre breakdown is the
way in which new classification systems are created, models for theatrical pro-
duction imagined, allowing for a sort of paradigmatic belonging of individual
works to categories within which the works acquire, if not meanings, at least
horizons of expectations for viewers and/or readers. Labeling a work “tragédie
lyrique” or “scène patriotique” gave these viewers a sense of expectation, as is
both obvious and well known. But in the Revolution, generic categories, as
I would like to suggest, also contributed to the institution’s self-fashioning: to
describe a work as a “tableau patriotique” also told audiences (and those who
concerned themselves either offically or not with surveillance) something of the
nature and ideological slant of the works concerned and thereby of the institu-
tion’s political position. There is also an important sociological dimension to
this breakdown, for genre hierarchy is also a cultural code to which an elite
subscribed, and which was less familiar to a more popular segment of
the Parisian theatrical public of the Revolution. As we shall see, genres are
progressively diversified, and “patriotic” genre labels are adopted after 1793.
Table 5.6 gives the genre designations of the various new works in the rep-
ertory between 1789 and 1794. The following graphs (Graphs 5.7–5.12) then
show proportions by season (in each case of performances, rather than numbers
of works), and from a comparison of these, several conclusions can be drawn.
The last year of royal administration sees a large injection of new comedies, a
pattern not sustained by the city, whose receipts and level of new works both
reach an all-time low in 1791–92; the following season, under Francœur and
Cellerier, brought a much greater generic variety and a higher level of receipts,
despite the charge leveled at them a year later that they had failed to manage
23 Philippe Bourdin and Gérard Loubinoux (eds.), La Scène bâtarde entre Lumières et
romantisme (Clermont-Ferrand: Presses universitaires Blaise Pascal, 2004).

Table 5.6. Genre designations for all works performed in the period 1789–1794
Title (Works created Genre (Taken from Variant generic designation,
1789–94 in bold type) libretto unless from alternative libretti
otherwise stated) or from scores
Alceste tragédie lyrique

*Antigone opéra lyrique opéra (ms. and published
scores)
Ariane et Bacchus drame lyrique
Armide tragédie lyrique
Arvire et Evelina tragédie lyrique
*Aspasie opéra
Atys tragédie lyrique
Caravane (Le) du Caire opéra
*Castor et Pollux (revised) tragédie-opéra
Chimène tragédie lyrique
*Cora opéra
*Corisandre comédie-opéra
*Démophon (Vogel) opéra lyrique
Démophoon (Cherubini) tragédie lyrique
Devin (Le) du village intermède lyrique
Diane et Endymion opéra
Didon tragédie lyrique
Double Epreuve (La) opéra
*Fabius opéra tragédie lyrique (libretto 1793)
*Fête (La) de la raison opéra
*Heureux Stratagème (L’) comédie lyrique
*Horatius Coclès acte lyrique
Iphigénie en Aulide tragédie lyrique
Iphigénie en Tauride (Gluck) tragédie lyrique
Iphigénie en Tauride (Piccinni) tragédie lyrique
*Louis IX en Égypte opéra
*Mariage (Le) de Figaro opéra
*Miltiade à Marathon opéra
*Nephté tragédie tragédie lyrique (ms. and
published scores)
Œdipe à Colone opéra
(Continued)
207
Table 5.6. Cont’d
Title (Works created Genre (Taken from Variant generic designation,
1789–94 in bold type) libretto unless from alternative libretti
otherwise stated) or from scores
*Œdipe à Thèbes tragédie lyrique

*Offrande (L’) à la liberté scène patriotique
Orphée drame héroïque
Panurge comédie lyrique
*Patrie reconnaissante (La), opéra héroïque
ou L’Apothéose de
Beaurepaire
Phèdre tragédie lyrique
*Pommiers (Les) et le moulin comédie lyrique
*Portrait (Le), ou la divinité comédie lyrique
du sauvage
*Prétendus (Les) comédie lyrique
Renaud tragédie lyrique
*Réunion (La) du 10 août sans-culottide
dramatique
Roland tragédie lyrique
*Siège (Le) de Thionville drame lyrique
*Tarare (revised) mélodrame
*Toulon soumis fait historique opéra (ms. score)
*Toute la grèce, ou ce que tableau patriotique épisode civique (libretto:
peut la liberté Froullé, 1793)
*Triomphe (Le) de la divertissement lyrique
république
the institution’s finances. As may be expected, the number of genres increases,

but moderately. Intermediate genre designations are frequent throughout the
period and grow increasingly. The 1790–91 season adds the label drame
lyrique, normally associated with the minor stages and Comédie-Italienne.
Tragédie lyrique dwindles, also as expected: in 1788–89 it represents 42 percent
of the production; by 1792–93 it is 30 percent, falling to 23 percent in
1793–94 and 12 percent thereafter. Less expected is the dwindling of ballets
after a resurgence in 1790–91 and the failure of comic works to gain a foothold
in the repertory, despite this being a major innovation of the first two seasons:
was the intention to avoid seemingly “frivolous” works in 1791–92, a season
which reinstates tragédie lyrique (46%) and falls back on classics?

Ballet
9%
Tragédie lyrique
Ballet pantomime
29%
14%
Ballet héroïque
3%
Opéra lyrique
5% Comédie lyrique
Opéra 19%
12%
Intermède lyrique Drame héroïque

3% 5%
Drame lyrique
1%
graph 5.7. 1789–1790: Genres

Ballet
2%
Ballet pantomime
17%
Tragédie lyrique
32% Ballet héroïque
6%
Comédie lyrique
12%
Opéra lyrique
2% Comédie-opéra
Opéra
17% 3%
Drame héroïque
2%
Intermède lyrique
Mélodrame
2%
5%
graph 5.8. 1790–1791: Genres
By contrast with the fluctuation of frequency of tragédie lyrique, there is

stability in mixed genre designations. The term lyrique as a generic descriptor
represents approximately one-half of all production throughout the period; the
term opéra between 10 percent and 19 percent according to year, with no dis-
cernible pattern. Most important, pièces de circonstance become vastly more
important at the end of the period, but we should also note that this is partly
at the expense of the ballet. From only 4 percent of the production in 1792–93,
it represents 17 percent in 1793–94 and 54 percent in the remainder of 1794.

Ballet
4%
Tragédie lyrique Ballet pantomime

43% 31%
Opéra Ballet héroïque

11% 3%
Comédie lyrique
5%
Opéra lyrique
3%
graph 5.9. 1791–1792: Genres
Ballet pantomime
Tragédie lyrique 24%
29%
Ballet héroïque
4%
Comédie lyrique
Scène patriotique 4%
14%
Comédie-opéra
5%
Drame héroïque 2%
Opéra
9% Divertissement lyrique
Opéra héroïque Mélodrame 4%
1% Opéra-comique 3%
1%
graph 5.10. 1792–1793: Genres
Is it possible that the pièce de circonstance takes over some of the functions of the
autonomous ballet? It certainly has features in common with the operatic
divertissement, as I shall suggest in later chapters. Indeed, one of the most
performed new works is L’Offrande à la liberté, a simple potpourri of musical
movements with published title “scène composée de l’air ‘Veillons au salut
de l’Empire’ et de la Marche des Marseillois avec récitatif, chœurs et accompa-
gnement à grand Orchestre.” Although L’Offrande à la liberté is unmistakably
Republican, it is simply a collection of revolutionary songs strung together
in the manner of the festival and not a dramatic action in any real sense.

Acte lyrique
3% Ballet anacréontique
1%
Tragédie lyrique
23% Ballet pantomime
19%
Tableau patriotique Ballet héroïque

7% 6%
Comédie lyrique
1%
Comédie-opéra
Scène patriotique Drame 1%
17% lyrique Drame héroïque
6% 3%
Opéra
11% Fait historique
Opéra-comique 1%
1%
graph 5.11. 1793–1794: Genres
Acte
lyrique Ballet
Tragédie lyrique 5% héroïque
12% Drame héroïque 3%
7%
Tableau
Drame lyrique 2%
patriotique
8%
Fait historique
Scéne patriotique 13%
13%
Opéra
Sans-culottide dramatique 11%
26%
graph 5.12. April-August 1794: Genres
From 1790, André Tissier points to the confusion of public and private spaces,
of performance and perception, of theater and the festival,24 and this trend is
unmistakable after 1792 at the Opéra, both in festal works such as L’Offrande,
and larger-scale works such as the first genuinely Republican libretto to be set,
Le Triomphe de la République, one of several works celebrating French victory
with a rather flimsy circumstantial plot and a unified setting and action.
24 Les Spectacles à Paris pendant la Révolution, i.34.

The Affiches, avis et annonces divers called Le Triomphe “une bagatelle lyrique
qui offre du spectacle,” quoting from the terms Chénier had used in his
avertissement to the libretto;25 Chénier and Gossec named their work a
divertissement lyrique rather than a dramatic work. Despite the vague narrative
shape that this work has, it should be considered an outgrowth of the celebra-
tory works composed for particular events or occasions and featuring a variety
of musical numbers loosely linked together, even offering a kaleidoscope of
numbers on a similar theme; in that context this work has a stronger organi-
zational thread than many. Cahusac’s entry in the Encyclopédie only discusses
the end-of-act or end-of-work divertissement and mentions only briefly the
divertissement as an autonomous work, although examples exist from the very
beginning of the century.26
It seems that the following tentative points can be made, and they are
further discussed in the final chapters: variety in genre was a constant crite-
rion, from which comedy and mixed genre benefited in the first three seasons,
and pièces de circonstance in the last two; the softening of genre labels to replace
tragédie lyrique was a progressive factor throughout the period; the mixed for-
tunes of the ballet and divertissement also need to be noted despite a continued
search for visual spectacle in new works; and finally we should note the unusual
1791–92 season, which suddenly fell back on traditional works, possibly for
financial and managerial reasons.
25 AAAD, 29 January 1793, p. 401.

26 Encyclopédie, iv.1069: “a generic term, used to designate both those short libretti set
to music, performed on stage and in concerts; and the danced movements containing song,
sometimes placed at the end of 2- and 1-act comedies. La grote de Versailles, l’Idyle de Sceaux,
are examples of the first type of divertissement.”

6 Tragedy and Serious Works
This chapter is concerned with the tragic and serious works produced in the
first three seasons of the Revolution, during which the Opéra was regulated by
the crown, and then (after April 1790) devolved to the city of Paris. In this
period, seven new works were produced, if one includes Candeille’s reworking
of Rameau’s Castor et Pollux (Table 6.1). The works had very differing levels of
success, which suggests that La Ferté’s plan to weed out likely flops via the
renewed practice of adjudicating rehearsals (see Chapter 1) had been only par-
tially successful. Since this study is interested above all in the impact and
cultural relevance of works in the specific period of their premieres, the relative
weight I give to these works in my discussion will to an extent reflect those
levels of success. For instance Zingarelli’s Antigone on a libretto by Marmontel,
flopped completely, leading the Opéra to cast around for a quick replacement:1
although I shall discuss reasons for that failure, I shall not undertake a full
analysis of the work, since it sank without trace after only two performances
and can therefore reasonably be discounted in an account of the interrelation
of the repertory and contemporary cultural-political concerns.2 The same goes
for Méhul’s first work, Cora, on a libretto by Valadier, which was taken off
after five performances and generally considered a failure.3 By contrast, although
1 “Délibération sur Antigonne,” dated 30 April/4 May 1790 (AN: AJ/13/2).

2 Moniteur, 131 (11 May 1790), iv.333.
3 For a study of the genesis and performance history of Cora, see Bartlet, Méhul,
pp. 169–88. For reception, MF, 26 February 1791, 19 March 1791, p. 111. There is also
a brief discussion of Pâris’s costumes in Wild, “Costumes et mise en scène à l’Opéra,”
pp. 248–49.
Table 6.1. New Productions, 1789–1792
DÉMOPHON, tragédie lyrique/opéra lyrique; Desriaux; music by Vogel; ballets by
Gardel—22 September 17894 [24 performances]
NEPHTÉ, REINE D’ÉGYPTE, tragédie lyrique; Hoffman; music by Lemoyne—
15 December 1789 [39 performances]
ANTIGONE, opéra/opéra lyrique; Marmontel; music by Zingarelli—30 April 1790
[2 performances]
LOUIS IX EN ÉGYPTE, opéra; Guillard and Andrieux; music by Lemoyne—15 June 1790
[10 performances]
CORA, opéra; [Valadier]; music by Méhul; ballets by Gardel—15 February 1791
[5 performances]
CASTOR ET POLLUX, tragédie lyrique / opéra; Gentil-Bernard; new music by Candeille,
original score by Rameau; ballets by Gardel and Laurent—14 June 1791 [50 performances]
ŒDIPE À THÈBES / Œdipe et Jocaste, tragédie lyrique; Duprat de la Touloubre; music by
Le Froid de Méreaux—30 December 1791 [7 performances]
the changes made to Castor et Pollux were less extensive in terms of musical
dramaturgy, the work was performed much more (50 times), had some
considerable impact on debates over the purpose of the Opéra, and is therefore
comparatively more important to this study.4
A second methodological clarification is required: as this study is tracing
the development of an institution, not a genre, it is more concerned with a
cultural study of the works than a musico-dramatic one. The two are not
mutually exclusive, of course, but the balance of discussion is different. In
attempting to re-place these works in their institutional and cultural context,
I shall be particularly concerned with the following: how the works were
selected, produced, and finally performed, following the production process set
out at the end of Chapter 1; their success both quantitatively (in terms of gross
takings and numbers of performances) and qualitatively (in terms of press
reviews); and their cultural relevance. Musical dramaturgy, although impor-
tant, and the subject of a detailed study by Julian Rushton, is part of a wider
whole, and the significance of individual works for the history of French opera
as a genre will not be foregrounded.5 Moreover, the musical sources at
the Bibliothèque de l’Opéra are extensive and almost untapped: most scores
4 The libretto states, in error, that the work was first performed on 15 September
(on that occasion Œdipe à Colone and La Rosière were performed).
5 “Music and Drama at the Académie Royale de Musique (Paris), 1774–89”
(unpublished D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 1970).

contain substantial collettes, and a full analysis of the musical sources would
have expanded this study far beyond what is reasonable.
How politicized is the repertory in the early years? André Tissier has
helpfully suggested a fine-grained process, which sees the gradual integration
of contemporary concerns into theatrical culture. In 1789–90, he suggests that
there was no “Revolutionary theater” as such. Even such a notorious work as
Chénier’s Charles IX was perceived as a historical tragedy by contemporaries
and only became a fiasco when it was banned. Moreover, that controversy
centered on the administrative and juridical issues that banning raised, not on
the content of the play itself.6 Tissier suggests that the two first influences
of contemporary concerns to be found in the theater are first, an increasing
propensity to seek lessons for the present, or flattering images of the contem-
porary, in works dealing with the past. As a consequence the period witnesses
not only an increase in the quantity of historical plays performed but also a
qualitative difference in the ways such works were perceived. Second, he points
to the textual adaptation of speeches of the national assembly and other
material such as anecdotes and matters of contemporary concern [ faits-divers]
into newly composed works.7 By the 1790–91 season, the integration of
work and context is more thoroughgoing,8 the Fête de la Fédération being the
major turning point. Theaters began systematically producing works explicitly
dealing with specific events, and in genres such as “traits civiques,” “pièces
épisodiques,” and “faits historiques.” The repertory of the Opéra seems par-
ticularly out of line with this tendency in the second year of the Revolution,
when its new works are not only few in number but fail to capitalize on this
trend at all; this pattern was repeated in 1791–92, a season during which the
Opéra’s repertory not only falls back ever more on classic works but also fails
to present many significant new productions. It is only under the artists, much
later in September 1793, that this changes radically (Chapter 8).
As the single best-known example of historical material adopted by the
Revolution, the fortunes of the Brutus story might here be usefully invoked. It
is a particularly important model because it concerns artistic works written
before the Revolution that acquire new meanings in a new context, and because
treatments of the theme form a nexus of theatrical, painterly, and historical
the Comédie-Française, 1777–1791,” SVEC, 373 (1999), 235–371.
7 Les Spectacles à Paris pendant la Révolution, i.27.
8 ibid., i.32.
tragedy and serious works | 215

material relevant to our corpus.9 Lucius Junius Brutus, having sworn to rid
Rome of the Tarquins and of monarchy itself, succeeds in exiling the royal
family and establishing the first Roman republic; but he subsequently discov-
ers a monarchist plot to restore Tarquin the Proud in which his own two sons
Titus and Tiberius were involved, and orders their execution, which he wit-
nesses in person. Roman sources such as Livy insisted upon the “extraordinary
spectacle” afforded by the “looks and countenance of Brutus.” The episode was
treated by Voltaire in his tragedy of 1730 which, as noted in Chapter 4, was
such a central play of the Revolutionary period, as well as by David in 1789.
But David’s work was conceived before the troubles of 1789 and evolved in
parallel to the very beginning of the Revolutionary process; it came to acquire
a resonance that was not originally intended but was projected onto the work
subsequent to its completion, freeing its radical potential. As Herbert puts it,
the story of David’s Brutus offers “an unusually exciting lesson in the use of
circumstantial evidence.”10
This raises the question of critical reception and what meaning we can
reasonably ascribe to these works with hindsight. It is certainly the case that
the primary concern of the Académie Royale in the early seasons was continu-
ity of service, reform of administration, and improved public success (and
thereby, receipts). Its criteria are not significantly different immediately after
1789 than before; but we should note (1) a fluctuating tendency to doctor
libretti in order to remove lines likely to give rise to “applications”; and (2) the
widespread propensity of journals to talk about the Opéra, its crisis, and its
likely future. Reviewers often seem, implicitly or explicitly, to be searching for
that work that might signal improvement and progress in a theater known to
be struggling.11 The institution consciously avoided entering into political
matters and issues of contemporary concern, and its programming cannot be
seen to be governed thereby in these first two seasons. But this does not mean
9 Robert L. Herbert, David, Voltaire, “Brutus” and the French Revolution: An Essay in
Art and Politics (London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 1972). My summary is based upon Herbert’s
account.
10 David, Voltaire, “Brutus,” p. 52.
11 For instance, in the review of Antigone, the Moniteur finishes: “It is most unfortu-
nate for the new administration of the artists, under the inspection of the municipality, to
have opened the season with such a poor work. This is no way, in the present circum-
stances, to bring back public favor, which the Opéra needs so much and which it deserves
in every way.” 122 (2 May 1790), p. 424. Cf. review of Louis IX en Egypte, which begins:
“This theater, in the midst of trouble, has at last achieved a level of success capable of
ending that trouble.” Moniteur, 169 (18 June 1790), iv.655.

that the works produced were devoid either of contemporary relevance or of
political meaning. Such meaning is not always explicit in reviews, and to an
extent it will be a matter for textual interpretation, as was the integration of
political concerns into theater during the Old Regime. The reviewing of opera
is much more formulaic in this period than it will become in the nineteenth
century, on which one recent work has been able to offer a fine-grained
cultural-political reading of Grand Opera by demonstrating the fragmentation
and diversity of political viewpoints projected onto the work.12 By contrast, the
Revolution is historically uncharted territory, so it has fewer reference points to
articulate its understanding of its own trajectory; only by summer 1790 do we
see the beginnings of an explicit willingness to relate the subject matter of
works to the context of their production, but even then reviews frequently
surprise for their lack of such comment. Several broad areas of interest can
nevertheless be seen to link several of the works under discussion here
and their cultural context. In particular, I see Louis IX en Egypte as forming
part of a range of works dealing with political legitimacy and construals
both of the people and of kingship, a matter fully recognized by the press.
I shall also trace the development of a historical perspective in the opera, in
line with developments in spoken theater, and opera’s capacity thereby to self-
consciously adopt subject matter considered important in terms that reach
beyond the artistic. The dramatic use of the chorus has a relevance to the
construal of the “people” in these works, in a manner foreshadowing
nineteenth-century Grand Opera, where massed groups of citizens map the
moral forces of the drama.
It would be unhelpful to categorize the dramaturgy of the serious works
performed in an over-schematic manner, but the first two seasons see the
coexistence of two distinct conceptions of opera. On the one hand, we see the
continuing importance of works where an implied tragic ending is either
avoided or softened (and accordingly the work is labeled opéra), plot is pared
down (generally from five to three acts), and action and its resolution are reso-
lutely human: Antigone, Démophon, and the new Castor et Pollux are examples,
as is, in some respects, Louis IX en Egypte. On the other hand, a neoclassical
Gluckian dramaturgy continues to thrive, albeit overlaid with a renewed
appeal to Antiquity and also to cultural renovation, unlike that theorized by
Gluck himself: Nephté and Œdipe à Thèbes may be seen to fall into this category.
There was internal dissension over the major work which this spawned
12 Sarah Hibberd, French Grand Opera and the Historical Imagination (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009).

in 1789: Dauvergne, now an elderly man, seemed unimpressed in a letter
concerning Nephté to La Ferté where he describes Lemoyne and Mme. de Saint-
Huberty as being unreasonably obsessed by “plots concerned with incest,
poison, or assassinations” and suggests that Hoffman was tiring of collabora-
tion with Lemoyne and was making approaches to Cherubini for a different
sort of project.13 And the comité’s internal Journal describes the work as “one
of the darkest and most beautiful, both in its libretto and its score.”14 Musically,
a continued dichotomy between the legacy of Gluckism and Piccinnism is
observable, as Rushton’s study has demonstrated.
1. Writing National History

In terms of subject matter, the major innovation at the Opéra is the extension
of national history. Historical material, as opposed to Antiquity, was first pio-
neered in the 1760s and 1770s with Ernelinde (set in Norway: 1767), and Adèle
de Ponthieu (France: set in 1768 by La Borde and Berton and 1781 by Piccinni),
and developed extensively in the 1780s (Jacobshagen lists a further six works
before 1789).15 I have elsewhere sought to consider some of the implications
of history writing for a range of Revolutionary drama, spoken and lyric.16
Buirette de Belloy’s spoken five-act play Le Siège de Calais of 1765 did much to
establish the essential features of “national tragedy” which remain current
after 1789. In focusing upon the English blockade of Calais by Edward III
during the Hundred Years War and the subsequent sacrifice of six burghers
of that city after seven months of resistance, the play was easily applicable
to the immediate context of its first performance: a resurgence of patriotism
following France’s humiliating defeats in the Seven Years War (1756–63), and
an aesthetics which the author based on “enthusiasm” and claimed could be
harnessed for moral purposes. In describing the work as a “national tragedy,”
de Belloy implicitly addressed his work to the patriotic segment of the Republic
of Letters, as well as to the mass of French citizens. And “national tragedy,” as
de Belloy formulates it, announces many of the principles followed by works
performed after 1789: enthusiasm is the criterion for reception, and emulation
the intended effect, based upon an assumed congruency of the spectator’s
13 AN: O/1/619 #434.

14 Po: Rés.1025(2), p. 243.
15 Der Chor, p. 228.
16 Mark Darlow, “History and (meta-)theatricality: The French Revolution’s paranoid
aesthetics,” in Modern Language Review, 105.2 (April 2010), 385–400.

situation and that presented on stage.17 In the specific field of lyric theater, a
strong defense of historical material in opera is made around the same time by
Farmian de Rozoi, in his 1775 Dissertation sur le drame lyrique.18 De Rozoi, who
had already produced several historical opéras-comiques, had already argued in a
previous preface, which he quotes in the Dissertation, in favor of “a purely his-
torical type of theater, where children would seek instruction, by watching those
events that had glorified or villified their Nation”:19 terms similar, in fact, to those
of de Belloy. He further argues that the purpose of such a form of theater would
be to teach children of all social backgrounds to judge human actions by seeing
them “unmasked […] to posterity” (pp. 37–38). Rather than simple exempla,
history plays as conceived by de Rozoi could be either positive or negative illus-
trations of actions: to see vice punished was just as valuable as being shown
models of virtue. There is nothing new about the view of theater as moral correc-
tive. The new implication, however, is that the emotional charge of the work
would be greater were its subject matter relevant to the heritage of the state. The
other specific claim is that to set history as an opéra-comique is not to trivialize it,
as an unidentified critic (p. 34) seems to have suggested. On the contrary, claims
de Rozoi, serious material is so well embedded in opera and opéra-comique that
both genres can easily accommodate national history (p. 39), and the emo-
tional appeal of lyric theater can strengthen the relevance of patriotic material
by adding a personal, emotional counterweight to the public duty of the hero:
History in madrigals! . . . yes, if you mean by madrigals, the expressions
of a touching love story, an episode linked to the main plot, when it is
not the principal subject matter itself. If the protagonist, amid a siege
or a battle can only see his duty and the fatherland, his subjects and the
danger they face, his enemies and ways of forgiving them, if in this
moment he is occupied neither with love nor with jealousy, and if all his
discourse concerns valor, prudence, goodness, justice, why do you speak
of madrigals? Why consider ridiculous those love intrigues which only
give extra interest, pathos and generosity to those good patriots who
17 Pierre-Laurent Buirette de Belloy, Le Siège de Calais: tragédie, in Théâtre du XVIIIe

siècle, ed. Jacques Truchet (Paris: Gallimard/Pléiade, 1974), ii.447–516. On Le Siège,
see Breitholtz, pp. 191–234. Voltaire’s Tancrède (1760) also insists upon inspiration
and emotional contagion within a viewing public: see the recent edition by Thomas
Wynn in the complete works of Voltaire, Vol. 49B (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2009),
pp. 21–23.
18 (La Haye/Paris: Vve Duchesne, 1775), pp. 34–46.
19 Dissertation sur le drame lyrique, p. 37.

are obliged to put their love aside in the interest of the needs of
their country or their king? (p. 40)
The secondary love interest was one of the hobbyhorses of neoclassical critiques
of theater, which reproached Voltaire’s tragedies among others, for the dilution
of tragic effect which such love intrigues supposedly created. The opposite
claim—that these dimensions actually strengthened the emotional charge of
such actions on stage by showing the personal sacrifice they entailed—is a
pioneering observation that renovates the tired duty/passion divide, that same
dilemma as dramatized in David’s “pre-Revolutionary” canvases, such as the
Horatii and Brutus. As we shall see, the Mercure remained generally severe of
interpolated love interests, and prefaces and discussions of many of the operas
I shall discuss were centered on that issue. In the lyric theater, unity of plot
was a cornerstone of so-called reform opera, as Gluck’s prefaces and treatment
of several works makes clear; but the debate was still unresolved by 1792, and
many of our works will feature it. De Rozoi’s second defense of passion in the
opera is equally fruitful for our topic:
. . . suppose that the most passionate love is allied to patriotic interest:
if the hero has moments when his soul can give way to the feelings
which move him, these are hardly madrigals, if this same sentiment
takes hold of him, transports him out of himself, either through an
access of jealousy, or a rage of despair. (p. 41)
Passionate emotional states were to be at the heart of a new morally improving
theater, and the cornerstone of the Revolutionary aesthetic, based as it
was upon “enthusiasm,” “electrification,” and “contagion.” Significantly, de
Rozoi cites Racine at this point. (His example is Mithridate, although the link
between other Racine works and Gluck is clear, and Saint-Foix’s Iphigénie had
been performed at the Comédie-Française several years earlier in 1769.) And
because national history lends itself particularly well to passionate situations,
it is highly appropriate to musical composition (p. 44).
The 1770s and 1780s had seen the revision of music drama to embrace
national history, neoclassicism, violent emotion (sometimes in tension with the
sobriety required of neoclassical treatment). In the case of the lyric theater, one
of the pioneering examples was Adèle de Ponthieu (St. Marc—La Borde, 1772),
whose avant-propos insisted upon the place of virtue, honor, and patriotism for
the medieval context.20 The principal aim of historical theater based upon the
20 (Paris: Aux dépens de l’Académie/Delormel, 1772), p. 3.

Middle Ages, for these writers, was to present a previous period in the nation’s
history and to insist upon such moral and cultural values, which they saw as
having been lost (here, a constellation of values attaching to chivalry).21 As we
shall see, several of the works here take de Rozoi’s and St. Marc’s prescriptions
to heart. Yet their focus upon themes sensitive for the contemporary political
situation perhaps unwittingly place the Opéra at the heart of controversy.
In doing so they entail a process whereby the Opéra can transform itself
from repository of national artistic tradition, to—eventually—the instrument
of the state’s moral regeneration, by writing drama that is at once nationally
relevant, emotionally charged, and historically minded.
2. Revisions
Change, however, was only gradual and was only partially grasped by contem-
poraries: (repertory) shifts can only be fully perceptible with hindsight. The
classic repertory was retained in the early Revolution, with revisions where
necessary, due to severe financial pressures and the need for a rotating stock of
classics. Even among the new works, established subjects seem at first to have
been the most successful: the most performed work of the period was Rameau’s
Castor et Pollux rewritten by Candeille, and the second was Nephté, which
although a brand new subject for the Opéra, was an adaptation of Thomas
Corneille. Payment was made to revisers of classic operas, making the task an
attractive one, and the continuing presence of such works is a feature of the
repertory until 1793: under the artists notably fewer “Old Regime” works were
performed (yet even Gluck’s Armide continued to be performed throughout
1794). Works revised by Marmontel would deserve separate discussion as
adaptations because his changes were so substantial.22 However, there were
no new adaptations of this type after 1789, save for Castor et Pollux, and the
production of repertory works tended to avoid major revisions.
21 For a recent discussion of Adèle de Ponthieu, Michele Calella, “Piccinni und die
Académie Royale de Musique: Neue Dokumente,” Neues musikwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch,
9 (2000), 67–83.
22 Julian Rushton has discussed several of Marmontel’s adaptations in NGDO,
iii.222–23: “[Marmontel] retained the choruses and divertissements and most of the recita-
tive, but made space for arias and ensembles; he also condensed the action into three acts,
with drastic results in Persée.” Rushton also notes Marmontel’s “contrived happy ending”
for Atys and oversimplification of plot in Démophoon (p. 223). See also Music and drama,
pp. 113–49 for a discussion of Roland, Amadis and Atys.

Castor et Pollux, Rameau’s second tragédie lyrique often seen as his master-
piece, had already been revised: the original (1737) version was revamped in
1754 during the Querelle des Bouffons, and the libretto’s preface claims that
the re-use of one of Rameau’s key works was a contributory factor for the
Bouffons’ ultimate failure and departure in 1754 (it was also re-produced in
the 1770s). The 1754 revised version had removed the prologue and rewritten
act I to replace the rivalry of Castor and Pollux for Télaïre with a new situation
where Castor and Télaïre are in love, but Télaïre is betrothed to Pollux, who
gives her up to his brother once he realizes the strength of their affection.23
Otherwise, textual material in the libretto was retained basically intact
with minimal redistribution: a passage in I.1 is recast as a recitative; some of
the stage directions are revamped, but that is all. New divertissements were
provided for act ends, however, and the musical score was freshened up. The
1754 version was very successful, and it remained in the repertory, being last
performed in 1785. The performance schedule for 1754 has not survived (the
period from April 1753 to April 1756 is missing); but from 1764 it received a
total of 191 performances. The frequency of performances dropped off around
1778–79, possibly in the wake of Gluck’s massive success.24
In the 1780s, plans were discussed to revive the work anew. The Journal
encyclopédique reviewed the revised work in 1786; late in the 1780s, Dauvergne
formulated a plan involving a new score composed by five composers (Langlé,
Gossec, Piccinni, Sacchini, Grétry) setting one act each: this plan provided for
a choice of Rameau’s movements to be conserved while other parts of the
libretto were reset,25 exactly as was to happen with Candeille in 1791. Indeed,
Candeille’s “Avertissement” to the 1789 libretto claims that he had been
approached by “several amateurs” for some years to revise the work, but that
he had only grudgingly accepted in order to ward off a rumored rival version by
a “foreign” composer, which threatened to ruin the entire work: evidence else-
where bears this out and suggests that Salieri is the composer in question.26
23 For a brief summary see Cuthbert Girdlestone, Jean-Philippe Rameau (Paris: Desclée
de Brouwer, 1962), pp. 237–39; vol. 8 of Rameau, Œuvres complètes (New York: Broude,
1968 [reprint of Durand, 1895–1924]).
24 Charles Dill gives a discussion of the 1754 version compared with the original in
Monstrous Opera: Rameau and the Tragic Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1998), pp. 73, 88–96, 99–102, 107, 126–27. Because his is essentially a study of Rameau’s
creative work, it does not discuss Candeille’s version at all.
25 AN: O/1/621 #122 [undated]. Cf. Henri de Curzon, “Un projet de vandalisme
musical au XVIIIe siècle,” Le Ménéstrel, LVII (1891), 219–20.
26 MF, 25 June 1791, p. 144.

Candeille’s revision presented itself as a self-consciously French enterprise
by a composer intimately familiar with local musical resources and taste, and
sensitive enough to retain the strongest sections of Rameau’s original, deserv-
ing of preservation.27 The first performance took place on 14 June 1791 and in
total the revised work received fifty performances up to 1 January 1793,
grossing 140,794 livres, 10 sous. This gives an average of just over 2,815 livres
per performance, which is a very high amount, sustained over such a long run,
and makes the work one of the most successful of our period: as a relatively
straightforward adaptation and hence cheap to stage, it was a financially advan-
tageous work to retain in the repertory. The press was, moreover, generally
complimentary about Candeille’s work: the Journal de Paris approved of
Candeille’s retention of much of Rameau’s music (including “almost all” the
dances) and his sensitive stylistic changes to those passages he modified. In
conclusion, it claimed that he deserved praise for making the work perform-
able anew.28 In certain places, Candeille’s music intends to elicit “pity and
terror,” for instance, at the opening of act IV, where the libretto specifies: “Tout
doit retracer l’horreur la plus effrayante”;29 and in general as Elena Tonolo’s
detailed study demonstrates, some of the movements Candeille retains are also
those of spectacular effect or particular pathos (for instance, the three move-
ments he revised: the chorus “Que tout gémisse” (II.1), the monologue of
Télaïre “Tristes apprêts” (II.2), and the chorus of demons “Brisons tous nos
fers” (IV.4). (The three movements retained without change were famous dance
movements: see Tonolo 5.2: “I brani ripresi.”) So the work announces some
of the features we shall observe with later libretti. The Mercure pointed to
Candeille’s back-pedaling after completion of his revisions, out of fear that he
had sacrificed certain movements of Rameau’s that should have been kept.30
In discussing the chorus “tristes apprêts,” the columnist also speaks of “force”;
the Opéra presumably insisted that certain passages of Rameau’s music be
retained, although no record of this correspondence has survived.
We do not know much about the 1791 production, but the revised stage
directions suggest an amplification of the spectacular dimension of the work.
27 Bernard-Candeille, Castor et Pollux, tragédie-opéra (Paris: P. de Lormel, 1791),

p. vii.
28 JdP, 19 June 1791, p. 683.
29 Elena Tonolo, “Castor et Pollux da Rameau a Candeille: Analisi di una lunga durata
(1737–1817) nel repertorio della tragédie lyrique”, Tesi di Laurea, University of Venice,
2 vols., 1993–94. [BNM: Vmb.7073(1–2)], pp. 165–85, 237–329.
30 MF, 25 June 1791, 144. Candeille’s letter is printed in CdP, 1791–162 (11 June
1791), pp. 646–47. Several passages of this letter are re-used in his “Avertissement.”

illustration 8. Pierre-Adrien Pâris, Triumphal arch for revival of Castor et
Pollux, pencil, color ink and wash [Bibliothèque municipale, Besançon. Fonds Pierre-
Adrien Pâris, V.483 #76]
Two of Pâris’s designs survive: that of a triumphal arch and a larger-scale scene
with bridge and city gates.31 They both pose some problems with placing. On
the one hand, the description of the arch, signed by Pâris himself, states that a
march passes under it (Illustration 8). There are two marches noted in the
31 BMB: FP: 483.76, 73.

libretto; of these, the one in II.4 (“Que pour les vrais héros la victoire a de
charmes!”) is clearly the more likely, since this deals with military triumph,
unlike the “religious march” of III.2. But it is more likely still that the arch
would have been used for the return of Pollux in act V, given the setting
for the act as a whole, which may also explain the other illustration
(Illustration 9), judging from the opening stage direction for that act:
The theater represents a pleasant prospect of the surroundings of the
city of Sparta, with a triumphal arch in the foreground, decorated with
festoons and garlands for Castor’s return. (p. 41)
The Chronique de Paris notes that the work necessitates great pomp and that
Pâris’s work, the basis of most of the décor (it does not specify who else was
involved) did not disappoint; in particular, it pointed to “the machine in which
Mercure takes Castor away” (end of act IV), which “caused astonishment, and
even fear due to its boldness”; and Bornier’s clouds, which apparently led one
to fear for the passengers’ safety! The review also singled out the zodiac and the
sun chariot. All of these were required for the spectacular final scene of act V.
Musically and visually, then, the work was both self-consciously spectacular
and deliberately presented as part of the national musical heritage. As such,
it was a key work in the context of a season where continuity of service and
stability were paramount.
The opera also offers a particularly interesting example of how contempo-
rary interpretations were projected onto particular segments of the text, even
when those interpretations were inconsistent with the contextual meaning of
those segments: performances of the work during the Revolution were highly
charged cultural events. Candeille’s work was chosen for a gratis performance
on 19 September 1791, and the royal family attended a performance on
20 September, widely discussed in the press. Royal attendance at a perfor-
mance always drew a large audience, and this one grossed 6,636 livres 15 sous
(a good evening would have taken 2,500 livres).32 Marie-Antoinette had given
up the royal box the previous year, donating the annual fee (6,000 livres) to
charity; it is not known where she was seated on this occasion.33 The Courier
français gave a particularly anti-aristocratic spin to the event, claiming the
royal family had been applauded by aristocrats who “aimed to gradually bring
back despotism by praising the court.” It is worth spending a moment on the
32 Lacroix, II.v.324–25; Journal de l’opéra, September 1791; JdP, 21 September 1791,

p. 1077; CF, 265 (22 September 1791), p. 300; CdP, 1791–264–5 (22–23 September 1791),
p. 1068, 1072–73; RdP, 115 (17–24 September 1791), pp. 523–24.
33 CdP, 21 (21 January 1790), p. 83.

illustration 9 . Pierre-Adrien Pâris, Entry to a city for revival of Castor et Pollux [Bibliothèque municipale, Besançon. Fonds Pierre-Adrien
Pâris, V.483 #73]
applications to which different performances of Castor gave rise, as they offer a
particularly rich series of examples of how works could be used politically by
institutions or factions in the audience. In a context where audiences were
ready to seize upon certain lines that could acquire relevance out of dramatic
context, we need to consider an individual performance of a work as a specific
cultural event whose meaning is constructed in the context of the auditorium.
The Journal de Paris reports that the overture was preceded by the aria “Où
peut-on être mieux, qu’au sein de sa famille,” from Marmontel and Grétry’s
opéra-comique Lucile (1769), which received rapturous applause. This aria was
to become an unofficial anthem of royalism during the Restoration: as we see,
it was already being used as rallying point for royalism at the Opéra in late
1791. The columnist continues by describing the lighting:
At the point in act IV where devils arrived with flaming torches to block
Pollux’s passage to the underworld, the light of their torches illuminated
the royal box. The sight suddenly reawakened [royalist] feelings, and
cries of “long live the King! long live the Queen!” began once more.
The royal family’s presence apparently also led to “applications” to Pollux’s
imperative to Castor: “Règne sur un peuple fidèle” [Reign over a faithful
people] (IV.6). The Journal de Paris claims “The audience immediately made
an ‘application,’ turning suddenly toward the king’s box, and by their vigorous
applause seemed to offer his Majesty the same invitation. . . . Never has a
people shown such love for its king, and never has a king received praise
so worthy, because offered by a free people.”34 There was nothing explicitly
tendentious about the passage itself, which actually concerns Pollux taking
his brother’s place in the underworld and allowing him to return to his realm
and resume his position. One can see, however, how a passage describing the
liberation of a king after a period of enslavement might have caught the imag-
ination. In June 1791, the royal family’s position had become untenable, lead-
ing to the ill-fated flight to Varennes, when Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette,
their children, and the king’s sisters fled Paris for the comparative safety of the
border (or, detractors claimed, abroad); on 14 September, Louis had accepted
the new constitution, to the acclamation of constitutional monarchists.35 These
applications led to a dispute between Lays (singing the role of Pollux) and
Prud’homme, the author of the radical weekly Révolutions de Paris, over the
34 JdP, 21 September 1791, p. 1077–78.

35 Timothy Tackett, When the King took flight (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2004).

dividing line between the artist’s personal political affiliation and the fictional
role he was playing (the blurring of these two is a feature of Revolutionary
theater, as we shall see at several moments of this study). The Gazette universelle
had already complained that Lays had repeated a line at the public’s request
and had himself made an “application,” by turning affectionately to the royal
box as he delivered the line mentioned above, rather than leaving the audience
to make the connection itself. (The critic inaccurately cited the line as “Allez,
traversez les airs & descendez sur la terre, pour y voir ce roi de l’univers.” While
we cannot be sure exactly what was sung on any one occasion, there is no such
line in the published libretto.) The Chronique de Paris, a paper close to the
constitutional monarchists and thereby more supportive of the institution in
this matter, then entered the fray, retorting that the artists of the Opéra
were too professional to step out of role to make such applications.36 But then
Prud’homme went further and stated that Lays had over-enthusiastically
agreed to repeat the line in question, which he cited as “Régnez, aimable reine,
Sur un peuple généreux,” [Reign, Majesty, over a generous people] after the
monarchist segment of the public applauded wildly; and that in general “tous
les sujets de l’opéra se conduisirent en bas valets.” [all performers behaved like
low servants.]37 (Again, there is some bad faith in the citation. The libretto
gives “Règne, sur un peuple fidèle” and the line is addressed to Castor; the
addition of “aimable Reine” is dramatically nonsensical, and therefore implau-
sible, even on this occasion.) Lays objected to this conflation of his role as an
artist and his own political views, defending his own patriotism:
The singer Lays, whom you will please distinguish from the citizen Lays,
sings the words invented by the librettist when he performs in an opera. . . .
It is true that the audience cried encore; and it is also true that Lays obeyed;
but what citizen Lays needs you to realize, is that he was not the last to take
up arms for liberty, back in the days when the public were doing other
things than crying encore; and that he nearly lost his post in the process.
You may add, sir, that if the opportunity were to arise again, citizen
Lays would be just as willing to sacrifice all for the public interest; and
that nonetheless the singer Lays never deforms the words of operas in
which he performs.38
36 CdP, 1791–265 (23 September 1791), pp. 1072–73.

37 RdP, 115 (17–24 September 1791), p. 524.
38 CdP, 1791–278 (5 October 1791), p. 1121. RdP also printed this, with a rebuttal:
117 (1–8 October 1791), pp. 29–32.

Lays, then, dissociated from his role as an artist: to perform whatever lines
were written by a librettist (a distinction widely accepted today, but not always
evident in Revolutionary debates, as we shall see at several points). In further
support, the Chronique de Paris noted that the Opéra was to be congratulated
for having programmed the work to coincide with a large influx to Paris of
citizens from the provinces for the two cultural events of the summer of 1791:
the ceremony transporting Voltaire’s ashes to the Pantheon (11 June) and
the first anniversary of the Fête de la Fédération (14 July), a festival that
proclaimed national unity, first held on the Champ de Mars on 14 July 1790,
one year after the fall of the Bastille.39
A consequence of applications and ensuing debates is that the meaning of
the works floated free from any authorial or managerial “intention,” in the
sense that textual emendations and applications could give political charge to
even the most anodyne libretto. Indeed, one oddity of the work’s reception was
its subsequent treatment during the Terror, when such emendations completely
bowdlerized the opera as conceived by Bernard and Rameau fifty years before.
We know about this case because of complaints from the Commission de
l’Instruction Publique, which became involved with the work in 1794, criticiz-
ing municipal meddling with Bernard’s libretto (a fact mentioned briefly in
Chapter 4). The Commune had clearly demanded revisions to Bernard’s text
during the production process, which the Commission saw as cultural
“Hebertism.” In particular, the Commission singled out the forced revisions
made to the famous “invocation” scene beginning act III: the passage, sung by
Pollux, was originally as follows (in both Rameau and in Candeille’s resetting):
Présent des dieux, doux charme des humains,
O divine amitié! viens pénétrer nos âmes:
Les cœurs éclairés de tes flâmes
Avec des plaisirs purs, n’ont que des jours sereins.
C’est dans tes nœuds charmans que tout est jouissance;
Le tems ajoute encore un lustre à ta beauté;
L’amour te laisse la constance;
Et tu serois la volupté,
Si l’homme avoit son innocence. (III.1, L, pp. 19–20)
[Oh divine friendship, gift of the gods, charm of humanity, imbue our souls.
When enlightened by your rays, hearts enjoy pure serenity. In your enchanting
39 CdP, 1791–167 (16 June 1791), p. 666.

embrace, all is happiness. Time adds yet more luster to your beauty. Love aban-
dons constancy to you. You would be voluptuousness if man were innocent.]
This text was retained without changes in the published 1791 libretto; but
the Commission objected to a different version, which it claimed the Commune
had insisted upon for performance (changes in italics):
Présent du ciel, délices des humains,
O céleste Raison, viens éclairer nos âmes;
Les cœurs embrasés de tes flammes
Avec des plaisirs purs n’ont que des jours sereins.
Sous ton empire heureux tout devient jouissance;
Sans ton divin flambeau, point de félicité.
Qui suit les lois avec constance,
Ne connaît d’autre volupté
Que celle de la bienfaisance.
[Present from heaven, delight of humankind, oh celestial reason, enlighten our
souls. When hearts are enflamed by your flames, they have only serene moments
with pure pleasure. Under your happy control all becomes delight, without
your divine torch, there is no happiness. He who follows the laws with con-
stancy knows no other delight than that of beneficence.]
As the report points out, at a moment of maximum pathos in the plot
when one brother is to be separated from another, and the dominant feelings
are the conflict between sexual love and brotherly affection, the revised version
removed dramatically appropriate terms because of their contemporary reso-
nance. This is held up as dramatically absurd (as indeed it is), especially
because the references to transcendence (dieux, divine) were so non-specific, and
because the word that might remind a reader of an unpopular regime (empire)
was in any case being used metaphorically. The Commune had also quite gra-
tuitously changed two key references—to amitié and amour—to refer to the
rule of reason and law, terms utterly irrelevant in the dramatic context. The
argument is hence one of dramatic and aesthetic appropriateness40 and is akin
to the wider context of the Commission’s stance attacking cultural vandalism,
which I discussed in Chapter 4; the changes are also in line with those described
by Sergi and others who have discussed censorship during the Terror.41
40 “The uppermost rules to respect in a drama are those of taste and good sense; and
these rules should certainly have taught you that the worst tribute you could pay to reason
would be to insert praise to it in that passage.” CIP, iv.716, quoting Moniteur, 307
(7 Thermidor An II [25 July 1794]), p. 37.
41 “Phèdre corrigée sous la Révolution,” Dix-Huitième Siècle, 6 (1974), 153–65.

More interesting though is the wider discussion of the reasons for reinstating
the original version, since the report ends by claiming that a reason was to
provide the public with “the charm of the original text,” but also “a useful
lesson, in the shape of contemporary virtue [à l’ordre du jour].”42 Performances
of Castor et Pollux had stopped on 1 January 1793 and were not to begin again
until 16 December 1794; the “corrected” version has not been traced.
A second issue concerning the contemporary context of adapted works is
their metaliterary value as adaptations, taken from the cultural heritage of the
Old Regime, and the stock [ fonds] of the institution. While evidence suggests
that there was little disquiet at this in the first three seasons, occasional com-
plaints at the policy did surface. Whereas the Commission had returned to a
patrimonial approach to the arts by 1794, this was clearly slow in coming and
was not an approach favored in all quarters. The Mercure opened its review of
the 1791 production of Castor et Pollux with a reference to the inherent conser-
vatism of contemporary musical taste, asking rhetorically “Why must we go
on admiring music which causes such deathly boredom?”43 And the district
des Blancs-Manteaux had complained, back in March 1790, that new works
such as Les Incas (an inextant work not to be confused with what was to become
Méhul’s Cora [et Alonzo]),44 were passed over in favor of old works such as the
same Castor et Pollux.45 Such sporadic complaints remind us that the institu-
tion’s repertory was coming under some popular scrutiny early in the decade
and that its repertory was being judged on political grounds. Castor et Pollux
was thus a paradoxical cultural object: at once an emblem of royalism, a
segment of the national musical heritage, and an object onto which the politi-
cal pre-conceptions of different parties were projected. An “Old Regime”
repertory work, it became a “political” object in performance.
3. “La pureté de l’histoire”: Nephté (Hoffman, Lemoyne)

If Castor et Pollux became, in spite of itself, a focus for ideological projection,
Hoffman and Lemoyne’s tragedy Nephté seemed to eschew explicit opportuni-
ties for political involvement, by insisting upon a “pure” return to history
42 CIP, iv.716.
43 MF, 25 June 1791, p. 142.
44 Ludwig Schiedermair, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Oper um die Wende des 18. und 19.
Jahrhundert, 2 vols. in 1 (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1907), i.224–25.
45 Lacroix, I.iv.500–2, which describes this refusal as “a new kind of aristocracy.” The
work rejected, entitled Les Incas, by a M. de Vély, has not been traced.

(in this case Egyptian), and an exoticism at a seemingly safe remove from the
contemporary situation in France. Of course, any work dealing with monarchy,
which Hoffman’s libretto obliquely did, still had resonance in 1789. But the-
matic “mapping” will not help us to interpret this work, whose engagement
with Antiquity and Republican themes occurs at a different level. Yet as
suggested by Tissier, the reception of historical theater was itself in flux in
1789–90, and Nephté did not escape scrutiny of that type, despite its success.
As Loewenberg notes, the success of Hoffman and Lemoyne’s work was
such that it was the first work in the history of the Paris Opéra whose
composer was called before the curtain.46 However, the trajectory of the
work was more complex, in that the Opéra withdrew the work before it could
reach forty performances. Hoffman alleged that the Opéra did not wish to
grant him the pension that would have been due thereafter.47 Premiered on
15 December 1789, the work did indeed receive a total of thirty-nine perfor-
mances, the last on 18 March 1792. This lends credence to Hoffman’s claim:
the season did not end until 27 March, and so there was clearly time for
a subsequent performance in that last week. But receipts had dropped sig-
nificantly toward the end of the work’s run: the last five performances, each
in a double-bill with a repertory work, grossed 899, 2,094, 1,088, 817, and
978 livres, respectively; and of the thirty-nine total performances, sixteen
were below the 2,000 livres level. For whatever reason, and in spite of positive
critical comment in the press, the work was not attracting large audiences
toward the end of its run. On the administrative level, relations between the
Opéra and Hoffman had become strained.48 The work was dedicated to Mme.
Saint-Huberty, whether maladroitly or as a deliberate provocation (she was
unpopular with the administration).49 And Hoffman had threatened to
push for legislation respecting authors’ rights to maintain control over their
published works: a contentious issue ever since Beaumarchais had embarrassed
46 Annals of Opera, p. 473.

47 Œuvres de François Benoît Hoffman, 10 vols. (Paris: Lefebvre, 1829–34), i[1829].3–4.
The editor goes on to claim that there were attempts by later administrations to make
amends by reviving Nephté, but I have found no evidence.
48 Dauvergne’s letter of 11 December 1789, for instance, complains that Hoffman
refuses to pay for the printing of libretti, as was customary: O/1/619 #560. Cp. #554
(letter of 24 September 1789).
49 Mme de Saint-Huberty (real name Antoinette Clavel) had been Lemoyne’s pupil
and performed in his Le Bouquet de Colette in Warsaw and Phèdre in Paris. (Julian Rushton:
NGDO, iii.971). At the premiere, however, it was Mlle. Maillard who took the lead role:
MF, 26 December 1789, p. 158.

the Comédie-Française into releasing their accounts for his works.50 Hoffman
also quarreled with the Opéra over their wish to add divertissements to Nephté
(although on the level of dramatic appropriateness he was surely right to
object).
Although several details of plot construction were criticized by the Mercure,
the review was generally positive, speaking of the “numerous beauties” of the
work, which was “perfectly designed for the stage, and structured most favor-
ably for musical setting, whilst being elegant and natural in style.” Both the
music and the scenery also received praise.51 The Chronique de Paris, Moniteur
and Journal de Paris were also enthusiastic;52 the latter in particular singled out
the performances of Mlle. Maillard (replacing an indisposed Mme. de Saint-
Huberty) and Lainez. The Correspondance littéraire was more reserved, since
although it agreed that the style of the libretto was elegant, it found that the
text was rarely fitting for arias and considered the work overall as being rather
uniform in emotion and immobile in action, since the situations of, and
relations between, characters hardly changed throughout the work.53 Nephté
was clearly one of the more important operas of its period and is an interesting
work of historical reconstruction and pseudo-Gluckian “sobriety”; it also
deserves attention for its staging, since several of Pâris’s sketches for it
survive.54 Hoffman has been recognized for his attention to character develop-
ment, for his well-constructed plots, finely paced dramatic action, and finesse
in language (even if he was sometimes rather verbose).55 Following a produc-
tion of Démophon that foregrounded the sensibility of the monarch, Nephté
extends reflections upon kingship at the same time it carries cultural resonances
relating to Antiquity. Indeed, although it was set in Egypt, the inspiration
for the work was Rome, although this was a rather marginal subject in the
contemporary French historiography.
50 NGDO, iii.731.
51 MF, 26 December 1789, p. 158.
52 CdP, 115 (16 December 1789), p. 459; Moniteur, 121 (21 December 1789), ii.440;
JdP (20 December 1789), p. 1640.
53 Tourneux, xv.574–75 [January 1790].
54 Discussed by Guiet, Livret, on p. 154 only. Pâris’s sketches for Nephté have been
discussed in Marc-Henri Jordan, “L’érudition et l’imagination: Les décors de scène,” in Le
Cabinet de Pierre-Adrien Pâris, Architecte, Dessinateur des Menus-Plaisirs (Paris: Hazan/Musée
des Beaux-Arts de Besançon, 2008), pp. 68–81 (71, 73); Nicole Wild, “Egypt at the
Opéra” in Jean-Marcel Humbert, Michael Pantazzi, Christiane Ziegler (dir.), Egyptomania:
L’Egypte dans l’art occidental, 1730–1930 (Paris: Réunion des Musées nationaux/Ottawa:
Musée des Beaux-Arts du Canada, 1994), pp. 390–447 (392–93).
55 NGDO, ii.731–32.

As Hoffman openly acknowledged, Nephté was a free adaptation of Thomas
Corneille’s tragedy Camma, which had been a huge success in the year of its
premiere (1661), although according to the Moniteur the play was completely
forgotten by 1790.56 Nephté has plenty of what we might consider with hind-
sight to be staple ingredients of Revolutionary drama, including popular insur-
rection and reflections on tyranny (defined here as the usurpation of power by
a monarch). But Hoffman crafted a more self-consciously classical work,
avoiding the temptation to foreground themes of contemporary concern and
eschewing the secondary love interest that had been present in the original. In
fact, the love interest was probably removed not just for reasons of sobriety of
plot but its implications for the way the character of Camma/Nephté was
received. Hoffman noted in his preface that Thomas Corneille’s play had
greatly embellished the historical record by introducing a subplot in the form
of a love interest between Camma and her late husband’s confidant Sostrate, an
embellishment demanded by period fashion but inappropriate to the dignity
required of the heroine and the interest and emotional focalization [intérêt] she
needed to inspire. La Harpe also criticized the original work, claiming that
Camma and Stilicon “lack that intérêt necessary to bring tragedy to life. There
is no passion, no movement, no character, and heroes and villains are lifeless:
they pontificate and deliberate, but that is it.”57 Thomas Corneille has often
been criticized for his rather stiff, cold characters, and this seems a fair assess-
ment of Camma and Stilicon in the original. Yet however unsatisfactory, the
love plot also provided necessary padding: Derek Watts has pointed out that
the unity of time required that Corneille relegate the murder of Sinatus, and
Sinorix’s usurpation of his throne, to the past, leaving a basic plot far too sparse
for five-act treatment without the subplot. Moreover, the subplot is better inte-
grated than Hoffman implied, since the principal action of the play is derived
from the development of the relationship between the four main characters:
Hésione, Sostrate, Camma, and Sinorix.58 Hoffman’s related criticism of the
characters also seems a decidedly unfair dismissal of Thomas Corneille’s great
skill in putting together an intricately plotted dramatic action that combines
seamless coherence with a rich quantity of peripeteia. But it is true that there
56 Thomas Corneille, Camma, ed. Derek Watts (Exeter: University of Exeter, 1977),
vii–viii. Watts also surveys French treatments of the character of Camma between Amyot’s
translation of Plutarch and Thomas Corneille’s work (pp. x–xiv).
57 Cited from Œuvres complètes de Pierre Corneille, et Œuvres choisies de Thomas Corneille,
2 vols. (Paris: Didot, 1852), ii.650.
58 Watts, p. xiv.

was no such secondary love interest in Plutarch,59 and to that extent Hoffman’s
revised plot is indeed much closer to the classical sources (despite some notably
late eighteenth-century coloring); this pares down the action so that the minor
characters involved only in that love intrigue can be removed, to leave a cast of
only four principal characters, or five if one counts the silent role of Nephté’s
(unnamed) child. Indeed, one of the apparent paradoxes of Hoffman’s libretto
for Nephté is that it is simplified to the extreme in terms of subject matter but
insists so much upon visual spectacle, a pattern that will recur throughout this
chapter. The two features are perfectly compatible on the stage; but Gluck’s
understanding of neoclassicism, frequently linked to Nephté in surrounding
texts, also implied a sober visual dimension where the accent would be
upon the expression of passions in the libretto, and so this work only partially
satisfies “Gluckian” principles, as I shall argue presently.
The Correspondance littéraire felt that the authors were right to remove the
love interest but that an alternative approach to Nephté’s emotions would have
provided necessary emotional variety and coloring. In particular, they sug-
gested two possible solutions: either that she should have been unaware of
Pharès’s guilt at the beginning of the work, allowing for her innocently to
accept his hand in marriage, only subsequently to discover his guilt; or for her
to have had a secret passion for him that she was eventually unable to restrain.
“What varied movements, artful transitions, varied nuances the librettist could
have supplied the composer, had he conceived his text in one or the other way!”
they exclaimed.60 The interest had to come from elsewhere.
why egypt?
The opera’s scenic and local color consist not only of the staging (we have evi-
dence in the form of Pâris’s set designs and the descriptions given at the begin-
nings of the acts), but inflections of the plot and treatment of themes such as
death and sacrality, on which Hoffman had done substantial background
research. As sources for the Egyptian setting, Hoffman named Paul Ernest
Jablonski’s Pantheon egyptiacum (from which was derived the etymology of the
59 Plutarch, Moralia, 16 vols. (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1969–

2004): iii.551–55; ix.423–25. Hoffman is however unfair in his assessment of the charac-
ter, describing her as: “scarcely faithful to a husband she seems not to miss” (p. 5): on the
contrary, Corneille is at pains to stress her fidelity to Sinatus. Hoffman deliberately fore-
grounds this aspect; cf. I.4. In this respect, a French audience would just as readily have
been reminded of Racine’s Andromaque.
60 Tourneux, xv.575 [January 1790].

name Nephté),61 and Herodotus and Diodorus of Sicily (both of whom had
visited Egypt) for various details on Egyptian funerary practice. The Dutch
philosopher Cornelius de Pauw was also cited for his claim that Egypt did
not recognize female monarchs, because no woman was admitted into the
sacerdotal caste [classe sacerdotale], although women were occasionally regents.62
(This justifies Nephté’s remarriage by her need to retain the crown legitimately,
an aspect problematic in Corneille because without such necessity, Camma’s
love for Sostrate conflicted with her fidelity to her late husband.) On Egypt,
early-modern France also had a range of accounts, including Jean Thenaud
(1512), Pierre Belon du Mans (1547), the Chevalier d’Arvieux (1660), the map
by Father Claude Sicard (1722), and the Comte de Caylus’s more mainstream
Antiquités égyptiennes, étrusques, grecques romaines et gauloises (1752–57). In opera,
there are few antecedents, although Algarotti had recommended Egypt as a
setting in his Saggio sopra l’opera in musica, translated by Chastellux in 1773: he
felt that it had a combination of majesty and sobriety perfect for what he saw
as a “Tuscan” aesthetic, citing Michelangelo as an ideal.63 Surviving evidence
suggests great care with the visual dimension of the production, a fact not lost
upon the reviewers. Scenic descriptions of acts II and III are sparse, but the
libretto gave the following dense description of the setting for act I:
The whole right-hand side of the stage must represent an arid moun-
tain, with twelve crypts or sepulchers carved out of the rock. Each of
these grottos contains the tomb of one of the Kings of Egypt, each lit
by a funerary lamp. The first and newest contains the tomb of Sethos.
Four priests in linen robes are seated on stones at the four corners of
the tomb.
The left shows the facade of the palace of Memphis. At the edge of
the mountain is the Grand Temple of Osiris and the Sun: only its doors
are visible. The temple must take up no more than half of the back-
ground, in order that between it and the tombs may be seen the fertile
landscape bordering the river Nile and one of the Great Pyramids,
61 Paul Ernst Iablonski, Pantheon Ægyptiorum, sive de diis eorum commentarius, cum pro-
legomensis de religione et theologia Ægyptiorum, 3 vols. (Frankfurt: Christ. Kleyb., 1750–1752).
The Moniteur explained that the word was composed of Neith (wisdom) and Pithá (cour-
age), 121 (21 December 1789), ii.440.
62 Recherches philosophiques sur les Egyptiens et les Chinois, par l’auteur des Recherches sur les
Amériquains [sic], 2 vols. (Berlin: C. J. Decker, 1773), i.31. Pauw does not explicitly cite
Plutarch here.
63 Essai sur l’opéra, traduit de l’Italien du comte Algarotti par M. *** (Pise/Paris: Ruault,
1773), p. 76.

whose apex disappears into the horizon. A huge Sphinx avenue leads
from the temple to the portico of the Palace. The remaining space
between the sphinx and the tombs is planted with cypress trees. Day
has not yet broken, and the stage is lit only by the funerary torches.
Pâris’s design for this act seems to be the one conserved in Besançon, although
it does not match the description perfectly (Illustration 10).64 But it does
include a temple to the right, burial chambers cut into the rock in the fore-
ground, sphinxes, and a pyramid in the background. Much of the detail on the
décor is in pseudo-hieroglyphical characters, and so there is an attempt at both
“surface” reconstruction and deeper cultural research. One assumes that this
design sketch corresponds to act I, since acts II and III were set in interiors
(respectively, the throne room of the palace and the Temple of Osiris, Egyptian
god of the afterlife). In Pâris, Hoffman found a set designer who was as enthu-
siastic and well informed as Hoffman himself: Marc-Henri Jordan notes that
Pâris had lived in Rome between 1769 and 1774 and had succeeded de Wailly
and Challe at the Cabinet du Roi; there he saw various relics brought from
Rome, including items originally derived from Egypt. He had also been in
Rome when Piranesi had published his Diverse maniere d’adornari i cammini
(1769), a controversial work blending motifs from a variety of civilizations and
from mythology. From Piranesi he had also been inspired, as Jordan points out,
to sketch the lamp decorating act III, set in the temple (Illustration 11).65 For
good measure, he had additionally been much inspired by the Danish Frederick
Ludvig Norden’s Travels in Egypt, translated into French in 1755.66
The care over décor seems not to have extended to costumes, however; the
Chronique de Paris, although politically moderate and generally supportive, as
we saw above, accused the Opéra of recycling and confusion between different
national traditions, and grumbled that the cost of the Opéra to the national
purse should have justified a less parsimonious production. The palace from
act II had been borrowed from the production of Panurge, it claimed, enlivened
with large porcelain vases, seemingly Japanese in style! Rather acidly, it com-
plained: “Although a certain scholar has discerned similarities between the
Egyptians and the Chinese [presumably Cornelius de Pauw is meant here],
64 BMB: FP: V.483, #147. Reproduced in Egyptomania, p. 393 (fig. 232).

65 BMB: Cat. 77D. Reproduced in Cabinet, p. 72.
66 Jordan, “L’érudition et l’imagination,” p. 74. Cf. Alain Gruber, “L’œuvre de Pierre-
Adrien Pâris à la cour de France 1779–1791,” Bulletin de la société de l’histoire de l’art français,
année 1973, pp. 213–27. In Pâris’s papers survives a “Plan d’un édifice immense,” taken
from Norden. (BMB: FP: V.476 #15)

illustration 10. Pierre-Adrien Pâris, “Grand temple égyptien,” for Nephté [Bibliothèque municipale, Besançon. Fonds Pierre-Adrien Pâris,
V.483 #147]
illustration 11. Pierre-Adrien Pâris, “Lampe” for Nephté [Bibliothèque munic-
ipale, Besançon. Fonds Pierre-Adrien Pâris, V.483 #81]
239
this is no reason to mix them up on stage.”67 This is the beginning of a series
of critical comments by this and other papers, which continued to grumble
about the expense incurred by the national Opéra in the years that followed.68
funerary sobriety
Egypt in particular lent the production the mixture of majesty and sobriety of
which Hoffman particularly approved in the opera. Sobriety was one of the
watchwords of neoclassicism in general and the Gluckian reform in particular;
in Gluck, it was normally applied not to musical expression (which could be
violent) but to form, as concerned dramaturgy and plot. (Reviewers of Louis IX
were also to point to the sobriety of Lemoyne’s recitative and the relative brev-
ity of the ballets in that work.) 69 Some concessions were made of course: much
was written in the press of the dénouement’s use of a surprise poisoned chalice,
which Hoffman had retained from Camma, a device also used by Marmontel in
Denys le Tyran (1748). And in this period when the Opéra’s success depended
so heavily on its ballet (the best in Europe, or so it was said), some critics felt
that the tragic form and lack of any type of divertissement were in tension with
the norms of lyric theater, which continued to rely on this aspect.70 Indeed, the
Moniteur believed that although the work was well structured and moved
purposefully, there was a certain monotony of material that it put down to
Hoffman’s decision to let maternal and conjugal love dominate the work, to
the expense of other, more varied, elements (it does not say which: should
he have kept the subplot?). In spite of this monotony in the libretto,
it conceded that Lemoyne’s “genius” had allowed him to derive a variety of
musical tone; indeed it went as far as to describe Lemoyne as “the hope of
the lyric theater.”
The setting of act III, representing the Temple of Osiris, was described in
the libretto as being circular in form and of vast dimensions, and the librettist
insisted that all must be architecturally “simple and austere [sévère]” (my italics).
Yet more important was the funerary atmosphere pervading the work.
67 CdP, 115 (16 December 1789), p. 459.

68 A notable example is RdP, xxii.30–31: “Faits et observations de l’abbé Gouttes, sur
les articles des dépenses de l’Opéra à la charge du gouvernement.”
69 Moniteur, 169 (18 June 1790), iv.655–56.
70 Moniteur, 169 (18 June 1790), iv.655–56. For a brief discussion setting the divertisse-
ment in context, see Rebecca Harris-Warrick, “Ballet,” in The Cambridge Companion to
Eighteenth-Century Opera, ed. Anthony DelDonna and Pierpaolo Polzonetti (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 99–111.

Hoffman had read Diodorus and Herodotus on Egyptian burials, and the
scenic description to act I insists upon the burial chambers carved into the
rock toward the right of the stage, contributing to an overriding sense of faded
grandeur. Central to this conception was a pervasive sense of grief, given
explicit visual expression. The act opens before daybreak and begins in a pen-
umbra; it only begins to receive natural light toward the end of I.1. The very
first chorus (“Memphis, ton roi n’est plus; abaisse ton orgueil” [Memphis, your
king is dead; moderate your pride]) underscores this sense that the greatness of
the polity is past, and that “Sceptres, grandeurs, vertus, puissance” have “dis-
paru dans l’ombre du cercueil” [Scepters, grandeur, virtue, power, have disap-
peared into the shadow of the tomb]. Similarly, Nephté’s opening recitative in
I.2 expresses a wish to join her late husband in death and is addressed directly
to him; it is in a style that may owe much to Racine’s Andromaque, where the
heroine similarly addresses Hector at his tomb at a moment of emotional
anguish. Before Nephté is reminded of her need to seek revenge, her speech
ends with a reference to following her husband into “la nuit du trépas; / Sans
toi le monde entier n’est qu’un désert pour elle” [Deathly night; without you
the world is but a desert for her]. Yet after encouragement from the High
Priest, this despair soon gives way to determination, as the recitative “Reine, il
ne suffit pas de pleurer votre époux” [Your majesty, do not just lament his
death], leads to a presto section where Nephté declaims “Je veux te venger”
[I will avenge thee] against furious triplets and a martial dotted rhythm]
(Musical example 1). This is also the essence of her first confrontation with
Pharès, where she replies: “Le deuil de ces cyprès n’afflige point mon âme; /
Leur sainte obscurité convient à mon malheur. / S’ils sont affreux pour moi,
c’est par le crime infâme / Que ces tombeaux rappellent à mon cœur.” [These
deathly cypress-trees do not trouble my soul, for their sacred darkness befits
my grief; it is the infamous crime which these tombs bring to mind which
troubles my soul.] In all, although she will be persuaded to seek vengeance,
the funerary aspect takes precedence in the opening scenes, linking with her
choice of revenge at the end.
More widely, the funereal imaginary seen in Nephté points toward the
Terror’s willingness to publicly exhibit martyrs because in both cases an
eternal significance is lent to the otherwise ephemeral moment of death.71
This work does not foreground the former king’s martyrdom (although it
71 Antoine de Baecque, The Body Politic: Corporeal Metaphor in Revolutionary France

1770–1800 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997 [orig. Paris: Calmann-Lévy,
1993]), chapter 8.

makes full use of the deaths of other characters), but it is clearly no accident
that Osiris, god of the afterlife, is frequently invoked, nor that the death is here
linked to royal legitimacy and to usurpation. The funerary backdrop supports
one aspect of the plot that is foregrounded in the new setting (in Corneille it
was present but not significantly developed): the instability of a ruling dynasty.
For that reason, much is made of the importance of Nephté’s unnamed child
(“notre unique espérance” [our only hope], I.6), and of his safety, since the life
example 1
Reine, il ne suffit pas de pleurer votre époux
Recitative
Le Grand Prêtre:
Vocal
(el - le) Reine,il ne suf - fit pas de pleu -rer vo- tre_é poux, lais - sez auxfai - bles coeurs des re - grets i - nu
Keyboard (Strings) f p fp
reduction
ti - les, le ciel vous fit une â me et le ciel mit envous d’au - tres sou la - ge-ments que des lar - mes sté - ri - les.
f f
Aria
Nephté 10 Presto
Oui! Je veux te ven - ger ar - me ma fai - ble main, per - ce l’af - freux se
Vlns., Vla. 3 3
p cresc. cresc.
Vc. 3 3
Cb.

example 1 Cont’d
2
13
- cret, nom - me ton as - sas - sin. quel - que puissant qu’il
trem.
f ff
+ Vla.
trem.
16
soit il fau - dra qu’il suc - com - be tout

Fl., Cl.
pp Vlni, Vla.
Fg., Trmbn.
Vc.
Cb.
19
son sang va cou -
cresc. cresc. f
22
- ler, il rou gi -ra ta tom - be. ...
f ff ff ...
Vc.
Cb.
243
of the heir is considered central to the future stability of the polity. This aspect
moreover also allows for a certain dramaturgical thickening of act II, whose
action would have been decidedly sparse without this aspect.
The child first appears in I.2, sitting on one of the stones surrounding the
tomb, and is present for Nephté’s first entrance (I.2); but he is subsequently
hidden in an underground grotto for his own safety when Pharès arrives (I.3),
a haven whose value is restated later (I.6). Pharès uses the danger threatening
the child as a lever on Nephté’s feelings by taking him away in II.4. (The son
of Andromaque, Astyanax, was treated similarly by Pyrrhus in Racine’s
Andromaque.) Pharès is able to do this with the support of the people because
Nephté and the priest Amédès had previously decided not to reveal that Pharès
was the assassin, so the soldiers also assume his motives are pure (namely, mar-
riage with Nephté and protection of her child). And because the people are
unaware of this, the scene is also able to dramatize competing claims on popu-
lar assent, although this is not developed in any way to make a point about
political legitimacy as it might be. But Nephté complains, supported by a
female chorus “Un assassin triomphe; il est choisi pour roi” [An assassin tri-
umphant! chosen to be king] (II.5), and Amédès exclaims (II.7): “Je sais tous
vos malheurs, l’usurpateur prospère.” [I know all your misfortunes; the usurper
prevails.] Otherwise, reflections on usurpation and monarchical legitimacy are
far more discreet than they were in Camma, which saw a long discussion of
the legitimacy of Sinorix as monarch. Much, however, is made of the future
security of the dynasty at the end of the work:
NEPHTÉ
Ne pleurez pas mon sort, il n’est pas malheureux.
J’ai rempli mes devoirs . . . mon fils respire encore;
Ah! conservez-le bien, ce dépôt précieux,
C’est l’image du roi que tout Memphis adore.
(A ses femmes)
Donnez-moi le bandeau que j’ai fait préparer.
Qu’il lui serve de diadème . . .
Je veux . . . avant que d’expirer,
Sur son front l’attacher moi-même.
Memphis, voilà ton roi . . .
(Nephté expire en prononçant ces mots, et les soldats saisissent l’enfant, l’élèvent
sur un pavois, et le présentent au peuple, qui tombe à genoux.)
CHŒUR
Veillez sur lui, grands dieux!
Qu’il imite Séthos, mais qu’il soit plus heureux. (III.5)

[Do not lament my fate, I have fulfilled my duty and my son is still alive.
Take good care of him, this precious object, image of the king adored by all
his subjects. (To her ladies) Give me the band I have prepared, which will serve
as a crown. Before my death, I shall attach it myself. . . . Memphis, behold your
king! (Nephté dies as she sings these words; the soldiers seize the child and lift him onto
a pedestal before the people, who fall to their knees. The chorus sings) Watch over him,
O gods! May he act like Sethos yet have a happier fate!].
oaths, sacrifices, transcendence

Dramaturgically, Hoffman insisted upon the reduction of reported action in
favor of direct depiction on stage, so that Nephté contains not only a final scene
where the heroine and her new husband die from poison on stage, but also a
sacrifice in I.8, dedicated to Osiris. In the preceding scene the priests’ entry
frames the space in which the action is to unfold, in the style of a tableau (“Le
temple s’ouvre, et l’intérieur en paraît obscur. Les prêtres en sortent en habits funèbres, et
viennent se ranger le long des grottes; les grands de l’état sortent du palais, et le peuple
du fond. On élève un autel près du tombeau de Séthos. Amédès est seul auprès; les prêtres
à ses côtés; les grands forment un cercle plus éloigné; Nephté reste sur le devant de la
scène, et le peuple inonde le fond,” I.7) [The doors of the temple open, revealing a
dark interior. The priests exit in their funerary costumes, and line up alongside
the tombs. The notables exit the palace, and the people arrive from the back-
ground. An altar is raised near Sethos’s tomb. Amédès stands beside it, with
the priests alongside him and the notables form a circle beyond them. Nephté
remains at the front of the stage; the people fill the background.] Onstage
sacrificial scenes can be found in several works of our corpus, such as in act IV
of Cora, where the scene is accompanied by complaints at the barbarity of
exotic customs and the cruelty of the priests (Cora, IV.4, L, p. 44). However in
Cora, the sacrifice is interrupted and does not take place. Here, although little
evidence survives about staging, the libretto requires that the scene go ahead,
which however presented is surely a serious breach of bienséance, not to mention
of sobriety:
ENSEMBLE
AMÉDÈS ET NEPHTÉ.
O puissant Osiris! écoute leurs sermens.
(On brûle l’encens; on pose la victime sur l’autel, et le grand-prêtre saisit le
couteau sacré qu’il tient levé en disant les vers suivans.)
AMÉDÈS.
Objet de notre amour, reçois ce sacrifice,

Et sur tous tes vengeurs jette un regard propice,
Que ce couteau sacré, gage de leur fureur,
Déchire le sein du perfide.
(En frappant la victime.)
Périsse ainsi le parricide
Qui t’a plongé le poignard dans le cœur.
CHŒUR DU PEUPLE.
Périsse ainsi le parricide
Qui t’a plongé le poignard dans le cœur!
Et que ce fer, gage de ma fureur,
Déchire le sein du perfide. (I.8)
[Oh mighty Osiris! Behold their oath. (Incense is burned, the victim is placed on the
altar, and the High Priest takes the holy knife and holds it aloft as he pronounces the
following words:) Oh beloved Osiris, receive this sacrifice, and look kindly upon
the avengers. May this knife, a symbol of their fury, pierce the breast of the
enemy. (He strikes the victim.) Death to the parricide who plunged his dagger
into your heart. (Repeated by the chorus.)]
The scene ends with an oath, pronounced “with exaltation”: one of no fewer
than three oaths pronounced during the work. (In I.4, Nephté has Pharès swear
to avenge Séthos; this takes place at the beginning of I.5, overseen by the priest
Amedès, who is shocked by this “sacrilegious oath”; and in II.3, the soldiers
swear obedience to Pharès, while he swears to defend them, although this
latter oath is interrupted.) Oaths are central to the Revolutionary opera, as
Elizabeth Bartlet has shown, although she has only considered the Republican
phase of the repertory and by implication sees those works as distinct from the
ones of the earlier period.72 Yet a continuity may be traced through Nephté to
those works.
nephté as gluckist work

Lemoyne had presented himself as a disciple of Gluck in the preface to Electre,
which was dedicated to Marie-Antoinette (herself a patroness of Gluck),73
72 “The new repertory at the Opéra during the Reign of Terror: Revolutionary rheto-
ric and operatic consequences,” in Music and the French Revolution, ed. Malcolm Boyd
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 107–56.
73 Performed 1782: Julian Rushton, “An early essay in ‘Leitmotiv’: J. B. Lemoyne’s
Electre,” Music and Letters, 52.4 (1971), 387–401. On Nephté, see his “Music and drama,”
pp. 292–94.

and an anonymous pamphlet concerning Nephté from 1790 makes a similar
conflation. It was dedicated to “the shades of abbé Arnaud,” one of the two
most strenuous supporters of Gluck in the pages of the Journal de Paris in the
later stages of the quarrel with Piccinni (in 1777 particularly), and recast
Gluckist opposition to “Italian” musical dramaturgy in the frame of cultural
degenerescence that Rousseau had popularized. The pamphlet criticizes the
concept of the musical “period”;74 it aligns vocal decoration with soulless
display and (via un unquestioned conflation with castrato roles) also with
effeminacy, the crux of “neoclassical” complaints against what it saw as rococo
frivolity and by 1790 something of a musical commonplace.75 By contrast,
Gluck is aligned with nature and divinity, a combination of truth and
eloquence, and with the energy of the Ancients (themselves aligned with uni-
versality). This account ignores the main charge brought against Gluck by his
detractors: a certain coarseness of musical expression. Gluck’s opera is described
as a spectacle worthy of Ancient Greece because his works show great passions,
brought to life by contrasts depicting man buffeted by the tempests of life and
finding his unavoidable destiny everywhere.76 The Mercure review of the pro-
duction was also to praise the music of Nephté for both the “grace” of its vocal
line and the vigor of its harmony.77 The power of melody and the dignity of
Gluckian works make for a spectacle worthy of the Ancients. This point was
hardly new, but neither was it straightforward, for it depended upon two linked
polarities: between “enthusiasm” and “divine expression” on the one hand, and
between rationality and emotional affect on the other. Certainly one might be
forgiven for considering that Nephté instrumentalizes a rather histrionic aes-
thetics of “pity and terror,” such as Nephté’s “Dieux! de quelle frayeur je me
sens émouvoir!” [Oh gods, what intense fear I feel.] (I.6).
It also points up an aesthetics of enthusiasm, such as in the end of I.8, to be
performed with “exaltation”: the ideal Revolutionary aesthetic response. Here,
for instance, is the pamphlet’s description of the beginning of I.8:
Do not bemoan his death, she cried, Sethos is already in heaven.
Suddenly a sacred exaltation [ivresse] takes hold of the people, voices are
raised to the heavens in song, and all hearts are united with divinity.
74 De la musique et de “Nephté”: Aux mânes de l’Abbé Arnaud (Paris: Imprimerie de

Monsieur, 1790), pp. 11–12.
75 De la musique, pp. 12–13.
76 De la musique, p. 15.
77 MF, 26 December 1789, p. 158.

Only a composer of genius recieves such sublime inspiration; vulgar
artists shall never feel it or understand its effects.78
And this enthusiasm is the musical equivalent of divinity: “when music cele-
brates heroic virtue or the gifts of nature, it takes on a celestial quality”.79 One
of the ways this was supposedly achieved was through a gradation of intérêt,
gradually augmenting the spectators’ involvement, guiding them from being
touched, through tears, pity, and finally terror. One may take as an example of
this gradation the initially lugubrious song of the priests; as the sun rises, the
music passes through consolation, and then joy, before the mood turns back
to melancholy (which the pamphlet describes as the return of calm and peace
to the soul.) Nephté then enters (scene 2) and is at first solemn, before love for
her late husband takes over and vengeance becomes the dominant emotion
(“ô mon époux! ô mon amant!” [Oh my husband! oh my lover!]); her final
prayer is then characterized by a “religious effusion” [transport]. This is the
movement whereby she agrees to the marriage with Pharès (although, as we
will learn only later) she has decided to kill him and herself.80 Popular accla-
mation of the former decision ends act II. A second example is given by Act I,
which moves from a plaintive mood, to suspicion of Pharès’s guilt, to horror at
his sacrilegious oath, and thence to Nephté’s determination for revenge, once
guilt has been confirmed (ending with an expression of pity and terror for
the son).81 If this is Gluckism, it has been recast through the Revolutionary
framework of enthusiasm.
78 De la musique, p. 22.
79 De la musique, pp. 5–6.
80 John Lemprière claims, of Camma, “She escaped by refusing to drink [the poison]
on pretence of illness” (Classical Dictionary [London: Bracken, 1994; facsimile of 1850],
p. 136), a claim which I have been unable to verify in any classical source. He refers to
Polyænus of Macedonia, Stratagems, 8.c.39: see trans. by P. Krentz and H. L. Wheeler
(Chicago: Ares Publishers, 1994), ii.801. That passage of the Stratagems, however, follows
Plutarch in claiming that she also drank and died at the altar. According to the editors,
Polyænus was well known in eighteenth-century France, having served as a source for
Paul-Gédéon Joly de Maizeroy, Cours de tactique théorique, pratique et historique, 2 vols.
(Paris: Jombert, 1766). But Lemprière’s claim remains mystifying. I am grateful to my
colleague Dr Peter Agocs for his help in locating this reference.
81 “Tous mes sens sont glacés; ô vous, mon seul appui, / Ayez pitié de moi, daignez
veiller sur lui: / Pour le défendre, hélas! je n’ai que ma tendresse.” [My senses are petrified:
have pity on me; deign to watch over him, for I have nothing more than my tender feelings
to defend him.] I.6.

neoclassicism: une vertu mâle
The ideal underlying this, according to the author of the pamphlet, was that of
strong emotions, conflated with a supposedly “masculine” aesthetic: commonplaces
of Gluckian reform and neoclassical theory, respectively. Toscan theorized the
emotions in the following way:
Librettists and composers inspired by the same genius, if you wish to
engage the spectators and offer grand spectacle, then strike them with
pity and terror. Great passions make for close involvement. At the very
moment when crime appears to triumph, a divine ray seems to shine on
oppressed virtue, and in the tears shed, in the pity thereby obtained, can
be found a secret pleasure and enjoyment which is derived from human
weakness and the greatness of that unhappy virtue.
If however you prefer gentler images, or if you wish to offer pleasant
tableaus, more faithful to nature, you should seek them in the human
heart, the source of all pleasures and all pain, all memories, all interests,
all promises of happiness. That is where you shall find that warmth and
life that will animate your genius and your song.
In Thomas Corneille’s original play there was nothing very feminine about the
heroines; quite apart from Hésione (who disappears in Hoffman’s version),
Camma was noted for a rather cold—because implausibly superhuman—
bravery: this was similar to Plutarch’s depiction, but difficult for a late seven-
teenth-century audience to accept, and absolutely inadmissible for the late
eighteenth. Some of this characterization has survived, for like Camma, Nephté
does not flinch at revenge, exclaiming almost with relish: “Quelque puissant
qu’il soit, il faudra qu’il succombe; / Tout son sang va couler, il rougira ta
tombe” [However powerful he may be, he must be killed; all his blood must
run, and stain your tomb] and asking “Je puis donc le connaître et lui percer
le sein?” [Can I see him and pierce his breast?] (I.2). Moreover, she is character-
ized not only by “male” virtues, but also by self-restraint, such as at the begin-
ning of I.4 and III.1, where she prays: “justes cieux, / Effacez de mon front tout
funeste présage; / Cachez-lui mes desseins: donnez-moi le courage / De tromper
sa tendresse, et de feindre à ses [Amédès] yeux.” [Oh gods, let not my face
betray my intentions. Give me the strength to deceive his eyes and his amorous
heart.] In the end she does not act, however, and what Hoffman and Lemoyne
add (important for a late eighteenth-century audience) is a contrastive sensibil-
ity that humanizes the characters. The chorus’s exclamations of horror at
both sacrifice and revenge serve to relativize what would otherwise be a rather

cardboard kind of heroism;82 and the introduction of the child allows a
“natural”—because maternal—pity in Nephté herself, humanizing her emo-
tion without weakening it, and creating a dilemma. These contrasting emo-
tions are doubled by scenic effects, such as effects of darkness and light in
I.6–7, and scenes where the emotional trajectory is often from horror to
sensibility and thence to pity. In this context, the character Amédès is parti-
cularly significant, because he not only embodies a mixture of horror and
sensibility (Ô contrainte! ô douleur! / Faut-il que je déchire une âme aussi
sensible? / Ô contrainte! ô moment terrible! / C’est moi qui lui perce le cœur”
[Oh cruel duty, must I destroy such a sensitive soul? Oh terrible moment,
I must pierce his heart!], but is Nephté’s father, as well as a priest, introduc-
ing generational and emotional ties to what would otherwise be a political
conflict.
the failure of antigone

It is in the context of Lemoyne’s “Gluckism” that we can helpfully discuss the
failure of Marmontel’s Antigone. Its first performance grossed a very respectable
3,917 livres 4 sous (curiosity?), but by the second performance, on 4 May, it only
took 594 livres 18 sous and was immediately removed. As shown by the
comité’s “deliberation,” the Opéra sought a quick replacement and decided to
perform Louis IX en Egypte in its place, writing to Pitra, author of a work
entitled Clitemnestre, to reassure him that his own opera, although not ready,
would also be performed in due course.83 (It never was, however.) Many of the
reproaches leveled at Antigone were those faults commonly found in “Piccinnism”:
emotional over-simplification; a music sometimes over-sweetened, often at the
expense of dramatic appropriateness, despite its beauty; a lack of dramatic
variety and force. As the Moniteur put it:
In terms of form, the music has all the hallmarks of a master and contains
striking movements, although others are too carelessly put together.
82 One might note the chorus’s horror at the mention of Pharès (I.3), and unlike
Camma in Corneille, who knows all along, Nephté learns, or rather guesses, Pharès’s guilt
from the chorus’s emotional response (“Dieux! quel est cet affreux mystère? / Pharès
aurait-il part au plus grand des forfaits?” [Gods! what is this dreadful mystery? Could
Pharès be involved in this greatest of crimes?]).
83 AN: AJ/13/2. Undated; early to mid-May 1790. Its header carries both “30 avril”
and “4 mai 1790” (the dates of the two performances of Antigone), and the marginal anno-
tation “juin 1790” alongside the reference to Louis IX (which was premiered on 15 June
1790).

It is not enough for a composer to express the meaning of the words
if this is done with commonplace music; the expression must be
adorned with original and striking turns, otherwise the ear has a sense
of familiarity.84
But more than this, the very subject was criticized for having induced too
great a monotony into the dramatic treatment, partly because the interest
inspired by Antigone’s respect for burial was greater in a period where such
matters were paramount; and partly because the types of love portrayed were
“sentiments” rather than “passions” (which I take to mean that they were
not sufficiently strong or varied for dramatic treatment). The result, it was
claimed, was weak and uniform emtions.85 The subsequent anonymous attempt
to rehabilitate the score singled out what were seen as passages and movements
of particular beauty and also insisted upon this same aspect. However, it
blamed Marmontel’s libretto for the monotony, and claimed that the score had
done much to overcome it: “Si l’on considere que le poeme d’Antigone n’est
qu’une longue et triste éloge, sans mouvement et sans passion, loin d’accuser
le compositeur de monotonie, on le louera d’avoir varié, par l’expression,
l’uniformité des sentiments.” [Given that the libretto is one long and dreary
praise of the heroine, the composer deserves credit for having varied the
expression.] 86
4. Exoticism and National History: Louis IX en Egypte

On 20 June, the eve of Louis’s ill-fated flight to Varennes, which was to signal
the beginning of the end of any consensus over the aspirations of constitutional
monarchy, the Chronique de Paris, in a passage of supreme dramatic irony, spoke
of how the cultural regeneration that had been witnessed during the summer
of 1791 signaled a new moment of civic hope for France:
The end of the first Assembly and the opening of the second, the anni-
versary of the Fête de la Fédération, the transportation of Voltaire’s ashes
84 Moniteur, 122 (2 May 1790), iv. 259.

85 Moniteur, 122 (2 May 1790), iv. 259–60. Cp. JdP, (1790), p. 488; Tourneux, xvi.7
[May 1790]; CdP, 121 (1 May 1790), p. 482. On Zingarelli Aspetti dell’opera italiana fra
sette e ottocento: Mayr e Zingarelli, a cura di Guido Salvetti (Lucca: Libreria Musicale Italiana,
1993).
86 Moniteur, 131 (11 May 1790), iv.333.

to the Pantheon, Castor et Pollux, the choruses of Athalie; all seems
poised to attract a multitude of outsiders to Paris and to give the city
what it lost at the end of the era of abuses.87
As this list shows, the Opéra was considered central to “regeneration.”

Performed in the same season as Nephté, Guillard and Andrieux’s libretto Louis
IX en Egypte, also set by Lemoyne, is interesting for its examination of the
legitimacy of kingship. Seen with hindsight, performing a work so clearly
favorable to the monarch in the summer of 1791 is an example of how appar-
ently topical material could very quickly become dated, and thereafter posi-
tively dangerous because perceived as reactionary. This did not happen to the
Opéra on this occasion, and Louis IX seems to have caused little disquiet,
but the awkwardness of performing a monarchist work after Varennes was
clear. Little material survives concerning the genesis of this work, although a
comment in the Chronique de Paris suggests that the first act was cut and its
action tightened up after the first performance.88 It is not listed in La Ferté’s
Précis, which I have elsewhere dated to between 4 September and 18 October
1789, so must have been definitively adopted after then; nor are there refer-
ences to it in Dauvergne’s correspondence with the secretary of state or in the
papers of the committee. The (unsigned) preface to the libretto expresses a
mixture of cultural rupture and return to origins, since it justifies its subject
in two ways: not only has the more obvious historical topic, Henry IV, already
been extensively treated (and misrepresented in the process),89 but also the
period under analysis, that of the crusades, shows France groaning under feu-
dalism while also featuring a good monarch comparable to Louis XVI as the
restorer of a supposedly original French “liberty.” In its ambiguous relation to
time, the work also invited a series of considerations over history writing, an
issue inherent in any play dealing with the documented past but particularly
pertinent here, since the preface claimed that France had not been used to
writing its own national history, in contradistinction to England. In support,
it cites Voltaire’s letter of 28 April 1769 to Gabriel-Henri Gaillard, acknowl-
edging receipt of a gratis copy of the latter’s Siècle de François Ier, and particularly
a passage where Voltaire stigmatized French history writing for being
“made up of court intrigue, large military defeats and insignificant military
87 CdP, 1791–171 (20 June 1791), p. 682.

88 CdP, 171 (20 June 1791) p. 683.
89 preface, p. iv. André Tissier confirms that Henry IV was a much-discussed mon-
arch in the theater of 1789–90: Les Spectacles à Paris pendant la Révolution, i.28–29.

victories, and lettres de cachet. Apart from a handful of famous assassinations,
especially the Saint-Bartholomew’s day massacre, this would be pure tedium.”90
Although history writing and historical theater had developed quite consider-
ably since the date of Voltaire’s letter, the librettists used it to claim that
Louis IX was an ideal subject for operatic writing: the contrasting groups of
characters, such as Saracens and crusading Knights, would allow a spectacular
dimension, in line with a development that was to culminate with Grand
Opera’s propensity to use contrasting groups of characters to echo, on stage,
the moral forces in conflict within a scene. As we shall see in a discussion of
sources, their treatment also demonstrates a willingness not just to modify
but at times to completely manipulate documented fact for aesthetic-political
reasons.
visual display
The Moniteur stated that the work, although sober in terms of emplotment,
was “established with considerable magnificence.”91 The visual dimension of
the Opéra was one that crown officials continued to support while reducing their
cost-cutting measures to invisible components of productions (Chapter 1).92
Presenting a work set in Egypt presumably allowed for some recycling from
La Caravane du Caire (1784) and some sharing with Nephté (the subject of
sumptuous designs by Pâris), but so little information remains that this must
be an issue for speculation; no designs for Louis IX appear to be extant.93
Beginning-of-act scenic descriptions are, however, suggestive. Act III of Louis IX
is set in a rather generic “Sultan’s palace”; Aspasie, Nephté, and Démophoon had
also set individual acts in palaces. Act I required a (presumably painted back-
drop) depiction of “a plain not far from the city of Damiette, between the camp
of King Louis IX and the city of Cairo”; whereas act II was set in an idyllic
90 Voltaire, Correspondance, ed. Theodore Besterman [notes trad. by Frédéric Deloffre],

13 vols. (Paris: Gallimard/Pléiade, 1977–1992), ix.883–85 [letter no. 11195].
91 169 (18 June 1790), p. 692.
92 ibid.: “if the artists of the Opéra, currently in charge of management, have made
reforms and cut costs, these have not been achieved at the expense of the audience’s
enjoyment.”
93 Pierre Pinon, Pierre-Adrien Pâris (1745–1819), ou L’archéologie malgré soi, Thèse
(Doctorat d’Etat), Université Paris-IV, 1998, has not identified any surviving drawings as
relating to Louis IX, which he lists, p. 602, merely as one of a large number of works on
medieval subjects.

landscape more reminiscent of the French pastoral than of Egypt at the time
of the crusades:
The theater represents a landscape, consisting of a delightful valley
inhabited by shepherds; one sees modest huts scattered about, and
mountains on the horizon. (p. 23)
Information on scenic movement and characters is more plentiful, because of
the widespread practice of printing the entire cast list including chorus at the
beginning of librettos. This shows use of a chorus of forty-eight members,
representing Saracens (20 members), Egyptian shepherds (14), Fiddlers [méné-
triers] (4), Shepherds [ pastres] (10), Sultanas (15), Mammeluks (9), French
knights (5), Bedouins (19). Little wonder, perhaps, that the Mercure seemed to
feel that the authors “seem less concerned with producing a regular plot and
genuine sustained dramatic interest, than with a series of varied tableaus both
touching and attractive, and divertissements deriving from the action” (p. 154).
As Jacobshagen has noted, the chorus gained movement and activity after
Gluck, and Louis IX is no exception: as the range of characters composing
the chorus also demonstrates, its role is genuinely dramatic.94 The Mercure
also noted approvingly that “the décors and costumes were produced with care
and accuracy. The costumes, of perfect historical accuracy, are sumptuous”
(p. 159). The Moniteur also pointed to the tableau-style of much of the work,
an issue to which I shall return.95 And the Chronique de Paris, which disliked
the libretto, was forced to praise the production, stating: “the show is impres-
sive, the décor well thought-out, the costume rich and varied, and the whole is
pleasing.”96
history writing and historical sources

Foremost among the historical sources is Joinville’s account of the 1249 cru-
sade given in his Vie de Saint-Louis, although the preface to the libretto criti-
cizes that work for its use of what it calls puerile anecdotes;97 also crucial were
Velly’s Histoire de France, depuis l’établissement de la monarchie jusqu’à Louis XIV,
94 I.9 of Louis IX contains the direction “Chœur de l’armée, arrivant en foule”; II.7
“Chœur des habitants du hameau accourant en foule.”
95 169 (18 June 1790), p. 692.
96 CdP, 168 (17 June 1790), p. 671.
97 I have used the edition by Jacques Monfrin (Paris: Garnier/Livre de Poche: Lettres
gothiques, 1995).

continued by Villaret and completed by Garnier;98 and also Père Daniel’s
Abrégé de l’histoire de France, depuis l’établissement de la monarchie française dans les
Gaules.99 The librettists made quite a liberal use of their source material.
Voltaire’s Essai sur les mœurs also has a chapter (58) on Louis IX and his
crusades, and has important material for a late eighteenth-century view of the
subject, such as Voltaire’s distaste for the crusades in general, which he sees as
an example of religious fanaticism (a point on which the librettists agreed).100
Finally, a printed summary of one theatrical setting of the subject has survived
from the Jesuit collèges, dated 1746: however unprecedented the subject may
seem on the public stage, it may have had a wider currency than is immediately
obvious, since the Jesuits often used historical material in their educational
theater, as Anne Boës has noted.101
Why choose this setting? On the one hand, eighteenth-century sources
were already agreed on Louis IX’s piety and care for his subjects, and the cru-
sade allowed for an exploration of the king’s capture, hence placing him in a
pathetic situation. For instance, Père Daniel had said of Louis IX: “his reli-
gious piety and his zeal for his realm went hand in hand with the most lively
ambition, and made of him a truly Christian hero.”102 The assault on Damiette
was the first example of Louis risking his life for the dual principles I have
mentioned (piety and patriotism), and was hence central to that crusade.103
kingship
Among critical responses, the Journal de Paris went the furthest in pointing
out what we with hindsight can easily forget: the sheer novelty of centering a
theatrical work on the representation of a French monarch, one of the unspo-
ken taboos of the Old Regime theater. Of course, there had been precedents.
Sedaine’s Richard cœur de Lion, whose chorus “O Richard, ô mon roi”
had become a rallying point for royalism in the theater, had already favorably
portrayed a medieval monarch and had also treated the period of the crusades
98 I have used the last edition completely published before 1790: that in 15 vols,
in-4o (Paris: Saillant/Nyon, 1770–74).
99 I have used the the edition in 12 vols. (Paris: Chez les libraires associés, 1751).
100 I have used the edition by René Pomeau, 2 vols. (Paris: Bordas/Classiques Garnier,
1990), i.529–600 (p. 594).
101 Anon., Louis IX, roi de France, captif en Egypte, tragédie en latin (Dijon: P. de Saint,
[1746]). Boës, La Lanterne magique, pp. 29–32.
102 Daniel, iii.2.
103 Velly et al., ii.462.

and the popular adulation of the king. Yet in that case the (English) monarch
was only seen on stage twice, and the work did not give much space to his
portrayal. Chénier’s notorious Charles IX had gone further in giving a deroga-
tory portrait of a weak king at a particularly sensitive moment of French
national history—and was groundbreaking for that reason. However, the
present work is arguably the first to give such central importance to such a
hagiographical portrayal of a past monarch, a fact of which the journalist
approved:
Not the least striking example of changes in our ideas and our institu-
tions is the fact that this work has taken a king of France for its hero:
the stringent delicacy which, eighteen months ago, would have forbid-
den such a subject in the lyric theater, was due more to seemliness than
politics. Why should those aspects of history possessed of interest and
grandeur not be transposed onto the stage, as long as we do not degrade
what is worthy of respect, and provided that in extending the purview
of art we can derive new moral lessons?104
Central to the work, then, was its construction not only of the pious monarch
but also of his people, and its choice of the crusades as historical backdrop
foregrounds a Manichean view of French and other characters, which will be
developed in the works of the Terror (see Chapter 8). The Moniteur even pointed
to this aspect as the one dimension that saved the work from implausibility.105
And the Chronique de Paris contrasted the work with classical French opera of
Quinault and Lully’s servile approach to their monarch.106 Despite the very
different type of setting and characterization, the work’s tone is close to the
royalist adaptations of Tarare that are undertaken after the Revolution, in
which the chorus is composed of groups of “people” [ peuple] who echo the
moral forces on stage; indeed, there are many similarities between this
work and the 1790 revision with its final “Couronnement,” performed just
six weeks after Louis IX. This work also makes much of popular adhesion
within the medieval contractual theory of monarchy, as well as a more early-
modern paternalist slant, for in both works, the “people” are won over by
the virtues of, respectively, Tarare and Louis IX, and accordingly give their
support to those individuals. These works show clearly that the Opéra was
104 JdP (16 June 1790), pp. 671–72.

105 Moniteur, 169 (18 June 1790), iv.655–56. Cf. JdP (16 June 1790), pp. 671–72:
“The main interest of the work is dervied from the generosity and virtues of Louis.”
106 CdP, 168 (17 June 1790), p. 671.

performing works that broadly followed the line of the Feuillants (favorable to
Constitutional monarchy) of summer 1790–91 rather than, for example, the
anti-clerical works elsewhere identified as typical of the spoken theater of those
years:107 the focus is upon the legitimacy of the monarch, based upon his
having been chosen by his people. For left-wing papers, this was too much.
The Révolutions de Paris saw the work as a deliberately royalist act in support of
Louis XVI, and stated:
It is hardly being too severe to say that this is the most absurd libretto
to be performed, even in this theater where absurdity reigns supreme.
The purpose of the work is to celebrate Louis XVI and to encourage
enthusiasm and adoration for him, which can only slow down the
progress of liberty in people’s minds.108
Prudhomme here accuses the work of employing the very techniques of per-
suasion of the Revolutionary arts—enthusiasm and loyalty—for a reactionary
subject matter, thereby making the work especially pernicious. This loyalty is
the focus of the very first scene and succeeding recitative. However, the strength
of popular adhesion is so great that it spreads through the infidel camp as well
and is the catalyst for the sultan’s decision to have Louis assassinated. As with
Nephté, the prevailing aesthetics is seen most clearly in the final scene of act I,
where the stage direction suggests that enthusiasm is a contagion that “spreads
throughout the Army”.109 Exactly the same plot device was used in Tarare,
where the soldiers’ loyalty to Tarare angers Atar,110 and one might note that in
this case it is the (feminine) compassion of the sultana that convinces her to
protect Louis (for instance, in her recitative: “Jugez mieux des terreurs dont
mes sens sont atteints” [Judge the terror afflicting my senses]). This appeal
is based on a concept of pre-rational attraction, also glossed as “charm”:
“quel cœur misérable / Pourroit ne pas céder aux vertus de ce Roi? / un charme
irrésistible . . . m’entraîne malgré moi” [what heart would not be swayed by
the virtues of this king? an irresistible charm seizes me] (p. 3). In this
account, sensibility, not martial or patriotic fervor, is valorized and is described
a contrario by the sultan and his wife as “ivresse.” [literally, intoxication].
Similarly, the king is described, as is common in this period, as paternal
107 Tarin, Théâtre de la Constituante, pp. 140–44.

108 RdP, l.640–45 [643]. Cp. RdP, liv.79.
109 Louis IX en Egypte [libretto] (Paris: Delormel, 1790), p. 21. All subsequent refer-
ences to the libretto will be made parenthetically, in the text.
110 In Tarare, the passage may be found in I.1, but Arthénée reiterates in II.2, that it
is a dangerous decision because of popular loyalty to Tarare.

(p. 21), although this element is conflated with the image of a benefactor
(p. 24). Important for this early Revolution, one of Louis’s positive characteris-
tics is his transparency (“Louis ne connoît point la feinte” [Louis knows not
falsity], p. 2); and one might also note that in act II, where Louis, benefactor
of Adèle, observes her incognito, it is his sensibility that reveals his identity
(p. 36). In other words, he is unable to suppress or otherwise obfuscate his
spontaneous response to an emotionally charged or touching situation. The
work hence conflates certain characteristics prevalent in the cliché of the good
king Louis IX since Joinville’s account (his extreme piety, his simplicity,
his close relationship with his subjects) with a more eighteenth-century
sensible depiction, indeed preferring these to the more classic ingredients of
royal legitimacy. For good measure, the work constructs a disparity between
the transparent sensibility of the protagonist and the hidden machinations of
the sultan.
One important feature of the work, which ties it to another opera from this
season (Nephté ), is the coronation of the monarch’s child, an aspect that betrays
the period’s concern with the future stability of the dynasty. In Nephté, the
child in question is that of Nephté herself who dies at the end of the opera. But
in Louis IX, it is the child of Meleck, the sultan of Egypt, who is presented by
the king to the Egyptians as a worthy successor to his father and one who is
“digne du rang où le Ciel le fit naître” [worthy of the rank in which he was
born] (p. 58). It is also explicitly hoped that the sultan may become an “enlight-
ened despot.” The popular legitimization of the monarch in this work seems
quite typical of the ambivalence of royal legitimacy in mid-1790, for the dis-
course of constitutional monarchy remained similarly imbued with many of
the old ingredients of royal absolutism as god-given and sacred, with an overly-
ing layer of popular approval— the two discourses being ultimately logically
incompatible. The message of any such work is also at best double-edged, since
the logical implication of a work emphasizing the contractual aspect of mon-
archy is that such a contract can be revoked. Such unease is already present in
this work, whose third act is underlaid with a conception of liberty that opposes
slavery, being described as the breaking of chains; also, it includes a ceremonial
scene (III.2) featuring the freeing of the slaves, where the king declares:
“Ne pensons pas qu’aux Rois les Peuples appartiennent; / C’est nous qui leur
appartenons” [We should not imagine that people belong to kings, it is we
who belong to them] (p. 47). He also states his determination to “Laiss[er] à
nos Sujets une liberté sainte; / Aimons-les; ils sauront nous payer de retour; /
Que les tyrans gouvernent par la crainte; / Sachons gouverner par l’amour”
[Grant our subjects a sacred freedom, love them, they will repay us. Tyrants
may govern by fear; we shall govern by love] (p. 48).

After the second act, which functions as an interlude from these hostilities
and which I shall discuss presently, act III centers on the planned assassination
of Louis by the Bedouins, characters who had been described by Velly et al.
as well as most eighteenth-century writers as mercenary and honor-free.111
Suggestively, it is claimed (p. 45) that ruse is legitimate, against this “vile
Christian,” and the sultan’s view of legitimacy is based on force (“Il faut se faire
craindre,” p. 47), whereas Louis’s is based on laws (“Je veux par mon pouvoir
que les loix se maintiennent; / C’est par elles que nous régnons.” [I wish for my
power to maintain the laws, for it is by them that we govern.]) Yet it is, again,
Louis’s goodness, in the sense of an emotional response to reading letters from
his mother (Blanche) that dissuades the would-be assassins (III.4, p. 51), who
end up falling at his feet and throwing away their daggers! This then leads to
a reunion of mother and child (Almodan) in III.6, which owes much to
the drame’s use of recognition scenes to clarify unknown or mistaken family
relationships at moments of maximum pathos, in a morally edifying tableau.
Act III, scene 7, then sees the Mammeluks’ declaration that they have assassi-
nated the sultan and wish to replace him with Louis, a logical continuation of
the action of act I. Hence the sensibility of Louis converges with the loyalty of
the infidels, and kingship is revealed to be a contract based upon the moral
qualities of goodness and sensibility. Surprisingly though, Louis refuses and
passes the crown to Almodan, exactly as happens in Tarare. (I shall return to
some of these similarities when discussing Tarare, but it would be reasonable
to hypothesize some cross-inspiration between Beaumarchais’s work and this
opera: for instance, both also feature a final scene including the freeing of slaves.)
retreat
Much of the review in the Mercure was given over to a discussion of the work
as a piece of history writing, an aspect of which Guillard and Andrieux
had also boasted in their preface.112 In contradistinction with d’Aubignac’s
assertion that it is ridiculous to try to learn about history from the stage,113
the Mercure, as was now common, approved of drawing subject matter from
111 Velly, ii.473–74. Cp. Sarga Moussa, “Le Bédouin, le voyageur et le philosophe,”
DHS, 28 (1996), 141–58.
112 MF, 26 June 1790, pp. 153–60.
113 d’Aubignac, drawing his distinction between the “poet” and the historian from
chapter 9 of Aristotle: “Du sujet,” chap. 1 of livre 2 of La Pratique du Théâtre, ed. Hélène
Baby (Paris: Champion, 2001), p. 113.

national history114 and commented that one of the virtues of historical material
was its propensity to serve as a moral corrective.115 Yet the critic found that the
second act detracted from the character of the king, and as such was a major
structural weakness.116 The death of the sultan and his replacement by
Almodan did indeed take place in 1249,117 and the role of Mammeluks was
noted by Voltaire and Joinville,118 but the action of act II does appear to be a
fantasy on the part of the librettist. Historians suggest that the crusaders spent
the summer following the fall of Damiette in that city rather than moving to
attack Cairo, partly out of fear of the likely flooding of the Nile and partly out
of military complacency.119 The Mercure concluded that Guillard, as librettist
of Iphigénie en Tauride, should have known better than to use a love intrigue to
prop up the plot of an opera that could perfectly well succeed without, although
the critic felt that the act contained a “charming” pastoral and reported that
the mute scene from the end had moved the spectators to tears (pp. 155–56).
And even the Correspondance littéraire, which otherwise found the work to be
rather lacking in dramatic qualities, considered the second-act tableau to be
“truly enchanting.”120 The Chronique de Paris, conversely, felt the whole work
was “riddled with implausible and inappropriate elements.”
It is not clear, geographically, where act II is set, since the reference to
Adele and Tristan in a hut [cabane] has a distinctly Western, pastoral feel. The
stage was to represent “a charming valley inhabited by shepherds” where one
saw “simple huts dotted about,” and with a “horizon . . . bordered by moun-
tains” (p. 23).121 Not only is there ample scope here for a development of
those features of Louis identified in act I as important—sensibility, paternal
114 “This has been in people’s minds for some time, but one did not dare, and one
could not, carry it out.” MF, 26 June 1790, p. 153.
115 “From now on, the theater … will do justice to tyrants and scoundrels, just as it
will offer pure hommage to good kings and virtuous celebrated men … No subject could
better demonstrate this new freedom, than an opera libretto devoted to Saint Louis.” Louis
IX en Egypte (Paris: Delormel, 1790), p. vi.
116 The Moniteur also stated: “The plot featuring Adèle and Almodan forms a discreet
action distinct from the main plot, and is perhaps insufficiently prepared in act I, but
produces tableaus of great interest in act II.” 169 (18 June 1790), iv.655–56.
117 Daniel, iii.66; Velly, ii.480.
118 Essai sur les mœurs, i.595; Joinville, §287.
119 Velly, ii.471.
120 Tourneux, xvi.35–36 [June 1790].
121 Cf. p. 25: ADELE: ‘“Cet asyle convient à ma douleur profonde; / Et que veux-tu,
Tristan, que j’aille faire au monde?’” [This haven suits my profound grief; how can I live
in the outside world?]

solicitude, and beneficence—but this microcosmic setting for the clandestine
love of two young people who have retreated there from a traumatic situation
and who moreover think of one another as brother and sister (p. 29) makes
act II typical of one of the main types of work from 1790: a literary space
symbolizing retreat from the harsh realities of the Revolutionary situation.122
Here, the retreat is explicitly thematized and takes place in a space which, in
traditional fashion, figures a rustic setting, physically bordered off from the
outside world, as a protective envelope for a microcosmic society to recover
from or come to terms with some kind of trauma. The closing off of this
little society is central to such works’ establishment of an idyllic space, as
Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie exemplifies:123 the tradition has
its roots in utopic fiction and is central to works from 1790, including
Bernardin’s own La Chaumière indienne. It is almost certainly a variant of the
classical locus amœnus and deserves consideration for that reason: examples
abound in the opera, that of I.6 of Handel’s Rinaldo being a significant
example. It is also worth noting that this setting is reserved for the central act,
and sandwiched between settings in, respectively, Damiette, and the sultan’s
palace, reinforcing its structural insularity by framing it with contrastive
dramatic material.
Adèle is described in the libretto as the daughter of Baudouin de Bouillon
and putative daughter of Tristan, a former equerry of Baudouin who has taken
care of her like a father; Almodan is the disowned son of the sultan. Significantly,
then, both characters are to all intents and purposes orphaned, which is a com-
monplace of insular fictions (both Paul and Virginie of Bernardin’s work have
each lost a parent; similar situations may be found in writers such as Ducray-
Duminil) as well as supporting the portrayal of Louis as paternal. Here the
utopia is momentarily threatened (II.3) by Tristan’s decision to take Adèle to
Louis (and hence away from Almodan), which occasions a scene preparatory for
separation with a final despairing trio. Significantly, this is the only ensemble
movement in the whole work and is followed by a fête, during which Louis
himself arrives and suspends the separation: the imaginary of the deus ex
machina here reinforces the image of the beneficent king. In all aspects, then,
structure reinforces a royalist portrayal.
122 Katherine Astbury, “Une chaumière et un cœur simple: Pastoral fiction and the
art of persuasion 1790–92,” in Revolutionary Culture: Continuity and Change, ed. Mark
Darlow, Nottingham French Studies, 46.1 (March 2006), 5–19.
123 Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Paul et Virginie, ed. Jean-Michel Racault (Paris: Librairie
générale française, 1999), pp. 33–40.

Why was this production ill-timed? The National Assembly had abol-
ished monastic orders on 16 February 1790, and the work’s construction of
legitimacy within a pious mode was arguably inopportune by June 1790: by
now the Assembly was pursuing a policy of secularization, and as René Tarin
has shown on the spoken theater, anti-clerical plays are frequent elsewhere in
1790.124 Moreover the civil constitution of the clergy was voted just one month
later on 12 July 1790, which may explain why the work was not performed
more than it was, given the positive reviews and Lemoyne’s overall popularity.
(After all, ten performances is a mediocre run, but gross takings were 30,512
livres, 14 sous, a figure well above the average.) It may also explain why the
revised Tarare, performed one month after the civil constitution on 8 August,
had to found royal legitimacy purely on the rule of law rather than on partly
sacred foundations, as is the case here. (I discuss Tarare in Chapter 7.) Yet how-
ever discreet these two works may have been in that regard, the final serious
work to be performed in the pre-Republican period would put the question of
royal legitimacy center stage.
5. Œdipe à Thèbes
Oedipe à Thèbes, also known as Jocaste and as Œdipe et Jocaste, was first rehearsed
and approved in June 1789 and premiered on 30 December 1791:125 a longer-
than-average genesis. One unfortunate coincidence of timing was that this
work, centered upon the punishment of a king for a crime of which he was
unaware, ended up being premiered in December 1791, after Louis XVI’s
flight to Varennes and amid calls for his trial for treason. For the uneasy com-
promise of the Constitutional monarchy had disintegrated severely in the year
following Louis IX: the king’s inability to accept the course France was taking,
especially such events as the Civil Constitution of the Clergy eventually lead-
ing to his flight from Paris, his capture near the border at Varennes and forced
return to France.126 For that reason, I believe that Christian Biet’s introduction
to the work is inaccurate in its emphasis upon the political motivations of
its librettist (a wish to defend Louis XVI after the flight to Varennes), who
124 Théâtre de la Constituante, pp. 140–44.

125 The libretto carries the date “Jeudi 29 Décembre 1791,” but AD2 and JO state
that Les Prétendus was performed on that evening, and that Œdipe was held over until the
Friday, a fact confirmed by Moniteur, 98 (8 April 1791), viii.63.
126 For a stimulating account, see Timothy Tackett, When the King took Flight
(Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).

must have completed his work before late 1789.127 Evidence has not survived
concerning the original submission; perhaps the final version of 1791 was
modified at a late stage and may therefore reflect immediate context in that
redrafting. But the original project antedates any Revolutionary context.
However, Biet is surely right to point to the rather paradoxical fact of using the
Œdipus theme in order to offer a sustained defense of the monarchy, and at a
theater that had come under some scrutiny for its reactionary politics, the fact
deserves attention.
The work was only moderately successful, receiving just seven perfor-
mances: the last took place on 27 April 1792. Reception was mixed, and press
reviews are short: the Mercure pointed to the rather sloppy style of the libretto
despite the obvious interest of the subject,128 and the Moniteur claimed that the
dramatic rhythm was wrong, consisting of two rather slow acts and a rushed
third act. It also pointed to the general stylistic defects of the libretto but
noted that the rapidity of several scenes and the interest of the subject in gen-
eral made up for these defects. It judged the music dramatic, and full of energy
and passion. The Journal de Paris stated that the music had been warmly
applauded, and it regretted that the composer had been held back by the
monotony of several situations and events as well as by the versification; how-
ever, it recognized that he had managed to give the different sung movements
the character appropriate to the dramatic situation in which the characters
found themselves: a rather lukewarm compliment. It also noted the perfor-
mances of Lainez, Mlle Maillard, and Chéron in the roles of Oedipus, Jocasta,
and the Grand-Prêtre, respectively. The Duchesne almanac was less kind,
claiming that the authors had displayed little dramatic skill in the cuts, a
weak sense of the tragic, but admittedly some sense of spectacle.129
The composer was Nicolas-Jean Lefroid de Méreaux (1745–97), organist at
Saint-Sauveur, at the Petits Augustins, and at the Chapelle royale. Apart from
his Alexandre aux Indes (1784), which the principals had claimed was subject to
the favoritism of La Ferté (Chapter 2), he had until then written only for the
Comédie-Italienne, which perhaps explains why his style was not considered
127 Œdipe en monarchie: Tragédie et théorie juridique à l’âge classique (Paris: Klincksieck,
1994), pp. 310, 314. Duprat’s work is not listed in La Ferté’s Précis, but the selective list he
gives of new works explicitly prefers “ceux des Poetes et des Musiciens avoués du public”
(p. 85), a condition not fulfilled by the comparatively unknown Lefroid de Méreaux, so it
is not clear from that text whether Œdipe à Thèbes had been received by the Opéra by the
time of writing.
128 MF, 28 January 1792, pp. 105–7.
129 SdP-Duchesne, 1793, p. 236.

up to scratch for the Opéra.130 The librettist was count P. A. Duprat de la
Touloubre, about whom almost nothing is known.131 The libretto states that
he was absent at a late stage in the production, and that words from Voltaire’s
play were used for an additional aria in II.3 (p. 25) in his absence; as a noble-
man, had he emigrated?
Œdipe was Voltaire’s first tragedy, premiered when he was only twenty-four,
and was a spectacular success: Voltaire had added a substantial secondary love
intrigue to improve his adaptation.132 However, in terms of emplotment,
Duprat, like Hoffman with Nephté, aimed at sobriety, aspiring to remove this
love plot and to remain more faithful to Sophocles. The Mercure noted this fact
but regretted that the scenes borrowed by Duprat from Sophocles lacked
polish. Equally noteworthy, the librettist supplied the one indisputably tragic
ending of the whole corpus for this chapter, even though that ending avoided
the death of Jocasta and blinding of Œdipus normally central to the myth. The
Moniteur review summarized the plot succinctly and with at least one rather
cutting remark:
The first act is composed merely of the wishes of the Thebans to be
spared the plague, and an oracle of Apollo which commands them to
find the assassin of Laius. Even before this happens, the second act fea-
tures a celebration by the people, and one may be forgiven for surprise
at a ballet in the middle of a public square so soon after talk of pesti-
lence. Another oracle, pronounced by the High Priest, declares that
Œdipus is the assassin. A witness who has been in prison confirms this
to the astonishment of all, including Œdipus himself. In the third act,
130 He had composed the music for Dudoyer de Gastels’ Laurette (1777), and
Anseaume’s La Ressource comique (1773) and Le Retour de tendresse (1774), all performed at
the Comédie-Italienne. See also his undated autograph letter to the Directors: BNM: VM
BOB- 21335. During the Revolution, he had also composed music for a “Hymne à l’être
suprême” and an oratorio on Samson, performed in front of Voltaire.
131 He is not listed in the standard biographical dictionaries. A certain Louis Ventre,
seigneur de la Touloubre (died 1767) was both a lawyer and writer, and may be an ances-
tor: [Michaud], Biographie universelle, ancienne et moderne (Paris: Mme Desplaces, n.d.),
xlii.19–20.
132 On Voltaire’s Œdipe, I have consulted Jack Rochford Vrooman, Voltaire’s Theatre:
The Cycle from “Œdipe” to “Mérope” (Voltaire Foundation, 1970), pp. 67–83; the introduc-
tions to the critical edition of David Jory in Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, IA: Œuvres de
1711–1722(1) (Voltaire Foundation, 2001), pp. 15–386; Ronald S. Ridgway, La Propagande
philosophique dans les tragédies de Voltaire (Voltaire Foundation, 1961); José-Michel Moureaux,
“Œdipe” de Voltaire: Introduction à une psycholecture (Paris: Lettres Modernes, 1973).

as he is about to go into voluntary exile, the king learns that his puta-
tive father, Polybus, is dead. He determines to discover the truth about
his birth. Just as in Sophocles, the confidant of Laius, questioned
by Polybus’s servant, states that Œdipus who had been exposed on
Mount Citheron is the son of Jocasta and Laius, that this unfortunate
prince has killed his father and married his mother. Œdipus is horrified
by this revelation, and the opera ends with a ballet of furies who
torment Œdipus and Jocasta, and the burning of their palace.133
Despite the sobriety of the plot, the production made space for an extensive
use of chorus and ballet at appropriate dramatic moments, such as the (actu-
ally, dramatically ironic) celebration at the end of act I that accompanies the
duet of Jocaste and Œdipe “Mais que rien n’échappe à nos yeux” [Let nothing
escape our eyes], and the similarly ironic II.2. In both cases, we merely learn
from the libretto “on danse.” In the score for act I, this terminal ballet con-
sisted of a first movement inaccurately described as a minuet (it is in 4/4 time),
and marked moderato (pp. 181–84), and a second minuet, to which the chorus
sings “Nous allons voir nos maux cesser” [We shall see the end of our misfor-
tunes] (pp. 185–205). The first is graceful and contains no ironic coloring
(musical example 2). The score for II.2 contains less detail, merely a six-page
passage without indication of movement: again, the character is graceful.
Despite the changes to which I have alluded, Voltaire’s version was per-
ceived by critics as the immediate model.134 Whether intentionally or not, the
first two lines echo Voltaire’s opening, and a similar funerary opening is pres-
ent: Thebes is described as “ravaged” (I.1, pp. 2, 3), the chorus speaks of new
misfortunes having opened tombs (I.1, p. 2), whereas Voltaire’s version had
also increased a “sense of doom and foreboding by comparison with his models”
by use of no fewer than fourteen separate mentions of premonitions.135 Duprat’s
libretto adds to the premonitory atmosphere by having Œdipe cry out in
(unspecified) remorse as early as I.3: “toujours autour de moi se présente un
abyme: / Je dis plus, je sens des remords” [An abyss is all around me; more,
I feel remorse] (p. 7). The character of Créon does not appear at all, although
he is announced by his sister, Jocaste, in II.2 (he was absent from Voltaire as
133 Moniteur, 8 January 1792, xi.63–64. CdP, 1792–91 (1 January 1792), p. 4 agreed
that this ballet ought to be cut, because it was dramatically inappropriate.
134 JdP, 31 December 1791, p. 1488: “Le sujet . . . est exactement le même que celui
de Voltaire.” [!].
135 Voltaire, Œdipe, ed. David Jory in Œuvres complètes de Voltaire: Œuvres de 1711–
1722(I) (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2001), p. 69. Henceforward: OCV.

example 2
Mouvement de Menuet
Moderato
Fl. Vlni, Ob. (- Fl.)
Ob. Vlni.
Keyboard f p
reduction
Vla.
Fg. Vc.
5 Fl.
Ob. Vlni.
p f
f
Vla.
Fg. Vc.
11 Fl., Ob., Vlni.
p
Vla.
Fg.
Vc.
Fg., Vc.
16
Vla.
rf
Fg., Vc.
well, but not from Sophocles or Seneca), nor does the blind seer Tirésias appear,
also removed by Voltaire.136 One serious divergence from Voltaire is the removal
of Philoctète, who was central to the secondary plot (a love intrigue with
136 On Voltaire’s removal of these two characters, see OCV, i.45.

Jocaste which in Voltaire occupied all of act II and III.1–4). However, part of
Philoctète’s role—for instance, as suspect in the death of Laius—is transferred
to Phorbas, of whom Jocaste says: “On récompensa mal son zèle: / On fut
même, Seigneur, jusqu’à le soupçonner; / Mais sa vertu m’étant connue, / Je
tremblois de le condamner” [His zeal was poorly rewarded; he was even sus-
pected. But his goodness was known to me, and I trembled to condemn him]
(I.3, p. 9), a similar conflation of issues as we find in Voltaire’s II.3, and further
evidence that, whatever the changes, Duprat had Voltaire’s version clearly in
mind. But there are other, important precedents with which Duprat’s libretto
shares several features: Ducis’s Œdipe chez Admète (1778), Buffardin d’Aix’s
Œdipe à Thèbes, ou le Fatalisme (1784), Lauraguais’s Jocaste (1781: published
only), possibly Bernard d’Héry’s Œdipe-Roi (1784: published only): these are
discussed extensively by Biet. In particular, he points to d’Héry’s tendency
toward lyricism which he shares with Duprat (p. 111) and Ducis’s similar use
of the chorus (pp. 122–24).
spectacle and sensibility

Among the most noteworthy aspects of Duprat’s libretto are the foregrounding
of the sensibility of the main characters and a grafting of political relationships
onto familial structures, particularly a convergence of kingship and paternal-
ism. The monarch’s sensibility is foregrounded from the outset: Œdipe’s air in
I.3 begins “Chers amis, chers infortunés, / Vous déchirez mon cœur sensible”
[Dear unfortunate friends, you are tearing my sensitive heart]; and Jocaste vis-
ibly sheds tears in II.2. In II.5, Jocaste is persuaded of Œdipe’s innocence, not
by any extrinsic evidence or by the improbability of his guilt, but because, as
she says, “I know your heart” (p. 32). Transparency of sentiment is the upper-
most criterion throughout and equates to a moral disculpation of Œdipe, con-
sidered to be innocent because he was unaware of his crime. “Quel exemple
terrible! Avec une ame pure / J’outrage la nature; / Et le ciel l’a permis” [What
a fearful example! My heart pure, still I offend nature, and the heavens do
nothing to stop me], cries Œdipe, “Me voilà donc souillé de crimes exécrables!
/ Et je suis vertueux . . .” [Here I am, tainted by execrable crimes, and yet I am
a virtuous man] (III.7: pp. 47, 49).
The sensibility of the protagonists leads to some important moral realign-
ments within the plot. For one thing, Phorbas receives a recognition scene in
II.5 which confirms the king’s guilt and allows for a staging of confrontation
and a human confirmation of what had already been learned. Explicit also is
the distress caused by the gods’ abandonment of the human characters—for
instance, that of Jocaste in III.1: “Je sens à ma douleur que le ciel m’abandonne”

[What pain! I can sense that the heavens have abandoned me], an aria that
shows her to be intensely aware of being powerless in the face of divinity
(“Je crois voir la Parque inhumaine, / S’armant de son fatal ciseau” [I see Fate
armed with her fatal shears]). And the confirmation of the crime leads not only
to the horror of the people, but also to a tearing apart of the moral fabric of
the community (cf. III.2, pp. 36–37: “Œdipe a déposé la puissance suprême; /
Il veut fuir une peuple qui l’aime” [Œdipus has abdicated supreme power, and
wishes to flee his faithful people]). So rather than a tragedy of fatality, the
scene provides a living spectacle of a monarch being torn from his people,
embodied by the chorus’s “Hélas! qu’allons-nous devenir?” [Alas! what shall
become of us?], and III.3 more generally.
The dramatic irony so central to theatrical treatments of Oedipus is gener-
ally rather heavy-handed in this work, as is, occasionally, the exposition
throughout the early scenes of act I. Act I, scene 4 (“Et toi, puissant Dieu du
Tonnerre” [Mighty god of thunder]) is an example of the evocation of pity and
terror by musical means. Also noteworthy is the music of the end of act I,
which is a dramatically ironic situation (“Mais que rien n’échappe à nos yeux.”
[Let nothing escape our eyes]).
The Moniteur had lavished scorn on the celebratory divertissement of act II
for its psychological implausibility, given that the situation was far from
resolved, and the remark could be extended to this passage, save to point out
that it was presumably intended by the composer as a means of underscoring
dramatic irony. As Biet points out, the tendency toward pathetic treatment
went hand in hand with the spectacular aspect, as can be seen in Ducis and
Buffardin particularly (p. 128), and both called upon a use of gesture and pan-
tomime that is difficult to reconstruct in the case of Duprat’s work because
little evidence has survived, but which needs to be borne in mind. In particu-
lar, Père Brumoy in his Théâtre des Grecs had pointed to the painterly qualities
of the Sophocles (Biet, p. 126). Here, one wonders whether the four lines of
suspension points in the libretto before Phorbas invokes the heavens (II.5,
p. 32) are not precisely an invitation for the production to introduce a tableau.
Be that as it may, it is clear that the sobriety of plot line did not prevent a
spectacular approach to the visual, whether via reported images, such as that
of I.3, where the Grand-Prêtre describes the previous night’s invocation of the
gods in the temple (p. 7), or Jocaste’s description of Laius’s murder (p. 8):
I.3: [Le Grand-Prêtre]
. . . L’ombre du Roi paroît . . . Alors un Dieu terrible
A dit: Thébains, votre crime est horrible,
Laïus, n’est point vengé.

Pour apaiser le Ciel, par le meurtre outragé,
Il faut de l’Assassin que l’on fasse justice;
Vous recevrez la mort, s’il échappe au supplice.
Il infecte encor vos climats. (p. 7)
[The specter of the King appeared. . . . Then a fearsome God said: “Thebans,
your crime is horrific, Laius is not avenged. To appease the heavens, outraged by his
murder, you must bring the assassin to justice, or die if he escapes death. He still pollutes
your country.”]
This “spectacular” approach came from the Senecan tradition, via Dryden
and La Tournelle; Voltaire himself had also called for thunder and lightning in
his final scene (OCV, i.253; Biet, p. 125). This effect is extended in the music
and staging of III.8 (which is the final scene in performance), and whose stage
direction reads:
(Le foudre frappe le palais, & le fait crouler de toutes parts: il y tombe une grêle
de feu. Une partie [des] EUMÉNDIES & des FURIES l’incendie avec leurs
flambeaux. Le théatre n’est éclairé que par l’embrâsement, qui doit durer jusqu’à
l’arrivée du Grand-Prêtre, au moment où l’on entend le coup de tonnerre.)
[Lightning strikes the palace and makes it all crumble, then a hail of fire falls.
The theater is lit only by the sparks, which last until the High Priest arrives.
Then one hears the thunder.]
Further evidence for the librettist’s awareness of the importance of the
spectacular is his note to page 55 of the libretto, which separates the text as it
might be read from the manner in which it might be staged by claiming, of
III.9: “A la représentation on retranche cette Scene & celle qui suit, afin de
terminer le Spectacle d’une maniere brillante.” [In performance, this and the
following scene are to be cut in order to finish the show with a brilliant spec-
tacle.] This means that instead of final scenes that stage the suicide of Jocasta,
the opera ends with the Furies who claim: “Ta race est aussi condamnée; /
De tes enfans maudits l’horrible destinée; / Remplira l’univers d’effroi.” [Your
people are condemned, the horrible destiny of your children will fill the
universe with horror] (III.8). Sobriety, then, has been discarded as a guiding
principle.
Noteworthy is the way space is used to underscore this. Voltaire’s settings
were generic, merely placing the action in Thebes (OCV, i.168), and allowing
for the doors of a temple to open (I.2, OCV i.178). Duprat’s directions are more
specific, staging II.3 before an altar, as the oracle is to pronounce. The statue of
Apollo had been alluded to in the opening of the acts, and the entire action
is set in the Temple of Apollo, in what is surely an embellishment on

both sources. Indeed, the aria from II.3, “Elevons nos cœurs vers les Cieux”
[Let us raise our hearts up to the heavens], and following the choral aria with
solo line sung by the Grand-Prêtre (“O toi, le fils du Maître des humains” [Oh
thee, son of the Master of the human race]), takes place against a mute scene,
described thus: “on offre des présents sur l’autel d’Apollon, & l’on fait des liba-
tions” [Offerings are made on the altar of Apollo, and libations offered]. And
this invocation for Apollo to name the guilty man leads to a darkening of the
stage, not present in Voltaire:
Dans ce moment tous les personnages sont en proie à la plus vive inquiétude.
LE GRAND-PRÊTRE, dans l’espoir de faire expliquer les Dieux, brûle
de nouveau l’encens sur l’autel. La flâme retombe sur lui. Aussitôt le théatre
s’obscurcit, les éclairs se succedent rapidement, & le tonnerre se fait entendre.
La musique bruyante annonce le courroux des Dieux: L’effroi s’empare de tout ce
qui est sur la scène. LE GRAND-PRÊTRE est inspiré, & le jour reparoît.
[At this moment, all characters are in thrall to the greatest fear. The High
Priest, hoping to obtain an explanation from the Gods, again burns incense on
the altar. The flame falls upon him. Suddely the stage darkens, lightning
flashes rapidly, and thunder is heard. The noisy music announces the anger
of the Gods. Horror seizes all characters on stage. The High Priest receives
inspiration, and the stage is lit again.]
Voltaire had made much of the contrast between light and dark (OCV
i.68–69), a technique further extended here.
Invocation is an important element of Revolutionary drama, as has been
mentioned above, as it foregrounds an action that is to be exemplary and uni-
versal (“Que son supplice étonne l’Univers!” [may his death astonish the
world], p. 17) and which must astonish (“Quel prodige étonnant, que je ne
conçois pas!” [what incomprehensible miracle!]).
kingship
Oddly, even this subject was treated in continuity with Nephté and Louis IX.
Œdipe is a “magnanimous” king, who has a sensitive heart (I.3, p. 5), and is
motivated by love for his subjects (I.1, pp. 2–3), which he himself confirms
in the following scene, allowing the chorus to acclaim him as the best of
Kings (I.2, p. 3) and to exclaim “a beneficent King is a gift from the Gods”
(I.3, p. 9). This, it hardly needs stating, is a considerable deformation of
Sophocles, in presenting a king at one with his subjects. In fact, Œdipe in this
scene has an authority and his subjects a submission, which sees kingship as
devoted and paternalistic (“toujours Œdipe, & toujours notre père” [still Œdipus,

still our father], sings the Grand-Prêtre: I.3, p. 5). The Grand-Prêtre states that
Œdipe alone can “disarm” the anger of the Gods, a fact that Œdipe himself
denies, although he explicitly states that his happiness depends upon that of
his subjects (whom he calls “chers amis [!], chers infortunés” [dear unfortunate
friends]; I.3, p. 6). Now the paternal dimension was already fully present in
Bernard d’Héry’s version (Biet, p. 128). But here, the implication of such scenes
is also that the “people” should leave the care of the state to their monarch
(I.4: “Peuples, cessez vos soupirs” [People, cease your sighs]). In fact, the role of
the people is even to defend their monarch against the pagan gods, in the hope
that the heavens will pardon him. As Biet notes:
Just like the character Creon in Buffardin’s version, here the people
wish to consult the gods because they wish to reverse their decrees. If
Buffardin did not give an answer to this issue, Duprat gave a dual
response: the pagan gods are guilty and incapable of mercy, but heaven
can still save the king, and is invoked by the people at the end of the
play. [sic] Should one doubt the sovereign who has recognized his faults?
How can this magnanimous king, at once father and master, be guilty,
especially when supported by a queen who is mother of the people? The
people must support its monarch when he is attacked by infernal
powers. All Thebes is united behind the king and awaits a divine man-
ifestation which can cancel out these nefarious powers. (Biet, p. 313).
On the subject of kingship, then, the early material is consensual, and musical
form, especially ensembles, generally supports this. But the end of II.3 leads to
a dispute between Œdipe and the Grand-Prêtre on whether the king is above
the law, in terms that are worth discussing in detail:
ŒDIPE
AIR.
Oses-tu penser un moment,
Que ta bouche sacrilége
Puisse abuser impunément
Du prétendu privilége
Que tu crois tenir de nos Dieux!
Si ton sang méritoit, perfide,
Que ma main devînt homicide,
Je t’immolerois sous leurs yeux.
Ta bouche ose accuser ton Maître!
LE GRAND-PRÊTRE.
Vous n’avez pas long-tems à l’être.

ŒDIPE.
Méconnoîtrois-tu ton Roi?
LE GRAND-PRÊTRE.
Non, Seigneur; mais, croyez-moi,
Le glaive du courroux céleste
Sur votre tête est suspendu…
Que ce jour vous sera funeste!
Votre régne est passé.
[How dare you think for a moment that your sacrilegious voice may abuse your
divine privilege with impunity? If your blood were worthy of being spilt by
my hand, I would sacrifice you before the gods for accusing your master! —You
shall not be for long.—Do you not recognize your king?—I do, my lord, But
believe me, the sword of celestial justice hangs above your head. This day shall
be fateful for you, your reign is over.]
The idea of divine justice ending a reign seems to detract from the concept
of this play as a defense of Louis XVI, and for a theatrical work to make this
point in late 1791 is highly charged. Elsewhere in the work, fatality and nature
are both constructed as supra-human forces, with the effect that there are sev-
eral strands to the way in which the work construes human agency. First,
Jocaste’s aria in II.4 considers “nature” as irrepressible, as a voice of conscience
which is at the heart of the human being:
Œdipe. . . ah! quelle est ma misere!

Quoi! de nos malheureux enfans
N’êtes-vous plus le tendre pere?
Ecoutez leurs gémissemens.
Voulez-vous étouffer le cri de la Nature?
[Ah Œdipus! what misery! Are you no longer a father to your poor children?
Listen to their moans, will you not hear the cry of Nature?]
Second, despite some rather formulaic references to the gods, this opera
again presents Antiquity and its myths stripped of any supernatural or tran-
scendent element: human dilemmas are foregrounded throughout. Similar
invocations to those in Nephté are made, such as Jocaste and Œdipe’s duet
“Apollon, deviens-nous propice” (I.2), but the moral center of gravity is else-
where. Biet notes that in Buffardin’s version, fatalism is an abstract element,
borrowed from Sophocles, and Œdipus is presented as a victim of fatality without
that fatality being either criticized or modified (pp. 308–10). One could say much
the same of the present work, except that this leads to a tension: characters are

extremely human because sensibility and emotional torment are foregrounded,
but because the gods do not have much real presence and because the guilt of
individuals is rather shied away from, the cause of the suffering remains some-
what abstract. The closest one really comes to the famous “sense of waste” seen
by Bentley as constitutive of the tragic drama is the rather vague sense that
Laius needs to be avenged because “la nature” has been “outragée”: because,
that is, the order of things is out of kilter.
The chorus is used as a locus of lyricism as much as a commentator on
action, sometimes oddly of galanterie, such as in II.1 with its lexis of dawn and
a nature that “chante[r] tes amours” [celebrates your love], much of which sits
rather uncomfortably with this myth (the line “Qu’il est doux d’espérer la fin
de ses malheurs!” [How sweet to hope for the end of our misfortune!] (p. 13)
might be a particular example). But the dramatic role of the chorus as repre-
sentative of the “people,” which we have observed elsewhere, is also notewor-
thy. Biet notes a growing integration of the chorus into the action throughout
the eighteenth-century adaptations of the subject and states, of Duprat’s ver-
sion (p. 122): “Marquant de nouveaux rapports entre le roi et les sujets, il [le
chœur] est invité par Œdipe à discuter des problèmes de la Cité.” [Marking a
new relationship between the king and his subjects, the chorus is invited by
Œdipe to discuss matters of state.]
The Moniteur was not wrong to claim that the justification for the divertisse-
ment of II.2 (“Dieu du jour, tu rends l’espérance” [Lord, you bring back our
hope]) is flimsy, to say the least: for all that has been learned at that point is
that Créon is on his way, and that the oracle is about to pronounce. In this
context, Jocaste’s “Tout nous devient propice: / Le Coupable en exil, le Ciel sera
content. / Célébrez ce beau jour par des chants d’allégresse” [All favors us: with
the guilty man exiled, the heavens shall be appeased. Let us celebrate this
happy day with songs of joy] (II.2, p. 14) seems awkwardly premature. Her
relationship to the chorus is similar to that of Œdipe to his subjects: it is based
upon “amour,” it is “sensible,” does not hesitate to shed tears (p. 15), and con-
sists in sharing the misfortune of subjects more than it implies an ability to act
to resolve such a situation, save for the willingness to sacrifice herself (p. 15),
which the chorus refuses.
Much of the work was clearly ripe for contemporary allusion. Several pas-
sages almost invite Revolutionary “applications,” such as “Rendre heureux les
Sujets est le devoir des Rois” [Assuring the happiness of his subjects is a king’s
duty] (II.2), or “Un Roi si bienfaisant est un présent des Dieux” [Such a benef-
icent king is a gift from the gods] (I.3). It is not immediately evident that such
disturbances took place in performance, judging from reviews, and we need to

be careful of seeing relevance where contemporaries did not. But to stage a
scene (II.3, p. 24) where celestial justice ends a king’s reign represents an over-
turning of the practice of the Opéra, in the sense that the directors no longer
removed passages susceptible of political interpretation. In the absence of spe-
cifically political responses to the work, this still needs to be borne in mind as
a transitional situation between the crown ideal of opera as timeless and the
Terrorist insistence upon a congruency of work to direct political situation.
Duprat de la Touloubre’s Œdipe was performed at a particularly sensitive
moment, and it is suprising, given the Revolutionaries’ propensity to read
meanings into works, that it passed without exciting more comment than it
did. The work seems to have been read as an adaptation of Voltaire and an
exercise in lyric tragedy exclusively. As such, it forms a convenient close to this
chapter concerning the serious repertory in the first two seasons. The Opéra’s
place in contemporary culture was clearly in a process of flux, commenting on
issues of national import and continuing to assume a role as a national institu-
tion. But the nature of that transformation is in danger of being misunder-
stood. Rather than seek allusions that we in our period would find relevant to
a political situation, surviving evidence points in two contradictory directions.
On the one hand, the Opéra was much less cautious than previously of present-
ing material susceptible of interpretation. If one compares La Ferté’s correspon-
dence with Marmontel in the 1780s, which shows deliberate excision of passages
susceptible of royalist interpretation, it is clear that pre-1789 policy was to
avoid political contestation. There is an interesting parallel here with the case,
cited by Herbert, of Cuvillier’s wish to avoid controversy in the 1789 Salon by
removing certain contentious paintings—including David’s Brutus—likely to
give rise to applications.137 By 1791, no such effort is made. This does not yet
answer the question of how the material is read, but it shows that the Opéra
no longer sought to produce works that were politically anodyne. On the other
hand, there is no evidence in contemporary reviews of critics reading the work
in relation to a specific context: that of the unfolding situation whereby the
nation came to the painful conclusion that Louis was a traitor, for instance.
Rather, the operas I have considered here might best benefit from being read
structurally and generically, as art objects primarily, but which have certain
features in common, and thereby reveal shared imaginary structures for
what they take for granted and the ways in which they model their fictions.
They are prepared to seek general lessons from past events. They are often
anti-tragedies, in the sense that their subject matter is resolutely human,
137 David, Voltaire, “Brutus,” pp. 55–65.

not transcendent, that they have happy endings, and the plot is propelled by
disasters not fatality, whereas external circumstances, not hamartia or hubris,
create the “fall”: that is, there is an unwavering confidence in the goodness of
human individuals. In fact, characters, although some are downright evil, are
rarely flawed, as classical tragedy requires that they be. Not only might this be
seen as the culmination of a trend running through “Enlightenment” tragedy’s
optimism in “human nature” but it establishes a template for later works: the
Revolution can rarely tolerate human wickedness on stage, and hardly ever in
its main protagonists, merely in opponents to those protagonists as foils. We
have the beginnings, here, of the Manichean moral structures of the Terror,
where the purpose of such is made explicit. And we have the hermeneutic
paradox of a set of artworks where contemporary critical silence is most elo-
quent, because that which is taken for granted is most in tune with the shared
structures we are seeking to elucidate.

7 Comic and Mixed Works
One of the major effects of the search for variety in the early years of the
Opéra’s Revolutionary history was a complaint that it was lowering the tone.
Although there had been calls for decades for the Opéra to recognize comedy
and mixed works—Bricaire de la Dixmérie famously calling on it to “légi-
timer un bâtard devenu plus riche que lui” [legitimize a bastard who has
become richer than his father] —the introduction of comedy was not without
problems. The de Vismes season had been very largely based on Italian comic
works to enhance the variety of entertainment offered to the public; yet its
success was clearly mixed, for the dramaturgy of Italian comic works was still
considered disorganized, the tone was considered out of keeping with the nec-
essary dignity of the national stage, and, by 1789, the Théâtre de Monsieur
was a direct competitor. The Opéra premiered a fair number of comic and
mixed works in the early years of the Revolution, but at best they received
mixed notices. For instance, the revised Tarare was, according to the
Correspondance littéraire of August 1790, worthier of the stage [tréteaux] of
Nicolet than the Royal Academy of Music.1 (Nicolet was entrepreneur of the
Boulevard theater misleadingly named “Grands danseurs du roi.”) Indeed,
reviews of almost all short comic works pointed to their plebeian tone and
origins. And the Almanach général de tous les spectacles for 1791 claimed that
even the mixed dramaturgy that increasingly replaced lyric tragedy brought
the Opéra closer to the level of the Boulevards.2
1 Tourneux, xvi.75.
2 AGTS, 1791, pp. 16–17. By the following year, the Almanach had changed its tune,
speaking of the necessary hierarchy between the Parisian theatres, and placing the Opéra,
Table 7.1. The comic and mixed repertory, 1789–1793
Comic Works
PRÉTENDUS (LES), comédie lyrique; 2 acts; [Rochon de Chabannes]; music by
Lemoyne—2 June 1789 [63 performances]
POMMIERS (LES) ET LE MOULIN, comédie lyrique; 1 act; Forgeot; music by
Lemoyne—20 January 17903 [23 performances]
PORTRAIT (LE), OU LA DIVINITÉ DU SAUVAGE, comédie lyrique; 2 acts;
[Saulnier]; mus. Champein—22 October 1790 [7 performances]
CORISANDRE, ou les fous par enchantement, comédie / opéra; 3 acts; Linières and Le Bailly;
music by Langlé; ballets by Gardel and Laurent–8 March 1791 [8 + 17 performances]
HEUREUX STRATAGÈME (L’), comédie lyrique; 2 acts; Saulnier; music by L. Jadin—
13 September 1791 [3 performances]
MARIAGE (LE) DE FIGARO, opéra-comique; 5 acts, subsequently reduced to 4 acts;
Notaris following Beaumarchais; music by Mozart (1786)—20 March 1793
[6 performances]
Mixed works
ASPASIE, opéra; 3 acts; Morel de Chédeville; music by Grétry; ballets by Gardel—17 March
1789 [14 performances]
TARARE, with Couronnement, mélodrame; 5 acts; Beaumarchais; music by Salieri—3 August
1790 [15 + 9 performances]
I have chosen to begin my discussion with Aspasie and then Tarare as exam-
ples of “mixed” dramaturgy, by which I mean either a combination of serious
and comic emotion (Tarare) or a comic work having structural or thematic
features in common with tragedy (Aspasie); these will be followed by the
shorter purely comic works that emulate opéra-comique, before then discussing
the one genuine dialogue opera of the corpus, an adaptation of Mozart’s Nozze
di Figaro (Table 7.1).3As well as questions of genre and tone, the strophic form
of these works will be considered, as it is one important aspect of the opéra-
comique and similar works performed at the Opéra, and one that links the
productions of the 1790s with the Festival (which also featured strophic vocal
numbers), song culture, and the minor theaters of Paris. We await a study of
the extent to which the Le Chapelier deregulation led to a hybridization and a
the Comédie-Italienne and the Théâtre de Monsieur at the top, in the views of the think-
ing members of the public [la saine partie du Public]: AGTS, 1792, p. 96. In this latter
article, Joseph Dubois, le Brun, and Roblot are explicitly credited (p. 95); the earlier piece
is anonymous. But the surrounding rhetoric is also completely different: the 1791 Almanach
attacks the Opéra as a bastion of privilege; the 1792 volume sees it as a national theater
consubstantial with the majesty of the crown, and above the petty politics of the
Revolution.
3 The libretto (Paris: De Lormel, 1790) [Po: Liv. 18[536]] gives 22 January 1790.

mixing of genres across the Paris theaters as a whole. But as we shall see in this
chapter, the Opéra capitalized upon these works as a means of diversifying its
repertory and, we may speculate, broadening its appeal.
1. Aspasie: Antiquity and Cultural Regeneration

We begin with the work that opened the 1789 season after the Easter recess,
although it had received its premiere shortly before the break:4 Aspasie, com-
posed by Grétry on a libretto by Etienne Morel de Chédeville, is derived from
a network of ancient and modern works, yet it diverges from those previous
sources’ treatment of the theme in various respects.5 Grétry declines to discuss
the work in any detail in his memoirs, on the grounds that this was a minor
work whose score was never published;6 and it has been little discussed
since, save for René Guiet, who sees it as a comic work having several features
in common with tragédie lyrique, notably its Ancient setting and attempt at
historical reconstruction. In its own period, the work tended to be talked
down. Morel’s “Avertissement” was explicit in its wish to present what was
really an extended divertissement as a glorification of Antiquity. Noteworthy
about the librettist’s plan, is that it sees the three fêtes which compose the
work as a means of returning the Opéra to its former glory, visual luxury
going hand in hand with dignity of tone, and with the elevated status of the
institution:
The first act of Aspasie is a living portrayal of the superb fresco of
Raphaël, The School of Athens, which we may regard as the temple of
the Arts. The second act ends with a Bacchanal, in the course
of which, as was custom in Ancient Greece, the victor of the Olympic
Games was crowned. In the third, Aspasia consecrates a Temple to
Venus. I venture to hope that the public shall receive this work
4 The work was clearly seen as a new work for the 1789–90 season: see “Service de
l’Opéra,” an annual summary of repertory, which lists Aspasie under “Ouvrages nouveaux”:
Po: Arch.18.38.
5 Morel’s previous libretti also include several workings of ancient history: Thésée
(mus. Gossec, 1782), Alexandre aux Indes (mus. Le Froid de Méreaux, 1785), and Thémistocle
(mus. Philidor, 1785). He was also librettist of La Caravane du Caire and Panurge, both set
by Grétry.
6 Mémoires, ou Essais sur la musique, 3 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie de la République,
Pluviôse An V), i.416.
comic and mixed works | 279

with indulgence, and more particularly that they shall see it as an
attempt on my part to give back to the Opéra its true type of work and
its former glory.7
There was nothing unusual about each act of an opera containing a divertisse-
ment; what is unusual is that this is the sole element discussed in any detail.
Noteworthy here is that the glory of the Opéra is presented as a cultural regen-
eration: a complex mixture of rupture with degenerate practice and a return to
origins. Jean Starobinski has described a “crepuscular” sentiment as central to
1789, which links regeneration with the metaphor of light.8 In certain respects,
Aspasie sits ill with this ideal: is it not more the fugitive and ephemeral—
because sensuous—type of art stigmatized by 1789 as a “rococo” æsthetic? The
return to Antiquity, the luxurious presentation of the national institution, the
celebration of the arts in the polity, may however be seen as a tentative experi-
ment to extend the use of comic material on the national stage while linking
with the Opéra’s festal function and visual splendor.
My discussion in Chapter 6 was concerned with contemporary thematics
such as kingship and the relevance of historical settings. A more diffuse but
equally important thread running through much of the repertory was the
“retour à l’Antique.”9 Such works appear apolitical to us and have been dis-
cussed or neglected as such, for various reasons: the subject is drawn from
classical sources, the national-historical or contemporary referent is absent, the
aesthetics is neoclassical, emphasizing sober expression and regularity of form,
and press reception also seems unconcerned with drawing political or moral
lessons from the work. However, attention to classical Antiquity could also
signify cultural-political regeneration. Aspasie, oddity though it indisputably
was, may be seen to partake of the regenerative ideal.
7 “Avertissement”: pp. vii–viii of ASPASIE, / OPÉRA / EN TROIS ACTES, /

REPRÉSENTÉ / POUR LA PREMIÈRE FOIS, / PAR L’ACADÉMIE ROYALE / DE
MUSIQUE, / Le Mardi 17 Mars 1789. / [double rule] PRIX XXX SOLS. / [double rule]
[Fleuron: initiales PDL [= Pierre de Lormel] 1789. viii–64p. [Ars: GD–40411]. Copies
of the libretto held elsewhere [I have also used Po: Livr.18.84] do not contain the
“Avertissement”, but the text of the opera is identical.
8 Jean Starobinski, 1789: Les emblèmes de la liberté (Paris: Flammarion, 1979), esp.
pp. 14–15. Cf. Mona Ozouf, L’homme régénéré: Essais sur la Révolution française (Paris:
Gallimard/nrf, 1989).
9 Inter alia, Chantal Grell, Le Dix-huitième siècle et l’Antiquité en France, 1680–1789,
2 vols. (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1995).

mixed dramaturgy
The first characteristic that sets this work apart from the majority of the early
repertory is its mixed dramaturgy. The printed libretto describes the work as
an “opéra,” a label that increasingly replaces tragédie lyrique in the 1780s and
1790s even to designate serious (that is, non-comic) works such as Louis IX en
Egypte and Antigone (!), but which remains distinct from those slighter works
described as “comédie-lyrique.” Aspasie is more typical of these serious works,
in the sense that its setting and characters are mostly dignified, the plot is one
of love thwarted, and the period is taken from Ancient history, which is rare in
comic works (conversely Ancient mythology is not: witness Rameau’s Platée).
But there is no deep exploration of the trials to which characters are put, nor
to their emotional pain; the tone is light and includes much ironic treatment,
and the ending is happy. (It does not, though, go as far as Tarare, whose ironic
and sometimes grotesque treatment of certain characters is also mixed with
genuinely touching moments.) In its review, the Correspondance littéraire pointed
to Abbé Barthélemy’s Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grèce (1788), which had
done more than any text to support a vogue for Antiquity in the years imme-
diately preceding the Revolution,10 and claimed that the half-comic, half seri-
ous tone of Barthélemy’s work was the source of Morel’s mixed dramaturgy.
Even on those terms the work had mixed success, for although the visual
dimension and the solo roles were acclaimed by most of the papers, the Journal
de Paris felt that the comic dimension to the Philosophers’ dialogue, especially
that of Aristophanes, did not really come through, due to a faulty libretto, and
(in act III) to Grétry’s score. The tone of the work was clearly problematic: the
Correspondance littéraire claimed that the librettist had “given the most esti-
mable characters of Athens a language which we could hardly accept from the
characters of La Caravane [du Caire] and Panurge” (two of Morel’s previous
comic libretti), and expressed dismay to hear these characters sing arias “whose
character was only just comparable to that of the most trivial buffo work.”11
Considered excessively long at the premiere, the work was subsequently cut,
10 Tourneux, xv.439 [April 1789]. Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grèce, dans le milieu du
quatrième siècle avant l’ère vulgaire, 4 vols. (Paris: de Bure l’aîné, 1788). I have used the
“troisième édition,” 7 vols. (Paris: De Bure, 1790); on Aspasia, see i.188, 227–28, 240. On
this text, see Grell, Antiquité, esp. pp. 141, 1149–56.
11 Tourneux, xv.440–41.

to the general approval of critics,12 and some of this more trivial dialogue
seems to have been removed.
historical reconstruction
Aspasie was notable for the time and care spent on historically accurate cos-
tumes, and represents a watershed at the Opéra, with classical sobriety replac-
ing frivolity, two years before Boquet (the costumier of the Menus-Plaisirs also
in charge of the Opéra’s costumes) was replaced by the more severe Berthélemy.13
Guiet’s claim that the work featured a level of historical documentation worthy
of serious works is exaggerated, however. It is true that recognizable historical
characters and situations are deployed, and that precedents in various texts can
be identified, but the historical foundation for the plot is relatively superficial,
and many of its constituent elements are pure fantasy on Morel’s part. The
work is centered on the eponymous female philosopher and (claims Plutarch)
companion of Pericles, reputed for her beauty and intelligence, and onto whom
a whole range of sexual stereotypes, ranging from the misogynist to the femi-
nist, were projected throughout history.14 Its three acts chart the process
whereby she gives up her lover Alcibiades in favor of her rival Hipparete15 and
seems to constitute a neo-stoical celebration of the virtue of self-abnegation,
although as we shall see the meaning of the work is not entirely clear-cut.
Historical sources on Aspasia are numerous.16 Chief among them is Plutarch’s
Life of Pericles; she is also prominent in Plato’s Menexenus and in Aristophanes’
Clouds. Conceptions of her in Antiquity tended to oscillate between two poles.
In one her sexuality and by extension her nefarious influence on the Athenian
male elite was foregrounded: one example would be her encouragement of
12 JdP, 18 March 1789, p. 356, and 26 March 1789, p. 389. We do not know exactly
what was cut, but Tourneux, xv.440 suggests that it was these comic passages of Alcibiades,
and his exchanges with Aspasie: there are enough of these in the manuscript libretto to
suggest that it predates the cuts, especially since the published libretto is missing some of
these passages.
13 Nicole Wild, “Costumes et mise en scène à l’Opéra. Un témoin: Jean-Simon
Berthélemy” in Le Tambour et la harpe, pp. 241–55.
14 “Life of Pericles,” in Plutarch’s Lives: with an English translation by Bernadotte Perrin,
11 vols. (London: Heinemann/Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press), v.3 [1958],
1–115, esp. xxiv.1–7 (pp. 69–73), xxx.3 (p. 89), xxxii.1–3 (pp. 93–95).
15 On Hipparete, see Plutarch, Life of Alcibiades, viii.3–4.
16 Danielle Jouanna, Aspasie de Milet, Egérie de Périclès: Histoire d’une femme, histoire d’un
mythe (Paris: Fayard, 2005); Madeleine M. Henry, Prisoner of Tradition: Aspasia of Miletus
and Her Biographical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

Pericles’ decision for Athens to side with Miletus in the Samian war of 441.17
In other accounts she is considered a philosopher whose participation in the
civic and political spheres was all the more noteworthy for having been made
by a woman. The close imbrication of the sexual and the political dimensions
to her life, including her own self-fashioning along the lines of the Ionian cour-
tesan Thargelia, explains why she was a focus for such projections. Two further
facts are worthy of note: first, she was born in Miletus around 470 bc and
arrived in Athens in 450 bc, precisely at the time of Pericles’ so-called citizen-
ship reforms, which removed from resident aliens [Metics] such as herself the
right to own property or to participate fully in civil society. Second, all ancient
sources link her beauty and her eloquence, which feeds into the Revolution’s
mistrust of the hidden or the veiled, and a wider cultural trend in favor of
transparency. She is thus an outsider known for her seductive qualities who is
at the heart of Athens and its political life and whose influence on that life is
problematized in all relevant sources.
This was not the first theatrical treatment, for an Aspasie had been written
in 1637 by Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin for the Théâtre du Palais-Royal and was
an integral part of a policy of cultural reform instigated at the behest of the
cardinal Richelieu.18 But most important, Abbé Barthélemy’s account of
Aspasie in the Voyage du jeune Anacharsis has political resonance in that it is
obliquely modeled upon Louis XV’s mistress Mme. de Pompadour.19 Only
some of the elements of Barthélemy’s portrayal are present in the opera, but
given the immense success of the Voyage, it is reasonable to suppose that con-
temporaries may have seen a conflation of Pericletian Athens and a corrupt
Bourbon monarchy in that text. Works discussing Aspasia abound in early-
modern France, from Mme. de Villedieu’s Les Amours des grands hommes of 1671,
which contains a section on Pericles, to an 1816 song anthology entitled Aspasie,
ou le pouvoir des belles. Some of these simply borrow the name for a character
who has nothing to do with the historical figure. In general, the seventeenth-
century Aspasie is a heroic, sometimes martial figure, far from the courtesan
image that characterized Greek depictions, and who was generally used in the
context of a nascent “feminist” literature; whereas the eighteenth century, par-
ticularly its erudite sources, saw her as seductive rather than a savante, some-
times condemning her character, sometimes tempering this with a recognition
of her social or worldly charm, and some going as far as to see her as a kind of
17 Plutarch, Pericles, xxiv.1–3, xxv.1, parodied by Aristophanes, Acharnians, lines 526–32.

18 Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin, Aspasie, ed. Philip Tomlinson (Geneva: Droz, 1992).
19 Grell, Antiquité, p. 275.

“salonnière,” in her integration of social and intellectual characteristics.
Conversely, a string of narrative fictional works tend, progressively, to make
her the victim of some kind of social injustice or tragic passion, changing the
interpretation of her sexuality as the century progresses, and foregrounding her
sensibility at the expense of her intellect or her political role.20 There was,
then, a complex set of myths, from which Morel borrowed several elements. In
terms of plot, it seems that main source was Mme. de Villedieu’s rather odd
treatments of the theme in Les Amours des grands hommes and her Portrait des
faiblesses humaines, since these were the first works to suggest a love interest
between Aspasia and Alcibiades, a thread subsequently adopted by Crébillon
in 1771. In reality, the two characters were of disparate ages and there is
no historical foundation for this plot line. Yet Morel’s concern is clearly not
historical accuracy, since the cast of characters is chronologically incoherent:
the work sees dialogues between Pythagoras (who died by 490 bc at the
latest) with Plato (born at the earliest 63 years later in 427). It also includes
characters who lived between these dates: principally Alcibiades, Anacreon,
and Aristophanes! For this reason, it is impossible to place the action of the
work in any meaningful time frame, except to say that Pericles is not present,
and that, given frequent suggestions of Aspasie’s age and wisdom, not to men-
tion Alcibiades’ fecklessness,21 the action can be placed sometime after Pericles’
death, which took place in 429 bc.22
visual splendor
The disjunction of characters is explained by Morel’s self-avowed wish to imi-
tate, on stage, Raphaël’s School of Athens, the famous fresco in the Stanza della
Segnatura in the Vatican. Indeed, the Raphael certainly features Heraclitus
(535–475), Aristotle (384–322), Plato (428/7–348/7) and Socrates (469–399)
as well as a possible depiction of Alcibiades. The Journal de Paris of 18 March
1790 had commented favorably upon the setting, and Morel’s “avertissement”
refers to a wish to bring together poetry, music, and painting in support of the
pomp and splendor of the spectacle.23 As reviews make clear, Aspasie was seen
20 This summary is based on Danielle Jouanna’s discussion on pp. 225–303.

21 Cf. II.5: ASPASIE [to Alcibiade] “Est-ce un crime à votre âge / d’être aimable &
volage?” Cf. Plutarch, Alcibiades, ii.1; xvi.6.
22 The Cambridge Ancient History, ed. D. M. Lewis (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1992) [CAH], v.398.
23 This point is also noted by JdP, 18 March 1789, p. 356. Quoted in Guiet, “Livret,”
p. 169.

by contemporaries as a relatively lightweight pretext for the kind of showy
entertainment favored on the stage of the Opéra, where the ballet corps had all
but eclipsed the sung and dramatic elements of productions and where the
visual aspect was paramount. It may be that there was an internal dimension
to this, since a rumor circulated in 1789 that Grétry was planning to withold
the work if the Opéra refused Noverre re-admittance as ballet master (there
was a wider cabal against Gardel in 1789, of which this appears to be a part).24
And as the second notice in the Journal de Paris makes clear (26 March 1789),
a rumor circulated to the effect that the ballets had been composed by Noverre,
not the current ballet master Gardel fils (Noverre had left the Opéra more than
three months earlier), a rumor that Morel and Grétry asked the Journal to
refute.25 Be that as it may, the Correspondance littéraire spoke for many when it
stated: “What would normally be considered an ancillary part of a lyric work
was the cornerstone of this one’s success.”26 Similar points are made by Babault’s
Annales dramatiques27 and the Mercure.28 As for the music, Lajarte notes that the
most successful parts of the score were the choruses and dances; and that sev-
eral of the latter were re-used in later ballets.29 Grétry himself discussed the
ballets in the Journal de Paris of 17 March 1789, claiming that he had been
asked by one of the principals to provide a dance air similar in character to
Rameau’s famous “danse des sauvages.” (He denied wishing to plagiarize).30
And the Journal de Paris had seen each of the three acts as a celebration of a god
or goddess: respectively, Apollo, Bacchus, and Venus.31 Evidence of the care
taken over the visual aspect can be found in the contemporary manuscript col-
lection of costume designs held by the Bibliothèque de l’Opéra, which includes
five costumes drawn in pencil and color wash.32 The importance of the visual
24 AN: O/1/619 #399, which suggests that Lasalle spearheaded the opposition to
Gardel. Evidence is scanty, however.
25 JdP, 26 March 1789, p. 389.
26 Tourneux, xv.440.
27 [Babault], Annales dramatiques, ou Dictionnaire général des théâtres, i (Paris: Imp.
Hénée, 1808), p. 381. This review is reprinted from JdP, 18 March 1789, pp. 355–56.
28 MF, 18 April 1789, p. 127.
29 Bibliothèque musicale de l’Opéra, i.363. Some of that music survives in Po: Recueils de
ballets, XLIII.7f, which contains fifteen movements from Aspasie: four choruses, and eleven
dance movements. In addition, Méhul’s Daphnis et Pandrose: Ballet en 2 actes de Mr Gardel
(24 Nivose an XI = 14 Janvier 1803) [Po: A.384. I–II] contains, ii.239–82, a divertissement
in orchestral score, marked “Aspasie” and “Mr Miller.”
30 JdP, 1789, p. 349.
31 JdP, 18 March 1789, p. 356.
32 Po: D.216 [IX], ff.62–66.

dimension is confirmed by Dauvergne’s correspondence, where he repeatedly
discusses delays with scene painting and costumes, and a request from the
librettist and composer to delay the premiere of the work until it has been
rehearsed four times with the (all-important) scenery in place.33 And by coin-
cidence, the inventory of the surviving holdings of the Menus-Plaisirs, which
Pâris drew up after the disastrous fire of 18 April 1788 in the Magasins on rue
Bergère, also contains further detail: in 1789, the Opéra possessed scenery for a
“Temple d’Aspasie, ou Ecole d’Athènes,” which one assumes formed the setting
for act I (marked “Le lycée d’Athènes” in the published libretto); a “Chambre
d’Aspasie” made of yellow drapery and gold brocade finishing (surely the décor
for act II—the published libretto merely states “un intérieur d’appartement”),
and rather intriguing, a “Montagne d’Aspasie.”34 This is surely for act III,
where the libretto calls for the peristyle of a temple, and in the center a rotunda
of columns, with draperies between, and an altar in the middle. Although we
know frustratingly little about the staging, care was clearly lavished on the
production, given what survives concerning staging and costume.
regeneration
Alongside the work’s concentration upon its visual and danced components,
the plot foregrounds a metatheatrical celebration of the power of the arts, and
specifically music, within a distinctly late eighteenth-century framework, even
though it claims to be Pythagorean in inspiration. For instance, the opening
scene celebrates “la puissante harmonie” (which although vague presumably
means the doctrine of the harmony of the spheres), but it is also more contem-
porary in its declaration that “Ce n’est qu’en charmant les oreilles / que l’on
touche les Cœurs” [Only by charming the ear can one touch the heart], all of
which is subsumed under the (decidedly modern) doctrine of enthusi-
asm (“Livrons nous à la tendresse / Laissons nous enflammer” [Let us be trans-
ported by feelings of affection]).35 The character of Plato also makes an explicit
link, in this same scene, between wisdom and musical harmony. These classi-
cal commonplaces on the power of music function in the same way as musicog-
raphy in the period, which highlights the role of music in the birth of society
and the glory of Athenian civilization, which we find in later writers such as
33 Dauvergne to unnamed, 9 February 1789: AN: O/1/619 # 448; ibid, 22 February

1789, #452.
34 BMB: ms.Pâris.24, entries no. 5, 6, 15, 3F, respectively.
35 I.2. On enthusiasm, see Mark Darlow, “The role of the listener in the musical
aesthetics of the Revolution,” SVEC 2007:06, pp. 143–57.

Jean-Baptiste Leclerc and Boissy d’Anglas, not to mention in the section of the
Voyage du jeune Anacharsis devoted to music and the Ancients. Or, to quote
from the pamphlet on Nephté previously discussed:
Music constituted the beginnings of Greek civilization: it formed the
first societies and lent divine majesty to their laws; but it gradually lost
its power as these societies progressed and as knowledge increased,
since the criterion for truth was increasingly based on reason and calcu-
lation. Little by little, languages lost their accents, and sentiment lost
its influence.36
This passage hence theorizes an original golden age followed by a progres-
sive cultural degeneration in Rousseauian mode, and points backward to an
ideal of cultural purity: renewal is a return to origins. Likewise, the opera’s
conclusion is surely also a metatheatrical homage to the ideals of French clas-
sicism in its twin Horatian principles of pleasure and instruction: “Et vous,
Ministre de Thalie [= Aristophane] / Rendez l’utile Comédie / Le miroir de
notre âme, et l’école de nos mœurs. / Le but de tous les arts, et le Sceau du
génie / Est de plaire à l’esprit, et de charmer les Cœurs.” [And you, Thalia’s
representative, make comedy the mirror of our souls and a school for morals.
The aim of all arts, and the stamp of genius, is to please the intellect and to
charm the heart.] (III.2).
Such metatheatrical talk about the arts is allowed precisely because so
much of the plot is given over to fêtes, foregrounded from the beginning. The
whole work opens with preparations for what is supposed to be a fête d’Apollon,
but it turns into an excited awaiting of Aspasie’s first entry. It foregrounds her
influence and closely relates her charm and that of the arts, as the following
passages show:
Pithagore: Je me sens plus de verve en donnant mes leçons / quand je
vois Aspasie attentive à mes Sons. [I feel my lessons have more eloquence
when I see Aspasie listening attentively.] (I.2)
Platon: Un regard d’Aspasie, et m’enflamme, et m’anime. [One look
from Aspasie enflames and animates me.] (I.2)
Platon: J’admire dans ses traits, j’observe dans ses yeux / Des célestes
beautés l’ensemble harmonieux / Et sa voix si touchante / dont le charme
m’enchante / M’explique des accords tout l’art mistérieux. [In her fea-
tures and her eyes, I observe and admire the harmonious mixture of
36 De la musique et de Nephté, aux mânes de l’abbé Arnaud (Paris: Imprimerie de Monsieur,

1790), pp. 7–8.

celestial beauties, and her touching voice explains the mysterious art of
harmony.] (I.2)
It also devotes much space to balletic movement and the drawing-up of
distinct and sometimes opposing characters and groups before any real
action begins. For instance, the score demonstrates that between parts of the
chorus “O puissante Harmonie!” of I.1 a series of balletic movements were
interspersed; some, I deduce, at a late moment. Episodes of mute dance
were central, oddly for an exposition, including one long episode (marked “air
chanté et dansé” in the libretto), consisting of a series of closed movements and
featuring danced imitations by disciples of their masters’ movements (score,
pp. 81–161).
from entrée to tableau

We do not know much about the staging in 1789, but references to the Raphaël
in act I suggest a strong tableau effect that immediately reminded contempo-
raries of the painting. The most developed discussion was that of the
Correspondance littéraire, which claimed that the painting had been copied
exactly, making optimal use of the theatrical space.37 However, the manuscript
libretto and score contain movements that do not correspond to this descrip-
tion, and it is likely that they were cut from the production and subsequently
removed from the published libretto, such that whereas the published version
opens with a tableau, the early version precedes that with an “Entrée cérémon-
ielle des philosophes” set in the Lycée, here described as “ce temple fameux où
naquirent les arts” (I.ii). The “Entrée” was of course a balletic term38 and must
be partly understood as such in the light of didascaliae relating to dance entries
later in the scene, although danced choruses to marched music were, to say the
least, unusual. But the choreographed entrance of a group of characters sug-
gests the processional meaning of the term. The production manuscript has no
information about staging, merely didascaliae comparable to those of the pub-
lished libretto. Nor do we know much about the choreographic element of the
material; although a full score and separate extracts of ballet music for re-use
38 Absent from Marmontel, Eléments de littérature; Rousseau (1767) defines a balletic
entry as un “air de symphonie par lequel début un Ballet” and “un Acte entier, dans les
Opéra-Ballets dont chaque Acte forme un sujet séparé” (Dictionnaire de musique in OC,
v.812), Cf. Encyclopédie, v.730.

elsewhere have survived, these do not contain stage directions.39 Here the entry
is divided into each of the Philosophers at the head of their group of disciples,
just as ceremonial and civic entries were also divided into categories of citizens
and accompanied musically by a “fanfare” and a “march.” Indeed the scene
seems to borrow from two traditions to modify them: early-modern civic pro-
cessions, and the ceremonial entry into the city, which the sovereign made at
major events of military victory or after his coronation.40 The ceremonial entry
embodies a view of society divided into corporate bodies, local officials, civic
categories or orders, all distinguished by costume (including color distinctions)
and their place in the processional order. And given the opening procession of
the Estates-General (5 May 1789) as well as a revived royal ceremonial entry
(17 July 1789), the tradition clearly retained cultural potency in 1789, albeit
revised, so that the July entry of the king emphasized not absolute power,
but humility before the nation.41 Civic and ecclesiastical processions were
moreover current at the end of the eighteenth century.42
The extent to which this entry conformed to or played upon cultural
stereotypes remains a matter for speculation: too much about this scene and
its staging is unknown. But the similarity must have implied that same
microcosmic and hierarchical view of civic society and may explain why it was
ultimately removed, as the use of royal ceremonial by other categories of
citizen in 1789 was a contested and problematic issue: it may have been con-
sidered too sensitive, given the proximity of the premiere (17 March) to the
Estates-General (5 May).
philosophes
Aspasie presents two positions on the relationship between sentiment and ratio-
nality, much of it in the form of philosophical disputes between rival schools,
whose opposition forms many of the work’s ensemble passages. The first posi-
tion is that of Aristophanes, who is presented as cynical and self-absorbed,
39 Po: Recueils de ballets, XIX.1 and XLIII.7f.

40 Lawrence M. Bryant, The King and the City in the Parisian Royal Entry Ceremony:
Politics, Ritual and Art in the Renaissance (Geneva: Droz, 1986), esp pp. 216–18.
41 Lawrence M. Bryant, “Royal ceremony and the Revolutionary strategies of the
Third Estate,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 22.3 (Spring 1989), 413–50.
42 Robert Darnton, “A bourgeois puts his world in order: The city as text,” The Great
Cat Massacre and Other Events in French Cultural History (London: Penguin, 1984), pp. 107–43.
The Encyclopédie has no article for the “Procession générale”; “Procession” (signed Jaucourt:
xiii.405–6) refers to ecclesiastical processions.

with the detached attitude to the emotions of others that allows lines such as
“Je les tourmente, et j’en ris de bon cœur” [I cause their torment, and am
amused] (III.2), and who deliberately publicizes Aspasie’s situation in order to
cause trouble (I.2): a portrayal in keeping with his reputation for satire.
Accordingly, he is scornful of those “Philosophers” who are troubled by senti-
ment, and in fact is scornful of philosophie in general, as indeed the real-life
character was. (This scorn appears in The Clouds, where he had parodied Aspasia
herself ): “Illustres fondateurs de la Philosophie, / qui de tout prétendez nous
donner des raisons / apprenez le sujet qui loin de vous l’engage / . . . L’amour.”
[Let me tell you, illustrious founders of philosophy, what engages her . . . it is
love.] (I.2) In this view, Aspasia herself is stigmatized as a sophist, who is sus-
pect because of her eloquence: “Sage avec coquetterie, / et sophiste jolie, / pour
séduire plus finement / Son art à tous les tons se plie.” [Wise with vanity, a
pretty Sophist; her art adopts a variety of tones to charm her listeners] (II.1),
and who is even powerful enough to “troubler leur [les philosophes] cervelle”
[trouble their minds], as Aristophanes claims (I.2). In certain interventions,
Aristophanes turns the conflict into one over the state, with paternal reproaches
which, if they do not have the same virile vigor as those of David, nonetheless
align patriotism with self-abnegation: “Vous n’entendez donc plus la voix de la
Patrie, / cette voix qui vous crie, / C’est dans mon sein que tu reçus le jour. / Et
ton cœur s’abandonne aux erreurs de l’amour, / quand tu me dois, ingrat, les
beaux jours de ta vie” [You no longer hear the voice of the state, to which you
owe your life, yet which you abandon for the errors of love] (II.1). This latter
position is not developed in any consistent way. In these views Aspasie should
abjure her feelings of love, since they are a form of passion stigmatized as trou-
bling and antithetical both to reason and to glory.
The second identifiable position is that of the Philosophes themselves,
whose characterization reminds us of the Stoics, who are also troubled by such
feelings but who ultimately overcome them. “Un sage par un noble effort / Sait
modérer ses feux, et maîtrise son ame,” [A wise person, by a noble effort of
self-mastery, moderates their passion] sing the Philosophes together (I.5).
Aristophanes’ air in III.1 (“Sexe aimable, sensible et tendre” [Sensitive, tender,
loveable sex]) borrows tropes of galanterie and conflates them with this division
(“Retenez bien cette leçon: / L’amour veille pour vous surprendre / Aux pièges
qu’il cherche à vous tendre / Tâchez d’opposer la raison” [Remember this: love
lies in wait to trap you; yet try to counter its snares with your reason]). For this
reason Aspasie feels a “trouble” (I.2), and her aria “ô fatale journée” in
I.3 foregrounds the tragic dimension of an overpowering passion (musical
example 3). And the following duet between Alcibiade and Aristophane
also presents a genuine confrontation and emotional trouble (“Ma sagesse est

d’aimer, / Ma gloire est de céder à l’ardeur qui m’enflamme. / Je ne connois de
loi, que celle de mon cœur” [My wisdom is love, and my glory is the ardor
which enflames me. I know no other law than that of my heart], I.5). In this
view of things, her love for Alcibiades is a folie and an erreur (I.5), and philoso-
phy is a calming force (I.3). Hence an admirable Philosophe is temporarily
unable to control her passions, and Aspasie turns out to be not a seductress
but seduced, not a prostitute but a victim, not a controller but controlled,
much in the line of the late eighteenth-century versions of the myth I have
example 3
Ô fatale journée!
Allegro agitato
f
Aspasie
(Voir) Ô fa - ta - le jour - né - e! cru - el - le dé - sti - né - e de
Vln. I
p
Keyboard
Vln. II, Vla, Vc.
reduction
Cb.
puis cet in - stant un feu dé - vo - rant, m'a - gi - tte_et me tour - men - te, je n’ai
(Vlni.)
12
plus de re - pos, mon â - me_im- pa - ti - en - te mon
(+Vla.)

example 3 Cont’d
2
16 f
â - me_im - pa - ti - ente - é prou - ve mil - le maux, é prou - ve mil - le maux, é prou - ve mil - le
23
maux, je veux fuir la pré - sen - ce de cet ai - ma - ble vain queur, j’é-
28
- prouve en son ab - sen - ce en - cor plus de ri gueur, en - cor plus de ri -
34
- gueur. Ô fa - ta - le jour - né - e! cru - el - le dé - sti - né - e de-
292
example 3 Cont’d
3
39
-puis cet in - stant, un feu dé - vo - rant, m’a - gi - tte_et me tour - men - te, m’a -
ff
45
gi - tte_et me tour - men - te, m’a gi - tte_et me tour - men - te, m’a gi - tte_et me tour- men -
51
- te, m’a gi - te_et me tour- men - te.
56
293
alluded to, until the final scene which overturns the situation. Hence this is
not simply a myth about heroic abnegation but a more cynical probing of
human passions.43
Because of this multiplicity of positions, the work presents a perspective on
the issues it discusses that feels confused rather than complex – for instance,
whether love is shameful or not. There are clashes between rival accounts of
such matters, but these are not developed in any meaningful way, which means
that the whole account feels rather confused in conflating the moral depravity
of Alcibiades with a rather prudish objection to love as transport, and the cliché
of philosophy as a calming consolation. In II.1 Alcibiades considers Aspasie to
be a poor match, given his social status: this is presumably because she is a
Metic, although this is never explained. (However, Aspasie is separated from
her lovers by a class difference in most versions of the story in eighteenth-
century France, so perhaps this is taken as read.) There is some dramatically
efficient contrast between trouble and calm, which are respectively identified
with amour-passion and esprit (beginning of I.4). Equally, the finale to act I
develops a disagreement between Pythagoras, who claims that “aimer est une
folie” [to love is madness] and Anacréon, who believes that “C’est faire de la vie /
un agréable emploi” [It is to make pleasant use of one’s life], and who also
claims that wisdom may be found “parmi les ris et les jeux” [in laughter and
in play] (III.2).
What view of Antiquity does the work give us? One might see a study of
the tension between sensibility and rationality as central to fifth-century
Athenian philosophical reform, in the sense that, in the words of M. Ostwald,
“The culture produced in fifth-century Athens is one of the momentous
achievements of the human mind in that it constitutes an attempt on many
fronts to comprehend man, his society and the universe in which he has
been placed by rational means with the least possible recourse to supernatural
explanations of the way things are.”44 The teaching of the Sophists would
have been considered at that time a modern form of education, based on
the intellect, whereas a more traditional form of education was based on the
physical dimension, upon graces and accomplishments. Aspasie foregrounds
this debate, which is why Aristophane can exclaim, interrupting a rather
43 II.5: “En proie à des feux dévorans / Je succombe, et n’y peux suffire / Est-ce encore
l’amour, / Ou la haine, ou la jalousie / dont j’éprouve tour à tour / les combats et la furie?”
[Subjected to all-consuming fire, I succomb and cannot resist. Is it love, or hatred, or
jealousy, whose combats and fury I feel?]
44 CAH, v.348–49.

sterile debate: “Sophistes pointilleux, et forts en arguments / vous tuez la raison
par vos raisonnements.” [You pedantic Sophists with your arguments kill
reason with your reasoning.] (III.2) But rather like the visual dimension,
one suspects that Morel de Chédeville has composed a patchwork of different
clichés of Antiquity, without due regard for dramatic coherence.
a failure?
The work, as I have suggested, was only moderately successful. Yet it has sev-
eral features of interest that we shall re-encounter in later, more important
works. In foregrounding the festal dimension and linking it to regeneration,
the work opens up a space which the works produced during the Terror will
inhabit, for much of that repertory grows out of the operatic divertissement, and
this work paves the way. That is the limit to Aspasie’s discussion of politics, for
certainly little is made of the potential for political or cultural comment about
(inter alia) the role of women in the state, the central issue facing resident
aliens in fifth-century Athens such as Aspasia, which is the problem of the
inheritance or transmission of cultural capital. Also, the integration of philoso-
phy and state culture is not foregrounded, as the subject matter would have
allowed. So Aspasie demonstrates—a contrario—that the kind of critical or
“pre-Revolutionary” use of Antiquity elsewhere observable far before 1789 has
not yet made it on to the stage of the Académie Royale. This ambivalence
about a potential for contemporary relevance and comment is one we have seen
in serious works, and it goes to the heart of one of the poles of the contested
way in which the Opéra was being run in 1789: a cultural monument whose
patrimonial dimension outweighed its propensity to present novelties.
Antiquity is not the “critical” Antiquity alluded to by Chantal Grell, nor the
Republican contestatory space that patriot critics read into early David can-
vasses such as the Oath of the Horaces or the Brutus, but a construction of a
cultural golden age, borrowed from Barthélemy and other works of the vogue
for Antiquity.45 The subject matter of these works is always resolutely human
(that is, non-divine) and secular (both anti-clerical and pagan), while borrow-
ing from long-established traditions with sacred underpinnings. Instead of
seeing such “traditional” elements of the works as reactionary, we should con-
sider them also as vehicles for a new understanding of such traditions within
the context of cultural regeneration. In this account, to celebrate Antiquity and
45 See Guiet, Livret, p. 170, for a survey of those aspects of the Voyage du jeune
Anacharsis borrowed by Morel de Chédeville.

its civic use of the arts is implicitly to reinterpret the place of the Opéra within
a civic culture that recognizes the educative power of art. Equally important,
as an aesthetic experiment, Morel and Grétry’s work did much to problematize
genre distinctions on the stage of the Opéra and to mix a comic tone with the
ingredients of serious opera. Tarare, in 1787, had been the pioneering work
for a true fusion of genres, and it is significant that its revival took place
the following year, since in that work, genuinely political concerns were
foregrounded to an unprecedented degree.
2. Opera, Democracy, and Patriotic Self-Fashioning:

The Revised Tarare
Probably the most successful work of the corpus, and one of the best known
today, is Tarare. Composed by Antonio Salieri on a libretto by Beaumarchais,
it was first written in 1787 and revised several times in the years which fol-
lowed: not only in 1790 and 1792, my focus here, but also in 1795, 1802, 1819,
and 1822. It features an unprecedented fusion of genres and uses exoticism to
satirize a society in decline, very much along the lines of Montesquieu’s depic-
tion of the harem in his Persian Letters.46 In terms of genre and thematics, it is
one of the most interesting “reform” operas of the eighteenth century;47 it
was also one of the most successful in purely financial terms, albeit at first
an astonishing and difficult work for audiences to understand. Not only is
the dramaturgy mixed, but the work has an ironic tone quite unprecedented
in opera. Indeed, in an interesting discussion, Guiet makes an analogy with
the irony of the Voltairean conte philosophique.48 By 1790, the work was ripe
for Revolutionary treatment, because it dealt explicitly with legitimacy and
liberty. But ironically, the erstwhile author of Le Mariage de Figaro was strug-
gling to establish his own Revolutionary credentials in 1789–90; he used the
46 Louis de Loménie, Beaumarchais et son temps: Etudes sur la société en France au XVIIIe
siècle, d’après des documents inédits, 2 vols. (Paris: Michel Lévy frères, 1856), ii. chapter 31:
“Tarare et ses métamorphoses. La politique à l’Opéra,” pp. 399–421; Thomas Betzwieser,
Exotismus und “Türkenoper” in der französischen Musik des Ancien Régime (Laaber: Laaber-
Verlag, 1993), kapitel VIII.3: “Die Türkenoper am Vorabend der Französischen Revolution:
Tarare,” pp. 332–58; ibid, “Exoticism and politics: Beaumarchais’ and Salieri’s Le
Couronnement de Tarare,” Cambridge Opera Journal, 6.2 (1994), 91–112; Béatrice Didier,
Ecrire la Révolution (Paris: PUF, 1989), pp. 161–69.
47 Betzwieser, “Exoticism,” p. 92.
48 Livret, p. 176.

revisions as an opportunity to self-fashion as a patriot at a moment when the
Opéra was becoming embroiled in municipal politics, making of this work a
template for the moral conflation of author’s personality to fictional ideology
which is so central to Revolutionary theater. What complicates matters further
is that an explicit policy of moderation in thematics was to create a work that
would appear reactionary by the time of its performance. This was particularly
true since Tarare was situated in a transitional space, appealing both to popu-
lar democratic sympathies and to political moderation and respect for the rule
of law, and hence mirrors the uneasy political compromise of the constitutional
monarchy period of the early Revolution in general. It also shows a rather awk-
ward collaboration between the increasingly unpopular Beaumarchais, eager
to save his reputation from accusations of aristocracy from the radical popular
sections, and an Opéra keen to tone down the excesses of the work while
making it acceptable to as wide a constituency as possible. The radical “poli-
tics” in the work came not from the institution or from the state, both of which
wished to tone down those aspects, but from the librettist, eager to fashion
himself as a patriot.
Once an ordinary soldier, Tarare has worked his way up to become a famous
general in charge of the king’s armies. King Atar owes his life to Tarare, yet he
is jealous of the popularity his general enjoys among the people, and he plots
against him. He has Tarare’s beloved wife Astasie abducted and quartered in
the harem while issuing orders for Tarare to be killed. Various escapades follow,
when the army announces its solidarity with its general-in-chief. Even though
his own life is at stake, Tarare reminds the rebelling soliders of their oath of
allegiance to their ruler. But Atar cannot face attributing his power to Tarare
and rejects his general’s call for loyalty, taking his own life. The people crown
Tarare, initially a somewhat reluctant monarch, but one who recognizes the
enormous responsibility that accompanies his power.
Much in this plot would have been recognizable to those who knew the
Figaro comedies: the trajectory of the ordinary man who rises against the odds;
the unfairness of his superiors; and some now explicitly democratic, pre-
Revolutionary overtones, especially in the role of the “people” and its treat-
ment of kingship. Beaumarchais was moreover skilled at using social spaces to
excite public anticipation for his works; he had followed exactly the same
public strategy for publicizing Tarare that he had with Le Mariage de Figaro,
leaking information about the cost of the production and its scandalous
novelty.49 On the evening of the premiere, the whole area around the Opéra
49 Œuvres, pp. 1455n.1.

had to be cordoned off by troops in preparation for a riot, and the performance
was an enormous success, partly because of this anticipation but also due to
some genuinely explosive material and a sumptuous production for which no
expense had been spared. In total, Tarare was performed thirty-one times
between June 1787 and February 1788 and accounts for no less than a quarter
of the institution’s income in that period.
At first sight, it is surprising that the work was produced at all. During
the first run in 1787, Beaumarchais himself had insisted that performances
cease due to the Opéra’s neglect of the production,50 and his relations with the
institution had been strained ever since. His challenge to the Comédie-
Française over remuneration had not been forgotten either: for contemporaries,
Beaumarchais must have been as redoubtably demanding as his works were
artistically and financially attractive. For that reason, the Opéra’s administra-
tors found themselves in an awkward situation when, in late 1789, a financial
crisis forced them to look to sure-fire financial successes and contemplate
having Tarare put back on.51 Dauvergne wrote to La Ferté on 3 September
1789 suggesting the revision; it is clear from the accounts that September
1789 was a particularly low point in takings, and one hardly repeated thereaf-
ter. So we need to be careful before claiming that the Opéra decided to stage
the work for its “Revolutionary” overtones. On the contrary, thus far, both
royal officials and the internal management committee had instead chosen to
avoid works with explicit overtones of either progressive or reactionary sorts
(in fact, correspondence with Marmontel shows that lines even likely to
be popular with radical patriots were removed from his works in 1789).52
Moreover, Dauvergne’s correspondence relating to the original 1787 version
shows that the work was performed against the wishes of the minister of the
Royal Household.53 It is more likely that the financial imperative was para-
mount, and that it overrode any sense of political caution. On 1 February 1790,
50 Beaumarchais to Breteuil, 4 November 1787 in Beaumarchais et le courier de l’Europe:

Documents inédits ou peu connus, 2 vols., ed. Gunnar and Mavis von Proschwitz (Oxford:
Voltaire Foundation/SVEC, 1990), ii.999–1000.
51 Dauvergne to La Ferté, 3 September 1789. AN: O/1/619 #538.
52 There is also evidence of ministerial involvement in censoring inflammatory
lines of Arvire et Evelina and thereby holding up an urgent production. AN: O/1/619
#420–24.
53 G. Vauthier also claims, in a study of Dauvergne’s correspondence relating to the
original 1787 version: “we know that Tarare, modified according to contemporary ideas,
and in spite of the unfavourable views of the minister of the royal household, was […]
performed.” ‘Tarare et le directeur de l’Opéra’, La Revue du 18e siècle, 4 (1917), 254–61’.

Beaumarchais wrote to Salieri, informing him that a deputation of members of
the Opéra’s committee had approached him with a view to reviving the work,
to be ended by “une fête neuve du Couronnement de Tarare” (their suggestion,
apparently).54 The letter suggests an urgency on the part of the committee,
which he claimed was too impatient to wait for Salieri and wished to offer the
work of setting the Couronnement to a local composer. However, Lemoyne and
Grétry both turned the Couronnement down,55 and it was set by Salieri.
(Beaumarchais had to lobby the Opéra to pay him at the rate of a first reprise
rather than a second, on the grounds that the Couronnement was substantially
new work.)56
Beaumarchais’s letters even suggest that the municipality wished to per-
form Tarare for the National Festival of the Federation on 14 July 1790.57 In
the event, this did not happen, but it shows how the division between the
opera and the festival became ever more permeable, long before the Terror, and
that the Opéra was participating in patriotic civic events as early as the summer
of 1790. Certainly, the municipality was particularly keen for the work to be
performed and asked the librettist to intervene personally with the Opéra to
speed up the production. (Beaumarchais claimed it had been held up by ballet
master Gardel. Dauvergne and La Ferté had frequently claimed in 1789 that
the décors and ballets held up the rest of productions.)58 Although the pre-
miere was delayed until 3 August,59 the new libretto was clearly in place much
earlier, since Beaumarchais’s friend and early biographer Gudin de la Brenellerie
notes that the mayor of Paris, Bailly, removed two lines on 22 June, which read
“Nous avons le meilleur des rois / Jurons de mourir sous ses lois” [We have the
best of kings. Let us swear to die under his orders].60 Bailly, whom posterity
has often criticized for his conservative interventions (it was he, for instance,
54 Beaumarchais to Salieri, 1 February 1790, in Proschwitz, Courier, ii.1077–78.

55 Betzwieser, “Exoticism,” p. 101; ibid., p. 1077.
56 Beaumarchais to Salieri, 15 August 1790, in Œuvres, p. 1454 and Proschwitz,
Courier, ii.1093.
57 Beaumarchais to Salieri, 6 June 1790, in ibid., ii.1083–84.
58 Beaumarchais to Salieri, 6 June 1790 in Proschwitz, Courier, ii.1084.
59 Beaumarchais to Salieri, 8 July 1790, in Œuvres, p. 1453, acknowledges receipt of
the score the previous day, and refers to a postponement of the premiere to the 8th, pre-
sumably of August, although the editor’s note points out that the premiere actually took
place on the 3rd. His letter of 15 August reports on the success of the work, quoting
receipts of 6,540 livres and 5,400 livres for the first two performances, respectively. [The
respective receipts were actually 6342 livres, 18 sous and 5163 livres, 18 sous]
60 For a discussion: Œuvres, p. 1432; Loménie, Beaumarchais, ii.41. The lines may be
found in Œuvres, p. 588.

who forbade performance of Chénier’s Charles IX), here toned down the royal-
ism of the work and, to be slightly anachronistic, moved it to the left. And
Beaumarchais’s letter to his wife of that same day (22 June) claims that an
unspecified individual—probably Bailly himself—suggested performing the
original 1787 version for the 14 July celebrations, given the delays in preparing
the Couronnement (but perhaps also given the political tensions).61
The revision was extremely expensive, and the review in the Moniteur of
7 August also pointed to the loss of costumes occasioned by the fire to the
storeroom of the Menus-Plaisirs in 1788, the year after the work’s first produc-
tion.62 Yet it was not a disappointment; like the 1787 version, the work,
although it produced a storm of controversy, grossed gate receipts of 68,024
livres, 19 sous (or, 2,834 livres, 6 sous per performance). This was not the highest-
earning new work (Louis IX had higher average receipts, as did the ballet Psyché
and Œdipe à Thèbes), but it was a much-needed financial success. Beaumarchais
wrote to Salieri (now in Vienna) how successful the work had been, naming
him a worthy successor to Gluck.63 One oddity is the generic descriptor
“mélodrame” on the title page of the 1790 libretto.64 Is this an Italianism
(melodramma: opera), or does it capitalize on contemporary developments in
French musical theater? This is impossible to determine, but the latter issue
was by no means absent from Tarare, especially given that the “avis de l’éditeur”
develops from Beaumarchais’s 1787 preface to derive, from the principle of the
primacy of speech over music, the ideal of a mixture of sung and declaimed
aspects (opéra-comique): it is claimed that Salieri’s setting is so respectful of the
rhythms of speech that it designates certain sections as “chanté” and others as
“parlé” in the score; and that it should therefore be possible for more modest
productions to stage the work as an opéra-comique. It is all the more interesting
that the Opéra was already experimenting with the production of opéra-comique
itself, an unprecedented step.
self-defining
As well as containing a new Couronnement, the libretto was revised by
Beaumarchais to sharpen up and bring out some of the political implications.
Whatever the political moderation of the institution, the work quickly became
61 Proschwitz, Courier, ii.1085.

62 Moniteur, 219 (7 August 1790), v.328.
63 Beaumarchais to Salieri, 15 August 1790, in Proschwitz, Courier, ii.1092–93.
64 (Genève: Pierre Lallemand/Paris: Chez les marchands de nouveautés, 1790), 49p.
This source subtitles the work “ou le Despotisme.”

the focus of political projections, which induced the librettist, ever the oppor-
tunist, to align the work with his own patriot self-conceptualization. For
instance, in the “avertissement” of 1790, adressed to his “concitoyens,”
Beaumarchais claimed that although merely entertainment in 1790, the work
had been an act of courage in 1787. The same claim is made by many
who wrote works just before 1789 and is a way of attributing the quality of
foresight to them, as well as pointing to the constrictive cultural structures
now absent, and implicitly thereby establishing 1789 as a fault line: “Citizens,”
he exclaimed, “remember the days when your philosophers were persecuted
and forced to veil their ideas with allegorical forms as they laboriously pre-
pared the way for our Revolution.” By this standard, Tarare is “the seed of a
mighty civic oak tree which has grown from the scorched earth of the Opéra.
It took six years to remove the obstacles which stifled it and stopped its
growth.”65 This use of the opera to self-fashion was noted at the time by the
Correspondance littéraire, which pointed perceptively to Beaumarchais’s tempo-
rary exclusion from the Commune as a motivation, an issue to which I shall
return presently.66
In the Couronnement Beaumarchais took the opportunity to make some con-
temporary references but also changed the dramaturgy and symbolism, and he
modified the plot. The published edition of the revised libretto introduces the
subtitle “ou le despotisme,” and it is clear that there is a change of scenography
to introduce an aesthetic close to that of the Revolutionary celebrations such
as the Fête de la Fédération alongside which the work was supposed to be
performed.67 The Fête also featured an altar for the fatherland,68 as does
the first scene of the Couronnement, which also features a crown placed on the
“Book of laws,” symbolizing the two mutually supporting features of the ideal
constitutional monarchy. Even the first duet is sung by Urson and Calpigi
“in the name of the people,” inscribing legitimate representation into the pre-
sentation of musical numbers! Fêtes in general staged entrances by different
political or social groupings, and the scene is split not into a distinction
between dialogue/recitative and aria and ensemble or chorus, but between
65 Beaumarchais, Œuvres, p. 1458.

66 Tourneux, xvi.74–75 [August 1790].
67 On this point, see Betzwieser, “Exoticism,” p. 95.
68 An aspect that was to turn up in several later works, including Le Siège de Thionville,
I.6, which features an autel de la liberté, on which characters ceremonially inscribe the word
“Egalité.”

unison stanzas sung by identifiable categories of citizens.69 The following
chorus, sung by “les ordres de l’Etat,” seems an obvious throwback to the
ceremonial entry of the Estates-General of 1789, in that different orders of
citizens perform as groups: in the succeeding ballet, dancers of different orders
“retain the characteristics of their station [état]” (p. 592). So although this is a
coronation, it is one quite Revolutionary in flavor, almost a microcosm of the
Federation itself. Placing a mini festival where Baroque opera would have
placed a divertissement, Beaumarchais here, as in so many other aspects, is pio-
neering. For instead of a closing celebration that enchants a passive spectator
with visual and musical display, we have a staged act of union between citizens
into which the spectator can project himself: the fiction aligns itself with the
world of the spectator because it mirrors what is going on outside the Opera
house.
The use of Revolutionary maxims on colored banners seen in scene 3 is also
an unusual aesthetic for traditional opera, and although others have shown
that these were far less an object of controversy than the freeing of the slaves in
scene 2,70 they feed into a tableau-style, framed presentation of scenography
that was also prominent in the Festival. Oaths (used here) were also central to
the fête, and in general much of the language is in a declarative, sometimes
performative, mode. There would have been no difficulty in reading this
metatheatrically and in reference to the Revolutionary situation, especially
since the thematics were contemporary also, and the chorus now represents the
“nation,” according to several stage directions. The insertion of the popular
Revolutionary song “Ça ira” also points forward to the practice of the Terror,
when Revolutionary songs were routinely performed at the Opéra.71 So even
this large-scale work was revised to incorporate material hitherto excluded
from the Opéra: festival aesthetics and strophic popular song.
Two major revisions to the thematics are the introduction of material on
divorce (scene 1) and slavery (scene 2), two reforms brought by the Revolution
(although both later, in 1794 and 1792, respectively) and at the forefront of
patriot discourse in 1790. For instance, a long debate on slavery in the chamber
of the National Assembly on 3 March had seen calls for sudden abolition
69 Mona Ozouf, La Fête révolutionnaire, 1789–99 (Paris: Gallimard/folio histoire,

1976), pp. 211, 218–20 (altars), 82–83 (cortege and oath).
70 Betzwieser, “Exoticism,” p. 96.
71 Laura Mason, Singing the French Revolution: Popular Culture and Politics, 1787–1799
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996). On “Ça ira” specifically, see chapter 3, which
shows how this song becomes, in July 1790, an “anthem” “emblematic of Revolutionary
aspirations” (p. 42).

particularly from Barnave, out of concern for safety of colonial leaders; Brissot
and Robespierre were in favor of its maintenance, and this was the view that
prevailed. Divorce was not adopted until 20 September 1792. Here, slavery is
described as consubstantial with “despotism” and laws are seen as its correc-
tive.72 Because it was caught between an enthusiasm for the popular festival
and a more politically moderate need to respect laws, the work sparked a vari-
ety of responses. Indeed, the Couronnement manifests a tension, typical of the
librettist and his class, between a fascination for the people and a fear of anar-
chy.73 The first run (of 15 performances, starting 3 August; a production in
1792 gave a further 9 performances) caused much disturbance, and increased
troops were called in to keep order, according to Loménie, who refers to the
“terrifying din” the performances created.74 An indignant Journal général de
France claimed that Beaumarchais should not have represented a lawgiver,
since the laws were now in the hands of the nation, not of one single authority,
a comment that led to an accusation of royalism from the Chronique de Paris.
However, it was not just patriots who were troubled by the work. Conversely,
royalists were offended by much of the ending. As Betzwieser puts it, the work
fell between two stools.
There was nothing new in the press reading a work politically, but this
work sparked a public debate to an unusual extent, and in a new way. An open
letter to Beaumarchais dated 4 August by a self-styled “patriot” named Rivière
complained at the behavior of factions within the audience,75 suggesting the
beginnings of a process whereby authors were to be held personally responsible
for the reception of their works. Conversely, the Chronique de Paris defended
Beaumarchais’s patriotism and past record, showing that the life and actions of
writers were beginning to be considered germane to the ethical interpretation
of their works:
Gossips were heard to say: “Beaumarchais wants to make his peace
with [the working-class district of] the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.”
We owe it to justice to point out that during the era of despotism,
Caron humiliated the Parlements, ridiculed count Almaviva, satirized
72 “Plus d’infortunés parmi nous. / Le despotisme affreux outrageait la nature; / Nos

lois vengeront cette injure. / Soyez tous heureux, levez-vous” (p. 593).
73 Ecrire la révolution, pp. 164–68.
74 Loménie, Beaumarchais, ii.416.
75 Cited in Loménie, Beaumarchais, ii.417.

magistrates, censors, the director of the book trade and syndics’ office,
and ambassadors.76
Later the same paper complained about the line “Le respect pour les [recte: des]
rois est le premier devoir” [respect for kings is the first duty of a citizen], which
it saw as an attempt to substitue royalism for a love of the constitution and of
liberty, since it had excited applause from the boxes (evidence of continuing
sociopolitical topography of the auditorium); and clarified: “This idea is quite
false. Respect for the king is doubtless one of our duties, but the first of all is
respect for the laws and for the constitution.”77 This criticism was unfair, for
the latter aspect was actually present in the work: the first banner carried in
scene 3 read: “La liberté n’est pas d’abuser de ses droits” [Liberty does not
mean abusing your rights]; and the second “La liberté consiste à n’obéir qu’aux
lois” [Liberty is to obey only the laws].
As the finer points of political legitimacy were debated in the press, a
second performance took place (6 August), and public disorder continued
within the auditorium.78 On 7 August the secretary of the committee, Lassalle,
appealed to Beaumarchais himself for some sort of statement that might
clarify his intentions in public and ease the troubles:
Sir, the committee has asked me to point out to you that the disruption
to yesterday’s performance must be due to a misunderstanding of your
intentions. Sir, could you not have a statement printed in the papers,
which would render them explicit? The committee would be greatly
obliged, as it is not used to such disturbances at the Opéra.79
This request for clarification is valuable evidence that what the Revolutionary
theater could increasingly not withstand was political ambiguity; Beaumarchais’s
response dated 10 August, removed any such.80 In particular, he counter-
argued that this was a plea for authority and subordination (since the line is
spoken by a soldier to his troops), and not for royalism. Clear though this was,
it inevitably stirred up the vexed question of the role of the monarchy. By the
76 CdeP, 217 (5 August 1790), p. 866.

77 CdeP, 218 (6 August 1790), p. 871. CdeP, 238 (26 August 1790), p. 950, followed
up on this: “Quite frequently performances of Tarare have seen differences of opinion
between the stalls and the boxes. One boos while the other applauds, and vice versa.”
78 CdeP, 222 (10 August 1790), p. 886, reporting that the National guard had had to
intervene to restore order at the line referencing respect for Kings.
79 Œuvres, pp. 1668–69.
80 Réponse de l’auteur au comité de l’Opéra (n.p.: n.pub., n.d.), transcribed in Œuvres,
pp. 1172–75.

third performance (10 August), rotten fruit was being thrown from the boxes
onto the young Brahmins as they demanded their freedom, and the altar of the
fatherland was booed.81 Having acceded to the request for clarification of his
“intentions,” Beaumarchais was now personally held responsible, just as he was
struggling to establish his reputation as a patriot. In the summer and autumn
of 1789, a storm of controversy had arisen concerning his suitability for elec-
tion to the Commune. The validity of his election for the district of Sainte-
Marguerite was contested (10 August 1789) because he owned two properties
and was refusing to pay taxes in the other of these (situated in the District des
Blancs-Manteaux), where he had previously lived.82 (His recent move to Sainte-
Marguerite had been the result of a dispute over the elections in the District
des Blancs-Manteaux, in which he had had no part.) 83 He was also accused of
hoarding, as were many of those seen as “aristocrats,” and was eventually
excluded from the Commune for these reasons.84 Eager to reestablish his
credentials, he arranged for patriotic donations of his to be reported in the
press,85 but this was at first widely ridiculed for hypocrisy. In fact, animosity
against him by certain patriots went as far as an anonymous death threat in
September of that year,86 and he subsequently penned a Requête to all members
of the Commune protesting his innocence.87 After an investigation and report,
he was finally re-integrated into the Commune (15 September),88 yet through-
out September there were indignant responses to this decision, including by
Marat.89
Beaumarchais’s Requête had pointed to the original Tarare of 1787 as evi-
dence for his proto-revolutionary stance, quoting liberally from the libretto
and claiming that certain passages had provided what he called “les Elémens
de la Déclaration des droits de l’Homme” (p. 20). According to his account,
Tarare had provided a terrible lesson to any despot who wished to usurp power
81 CdeP, 223 (11 August 1790), p. 861.

82 Lacroix, I.i.97 (election), 146, 202–3 (contestation), 203–4 (hoarding). The
election had taken place on 3 August. See also RdP, vi.8–9, xii.20.
83 Lacroix, I.i.211–12. Lacroix also cites the Procès-verbal de l’Assemblée des Electeurs,
ii.189, and gives further documentary references for this dispute, which need not concern
us here.
84 Lacroix, I.i.271, 279–80, 304, 352, 357, 379.
85 JdP, 28 July 1789.
86 Lacroix, I.i.357.
87 Requête à MM. les représentants de la Commune de Paris, dated 2 [ps. 5–6] September
(Paris: Maradan, 1789).
88 Lacroix, I.i.527, 530–1, 549, 577, 581, 590.
89 Lacroix, I.ii.77, 105–7.

by force, given a prophetic tableau of a monarch loved by a free people, and
satirized the vanity of birth (pp. 20–22). All of this showed, he claimed, that
he was patriotic even before 1789, and that he remained unchanged. So when
Tarare reappeared, it was bound to invite similar scrutiny.
revision in 1792
By 10 May 1792, a second reprise was produced and was performed a further
nine times, and again Beaumarchais was the subject of political projections. As
far as can be determined, the work was retained intact from 1790: there are no
new published sources, and the press makes no reference to revisions.90 And
later, Beaumarchais wrote to Salieri claiming that the artists of the Opéra
themselves were agitating, several singers wishing to cut scenes from the
Couronnement; Beaumarchais refused to do so, and for this he requested Salieri’s
written support, as composer, following new legislation on authors’ rights.91 It
is clear that the production had been substantially refreshed, with new staging
and ballets, but it appears that the libretto and score were unchanged save for
the ballet music, judging from the Chronique de Paris:
The intelligence and care with which the new production of Tarare has
been mounted is a tribute to the new owners [sic] of the Opéra, Cellerier
and Francœur. The costumes are almost all brand new, the ballets are
all new, and those in the third act were particularly successful. The
prodigious talent of [ballet master] Gardel was admired. The melodies
were taken from Méhul’s Adrien and are delightful, making many wish
that this work would be performed in its entirety.
Further evidence is given by the columnist’s deploring that certain contentious
aspects from 1790 remained unchanged, and again the librettist continued to
be personally held to account:
We were disappointed to see that Beaumarchais, a self-styled patriot,
left the line “And the respect for kings is the first duty.” We were even
sorrier to hear the characters carrying the altar of liberty declare
“Majesty, we place Liberty in the hands of your supreme goodness.” We
are quite sure that Beaumarchais forgot these lines when re-reading his
libretto. But he must have realized how inappropriate they are from the
90 Loménie also suggests this: Beaumarchais, ii.417.

91 Beaumarchais to Salieri, 24 August 1790, in Proschwitz, Courier, ii.1093.

abundant applause they received from the immoral men and impure
women in the audience who hate the Revolution. . . . He is not one of
those who use theater as a sign of rebellion, and we were pleased to learn
that he was willing to make changes to his work: patriots and friends of
peace will be grateful to him.92
It is unknown whether these changes were ever made. However, throughout
April 1792 Beaumarchais was again a focus for patriot attacks: this time they
came from Louis-Pierre Manuel, a procurator of the Commune (better known
as author of La Police de Paris dévoilée), who had publicly accused a series of
artisans for not paying their droit de patente, which included Beaumarchais as a
printer.93 And in summer 1792, Beaumarchais was further embroiled in a
dispute with Laurent Lecointre, one of the representatives of the Convention,
who on 28 November 1792 publicly denounced him as a suspect.94 And
Beaumarchais had used the Chronique de Paris to print his own defense to this
and other attacks, by styling himself “l’auteur de Tarare.”95 Beaumarchais’s
particular strategies of self-fashioning, then, were bound up with the reception
of Tarare, following a growing trend toward the breakdown of the insulation
of the fictional work from the outside world, by which I mean both the politi-
cal and ethical responsibility of the playwright, and the metaliterary or
referential ways in which the work is discussed. Since the Le Chapelier bill
would explicitly discuss the ethical responsibility of the playwright (art. 6),
this debate foreshadows that conflation in important ways. It also shows to
what extent the intentionality of works is paramount in their reception, and
the uncomfortable position in which it places the institution, judged as it
is alongside the author for its decision to adopt the work. If Tarare was prob-
lematic for essentially political reasons, the remainder of our corpus for this
chapter made comic theater itself a subject of contestation.
92 CdeP, 1792/134 (12 May 1792), pp. 530–31.

93 CdeP, 6, 10, 11, 21 April 1792, pp. 388, 404, 407–8, 446–47. A droit de patente was
“a preventive tax upon industry,” which “every artisan must deposit before he can exercise
a trade.” Edinburgh Review, 32 (1819), 386.
94 For more on Beaumarchais’s life and “self-fashioning” during the Revolution, see
Maurice Lever, Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, III: Dans la tourmente 1785–1799
(Paris: Fayard, 2004); and on the so-called affaire des fusils de Hollande, chapter 8,
“Errances,” which discusses Lecointre’s accusation.
95 CdeP, 1792/136 (14 May 1792), p. 538; 1792/137 (15 May 1792), pp. 542–43;
1792/351 (18 December 1792), pp. 1411–12.

3. The Influence of opéra-comique
Although the only work performed in this period to contain spoken dialogue
was Le Mariage de Figaro, the aesthetics of opéra-comique permeated the Opéra
in other ways, particularly via the light and rather unpretentious works the
committee programmed in 1789–91: Les Prétendus, Les Pommiers et le moulin,
Corisandre, Le Portrait. The implications are numerous. First, the use of strophic
song in Tarare has already been noted, and these works continue and extend
that trend. Also at stake were the tone and dignity of the institution and its
place in the hierarchy, since whatever the genuine social composition of audi-
ences of the Comédie-Italienne and the Boulevard theaters, the productions of
these theaters retained a link with popular and urban street culture in their
incorporation of popular vocal forms and particularly of vaudevilles. Equally
noteworthy features of this production are the return of esprit as an artistic
ideal,96 easier and cheaper productions for the institution, and the adoption
of the criterion of variety (as with de Vismes). Unlike Aspasie and Tarare,
these works are purely comic, and their plots are generally so slight that they
would not have been seen on the stage of the Opéra before 1789. These
simplistic “bagatelles” (Guiet) performed by the Opéra were an alternative to
the implausible Italian-style imbroglios that had dominated the comic side
of the repertory under de Vismes and may be seen as an attempt to inject
variety into the programming. Little evidence survives to suggest what the
motivation may have been: it is possible that the diversification of repertory
was an attempt to capture the interest of the influx of provincial visitors
to Paris in the early Revolution.97 I am not going to consider Jadin and
Saulnier’s L’Heureux Stratagème, which was a clear failure with only three
performances and universally mediocre press notices,98 but shall discuss the
others in turn.
96 Mark Darlow, “Le vaudeville à la Comédie-Italienne.”

97 I am indebted, for this point, to the anonymous reviewer of the present project.
98 The Almanach général des spectacles de Paris et de la province for 1792 refused (p. 124)
to name the librettist “parce qu’il n’a pas fait un bon ouvrage”; the libretto was not even
printed, which is unusual for the period at the Opéra, although Po holds a modern manu-
script copy of the libretto in the hand of former librarian of the Opéra, Charles Nuitter:
Liv.M.47.

boulevard recycling: les prétendus
Les Prétendus is Lemoyne’s longest-lived work and is discussed favourably by
Berlioz: unexpectedly, given its slightness.99 Yet the Mercure pointed to an
unequivocal success, which it explained by the flexibility of the composer’s
musical talents and the work’s “pretty” libretto. Indeed, from the number of
performances alone (63) it is the most successful comic work of the decade at
the Opéra. All the more striking, then, that it was such a slight, one-act work
and was considered by at least one contemporary as having been borrowed
from the plot of a Boulevard play, resonating with intertexts going back as far
as Destouches’s La Fausse Agnès (1753).100 This was even admitted by the libret-
tist, Marc-Antoine-Jacques Rochon de Chabannes in his “avertissement” to the
1789 libretto.
Born in 1730, Rochon de Chabannes had enjoyed a long career in the the-
ater, writing both for the Comédie-Française and the Comédie-Italienne; he
also had performed several further works in private theaters, such as Le Bon
Seigneur, performed by the masonic Loge de l’amitié in 1780, and Hylas et Sylvie
at the Duchesse de Mazarin’s theater in Chilly. Many of his works were transla-
tions and/or adaptations, often from English originals. This was not his first
work for the Opéra, for he was also librettist of Alcindor, set by Dezède in 1787,
and Floquet had set his Le Seigneur bienfaisant in 1780. The Correspondance
littéraire claimed that he had broken new ground in comic writing for the
Opéra by avoiding excessively lengthy recitative and cutting it with short,
varied ensembles, a feature that Lemoyne’s score lived up to.101 Many of the
arias are strophic, but the recitative is in alexandrines. The one-act work has a
simple, unified domestic setting, as in mature opéra-comique (the sole scenic
direction reads: “Le théâtre représente un salon.”) Also typical of opéra-comique
is the way in which the plot is centered on a simple opposition whose expression
permeates the whole fabric of the music: Julie loves Valère but her parents each
have different suitors in mind for her and disagree with one another: her father
has chosen a provincial nobleman; her mother has chosen an urban financier.
Her plan is to meet each and to be so disagreeable that they are each discour-
aged, leaving her free to marry Valère, a plot that is successful. So a great
deal of the score comprises duets with echoing or opposing voices (for instance,
99 Julian Rushton, “An early essay in “Leitmotiv”: J. B. Lemoyne’s Electre,” Music and
Letters, 52.4 (1972), 387–401 (p. 387). Berlioz, “Les soirées de l’Orchestre,” Douzième soirée
(“Le suicide par enthousiasme”).
100 Tourneux, xv.481 [July 1789].

Julie and Valère (sc.1): “Trois époux pour un! Mes parents sont charmants!”
[Three husbands not one! A strange idea by my parents!]. Scene 2 sees a comic
dispute between the parents with similar vocal opposition, scene 3 the comic
rivalry of the two suitors; scenes 6 and 8 an opposition between Julie and the
two suitors themselves, respectively named Baron de la Dandinière and
Mondor.
This is a safe, unthreatening situation, where (as is classic in comedy) the
solid good sense of the young is opposed to the monomania of the old; the
detached and knowing servant supports the young protagonist; the tone is
consistently light. Also typical of later opéra-comique is the use of galant rhetoric
in comic mode, with its reference to gloire, victoire, obstacles, and so on. Charming
but predictable, this is a light comedy that makes much of the opposition
between town and country and bases its humor on the moraliste observation of
character. It must surely have been read, on the stage of the Opéra on a second
degree, as an amusing piece of entertainment: it was performed in double-bills
with a variety of works, but particularly with ballets and other comedies.
a rustic opéra-comique : les pommiers

et le moulin
Premiered on 20 January 1790 (the libretto wrongly states 22), Les Pommiers
et le moulin had a rustic setting typical of mid-century opéra-comique with
its rather cardboard peasant characters, but it was clearly unusual for the
Opéra.102 A slight work, in terms of plot and length, it was also only ever
performed in double bills, with either tragédies lyriques from the 1770s and
1780s or the more substantial novelties, such as Démophon, Phèdre, and Nephté.
(Les Prétendus, with which it was paired on 9, 14, and 28 February and
20 March 1790, is an exception.) The work is filled with features characteristic
of opéra-comique: in terms of subject-matter one might note the village setting,
and peasant characters with gender-inflected pairs of names (here, Lucas,
Lucette). In terms of form, the work employs a variety of meters in strophic
forms, rhymes carried through entire exchanges (such as the trio of scene 1
between Lucas, Lucette, and Rosette with its lines ending with -ette), the
102 The Mercure gave the following plot summary: “Two peasants live side-by-side:
one has a windmill, the other an orchard. The miller hopes for windy weather, but the
other wants the opposite. Each bothers the other, both in jest and seriously. […] But since
their mood is as changeable as the weather, they end up in agreement, and the mariage
[of their children] can take place.”

burlesquing of serious emotions such as fear in the safe context of rustic life
and love, or the anger of Thomas when the wind stops blowing, and finally
“intradiegetic” and strophic songs which consider a situation from multiple
points of view (such as “Souvent nos sages parents” [Often, our wise parents]
in scene 1). This form allows for a light-hearted moraliste approach to simple
character traits, the construction of a beneficent nature and a chronotope akin
to the utopia—that is, an unchanging and timeless rustic present that sees
characters in harmony with each other and their surroundings, filling their
days with an enjoyable and self-sufficient labor, until some chance event dis-
rupts that harmony (for instance, Mathurin’s song in scene 2 “A l’exemple de
ton père” [Following your father’s example]), only to stage the comic recon-
ciliation of the characters in the final scene(s). The musical form is similar to
that of mid-century opéra-comique, featuring binary structures (in ensembles
and in staging); the citation of tropes of rustic literature (such as the line
“Colin disoit à sa bergère” [Colin said to Colette] (libretto, p. 7), one of the
topoi of the genre throughout the century); and the use of rustic language,
whether oaths (morbleu!) or terms of endearment (compère). Eavesdropping also
allows for a supplementary “framing” effect with certain arias, and the work
also uses a finale in opéra-comique style, where each stanza is sung by a different
character. Much of the freshness and grace of Favart is present here and argu-
ably allows for a detached appreciation of form (esprit is always the watchword)
and a somewhat condescending sort of attendrissement for the “simple” charac-
ters. No wonder reviewers are quite condescendingly approving of this “little”
work: the Chronique de Paris, for instance, called it a “jolie bagatelle.”103 The
review in the Moniteur pointed to the work as an example of what we might
call a return to the “esthétique du petit”: an unpretentious and attractive rococo
depiction of a rustic landscape with simple action to match. No genre should
be banned, it claimed, provided it is artfully done.104 It said the Opéra was to
be applauded for such variety in its offerings and pointed to the “pressoir”
previously seen on stage [work unidentified] as a further example. Variety,
rather than genre hierarchy, becomes the criterion, even before Le Chapelier’s
deregulation. Accordingly, journalists make quite some effort to approach this
work and others on their own terms, accepting the unusually flimsy plot on
condition that it provide music of sufficient variety and piquancy (this one,
claimed the Moniteur, fell short, but in mitigation the columnist accepted that
103 CdP, 21 (21 January 1790), p. 83.

104 Moniteur, 22 (22 January 1790), iii.178. Nathalie Rizzoni, Charles-François Pannard
et l’esthétique du “petit” (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2000), chapter 5.

it was Forgeot’s first work for the national stage: he had previously written for
the Comédie-Italienne).105 Quite different is the role of Lemoyne, composer of
Phèdre, Nephté, and other works for the Opéra, but here the music was judged
positively as being graceful and colorful, and expression appropriate to the
characters, although the work was so different from his previous commis-
sions.106 The only false step was the final ballet, insufficiently integrated into
the action and featuring Béarnais costumes, for reasons that remain unclear
(sources for the ballet of Les Pommiers et le moulin have not survived).107
The strophic divertissement contains a classic celebration of rustic simplicity:
“Vive la gaieté des champs! / Elle est naïve, elle est bonne” [Rustic gaiety is
wonderful: naive and full of goodness] begins the refrain; and a no less classic,
but perhaps unusually pointed, critique of urban sophistication (“On danse
bien à la ville, / Mais souvent c’est sans plaisir” [City-dwellers may well
dance, but with little pleasure]). This dichotomy is then applied to happiness
(sterile, because based upon financial exchange in an urban context; transpar-
ent human relations are to be found in the country) and to marriage (which
is characterized by convenience in town but genuine in the country). There is
little literary originality here, and the work is a decidedly odd choice for
the stage of the erstwhile Académie Royale de Musique; one wonders whether
an attempt is being made to recreate some of the cultural atmosphere of
Rousseau’s Devin du village, which made similar cultural points and which
continued to be performed at the Opéra until 1791, often in a double bill with
Les Prétendus.
le portrait, ou la divinité du sauvage

If we turn to a third work, journalistic good will seems to have evaporated.
The Mercure of 20 November 1790 (pp. 110–11) pointed to the disorder of the
Opéra and its difficult repertory situation before discussing Le Portrait as a
105 Nicolas-Julien Forgeot (1758–98) had written a total of eight works prior to 1790,
according to Brenner, Bibliographical list, p. 68: five for the Comédie-Italienne, three for
the Comédie-Française. Authorship of a ninth, Le Mensonge officieux, is disputed.
106 The Correspondance littéraire disagreed: “the words are … arranged quite well for
music but they did not inspire much melody in Lemoyne, nor is there much evidence of
either the lighthearted gaiety or the witty piquancy which alone can make a work like this
worthwhile.” Tourneux, xv.586 [February 1790].
107 The libretto, however, confirms that this was the intention: p. iv lists, under
“Personnages dansants,” twenty-three members of the ballet corps under the heading
“Béarnois.”

rather lightweight work (the implication is clearly that this is merely the least
unworthy of discussion), concluding: “written without much fuss, it was
received accordingly.” The Correspondance littéraire was ruder still, describing
Le Portrait as a “ridiculous work,” and speaking of the “silly plot” and the
“platitude of style and versification.” Two arias were singled out as acceptable
(it is not specified which), but the rest was deemed to be “a mix of clichés
and triviality.”108 It ran for only seven performances, compared with the
twenty-three of Les Pommiers, even though it had been subjected to cuts and
changes between first and second performances,109 and notices of the second
performance were positive.
Why did this rather simple work fail where the other was tolerated? This
one was more substantial than Les Pommiers; not only did it have two acts but
it also used extended choruses and dances rather than the cast of five singing
characters to which Les Pommiers was limited.110 Possibly Le Portrait was too
large to allow the rather condescending and ultimately rather frivolous atten-
tion of the previous work, yet too flimsy to be taken seriously against the
habitual criteria of the Opéra. Moreover, in the meantime, the revised Tarare
had been mounted (in August), and the directorship of the institution had
passsed from the crown to the municipality: it may be that critics felt more
comfortable criticizing the works of the institution in this new managerial
context.
The scene is set in Le Havre. Dorval has been absent at sea, and Julie anx-
iously awaits his return, consoled by Finette (act I, scene 1); a vessel arrives
from America (2–4) bearing Freport, who disembarks (5–6) with a Savage he
has brought back from America, who is fascinated with a portrait of what he
takes to be a divine being (it is of an unspecified female). In act II, all but
Julie are amused by the Savage (she is more concerned by Dorval’s continu-
ing absence), who turns out to recognize Julie by name (1–2). Dorval then
arrives and is identified by the Savage as his master (3), which explains how he
recognized Julie: it was her portrait, owned by Dorval, which he has been
admiring (4). The work ends with a celebration of female charm, then a ballet
and terminal Vaudeville. Musically less elaborate than it appears (II.3 contains
a sextet, but the six voices frequently sing together, as do the three voices of the
trio in II.2), and insubstantial as to plot, this rather flimsy work has a few areas
108 Tourneux, xvi.110–111 [November 1790].

109 CdP, 297 (24 October 1790), p. 1186 and 299 (26 October 1790), pp. 1194–95.
110 For instance, it had a chorus of twenty-two ladies and twenty-six men, and was
divided into two sides of the stage. The ballets had nine sailors, ten peasants, and fourteen
rustic characters [villageois(es)].

of interest. Most of its recitative is in alexandrines, and the tone is therefore
more polished than that of the previous work and more like Les Prétendus: in
fact, both are reminiscent of the weightier opéras-comiques performed at the
Comédie-Italienne in the 1780s, which also incorporate galanterie and stylistic
polish with a nonetheless rather thin comic plot for two acts. There is evidence
in the manuscript score that management decided to bill the work as being in
one act after the premiere, judging from corrections to title pages of each of the
two volumes and to certain of the scenes (II.2 is renamed scene 8, for instance:
ii.35), although this has not been corroborated.
At the same time, the arias remain stylistically simple and often (p. 5) feel
like opéra-comique: we can speculate that they must have felt excessively light-
weight to the Opéra’s audience. Scoring and texture are generally thin; ensem-
ble voices sing in unison or parallel. Some of the arias have some rather obvious
stylistic oppositions, which again feel rather obvious in this context: consider
the trio of II.1, which marks Julie’s concern at Dorval’s continued absence in
the following way:
FREPORT et VALERE
Eh oui, eh oui, c’est là tout son délire.
On peut en rire, on peut en rire,
Rien de plus galant que cela.
JULIE, encore effraiée.
Eh mais, eh mais, laissons là son délire.
En peut-on rire, en peut-on rire?
Rien n’est moins plaisant que cela. (pp. 20–21)
[FREPORT and VALERE: Oh yes, oh yes, she is obsessed / Let us laugh, let
us laugh / Nothing is more charming. JULIE: Oh no, oh no, I’m not obsessed /
You can laugh, you can laugh / But it is no joke.]
Much of the aria writing contains similar rather awkward oppositions:
another example would be the opening duo between Julie and Finette. A second
area of interest is the presentation of savagery. The Savage disembarks in I.7,
and his presence instrumentalizes some rather obvious tropes:
C’est un homme ignorant, mais non pas sans génie.
Celui de nous qui s’en est emparé,
En le civilisant, ne l’a point éclairé.
Tous nos arts sont pour lui prestiges & magie.
Le bruit de nos canons est la voix de nos Dieux,
Et nos boulets en feu sont la foudre à ses yeux.
Une montre, son bruit, sa marche, tout l’étonne,

Il la suit, il l’écoute, avec elle il raisonne,
Et ses discours naifs décelent sa raison. (I.7, p. 14)
[He is an ignorant man, but not without genius. The person who brought him,
while bringing him civilization has not enlightened him. All of our artifice is
like magic to him. The sound of cannons he takes to be the voice of the gods,
and our cannonballs he confuses with lightning. The sound of a watch and
its machinery astonish him. Listening to it, talking to it, his naive words
reveal him.]
This “innocence” and “candor” (I.7, p. 17) allow him to be enchanted by a
portrait of a woman (= “sa divinité”): “Mais ce qui trouble plus son ame, / C’est
un petit portrait de femme, / Entre les mains de son patron” [What troubles
him is a small woman’s portrait owned by his master], I.7, p. 15. It is this
which introduces one of the most noteworthy aspects of the work: its celebra-
tion of galanterie. Indeed Dorval disabuses the Savage about Julie’s divinity in
II.x, which scene could be considered as an interesting “de-catachrization”: a
re-use of standard metaphorical terms in a new concrete context, which draws
attention to them in an unusual way:
Je t’ai trompé par ma tendresse,
J’ai ri de ta simplicité.
Je n’adorois qu’une maîtresse,
Et non une divinité.
Ce n’est point l’art de la magie,
Le pouvoir merveilleux des Dieux;
Ce n’est que l’humaine industrie
Qui la présentoit à tes yeux (II.3, p. 33)
[My tenderness misled you; your simplicity amused me. The object of my
affections was a mistress, not a divinity. It is not magic or divine power, but a
man-made [portrait] which presented her to you.]
It is interesting that in the context of the 1790s, and following Aspasie, the
work could put so much time into the dissection of a trope normally taken
for granted. The terminal chorus (pp. 38–40) not only points to the drama-
turgy of opéra-comique but also consists of the same metaliterary celebration
of “l’empire des belles” that we find in that other work (“Reines par tout,
ce n’est qu’en France / Qu’elles sont des Divinités” [While these beauties reign
everywhere, only in France are they divine]): in this way, the whole work func-
tions as a kind of extended metaphor and attempts to imitate the “compli-
ment” style of the ending of opéra-comique; however, different from that genre,
the individuals remain in character, rather than adressing the audience, as they

would in a compliment. There are some interesting experiments here, but Le
Portrait, particularly performed in double bill, must have felt, even more than
works previously discussed, like an accompaniment to the “other” work.
rustic chivalry: corisandre, ou les fous

par enchantement
More interesting than these rather unpretentious pieces is Corisandre, which
capitalizes on contemporary trends such as the chivalric setting—medievalism
had been popularized in the 1780s in comic theater particularly.111 The work
also borrows from seventeenth-century antecedents: in a Quixotic twist,
Florestan when mad thinks he is Orestes (from Racine’s Andromaque), whereas
Tirconel thinks he is a shepherd from Honoré d’Urfé’s pastoral novel of
1607–28, L’Astrée. This makes for a certain generic and thematic originality, as
demonstrated in a letter to Langlé concerning a possible revival in 1807.112
René Guiet, by contrast, sees Corisandre as the last gasp of the “old recipe” that
uses a chivalric setting and magic treatment to show love triumphant at
the end.113
Corisandre was inspired by the expunged fourteenth canto of Voltaire’s
La Pucelle d’Orléans, which had first figured in the 1756 London pirated edition
of the work and appeared in all subsequent pirated versions as well as the 1785
Edition de Kehl.114 The basic plot was retained intact: that “L’Amour voulut
que tout roi, chevalier, / Homme d’église, et jeune bachelier, / Dès qu’il verrait
cette belle imbécille [Corisandre], / Perdît le sens à se faire lier.” [Love intended
that king, cavalier, cleric, or simple soldier, once he saw this mad beauty, would
completely lose his reason.] (vv. 30–33); only compassion from Corisandre
would release the hapless victim from the state of imbecility, and much of the
humor both of the original and the opera was derived from a description of
the particular madness that befell individual victims (original, vv. 48–65).
111 Ms. copy of libretto held at AN: AJ/13/55: this is a copy almost identical (only
two variant words) to the published libretto, and is probably a fair copy made for produc-
tion. On medievalism, see Peter Damian-Grint (ed.), Medievalism and “Manière gothique” in
Enlightenment France (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2006).
112 AN: AJ/13/55.Corisandre (Le Directeur à Mlle Langlé, Ce 2 Xbre 1807.) Langlé
had died on 20 September 1807; this letter is presumably to a descendant.
113 Livret, pp. 106–7.
114 Voltaire, La Pucelle d’Orléans, ed. Jeroom Vercruysse (Geneva: Institut et Musée
Voltaire, 1970) [= Complete Works of Voltaire, vol. 7]. On the canto, see pp. 21–22, and for
the text, 601–14.

Characters borrowed from Voltaire are Lourdis, Chandos, Tirconel, Agnès,
Dorothée, and Corisandre. Others are Italian: Florestan, Roger, Dulcindor,
Agramant, Largail. (OCV, vii. 227) There was some similarity of characters
with the subject of Amadis of Gaul—less through the original chivalric novel
of Rodríguez de Montalvo, which was available to French readers through
the translation by Des Essarts (1540), than through four celebrated operatic
versions: by Lully (1684), Handel (1715), Jean-Baptiste de la Borde (1771–72)
and J. C. Bach (1779). In the original, the English Chandos and the Irish
Tirconel force their way into the castle and are similarly enslaved. They are
saved when a muletier dresses as a monk (vv. 293–97), then Chandos, Tirconel,
and the other characters are released from the spell. The opera retains this
basic scheme, albeit without the presence of Joan of Arc and replacing the
muletier with a noble character; it spends much of its material on comic depic-
tions of mad scenes, interspersed with traditional material on galant concep-
tions of love, and sensual charm. The number of victims is increased, so that we
see two French cavaliers (Florestan and Roger) and two English (the Chandos
and Tirconel of the original); the character of Agramant, a sorcerer whose
ward Corisandre is added, as well as several secondary characters: an Ecuyer for
Florestan, four ladies in waiting. Also, there is a large cast of secondary fools,
magicians, sylphs, children, and hobgoblins. The work was obviously successful
(25 performances in total, grossing 60,000 livres) and probably because of the
rather spectacular visual dimension, since the action is lightweight and at times
rather poorly integrated. The Mercure of 19 March recorded that “the cavaliers’
mad scenes caused much amusement and made this opera a success” (p. 112).
It also singled out several musical numbers as being important.
The château is self-consciously medieval, as is the chivalric setting; the
recitative is in verse. There was some potential for sexual innuendo: as the
Duchesne almanac for 1792 pointed out, the subject matter seemed likely to
offend, but the wit and delicacy of the treatment had saved the work from
becoming vulgar or shocking.115 Paule Druilhe describes Corisandre as demon-
strating “the composer’s solid technique and characteristic style: highly colored
orchestration, and an alternation of action scenes with poetic reflections.”116
Also noteworthy is the opera’s play with some of the tropes of the Baroque
tradition, and what it noteworthy is how these staples of the serious opera
are being burlesqued on the national stage. In particular, the linking of
danger, magic, and beauty (including the references to Corisandre’s dangerous
115 SdP-Duchesne, 1792, p. 236.

116 NGDO, ii.1098.

charm; I.1, I.4) immediately suggested the sorceress Armida, a cornerstone of
the operatic tradition, especially since Dulcindor’s solo aria in I.3 expresses the
(comic) hubris of wishing to “triumph” over her:
Aux combats que Mars vous prépare,
Volez, guerriers, remplis d’ardeur;
J’aime ceux où Vénus répare
Les maux que fait votre valeur.
De la plus charmante ennemie
Je vais triompher en ce jour:
Bientôt, Corisandre, à son tour,
D’amour connoîtra la folie. (L, p. 9)
[Go forth ardently, noble warriors, to the martial battle. I prefer the combats
of Venus which repair the damage done by your valor. This very day I shall
triumph over the most charming enemy. Corisandre shall soon learn the mad
pleasures of love.]
Similarly, I.2 has much material on chivalric glory, leading to a quintet
that also foregrounds what I am calling the comic hubris of the cavaliers.
The score is noteworthy for coloring, particularly an alternation between
light and dark, between comic (action) scenes and lyric emotion. Hence the
mysterious and rather lugubrious opening (“une obscurité redoutable” sings
the opening chorus) gives way to a scene of character comedy (2), and then to
lyricism (3–4), before the comic heroism returns (5). Also noteworthy is the
music of enchantment at the end of act I, particularly accompanying the
appearance of Corisandre in scene 7, whose gaze “causes a marked change in
their bearing.” The madness this scene introduces is then explored in act II.
Act II, scene 4 features the madness of Dulcindor and seems to be an expan-
sion of a short passage in the original: “Bertaut se croit du sexe féminin, / Porte
une jupe, et se meurt de tristesse / Qu’à la trousser nul amant ne s’empresse”
[Bertaut thinks he is a woman, wearing a skirt which, to his chagrin no
lover wishes to remove] (vv. 52–54). Yet just at that moment Lourdis and
Corisandre spot one another, and she seems intrigued at first. The role of
Lourdis was sung by Lays, and so the next scene between them (III.2) is almost
certainly one of the movements that the Mercure singled out for praise, since
it mentions a duo performed by Lays. As noted before, II.5 features a mad
scene for Florestan, who believes he is Orestes and has lost his friend Pylades
(there are also references to Iphigénie): the prevailing tone of this scene is
comic horror and bathos. In II.6 Chandos thinks he has become a Troubadour.
(The dramatis personae of the first page of the libretto suggests a movement
when Roger thinks he is a savage, but this does not seem to materialize.)

The various mad scenes were also used to maximize the visual impact of
the production. Act II, scene 7, for instance, calls for dragons and crocodiles
breathing fire, thunder, and goblins (p. 41). The supernatural element contin-
ues: in the final scene, Agramont talks of sending the Chevaliers to the
underworld; the whole of act II is set inside the sorcerer Agramant’s palace,
whereas act III is set in an underground cave containing the tomb of Merlin
the wizard. Of this act, the libretto specifies that “The grotto is lit by ancient
lamps, in whose glow one can make out various magical instruments.” In this
work, the character of Merlin is constructed as a sort of oracle (p. 44); his scene
includes a magic “evocation” and an ambiguous prognostication, which the
chorus misinterprets. Act II, scene 3 is the first danced scene and features
Agramant’s spirits and sylphs, who bring diamonds and garlands to Corisandre,
whereupon the Coryphées explain to Corisandre how to recognize love (in a
passage that will remind modern readers of Turandot). These are not the only
spectacular scenes that derive their impact from magical and supernatural
elements.
Alongside the supernatural, however, is a series of more traditional dra-
matic elements. In a duo between Agramant and his confidant Largail at
the beginning of act II, we learn that Agramant’s power depends upon
Corisandre’s remaining untouched by any suitors, and that he loves her. The
basic comic plot of the older man loving his ward without that love being
returned has been adopted wholesale here and added to the plot of La Pucelle
(where it did not originally figure). Agramant has some genuinely touching
arias, such as the cantabile of II.2: “L’amour est un doux sentiment” [Love is a
gentle feeling]. Moreover the act ends with an homage to love and ties back up
with the galant tradition which we have seen in earlier works (III.6–8). All of
this means that the work is a curious synthesis of material from different tradi-
tions: the spectacular visual display of the Baroque, the treatment of themes
such as madness and charm with its synthesis of galant and magical elements,
the at times light tone of opéra-comique, plus the pastiche and sometimes
burlesquing of more elevated material. Also, the structure is in three acts,
which allows a dramatic expansiveness not yet seen in the other purely
comic treatments. It is by far the most interesting experiment in comic mate-
rial during the Revolutionary period, but it does not seem to have been
followed up in any sustained way.
parody at the opéra: le mariage de figaro

By the end of 1792, comic material had all but died out at the Opéra, as
Chapter 5 has shown. One exception must be made in 1793 for the last

substantial comedy, which ironically is also the most significant operatic work
of our period. It was performed, however, in such revised form and the audi-
ence was so unable to appreciate the genius of the work that as a production it
was a relative failure: this is the adaptation of Mozart’s Nozze di Figaro.
The 1793 production of Figaro has been widely discussed already.117 It was
Francœur’s idea to adapt Mozart’s opera by translating the arias and ensemble
passages into French and replacing the recitatives with Beaumarchais’s original
dialogue: oddly, all specialists to have considered the adaptation fail to point
out that this was standard parody procedure, employed by the Comédie-
Italienne throughout the 1770s and 1780s to import Italian opera to the French
stage. Nor do they ask the key question which this raises: why do so in this
case? The Comédie-Italienne was obliged to use a mixture of parody and dia-
logue because Italian opera and through-composed music drama were both
outlawed by their bail: neither proscription was weighing on the Opéra in
1793. Presumably the difficulties of translating recitative must be part of the
decision, as must the notoriety of the original Beaumarchais plays. But
Beaumarchais himself, according to Gunnar von Proschwitz, was not involved
with the first stage of the project (although he was heavily involved later): for
the first performance which took place on 20 March (the work was then in five
acts), Notaris alone was responsible for the libretto.118 Regrettably we have no
information about this libretto, which is lost. But we do know that Beaumarchais
had been away from Paris until 26 February, by which time rehearsals were
well under way: inconclusive anecdotal evidence suggests that forty rehearsals
of this work took place,119 but this is a staggering number and such a report
must be treated with a degree of caution.
The first performance was a relative failure. The press remarked (generally
positively) on the novelty of performing in mixed genre (that is, with spoken
dialogue) and approved of the parody technique and the production’s fidelity
117 Léon Guichard, “Beaumarchais et Mozart: Notes sur la première représentation à

Paris des ‘Noces de Figaro,’” RHLF, 1955, 341–43; Sherwood Dudley, “Les premières ver-
sions françaises du Mariage de Figaro de Mozart,” Revue de Musicologie, 69 (1983), 55–83;
Jacques Proust, “Beaumarchais et Mozart: une mise au point,” Studi francesi, 16.1 (January–
April 1972), 34–45; J. Roulleaux-Dugage, “Un livret d’opéra inédit de Beaumarchais,” Les
Nouvelles littéraires (3 November 1966), p. 12.
118 Gunnar von Proschwitz, “Beaumarchais, Salieri et Mozart,” in Mozart: les Chemins
de l’Europe, actes du colloque de Strasbourg, 1991, dir. Brigitte Massin (Strasbourg:
Editions du Conseil de l’Europe, 1997), pp. 359–64 (p. 361).
119 Dudley, p. 61n20, citing Jullien, Paris dilettante au commencement du siècle (Paris:
Firmin-Didot, 1884), 92–93.

to Beaumarchais’s original. Almost all complained of the excessive length of the
libretto, however; adding music to so much spoken dialogue slowed down
the action, particularly given the fullness of Beaumarchais’s original plot (both
the Affiches and the Moniteur remarked on the need for cuts).120 The Journal de
Paris commented: “The Figaro comedy is a veritable novel, with an abundance
of events recounted in very compressed dialogue.”121 Accordingly, Cellerier
wrote to Beaumarchais, stating that the dialogue was too long and explaining
that it needed cutting down to bring the musical moments closer together;
also, he said that the actors were unfamiliar with spoken plays and needed
training in this specific aspect. He asked Beaumarchais to cut the material
from act III, which had appeared tedious [ froid ], and part of act IV. The letter
is dated 21 March 1793; a subsequent performance took place (presumably
without revision) on 22 March. A new version, in four acts, was performed
from 15 April (three further performances), and Beaumarchais’s involvement
with the revisions has been demonstrated both by his letter of 3 April advising
the actors on how to perform the various characters122 and his own manuscript
additions to the libretto, consisting of intercalated dialogue. In this new
version, acts III and IV had been amalgamated. It is rather curious that
Cellerier’s letter would ask Beaumarchais, who had hitherto had no involve-
ment, to suddenly revise the work: clearly sources are missing, and some aspects
of the production will be clarified only if the Beaumarchais papers are made
public.
In terms of sources, two orchestral scores have survived, one from the
Opéra library, and one from the music department of the Bibliothèque
Nationale (BNM): Sherwood Dudley has surveyed them.123 Both consist of a
full score of arias and ensembles translated into French, accompanied by spoken
dialogue in French taken verbatim from Beaumarchais’s original play. On the
former, corrections made after 22 March appear in pencil and with collettes.
The second is clearly a copy of the former, made after the 1793 revisions by the
Opéra’s copyists (Dudley, p. 60). One surprising aspect of the revision, which
Dudley does not appear to recognize, is that if the latter score is indeed a copy
of the revised first score (thus presumably incorporating those changes
120 JdP, 22 March 1793, AAAD, 22 March 1793, Moniteur, 1 April 1793, in Belinda
Cannone, La Réception des opéras de Mozart dans la presse parisienne (1793–1829) (Paris:
Klincksieck, 1991), pp. 147–48.
121 JdP, 22 March 1793, in Cannone, p. 145.
122 Proschwitz, ii.1147–49; Loménie, ii.585–86: he must therefore have attended the
second performance on 22 March.
123 Po: A.348.a.i–iv; BNM: L.10.675(1–4).

Beaumarchais was asked to make), it is odd that the dialogue is hardly cut at
all, and that what is cut is the arias. As he shows, from the first to the second
scores, several movements disappear: Suzanne and Chérubin’s skittish duet
from act II—“C’est moi, sortez bien vite” (the original “Aprite, presto, aprite”) —
and a large portion of act III, from the Count and Suzanne’s duet—“J’étais
bien las d’attendre” (“Crudel! Perchè finora”) —to the final sextet—“Viens,
mon fils” (“Riconosci in questo aplesso”). (The first three of these appear,
however, in the second score, merely at a different place, before the beginning
of act II; their presence remains unexplained.) By contrast, the cuts to dia-
logue in the first source, mainly occasional sentences and short passages
either removed or conflated by means of collettes, are minor, and the dialogue
remains extensive. A full survey is impossible here, and some of the collettes
obliterate the original passages. But the second version, if the score held by
the BNM is indeed the source for that, cannot have been substantially shorter
than the first; the internal Journal de l’Opéra moreover demonstrates that
the work was performed alone for the entirety of its summer run, as were
Aspasie and Tarare, evidence of the work’s substantial length. In part this
failure to prune the dialogue more vigorously is explained by the sheer com-
plexity of the action, only fully worked out if the majority of the dialogue
remains intact and too confusing if compressed. Perhaps this also explains why
receipts were mediocre, falling to 448 livres for the last performance. (It is not
clear why the work was revived once, on 1 September, along with L’Offrande à
la liberté ).
The Journal de Paris noted the complex gestural and bodily performance
required of the artists for this work, and the Abréviateur universel praised the
performance of Lays and other principals. However, the Moniteur remarked
that much of the music had been performed too slowly, which had impaired its
effect. But the cliché that the Parisian press did not recognize the genius of
Mozart is inaccurate: the papers were well aware that the music was outstand-
ing, in spite of a production whose length must have been discouraging to all
but the most fanatical. The Affiches spoke of the finale of the second act as a
“masterpiece”: genius, vigor, and elegance were all discernible, it claimed; and
the Abréviateur universel said the same. It would be more accurate to say how
little Parisian musical opinion was aware of Mozart’s wider reputation; because
Mozart’s operas had never yet been performed in Paris, he was described as a
“compositeur célèbre pour la symphonie [i.e., orchestral music]” by the Moniteur,
as a “célèbre compositeur dans la partie instrumentale” by the Journal de Paris.
Less encouraging was the accurate description by the Duchesne almanac of
the following year: “This is an experiment that is more odd than useful for

this theater: it proves that comic opera can be performed, but it will not be a
financial success.”124
In conclusion, the comic and mixed works, although often passed over in
studies of “Revolutionary” theater in favor of the more serious repertory, have
proven to be the object of some contestation and some relevance for the future
repertory of the institution. Adopted in response to a need for innovation and
variety, these works also allow the Opéra to re-position itself with respect to
the heritage of lyric theater, as colonizing a greater range of works places the
Opéra as the pre-eminent lyric theater of the capital. But the works also insti-
gate a certain number of trends: placing greater moral responsibility for the
work on its creator, even before Le Chaplier’s bill (Tarare); a metatheatrical
celebration of the importance of the arts, which is reflected back on to the
insitution and its self-definition as luxurious (Aspasie); and the construction of
operatic utopias as microcosms of the nation (Les Pommiers et le moulin).
124 Page 118. This comment was borrowed from AAAD, supplément du 1 April
1793, p. 1395, cited in Dudley, p. 62.

8 Republican Repertory (1792–1794)
Writing the Event

As we saw in Chapter 4, repertory policy shifted decisively over the course
of the 1792–93 season, patriotic repertory becoming the aspect most often
foregrounded by the artists. By 1794, the Almanach de tous les spectacles de Paris
claimed that of all Parisian theaters, the Opéra had done the most to “arouse
public spirit by means of patriotic scenes, composed to electrify even the cold-
est of souls.”1 We see some continuity of subject matter with the preceding
period, including a continued use of history, now overlaid with attention to the
contemporaneous, of Antiquity, and of patriotic self-fashioning on the part of
“authors”; but the use made is different. Antiquity is used to make specific
parallels with the contemporary situation in France, and focus shifts from the
timeless attributes of classical mythology to the specific applicability of ancient
history (Table 8.1). Hence the Brutus story was reappropriated as a Republican
exemplum in the context of the trial and execution of Louis XVI.2 And history
becomes “the battle-field where historical actors attempt awkwardly to conflate
their new world with the stirring images which had incited them to change
the old.”3 Another feature of the period is that plots are based upon a narrow
range of similar formulas: comparing their similarities can reveal the most
1 SdP-Duchesne, 1794, p. 99.

2 Herbert, David, Voltaire, “Brutus,” esp. pp. 90–93 and chapter 4: “David, Brutus
and martyrs to liberty, 1793–4.”
3 1789: Les Emblèmes, p. 59.
Table 8.1. Republican Repertory
OFFRANDE (L’) À LA LIBERTÉ, scène lyrique; music by Gossec; ballets by
P.G. Gardel—30 September 1792 [111 performances]
TRIOMPHE (LE) DE LA RÉPUBLIQUE, OU LE CAMP DE GRANDPRÉ,
divertissement lyrique; M-J Chénier; music by Gossec; ballets by Gardel—27 January 1793
[10 performances]
APOTHÉOSE (L’) DE BEAUREPAIRE, OU LA PATRIE RECONNAISSANTE,6 opéra
héroïque; Lebœuf; music by Candeille—3 February 1793 [3 performances]
SIÈGE (LE) DE THIONVILLE, drame lyrique; Saulnier/Dutilh; music by L. Jadin—14 June
1793 [21 performances]
FABIUS, tragédie lyrique; [Barouillet]7 J. Martin; music by Méreaux—9 August 1793
[14 performances]
MILTIADE À MARATHON, opéra; Guillard; music by Lemoyne—5 November 1793
(15 Brumaire An II) [34 performances]
TOUTE LA GRÈCE, OU CE QUE PEUT LA LIBERTÉ, tableau patriotique; Beffroy de
Reigny; music by Lemoyne—5 January 1794 (16 Nivôse An II) [27 performances]
HORATIUS COCLÈS, acte lyrique; Arnault; music by Méhul—18 February 1794 (30
Pluviôse An II) [14 performances]
TOULON SOUMIS,8 fait historique, en musique; Fabre d’Olivet; music by Rochefort—
4 March 1794 (14 Ventôse An II) [17 performances]
RÉUNION DU 10 AOÛT (LA), OU L’INAUGURATION DE LA RÉPUBLIQUE
FRANÇAISE, sans-culottide dramatique; Bouquier/Moline; music by Porta; ballets by
Gardel—15 April 1794 (16 Germinal An II) [24 performances]
insistent structures.4 The intention here is not narrowly psychoanalytic, for it

is based upon a corpus of texts from a range of different individual creative
subjects; instead, the intent is to tease out general structures that may be seen
as tropes structuring the cultural imaginary, more like the work undertaken
by Lynn Hunt, where the Freudian structure of “family romance” is used to
identify “imaginative effort” to “reimagine the political world” that “went on
below the surface . . . of conscious political discourse.”5 It is not just the empir-
ical frequency of these structures that matters, so much as what that frequency
suggests of their pervasive importance to contemporaries; and it is at this level,
I shall claim, that the works can be seen to have political importance. 6 7 8
4 See methodological comments in Charles Mauron, Psychocritique du genre comique:

Aristophane, Plaute, Térence, Molière (Paris: Corti, 1985), pp. 7–8.
5 The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1992), pp. xiv–xv.
6 Title of work also inverted: Noiray, “Repertory.”
7 According to Noiray, “Repertory,” and to NGDO, iii.340.
8 This work was also known under the title Le Siège de Toulon, according to Noiray,
“Repertory.”

David Andress has pointed to melodrama as a structure of feeling and
self-conceptualization during the Revolution, and it is likewise possible to see
within all of the works I shall consider here a basic structure centered upon
threats to virtue and closing with the restoration of the moral order.9 Shared
models such as this point to “structures of feeling” played out in artistic
works, and reinforced ways of expressing and interpreting individuals’ own
lived experiences, so that their self-expressions took on the forms of literary
tropes. In other words, any expression of human experience in narrative or
drama, either explicitly or implicitly, looks to artistic models, a model akin to
Hayden White’s Metahistory, which similarly traces the pervasion of literary
tropes in historiography of the nineteenth century.10
Because the works under discussion in this chapter narrativize their mate-
rial according to common structures of emplotment, they bring to bear certain
interpretive preconceptions upon notorious or significant days, or events of the
recent past; it is also helpful to consider the concept of an event. William
Sewell sees an event as “a ramified sequence of occurrences that is recognized
as notable by contemporaries, and that results in a durable transformation of
structures.”11 Taking as a case study the fall of the Bastille, he shows how this
event transforms structures, in the sense that it is interpreted according to notions
of popular sovereignty in order to be framed as a legitimate popular uprising
consubstantial with the modern sense of revolution, unlike other similar
actions that also took place in the summer of 1789 but were not similarly
invested. His study is thus bound up with the cultural and symbolic dimen-
sion of these occurrences, and he shows that events are not transparent, but are
constructed after the fact and in the telling. One might legitimately ask
whether the artistic works with which we are dealing are not also intended to
crystallize an interpretive consensus on an event, according to the definition
given earlier. Such an approach is fruitful because it allows the audience to
see the operas as both reflections upon, and interpretations of, events; also, as
cultural events, these works can themselves contribute to sense-making
and are thereby intended to provoke or encourage activity among the
9 Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and
the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976). For a more specialized musi-
cological study, see Jacqueline Waeber, En musique dans le texte: le mélodrame de Rousseau à
Schoenberg (Paris: Van Dieren, 2005).
10 Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973).
11 “Historical events as transformations of structures: Inventing Revolution at the
Bastille,” Theory and Society, 25.6 (December 1996), 841–81.
republican repertory (1792–1794) | 327

viewers, linking up narration, interpretation, and future activity. This presen-
tation has the advantage over the comparatively more sterile notion of
propaganda, as it leaves room for the viewers to actively construct meaning in
what they see and hear. It also allows for the complexities of authorship
and intentionality, at the same time with the recognition that the works are
ideologically charged.
In this chapter I shall consider three case studies. The first considers “festal
works,” where a convergence between the aesthetics of the festival and the
dramatic action of an opera celebrates and commemorates signficant actions.
The second considers two works replaying the repulsion of enemy threats to a
community, re-stating and reinforcing ideals of social cohesion and citizenship
in the process. The third looks at the transparent use of a redefined Antiquity
that has much in common with the second category of works but has a
more urgent, Republican flavor, in the context of reinforced external threat to
France from war.
1. Festal Works
I have made reference to the continuing attention given to the divertissements
in serious and mixed works, and the ever more permeable boundary between
the festival and the theatrical work, claiming that this foreshadowed the
repertory of the Terror. Those works which I am describing as “festal” take
place early in the Republican period, between September 1792 and January
1793; the last of these, La Réunion du 10 août, commemorates events from July
1789 to the celebration of citizens who have died in the war. This is the period
of the king’s trial and execution, the early war before its intensification when
England joined the opposition, and before heavy defeats and defections, the
Vendée and federalist revolts, all of which occurred in early 1793. There was
thus at least some degree of optimism, where the celebration of the progress of
the Revolution and the rejection of the “Old Regime” were foregrounded.
Needless to say, the trauma of the king’s perceived treachery and his trial cast
a pall over this optimism, and it is doubtless also true that there is something
rather too pat about the celebration, as if it masks a deep anxiety about the
direction of the Revolutionary events. But the anxiety was kept out of the
picture, for the time being, and the works performed were self-consciously
celebratory. None of these works is a true opera, if we mean by that a dramatic
action expressed through music within a coherent fictional world in a time
frame distinct from that of the playhouse. Some have no plot at all, such as

l’Offrande à la liberté,12 whereas others had the most meager of plot lines as a
pretext to string together patriotic music. Subsequent critics have been critical
of the works; for instance, Porta’s music for La Réunion du 10 août is judged by
Castil-Blaze to be “hateful,”13 whereas d’Estrée describes it as “a sort of politi-
cal opera, which must have been extremely tedious.”14 Winton Dean describes
this type of work as “pretentious” and “flatulent.”15 It is true that La Réunion
du 10 août is difficult for a modern-day reader to take seriously. The poetry is
in places inept, the tone appears to us to be naïvely sermonizing, and the sym-
bolism is of simplistic transparency. But it is a good example of how the Opéra
was moving toward a festival aesthetics in its programming, and serves as an
illustration of the ways in which the arts at the height of the Terror began the
mythologization of the Revolutionaries’ own history, and the use of theater to
commemorate. The works’ lasting value as a piece of theater is not at issue
here, but rather their value as a cultural historical document.
Le Triomphe de la République was probably conceived at the beginning of
October 1792 after France’s victory at Valmy under Dumouriez and Kellerman.16
This work by Gossec and Gardel was described by its librettist Chénier as
a “bagatelle lyrique,” on the grounds that it was a pretext for inserting
pre-existing revolutionary hymns and such was merely a distraction from his
literary works. If Role’s date is accurate, it was prepared in just two months,
for the first performance took place on 27 January 1793. The gestation of the
work therefore coincides with the beginning of the Republican phase of
the Revolution: the Convention opened on 20 September 1792, abolishing the
12 Recently analyzed by Elizabeth Bartlet: “Gossec, L’Offrande à la liberté et l’histoire

de La Marseillaise,” Le Tambour et la harpe, pp. 123–46. Bartlet’s article considers the score,
the work’s reception, and its politics. I believe she oversimplifies the reality when she
describes the tableaux patriotiques as “instruments du gouvernement” (p. 129). On Gossec’s
work during the Revolution, see Roland Mortier and Hervé Hasquin, Fêtes et musiques
révolutionnaires: Grétry et Gossec, special number of Etudes sur le XVIIIe siècle, 17 (1990), and
Claude Role, François-Joseph Gossec 1734–1829: un musicien à Paris de l’Ancien Régime
à Charles X (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000). In addition, much of his Revolutionary work is
collected and reproduced in Constant Pierre, Musique des fêtes et cérémonies de la révolution
française (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1899); it is catalogued in Role, Gossec,
pp. 298–300.
13 L’Académie impériale de musique, ii.31.
14 Théâtre sous la Terreur, pp. 268, 273.
15 The Age of Beethoven, 1790–1830, vol. 8 of The New Oxford History of Music (London:
Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 29–30.
16 Role, Gossec, p. 182.

monarchy and declaring the Republic the following day. Further victories
abroad (at Jemmapes in Belgium on 6 November, and the annexation of Savoy
on 27 November) and further domestic radicalization in the form of the king’s
trial between December 1792 and January 1793, explain both the need for
optimistic Republican works and the increasingly strident tone of the works
themselves. In fact, this particular work was cited by Gossec in his request for
subsidy to the Minister of the Interior Dominique-Joseph Garat on 8 April
1793.17 The plot traces an external threat to the polity from advancing enemy
forces, which shatters an opening scene of harmony; and the repulsion of
that threat by military action which is narrated by the General. After this the
goddess of Liberty herself arrives and bestows blessing on all present, replaying
victory on stage: hardly a subtle work. But to condemn it and others for
“flatulence,” as Winton Dean has done, is to miss the point that for contem-
porary theorists, an energetic use of rhythm and massed music had important
physiological effects. As Jann Pasler has shown, writers such as Grétry believed
that marches served as “civilizing forces, their balanced binary forms inscrib-
ing order on bodies as well as minds.”18 Indeed, much of the orchestral
ritornello, including introduction to the first scene, is composed of trochaic
rhythms (particularly ), inscribing the material within the military, par-
ticularly given its heavy use of unison brass.19 The later part of the century saw
much use of the funerary march, including Gossec’s 1791 Marche lugubre; here,
the trochaic produces a sense of decisiveness and of victory. The work parodies
several pre-existing choruses with new words, including Chénier and Gossec’s
Chant du 14 juillet (1791), used for the opening scene with the words “Dieu du
peuple et des rois,”20 a Rondo, and a Chœur à la liberté, taken from the festival
in honor of the Suisses de Châteauvieux (15 April 1792). So it continues the
practice, established by l’Offrande, of incorporating music from outside the
playhouse into a dramatic action.
The religious symbolism and references of the first scene are rather
odd, comprising Protestant or at least anti-Catholic references to Luther,
Calvin, and the “children of Israel” in line 2, to parsis [ guèbres] in line 3 (that
is, seemingly, all religions except Catholicism), and to a decidedly masonic-
sounding “Œil éternel, âme et ressort du monde” [eternal eye, the soul and motor
of the world]: these open a first scene that is both military/decisive and
17 Role, Gossec, pp. 184–85.

18 Composing the citizen, p. 122.
19 For a recording: Canti e suoni della Rivoluzione francese CD 1 (Amadeus, 2004).
20 Pierre, [No]. 6. And not for the overture, as claimed by François Moureau,
Chants, p. 49.

religious/celebratory (pp. 5–6). This work moves away from the structure and
preoccupations of opera and toward the festival in its explicitly invocatory
and celebratory quality, allied to its “open” theatricality. Here, the celebration
of the sun (representing a rather pantheistic-sounding “nature”) is allied to its
role in providing existence and structuring life (including regulating the cal-
endar): the scene was singled out by the Affiches, Avis et Annonces divers (p. 402).
Counter-Revolutionaries are variously described here as tyrants and slaves:
slaves because members of a polity that is not free, and tyrants because any
failure to break away from monarchy is implicitly an act against the Revolution
and hence of oppression. Scene 1 thus establishes a Republican version of
the utopias we saw in Chapter 7. The festal scene is then extended to a rustic
setting in scene 2, centered upon a ronde sung by Thomas, Laurette, and a
chorus of villagers. Much is made of the fact that these are ordinary citizens
and, given the rustic setting and the external appeal of the ronde, it brings the
scene closer to the aesthetics of opéra-comique, a merging we saw in the previous
chapter. The ronde moreover is itself an integrative song: each alternate stanza
refers to an outsider or a category of people and invites them to partake of the
celebration; the others expel individuals seen as counter-Revolutionary (nobles
and princes in stanza 2, royal guards [?bandes aguerries] at the Tuileries in
stanza 4, and so on). The Duchesne almanac for 1794 (p. 104), singled out the
air “vous aimables fillettes,” which it claimed to be universally known.
This social cohesion is shattered at the beginning of scene 3 by the générale
calling citizens to arms in the wake of the Brunswick manifesto,21 re-using
musical material from the first section of the overture to preface a syllabic
chorus expressing determination on the part of the citizens; it ends with the
by-now familiar slogan “la victoire ou la mort” and the re-use of the so-called
“Marche de Châteauvieux.” (The festival honoring the Swiss guards of
Châteauvieux took place on 15 April 1792, organized by David; it celebrates
the work of “simple” soldiers and features, as the ending of the work, an
allegory of liberty.) When the march returns in scene 5 (“Qu’une fête/Ici
s’apprête”), it is followed by military maneuvers [évolutions] replacing the ballet
that would have appeared in traditional operatic divertissements. There is no
evidence in the libretto of how these would have been performed. The only
contemporary evidence I have found for the performance of such maneuvers
comes from the text of Les Hommes égarés, a playscript held by the Archives
21 Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (6th ed., 1832) defines la générale as a “martial

term … signifying a drum beat used to sound the alarm to troops, either at the approach
of an enemy or a fire or revolt”

Nationales; this script seems never to have been performed, but it describes
marching displays of soldiers in formation, accompanied by “patriotic music”
and drums, covering the stage in different groups and separating into ranks
and files [colonnes] only to reform.22 It seems more than curious to us that such
experiments had any success at all, yet the Affiches positively praised the pan-
tomime dimension of the work. Gardel had also introduced “national” dances,
to great effect, including a Swiss dance to the “ranz des vaches” [!], and dances
from Savoy, Spain, Poland, and others.
The final area of interest, after a rather commonplace narrative of victory
that forms the second half of scene 5, is the allegory of Liberty, which forms
the final scene (6). The allegory was personified by Mlle. Maillard and takes
the place that would otherwise be allotted to a deus ex machina, using similar
technical means (descent on a cloud) and similarly completing the action
before final celebratory material. Here, in decidedly Baroque style, is a ballet
of different nations composed of different character pieces, hence mixing the
opéra-comique style of strophic celebration with the formal balletic entry of high
opera. The scene features an “archaeology” of liberty: born in Greece and cel-
ebrated by the arts, she was further strengthened by Rome until the pride of
the Senate took over. Then William Tell is referenced, followed by Benjamin
Franklin, before France. In other words, France here recognizes precedents,
while establishing its own supremacy, based upon its particular type of
Republicanism, founded upon regicide, or at least the repudiation of monarchy
(last two lines). As ever, the Revolution celebrates itself.
The Journal de Paris pointed to the congruency of politics and reception, by
claiming “Military victory guarantees that its celebration in music will be
similarly successful, provided that the bard is worthy of his subject matter, and
that his listeners are French citizens.”23 Subject matter itself guarantees suc-
cess, rather than a distanced taste-judgment, and the aesthetics is one of enthu-
siasm. This aesthetics had been pioneered in the festivals, and these provided
much of the music, including the numerous hymns composed by Chénier.
Gossec’s music, unusually, was less successful than the words, the columnist
concluded. The Affiches, avis et annonces divers also suggested a similarity with
the divertissement added to Mirza by Gardel and Gossec. The Correspondance
littéraire was less impressed, stating that the work was unworthy of Chénier’s
talent,24 because the rather declamatory alexandrines of the text and the
22 AN: AD/VIII/44, p. [85].

23 JdP, 1793, p. 115.
24 Tourneux, xvi.178–80 [February 1793].

ode-like stanzas were inappropriate for musical setting; after a rather dismis-
sive plot summary, it concluded that the music was unworthy of Gossec and
that the text was uninteresting in spite of the movement of a military camp,
the fracas of battle, the pomp of victory, and the [final] assembly of all nations.
There is no critical consensus on even these seemingly most orthodox
Republican celebrations in early 1793.
la réunion du 10 août
Just over one year later, the Opéra performed a retrospective celebration of
the Revolution: La Réunion du 10 août, whose title alone, in referring to the
popular overthrow of the monarchy at the Tuileries, makes it a Republican
work. La Réunion had first been performed on 13 March 1794 at the erstwhile
Théâtre de Molière (renamed in November 1793 Théâtre des Sans-culottes),
although with music by a different composer, Duboullay (the musical director
of that theater).25 A note in the proceedings of the Comité de salut public
(CSP) suggests that La Réunion was to be accompanied by Saulnier’s La Journée
du 10 août, although this instruction appears not to have been followed.26
The CSP’s decree shows that patriotic repertory from other, minor theaters was
borrowed for the Opéra, as political circumstances dictated. Bouquier and
Moline, moreover, were government officials: Bouquier was a member of
the Convention, and Moline a secrétaire-greffier. On 24 November 1793 the
Convention accepted the play and authorized the CSP to arrange for it to be
performed.27 On 2 February 1794, the CSP formally acknowledged a petition
from the Opéra appealing for a subsidy to perform the work. It agreed to pay
this from the funds that had been made available by the decree of 4 frimaire
[24 November], which I discussed in Chapter 4; sporadic funding increasingly
came with such strings attached.28 An undated memo authorizes payment of
25 Tissier, ii.233 [no. 1636 and note 13]. Cf. FdSP, 255 (25 Ventôse An II), p. 4.
26 CSP, xii.343 [2 April 1794]. Tissier, Spectacles, ii.305 [no. 2330] catalogues a work
entitled La Journée du 10 août 1792, ou la chute du dernier tyran, by Saulnier and Darrieux,
music by Kreutzer, which received six performances at the Théâtre patriotique from
23 October 1792 (he further notes that a four-act play with the same title was also
published by Maradan). On the cancellation of performance of La Journée, see CSP,
xiv.685. See also Moniteur, 238 (28 Floréal An II/17 May 1794), xx.480.
27 CSP, xiv.259; CIP, ii.650–52.
28 CSP, x.616–17.

subsidy to Cavailhés and Le Camus either from the funds of the Comité
d’instruction publique (CIP) or any other competent authority.29
La Réunion borrowed real-life characters and was widely discussed for its
topicality.30 The work was a staging of a festival that had already taken place
on 10 August 1793, celebrating the anniversary of the fall of the monarchy and
setting its material in five areas of the city [stations]: the Bastille, the Boulevard
Favart, the Place de la Révolution, the Invalides, and the Champ de Mars—five
separate festivities that formed the five acts of the work. Antoine Schnapper
has suggested that Jacques-Louis David may have been involved at an early
stage, pointing to a striking similarity between the artist’s two drawings
entitled “Le Triomphe du peuple français” and this opera, and hypothesizing
that they may have been a sketch for a backdrop.31 The décor for most of the
five acts, each set at a different moment of the Revolution, suggests a negative
understanding of Revolution as the removal or suppression of structures that
constrict inherent qualities such as liberty; this is to be expected of a work
whose title refers to 10 August 1792, the date of the effective abolition of the
monarchy by popular insurrection. Regeneration is a central element of
this structure and is based explicitly upon a return to and the recovery of a
supposed original liberty. This depends upon a voluntarist conception of the
people and the Revolutionary movement, which wills a new order into being:
“L’homme, né pour la Liberté, / Devient libre quand il veut l’être!” [Born for
Liberty, man becomes free when he wills it], sings the chorus of act V, scene 1.
This accounts for much of the tone of the work, the oaths and hymns in self-
consciously declarative mode and the constant address to the French on stage.
The Republic is generally constructed as inclusive and able to assimilate the
unfortunate, which explains the extraordinary scene where some blind charac-
ters are literally wheeled out, onto the stage, followed by a group of orphaned
children (p. 18). Leaving aside for the moment the potential for involuntary
bathos of an old man and woman being wheeled on in a cart [charrue] [!], the
fact that the work was written by members of the government might explain
the rather heavy-handed references to such adoption of unfortunates, which
was historical fact (on 27 June 1793, the Convention approved a law to give
state protection to orphaned children, for instance). The spectator can project
himself into the space that is being addressed. This is why the final scene
29 AN: AJ/13/47.III.; d’Estrée, Théâtre sous la Terreur, p. 272.

30 JdP, 1794, pp. 1879–80.
31 A. Schnapper, David témoin de son temps (Fribourg: Office du Livre, 1980),
pp. 143–46.

stages an altar to the fatherland, as did the end of Tarare, allowing for a tableau-
style presentation for a performative scene, composed of another oath and
hymn. The work is plotted so that the festal dimension, especially the ballets,
grows out of the emotional trajectory and is based on sensual, not dramatic
intelligibility (p. 40); this explains the frequent references to actions accom-
plished with “enthusiasm” (p. 5), “transport” (p. 6), even a “sacred delirium”
(p. 17). What are some of the main themes of this consensus?
Probably the most important is the unification of the new Republic around
the destruction of federalism (symbolized by a serpent rather than the more
usual hydra: does this have a biblical dimension? p. 30). And, before Sade’s
1795 La Philosophie dans le boudoir, the phrase, “Français, encore un effort”
[Frenchman, one more effort] (p. 30) implies that the Revolutionary process is
not yet complete. The décor for act I includes a Fountain of Regeneration, fea-
turing clear springs of water gushing from the breasts of a female allegory of
Nature. The fountain came from the Place de la Bastille and had been con-
structed for the celebrations of 10 August 1793. (One wonders whether the
triumphal arch used in act II was not similarly recycled from Miltiade à
Marathon, but there is no surviving documentary evidence.) David had designed
the fountain in the form of an Egyptian statue representing Isis, and as Nicole
Wild has shown in a discussion of Mozart’s Magic Flute, the link in the eighteenth-
century French imaginary between Isis, goddess of fertility and motherhood,
and regeneration was strong.32 The nature being celebrated here feels panthe-
istic, as a divine omnipresent force, rather than a specific deity, as in the invo-
cation (I.3): “Après tant de siècles d’erreur, / De préjugés, de servitude, / Nous
faisons notre unique étude, / D’être fidèles à tes loix.” [After so many centuries
of error, prejudice, and servitude, our only concern is to be faithful to your laws]
(p. 10). In this account, liberty is considered to be a “divine blessing” (p. 4); the
director of the festival [Ordonnateur] celebrates “sublime philosophy” (p. 4).
A second strand concerns rupture and continuity: much of the immediate
emotion is bellicose; and some dramatic effect is achieved by contrasts between
acts, such as in terms of genders, or spaces. Most suggestively, act I is set in
the ruins of the Bastille, as a concrete metaphor of what will elsewhere be
figurative: repudiation of the structures of the Old Regime is part-and-parcel
of the recovery. Hence characters will describe themselves as being released
from their irons, a favorite metaphor for the supposed “slavery” of the Old
Regime (p. 6), as they have “brisé l’idôle” (p. 6), and recovered their rights
(pp. 7, 10). There is nothing particularly new about that, but it has important
32 Humbert, Egyptomania, p. 392.

implications for “cultural memory.” The triumphal arch that adorns the stage
of act II, for instance, does not actually celebrate triumph at all, but “proscribes
the odious memory of a ferocius tyrant” (p. 13), a reference to the now deposed
and executed Louis XVI. And this reference is made proleptically, because it
features an act centered on the night 5–6 October 1789 that is described, more
than questionably, as an event “destroying royalty” (p. 13); of course, the
so-called October days did no such thing. Similarly, act III is centered upon a
celebratory bonfire in which are destroyed the “attributes” of royalty, and
releasing doves into the air (p. 23). The fire does not just reject but consumes
and obliterates; and the representation of any such on stage might be seen to
operate something of a representative double-bind; for the more one repro-
duces an act one supposedly wishes to forget, the more it is rendered present.
In a related discussion, Lynn Hunt has pointed to the seeming ambivalence of
the Revolutionaries’ posture with respect to the regicide, caught between a
wish to ban representations and effect a politics of forgetting, and an opposite
temptation to commemorate the event.33 The problem is acute, because of the
binary significance of most important Revolutionary events, which founded
the new as they suppressed, erased, or repudiated the old; to commemorate one
without reviving the other is problematic. For instance, scene 2 gives a list of
the constitutive elements of the Old Regime needing to be forgotten, estab-
lishing what we might call a cultural amnesia: to remember, through celebra-
tion, the Revolution’s destructive phase is ideally to forget the Old Regime.
That period is present by virtue of being implicit as the inevitable other of
what is being celebrated: this can never be a simple case of erasure. This is why
scene 3 makes such a clear link between the eternal and the concept of error
(p. 10): this memory is cautionary, for we must remember the Old Regime,
while explicitly rejecting it: to return would be error. One also wonders whether
the insistence upon the repulsion of external threat is not intended to banish
it. Act V, scene 2 links commemoration to imitation or emulation: we must
remember the actions of great men as a guide to personal conduct.
The festal aesthetics seem to be orthodox, but we have seen that critical
reaction was not consensual; moreover they were actually preferred by the
Hebertist Commune and quickly fell out of favor with Jacobins such as
Robespierre; the latter became increasingly concerned with the atheistic turn
the Revolution was taking, the Opéra under the artists espousing a popular,
sectional ideology, much more than that of the Jacobins. On 24 April 1794,
33 The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1992), pp. 56–64.

artists were called upon to celebrate the different epochs of the Revolution by
the CSP. But the controversy over the Fête de la raison of November 1793 was
eventually to lead, by May–June 1794, to a repudiation of Hebertist atheism.
Accordingly, as we saw in Chapter 4, the Commission of public instruction
then called for a regeneration of theater, in line with Robespierre’s famous
speeches of February on “morale politique.” The “festal” aesthetics capitalize
upon the moral conflation already shown in Chapter 7, between author and
work, and between fiction and known world. However these celebratory works
face a representational paradox: how to represent erasure and rupture with the
old, without that old being present in its very repudiation. The following
sections show that Siege and Danger plot lines solved this representational
paradox, creating a fiction of lost and re-found plenitude.
2. Communities under Siege: Thionville and Toulon

If the festal works were produced quickly to celebrate specific moments of the
Revolutionary process, equally noteworthy is the commemorative dimension
of that segment of the repertory known as the pièce de circonstance (and related
sub-genres such as the fait historique and the tableau patriotique), which grafted
contemporaneous subject matter onto the structures of history writing. These
works were also produced quickly, although the Journal de Paris suggested,
both of Le Siège de Thionville and Le Triomphe de la République, that they had
been rather long in coming.34 The purpose of these works was not primarily
artistic but moral; the preface to Le Siège de Thionville claimed that “the courage
and the patriotism of the garrison soldiers and the civilians of Thionville
have a right to our gratitude and deserve the fullest praise,” explicitly recogniz-
ing that moral qualities and actions invited a reciprocal recognition in the
spectator. These are, then exempla, which normally employ brief scenes and
fast-moving action to produce strong moral effects via enthusiasm, a category
that has already been discussed.
This type of theater is also a space for commemoration.35 The preface to
Le Siège de Thionville sees the aim of the work as to “retrace several scenes of
this memorable siege,” and thereby to “conserve the sacred fire which puri-
fied the actions of [classical heroes] [Mutius] Scaevola, [Gaius] Fabricius
34 JdP, 1793, p. 670.

35 Michèle Sajous D’Oria, preface to Jean-Nicolas Bouilly, René-Descartes: Trait
historique en deux actes et en prose (Bari: Palomar, 1996), pp. 7–8.

and Aristide”: the work should encourage in its percipient the kind of internal
enthusiasm which needs encouragement but which is immanent in all of us
and which we have in common with the Ancients. The Journal de Paris claimed
that the siege of Toulon was one of the glorious events of the Revolution, which
spectators would always be pleased to see on stage.36 However, these claims
lead to a seeming tension between Republican virtues being immanent and
intrinsic, and nevertheless needing encouragement. The crux of the Revolution’s
pedagogical project is here: the purpose of the arts was to allow the percipient
to reconnect with the original liberty that was inside himself, to give fullest
expression to the human nature which was at the heart of all citizens, but
which needed awakening, and then channeling appropriately. The preface to
L’Apothéose de Beaurepaire discusses the type of material appropriate for musical
setting, according to the criteria of energy and spontaneity. Works became cold
when scenes were too long; and it needs to be borne in mind that these plots
were really pretexts for visual display or for action,37 requiring that the com-
poser avoid excessively lengthy numbers or scenes and that he keep the plot
brief and the action rapid. The works also channel a civic self-presentation on
the part of the authors. For instance, Le Siège de Thionville was supported by
regional officers who wrote to the Opéra enjoining it to perform the work as
soon as possible.
Thionville is a border town in what is today the Moselle department; it had
first been besieged during the Thirty Years War and was again the focus of
attack from Condé’s emigré expedition in 1792, famously leaving Châteaubriand
for dead during the attack, an event recounted in chapter 15 of book IX of his
Mémoires d’outre-tombe.38 The assault began on 6 September 1792 and lasted for
three days.39 The siege of Thionville was a crucial turning point in the war,
being one of the first victories of the patriots. As such it was ripe for represen-
tation, and the production seems to have been spectacular in its visual appeal.
The Opéra requested gunpowder for this and related works on two occasions:
on 1 April 1793 (a request that was refused) and on 14 July 1793 (I have not
traced an answer to the latter).40 We know that it used explosives, though,
36 JdP, 1794, p. 1756.

37 JdP, 1793, p. 670.
38 Ed. Maurice Levaillant and Georges Moulinier, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard/Pléiade,
1951), i.330–33.
39 On the siege, see Paul Heckmann, Félix de Wimpffen et le Siège de Thionville en 1792:
Un épisode des guerres de la révolution (Paris: Perrin, 1926), especially pp. 98–103, a rather
superficial analysis of the opera.
40 AN: AJ/13/47.II. Fournitures 1793.

because a passage in the Journal de Paris states that a stagehand was quite
seriously injured by an exploding cannon during the previous Sunday’s
performance, losing three fingers in the process.41 According to the preface, the
work was first accepted, in opéra-comique form, in November 1792; despite the
Opéra’s noteworthy trend toward strophic song and an opéra-comique aesthetics,
it was subsequently decided to replace the dialogue with music, and no trace
of the original survives.42 The libretto states in error that the work was first
performed on 2 June 1793; on that day, there was no performance, and the
premiere was delayed until 14 June, when the Opéra took 5,287 livres, 10 sous
at the door. In total the work was performed twenty-four times; takings were
mediocre for the rest of the run.
The main characters of the work were taken from real life: Antoine-
Christophe Merlin (citoyen de Thionville) is listed, as is [Félix] Wimpffen who
led the city (the role was taken by Chéron). Other individuals are labeled by
their civic function (Mayor, Commander, Officer, Hussar). There is even a
chorus of cannoniers in Act I, scene 2 (p. 3). There are passing references
to several individuals: Luckner (I.3), presumably Nikolaus, count Luckner
(1722–94), the German in French service, who had served as commander of
the Army of the Rhine in 1792, and to whom la Marseillaise was originally
dedicated; Nicolas-Joseph Beaurepaire (1740–92), who had fought against the
Prussians in the battle of Valmy, the subject of a whole work in his own right;
a certain traitor named Dautichamp, possibly a reference to Charles Marie de
Beaumont d’Autichamp (1770–1859), a former Emigré and member of the
Garde constitutionnelle du roi; Christian Auguste de Waldeck (1744–98), a
soldier in the service of Austria who lost an arm in the siege. These works seem
quite happy to represent traitors and evil characters, as long as the status of
those is explicit and that they are punished within the fiction.43
From September of 1792, official policy was to honor individuals such as
these by official bulletins. One such, emanating from a Commission extraordi-
naire and written by François Lamarque, member for the Dordogne, proposed a
decree whereby Félix Wimpffen not only receive military honors, but that these
be published in order to mark national “satisfaction.”44 This representation of
known individuals points to qualities and actions that should be emulated, an
41 JdP, 1793, p. 1022.

42 Le Siége de Thionville, drame lyrique, en deux actes (Paris: Maradan, [1793]), p. iv.
43 “Théâtre révolutionnaire et représentation du bien,” Poétique, 22 (1975), 268–83.
44 Rapport en faveur de Félix Wimpffen, commandant de Thionville, des bataillons formant
la garnison de cette Place, et de trois soldats hussards . . . ([Paris]: Imprimerie nationale, [1792]),
pp. 6, 2, respectively.

ideal also pervading the operatic representations. Hence Beaurepaire was
described in the work celebrating him as “This French Brutus, who braved the
impotent terror of death on behalf of liberty,” and who “will receive the honor
of immortality.” A contrario it is claimed, of Lavergne, that “His memory is
tainted, and his days are branded with the mark of infamy” (p. 5). In perhaps
rather transparent mode, Wimpffen fils can also exclaim: “What more beautiful
destiny than to carry the affection of my father and my country with me to the
grave?” (p. 5). Theater serves to commemorate great men as living exempla.
Because it is centered upon a siege, the opera constructs a microcosmic
structure focusing upon external threat, rendered more potent because the
community is isolated from the outside world and is surrounded by the enemy.
(In the more usual Revolutionary fiction, the action took place in abstraction
of the outside world, but there was no reference to that isolation.) The struc-
ture of the work supports this, since act II focuses upon the outside, the
geographical and material boundaries and their breach being the pivot of the
action. This insular structure then instrumentalizes a binary moral logic and
establishes an ideal of transparency for the citizens of the community, while
the counter-Revolutionary is thought of as employing propagation as a model
(see, for instance, in I.2, Wimpffen’s exchange with Merlin). It is not just that
the enemies in this work employ dissimulation, in line with a trend elsewhere
identified which sees counter-Revolution as being opaque and employing a
mask,45 but also that spreading misleading rumors in order to create panic,
and thereby disorder, is a concomitant strategy. The dual danger of moderation
and/or fanaticism is pointed to at the middle of I.2, in line with what will later
become the prevailing policy of the CSP (such as Robespierre’s repudiation of
moderation, against Danton):
Si d’un Républicain le zèle trop outré,
Peut quelquefois être un funeste guide,
On doit bien plus encor craindre d’un modéré
Le langage perfide.
Par tant de trahisons, devenu soupçonneux,
Souvent dans une erreur, le premier voit un crime:
Le second nous endort, mais fascine les yeux,
Et nous conduit bientôt sur le bord de l’abîme. (p. 2)
[If exaggerated Republican zeal can sometimes lead us astray, the perfidious
language of moderates is far more dangerous. If the first has become too
45 Susan Maslan, Revolutionary acts, passim.

suspicious through repeated betrayal, and can tend to see crime where there is
only error, the second lulls us into false security and, enchanting our eyes,
leads us to the edge of the precipice.]
That moderation may hide criminal intent and hence be perfidious is
doubtless both paranoid and itself deliberately misleading; but more interest-
ing is the way in which such perfidy is held to operate: while extreme zeal
(fanaticism, by any other name) can be mistaken over intention, it is a neces-
sary vigilance which the latter attacks. There is some surely unfair slippage
between being “weak in the face of danger” and seeking to “trick the people”
(p. 3). All of this is another way of articulating the Manichean Jacobin logic
that elides and sometimes misrepresents intention in order to identify weak-
ness with perfidy, and which is the moral bedrock upon which so much of the
heroism of the work and others depends: the only acceptable course of action is
to be inexorable in the face of threat, real or perceived. Accordingly, as is stated
elsewhere, to even speak of surrender would be a “crime” (I.7, p. 14), a claim
that leads to the inevitable patriotic oath never to surrender. Similarly, much is
made of patriotic unity: division is seen as more worrying even than the enemy
(p. 3). But this unity is inscribed within the family unit, adding a domestica-
tion to the construction. Indeed, unlike the pre-Republican material, which
would operate a distinction between the public and the private and would
frequently dramatize family ties in opposition to public virtue and patriotism,
this work sees them as reconcilable, as in I.4, where Wimpffen fils consoles his
father (“Mon père, quelle est donc cette sombre tristesse?” [Father, why this
somber sadness?]). For this view of community sees domesticity and genera-
tional ties as being entirely compatible with public virtue, because it has shifted
the moral weight of opposition onto external characters, to construct a little
community characterized not only by its insularity but also by its harmony.
This moral alteration leads to some aesthetic and structural innovations,
reinscribing classic musical movements into new contexts; such as the
Republican soliloquy of I.3, or the duo of I.4, which dramatizes moral unity
and is sung facing a statue of Liberty! (“Seule divinité des Français adorée”;
[Sole divinity adored by the French], p. 7). As so often in such works, I.6 pres-
ents the return from battle of a number of individuals (here, three hussars),
who then present a narrative of the action, a scene that presents the characters’
reintegration within the insular community and uses hypotyposis, verbally
depicting an image or action not seen (and suggestively moving toward the
historic present):
A ces premiers brigands, qui parcouraient la plaine,

La nuit cacha notre marche incertaine.

Mais par d’autres bientôt nous fûmes rencontrés.
Tout ce que peut alors l’adresse et le courage,
Est par eux et par nous mis ensemble en usage:
On veut nous investir, nous nous tenons serrés;
On nous crie; armes bas; à cette fière annonce,
Nos mousquets aussi-tôt font partir la réponse,
Et le sabre commence un combat plus sanglant. (p. 10)
[Our hesitant steps were hidden by the night from these first brigands who
roamed across the plain. But we soon encounter others; and all our skill and
courage are then put to the test, as are theirs. They try to surround us, we
stand close together. Put down your weapons! they cry; but our muskets
respond on our behalf to this insolent demand, and our sabers begin a yet
bloodier combat.]
The chorus then grows out of the aria through a process of internal, dynamic
momentum, enthusiasm as ever being the motor. That is, music inspires others
to sing themselves:
PREMIER HUSSARD
Vos ordres ont été remplis avec succès,
Et nous vous apportons les augustes décrets,
Qui font naître par-tout l’allégresse publique:
Nous n’avons plus de roi, la France est République,
Le Sceptre est brisé pour jamais.
(Tous ensemble, dans le plus grand enthousiasme.)
Nous n’avons plus de roi, nous n’avons plus de maîtres!
Du tyran, le règne est fini:
Nous n’aurons plus à redouter les traîtres,
Ils sont privés de son appui. (p. 10)
[Your orders have been carried out, and we bring the proud decrees which
have led to public rejoicing everywhere. We no longer have a king, France is
a Republic. The scepter is shattered forever. (All together with the greatest enthu-
siasm:) We have no more king, no more masters! The reign of the tyrant is over,
and we shall no longer fear traitors, as they no longer have his support.]
Such scenes also feature the adoption of closed movements from outside
the work, such as a strophic Hymn to Equality (pp. 11–12) and the use of
“La Marseillaise,” which closes act I (sc 8, p. 15).
The style of the libretto and of the score were both judged to be lacking
by the Journal des spectacles. It was careful to praise the “intention” of the

creators, thereby putting asunder what most critics seemed to see as implicitly
linked—subject matter and authorial intention versus stylistic quality. Here,
the columnist explicitly attacked the divergence:
Poetry has always celebrated heroic actions. Yet unfortunately, each
time it was not worthy of its subject matter, its strains have soon been
forgotten.46
Citing a series of passages as evidence of faulty verse writing, it exclaims: “Can
the courage and actions of the defenders of Thionville really have failed to
awaken Saulnier and Dutilh’s talent and inspire sublime thoughts in them?
What would their work have been if they had had a dull subject and indiffer-
ent characters?” (p. 252). As for the music, it claimed:
The music deserves praise and would surely deserve even more, had not
the librettists clung to the composer and forced him into commonplaces
rather than allowing his talent to take flight. Wherever he was able to
free himself, Jadin shows eloquence and energy. The aria: My blood
belongs to the state, and the invocation to Liberty, both prove that beauti-
ful music is not unfamiliar to this composer, and that he is capable of
achieving success when he comes to compose to good libretti. (p. 253)
Others found more virtues in the work; the police official Perrière, in a report
to Garat, rhetorically asked:
Can there be anybody left in France or in Europe who doubts how dear
the Republic is to the French? If so, he should have been present when,
after the hussar brings news that there was no longer a king in France,
the following verse was sung: “We no longer have a king . . . the scepter
is shattered forever.” At these words, the entire auditorium erupted into
applause so loud it was as if the roof would lift and the applause would
reach the skies.47
Thereafter, he continues, the women in the audience joined in with the
hymn “Viens habiter dans nos contrées” [Come, live in our lands]; the men
then sang the “Marseillaise” along with the actors. So impressed was Perrière
46 JdesS, 32 (1 August 1793), 251.

47 Perrière to Garat, 17 June 1793, in Adolphe Schmidt, Tableaux de la Révolution
française publiés sur les papiers inédits du département et de la police secrète de Paris, 3 vols.
(Leipzig: Veit, 1869), ii.66.

that he asked his superiors for permission to return to inspect a subsequent
performance!
toulon
Toulon soumis is but one of a range of works in Parisian theaters celebrating the
famous siege: in total, eleven versions have been traced.48 The siege took place
on 19 December 1793; the first dramatization was that performed at the Lycée
des arts on 8 January 1794. The night of 12 July 1793 saw the beginnings of
a rebellion against particularly active Jacobinism, as part of a wider wave
of federalist revolt. The southern port city of Toulon was quite Jacobin
in May–July 1793, but the popular movement was progressively channeled
elsewhere—for instance, in the election of a “municipal commission” and the
return to power of many of the notables of the town. By the end of August, the
Patriots had been overpowered by royalists and imprisioned, and the royalists,
via a newly created Comité de sûreté générale, were able to turn the city over
to the English and their Spanish and Neapolitan allies (negotiations had begun
tentatively in early August). On 17 December, the city was bombarded by the
CSP’s military commander Dugommier, and finally taken on the 19th after
the foreigners had been turned away.49
Among a small number of articles concerning the pièce de circonstance,
Raphaëlle Legrand’s discussion of versions of Toulon raises some issues worth
noting. She claims, although without evidence, that the dual aims of the works
were to convince and to inform; and it is worth opening up the question of
whether illiterate spectators were genuinely informed for the first time of such
notorious events because they could not read the press (it could surely be
argued that news of such an important event would also have circulated orally).
Second, she notes, these works are filled with parasitic techniques: musical
parody (especially of “La Carmagnole” and “Ça ira,” and to a lesser extent
“La Marseillaise”) but also textual borrowings from the letters and speeches
of members of the Convention and representatives of the people. Finally,
one might re-examine the question of how these works place a premium on
spectactular visual effects (inconsistent with Legrand’s claim that they do not
48 Tissier, Spectacles de la Révolution, ii.374, 506, 764, 857, 1178, 1468, 1631, 1782.
Three further versions remained unperformed: by Mittié, by Bertin Dantilly, and by Bizet
and Faciolle (Tissier, ii.59n6).
49 This summary is based upon material presented in Maurice Agulhon, Histoire de
Toulon (Paris, 1988 [1980]), pp. 165–209, esp. 179–90.

aim primarily at aesthetic pleasure).50 As Jann Pasler has noted, Toulon was
also the subject of a particularly expensive and closely scripted Fête on
31 December.51
The version performed at the Opéra was by Fabre d’Olivet.52 Tissier claims
that it was a musical reworking of a play first performed at the Théâtre Molière
on 9 January entitled L’Heureuse Nouvelle,53 but other than the fact that the
original already contained music (it was described as a “vaudeville en un acte”
in the libretto), the works are quite different.54 L’Heureuse Nouvelle is in prose
and has a village setting and characters typical of rustic opéra-comique; the
recitatives of Toulon soumis are in verse. The music of the former is entirely
composed of vaudevilles; there is no evidence that these served in the new ver-
sion, whose music appears to be newly composed. However, the basic situation
is the same: the men have gone to besiege the town, leaving behind the women,
and especially one individual due shortly to be married who has left his fiancée
(Colin–Suzette in L’Heureuse Nouvelle, Hartfell–Adèle in Toulon soumis). As a
consequence, the work is constructed from the standpoint of the Republican
community which has sent soldiers (not, for instance, the scene of battle). But
otherwise, the versions are completely different. The earlier work centers much
of the first three of its five scenes on villagers; it mixes a discussion of liberty
and patriotism with rustic dances and derives comic effect from the use of the
naïf character Nicodème, judged too stupid to fight and acting as a lookout.
There is none of the latter version’s staging of battle itself, and nothing of the
treachery of the Toulonnais or the English is ever shown. As an example of
how the minor theaters adopted patriotic material for the framework of rustic
opéra-comique and the implications of this for genre, the work is interesting.
But so little has survived into the version performed at the Opéra, that to
speak of a resetting is quite misleading. That the same writer prepared
versions for two such different theaters is interesting in itself, however; little
50 “L’information politique par l’opéra: L’exemple de la prise de Toulon,” in Le Tambour

et la harpe, pp. 111–21 (the three points I cite are made, respectively, on pp. 119,
117, 119).
52 Toulon soumis, fait historique, opéra en un acte (Paris: De Lormel, 1794).
53 Spectacles de la Révolution, ii.59n6: “C’est la reprise d’une pièce jouée le 9 janvier au
Théâtre de Molière, no.1631, mais mise ici en musique.”
54 L’Heureuse Nouvelle, ou La Reprise de Toulon, Vaudeville en un acte, Par le C. F Olivet,
Représenté pour la premiere fois sur le Théâtre des Sans-Culottes, le Décadi 20 Nivose, l’an second
de la République (Paris: chez les Marchands de Nouveautés/Imprimerie de Pelletié, 1794).

information has survived to explain why the decision was made to use a work
by Fabre d’Olivet.55
In common with Le Siège de Thionville, the work opens with a private situa-
tion within a microcosmic community that is spoiled by incursion from an
external enemy. This opening is served dramatically by form because it begins
not with a massed chorus as heard so often, but with a solo recitative breaking
into aria; in this aria Adèle bemoans the absence of her husband who was
taken prisoner by besieging English forces, seemingly immediately after their
wedding. The setting is similarly internal, but opens onto an outside space
which is glimpsed rather than explored;56 Adèle’s solo is composed of an invo-
cation to Liberty to help the French and return her husband. The private wishes
are, again, compatible with patriotism in this account, as we have seen else-
where, in a twist to the pre-Revolutionary material. In an innovation to the
repertory of the Opéra, which moves the dramaturgy of the work toward the
opéra-comique, the second scene introduces one of the best-known songs of
the early Revolution, “Veillons au salut de l’Empire” (1792), a song that paro-
dies a melody from Renaud d’Ast, an opéra-comique by Radet with music by
Dalayrac (1787).57
It is striking how much space is devoted to an exploration of the “enemy”
from within (i.e., not described or analyzed by the French). For instance,
Hartfell’s aria in scene 3 instrumentalizes the trope of hidden treachery
elsewhere identified as so important:
Restons derrière ces remparts
Qui nous couvrent de toutes parts;
Ne tentons point hors des murailles
Le destin douteux des batailles;
Combattons de loin les Français,
Qui de près
Sont trop sûrs du succès.
L’arme la plus funeste,
55 The city of Toulon is under siege by the English; Adèle has been separated from her
lover, who has been abducted by the English. Battle commences and is eventually won by
the French, Toulon is destroyed, and Adèle’s lover turns out to be Hartfeld, who has joined
the English side and wishes to abduct her. He is finally defeated and killed; the French
celebrate their victory.
56 “Le théâtre représente l’intérieur de Toulon; à droite on voit le rempart […] Le port, que l’on
découvre dans le fond, le remplit entièrement” (p. 9).
57 On this song, see Constant Pierre, Les Hymnes et chansons de la Révolution: Aperçu
général et catalogue (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1904), pp. 544–45 (no. 608).

La seule qui nous reste
Pour les soumettre encor,
C’est l’or. (pp. 13–14)
[Let us remain behind the ramparts that protect us from all sides and not
tempt the uncertain outcome of battles. Instead, let us fight the French from
afar, since close by they are sure to win. The only weapon remaining to us, is
money.]
Equally significant, the planned French attack is to be an ambush, to take
place after nightfall.58 It turns out that Hartfell is the husband of Adèle, who
is about to abduct her when the attack begins. The most noteworthy feature
of this plot is the fact that almost half is given over to a staged battle and then
a lengthy celebratory scene.
The score of Toulon soumis has numerous stage directions not present in the
published libretto. Much of the action is given to a celebration of victory
that occurs two-thirds of the way through the work; and one wonders how the
battle itself was staged, since judging from the scenic descriptions it was quite
spectacular. After the customary approval of the work’s patriotic intentions,
the Journal de Paris complained that it “contains little more than military
maneuvers and a slight plot which is set out but not really developed.”59 It is
clear from the end of act I that the work made use of the same évolutions
militaires I have mentioned earlier; the direction reads: “The officers move to
the head of their batallions and lead them in processions before the statue of
Liberty” (p. 16). Otherwise, it remains a mystery how the work was actually
staged, since many of the battle scenes seem, according to stage directions, to
have been performed, rather than merely recounted. For instance, II.3, which
required that a group of French soldiers rush a group of the enemy with bayo-
nets [!], and in II.8, where the enemy is shelled by the French, combat is
engaged and “becomes terrible,” before Wimpffen is shown dead with “one
hundred bayonets in the breast.” In Toulon, the battle scene begins normally
enough with reported action suggesting off-stage carnage (p. 18); but it also
features cannonades and bombardments (p. 19), a house on fire (p. 20), and a
monologue pronounced by Adèle from her balcony, as the bombs fall around
her! Similarly, the retreat of the English is dramatized, not recounted, and
occupies much textual material (pp. 21–24). It features explicit references to
their expulsion (p. 21) and shows the enemy to be cruel in defeat, destroying
58 JdP, 10 March 1794 [20 Ventôse An II].

59 JdP, 1794, p. 1756.

what they can before retreating (p. 23). Surely much of this was not staged at
all, but the specifics of the production are unclear.
The final celebratory scene contains the following (by now, familiar) ingre-
dients: social reintegration, a commemorative renaming of the space (as “Port
de la Montagne!” p. 26), and a claimed quotation from a letter to the Convention
(pp. 27–28). One of the interesting moments of the final scene is the exhibition
of the body of the old man (p. 29), since Antoine de Baecque has insisted upon
the display of a body or simulacrum at moments of commemoration; this
reminds an audience both of the enormity of the sacrifice and the solemnity of
the occasion.60 Most important is the final ballet tacked on to the end of the
work, demonstrating that gaiety is not incompatible with the serious subject
in the mentality of the authors (it is composed of, respectively, a gigue gaie, a
menuet, 3 tambourins, a movement sung to La Carmagnole, a farandole, and a
rigaudon). The didascalia insists “The French give in to the gaiety that victory
has inspired, and dance on the debris of the rebel town, singing the following
verses.” It is sometimes difficult, from a modern perspective, to appreciate how
a song culture might have had a very different approach to this material, and
how a genuine outburst of spontaneous joy could be acceptable at the close of
such an action. The balletic and celebratory dimension, always the cornerstone
of the Opéra’s production, has by no means disappeared during the Terror.
3. “La patrie en danger”: The Appeal to Antiquity

On 5 Ventôse An II [23 February 1794], the Feuille du salut public, reviewing
Méhul’s Horatius Coclès, called for a stepping-up of patriotic history theater, on
the grounds that égalité had not yet found a worthy champion; it recommended
an adoption of what it called “simple beauty,” taking Sophocles and Euripides
as models, and making a congruency between Greece and France. In essence,
the Ancients were free men, and as such experienced “generous enthusiasms”;
the newly liberated French could likewise give free rein to their poetic genius.
Liberty was described as an inexhaustible and fertile source of virtue and
talents.61 It has been commonplace to describe the works of the Terror as
being composed quickly in response to a rapidly changing political situation,
such as the works we have just considered. Yet there is something paradoxical
about the works of that type performed at the Opéra, which is that the works
60 The Body Politic, chapter 8.

61 FdSP, 235 (5 Ventôse An II), p. 4.

dealing explicitly with “La patrie en danger” are performed between a full year
and eighteen months after that expression was first used, for “La Patrie en
Danger” was actually first declared by the National Assembly on 11 July 1792.
Of course the situation of military threat continued and was in fact intensified
by the summer of 1793, so the works were still very relevant to the developing
military situation. But the time lag is considerably greater than that
observed for works dealing with Toulon (four months), and is worth brief
consideration.
War was declared against Austria on 20 April 1792; Prussia joined the war
against France on 13 June. By July there was widespread recognition that
France faced defeat unless fortunes changed for the better, and on the 11th, a
lengthy debate took place in the Assembly.62 The intention of declaring the
danger of the country was to produce a “spark” to galvanize the polity: a com-
mission of twelve members had been mandated to consider and report on
whether the time had come to make such a declaration, and what the most
appropriate measure might be. “Let us produce a strong reaction,” Hérault de
Séchelles exhorted his fellow deputies in his speech: “let us deploy formidable
resources to make each and every citizen concerned for his destiny: the time
has come to call all French citizens into the service of the fatherland, all those
who have sworn to defend the Constitution even unto death, now have the
chance to live up to their oath” (p. 335). France’s enemies—both domestic and
foreign—were portrayed as wishing to destroy “our philosophy and the wisdom
of our principles,” and it was decided to prepare two separate addresses: one to
the people, another to the armies. The shorter of the two reads as follows:
Numerous troups are advancing toward our frontiers: enemies of Liberty
are armed against our Constitution. Citizens, the fatherland is in peril.
Those who gain the honor of marching in the front line to defend all
that is most dear to them, let them remember that they are French citi-
zens and that they are free, and let their fellow citizens who remain at
home protect both persons and property. Let the magistrates keep a
careful watch, and let all citizens maintain that calm courage that is the
cornerstone of true strength, and await lawful orders before acting: thus
may the fatherland be saved.
As we shall see, the operas concerning external military threat were themselves
intended to function in ways analogous to that declaration, or to use as themes
issues that the declaration raised. However they go beyond the siege plays by
62 AP, xlvi.323–44.

adopting Roman history to comment on the French situation; they expand the
plot to focus upon a polity galvanized by external threat and repelling that
threat to achieve stability and unity. In a brief overview, Béatrice Didier has
pointed to the emergence of what she calls a democratic spirit in the operas of
the Revolution and its implications for dramaturgy. In particular, she points to
the disappearance of the individual hero to be replaced by a “collective hero.”63
Although this is variable according to the individual work—individual hero-
ism is very much a feature of Fabius, for instance—the focus upon collective
emotion and the elision of private interest is an essential aspect of the works.
Moreover, the very expression is used in several of the libretti.64 Didier’s article
is also one of a number of studies showing how the role of the audience is
likewise modified in these works, which call for active mobilization and loy-
alty on the part of spectators.65 We also see a tension between the close allusion
to specifics and a more generalized “picturesque” treatment of Antiquity, and
between internal dramaturgical exegencies and political imperatives. For
instance, in the case of Fabius, restructuring the work into three acts also
entailed toning down the political dimension, to render it less bellicose and
more festive. The ideal of “la pureté de l’histoire” still takes precedence over
political manipulation, as shown in the Journal de Paris review of Miltiade à
Marathon.66 I shall divide the events of the plot into five series, which hardly
vary at all from one work to another: the interpretive structures thus estab-
lished tell us much about French Republican self-mythologization during
the Terror. At least one review felt that the plot of Miltiade à Marathon
was very slight but perfectly relevant;67 whereas the Moniteur said of the
tableau patriotique Toute la Grèce that it would be unjust to search for a dramatic
action, and to complain of its absence.68 Worthy of note is that a new sobriety
seems to characterize the works; the Révolutions de Paris said, of Miltiade à
Marathon, that “here is an opera shorn of dances, ballets, love, fairy-like
enchantment, which has achieved complete success thanks to the talents of
the librettist, composer, and performers, inspired by the love of Liberty and
the fatherland. Of all passions, this is the one which is most touching in the
63 “L’idéal démocratique dans les livrets d’opéra de l’époque révolutionnaire,” in

1789–1989: Musique, histoire, démocratie, ed. Antoine Hennion, 3 vols. (Paris: Maison des
sciences de l’homme, 1992), ii.271–82 (278).
64 Toute la Grèce, p. 8.
65 “L’idéal démocratique,” p. 281.
66 JdP, 1793, p. 1260.
67 JdesS, 128 (7 November 1793), pp. 1012–17 (1014).
68 Moniteur, 101 (11 Nivôse An II/31 December 1793), xix.251.

present circumstances.”69 I shall quote primarily from Fabius, Miltiade à
Marathon, and Toute la Grèce, since Horatius Coclès has been considered
elsewhere.70 First, an overview of the works is in order.71
overview of the works

Toute la Grèce, ou Ce que peut la liberté (libretto by Beffroy de Reigny; music
by Lemoyne) describes itself as a tableau patriotique; set in the Greece of
Demosthenes, the great opponent of Philip of Macedonia (fourth century bc),
it foregrounds Athens’s struggle against a coalition of enemies. From the
Journal des spectacles, we learn that Lemoyne had championed the work on
Beffroy’s behalf and that he had all but given up on the Opéra until learning
the care with which the work was produced.72 From a later review we also learn
that the Opéra made some cuts, including removal of Démarre, Philippe of
Macedonia’s ambassador.73 The music was praised, especially Eucharis’s aria
“partez, partez” and the children’s chorus “Grèce, nos faibles bras,” although
certain elements of staging were criticized, including the organization of entries
and exits to and from the stage. The work was dedicated to the national armies,
in an act of patriotism, and the generic subtitle itself clearly shows it to be a
reflection on contemporary France. Accordingly, the fiction is not just some closed
imaginary world, separate from the lived experience of the spectator, but also a
metatheatrical event implicitly reminding the spectator of parallels between the
fiction and the contemporary situation, as I have elsewhere argued.74
In the case of the second work, Fabius, the parallels were also explicit. The
librettist Martin explicitly linked the French contemporary situation with the
second Punic War in the libretto’s preface, especially the external threat to
the Republic posed by that war, and the enactment of the principle of
equality enshrined in the Saturnalia of act II. Even though the revised libret-
to’s preface removed much of the explicit cross-referencing of France with
69 RdP, 214 (15–22 Brumaire An II), pp. 194–95.

70 Bartlet, Etienne-Nicolas Méhul.
71 In the following section, I am quoting from libretti unless otherwise stated, with
parenthetical page references in the text, preceded by the following abbreviations: MM
(Miltiade à Marathon), TlG (Toute la Grèce, ou Ce que peut la République); L1 (Fabius, libretto
from 1792); L2 (Fabius, libretto from 1793).
72 JdesS, 190 (19 Nivôse An II), pp. 1509–11.
73 JdesS, 189 (18 Nivôse An II), pp. 1501–5.
74 “History and metatheatricality.”

Republican Rome,75 the parallel was still present. The libretto was issued
twice: a first edition was printed (according to the colophon) by the Société des
amis du commerce in 1792 and carries the phrase “Dedicated to the Academy
of Music, to be performed after the first victories of the French Republic.”
The second edition, by the Imprimerie de l’Académie de Musique, was dated
1793/An 2e de la République Française and has major structural changes rela-
tive to 1792: what was an “opéra” in one act is now a “tragédie-lyrique” in
three, several passages are different, and the names of certain characters have
changed as well. However, it is possible that this amplification fell short of
what was expected, since reviews claimed that the principal characters were
not sufficiently strongly drawn.76
In terms of the work’s internal history, most of the documents pertaining
to reception and production are lost for this period, but the 1792 libretto
(henceforward L1) states that the plan of the work was read to the Opéra’s
administrative committee on 10 October 1792 and that it was received in its
final form on 7 November. The work’s premiere took place on 9 August 1793,
so the production took nine months from acceptance of libretto (presumably
without score) to premiere, which demonstrates just how different the Opéra’s
policy had become with respect to repertory: works with urgent contemporary
relevance routinely jumped the queue and were adopted and produced very
quickly. Perhaps this is why reviews found some fault with the staging: the
Journal des spectacles, for instance, felt that the scenery of Fabius was more Greek
than Roman, and that the scenery for the Forum, in particular, was cramped
and rather lacking in grandeur.77
The libretto for Miltiade à Marathon was written by Nicolas-François
Guillard, who had written Iphigénie en Tauride for Gluck and would write La
Mort d’Adam for Le Sueur in 1799, among other texts. “Probably the best
French librettist of his generation,” his principal characteristics as a librettist,
as described by Rushton, are an uncertainty in handling the endings of stories,
but ingenuity in necessary compressions, and a capacity to show rather than to
75 Phrases removed in 1793 include the suggestion that “[les] personnes qui voudront
s’assurer combien les événemens de la seconde guerre Punique ont de ressemblance avec ce
qui se passe sous nos ïeux” [those who wish to see to what extent the events of the second
Punic war relate to what is going on in front of our very eyes] can read Charles Rollin’s
Histoire romaine (p. [iv]), and the claim that “les événemens qui caractérisent la seconde
guerre Punique . . . semblent n’être autre chose que notre propre histoire” [the events char-
acterizing the second Punic war, seem to be nothing less than our own history] (p. [i]).
76 JdesS, 42 (12 August 1793), pp. 331–36 (334).
77 JdesS, 42, pp. 334–35.

describe important events. His verses are “neat” and “elegant.”78 He was recip-
ient of a state pension and was a member of the Opéra’s “comité de lecture.” It
is not known whether Miltiade à Marathon was commissioned (even unoffi-
cially), and little is known about its genesis. Marathon had already been the
subject of dramatic treatment, by Jean-François Guéroult in 1792 (La Journée
de Marathon, a pièce historique in four acts, subtitled Le Triomphe de la liberté ),
and the subject was ripe for political treatment.79 Miltiades (540–489 bc) was
the military general [stratège; Gr. strategos] responsible for the Athenian victory
over the Persians at Marathon in 490, a battle recounted by Herodotus.80
Nicole Loraux has pointed out that Marathon has a special role in Greek
national history, not only as an episode of the Greco-Persian wars but what the
Athenians would come to see as their greatest victory.81 She shows that orators
made much of this exploit, although with vastly differing aims and in differ-
ing political contexts: no event, she claims, was more “manipulated in order to
support one policy or another.”82
As even these brief descriptions show, the three works have striking struc-
tural similarities, and the plasticity of this framework explains why I see it as
paradigmatic for an important trend during the Terror. This section will exam-
ine how the temporality and organization of the historical account are manipu-
lated to produce an edifying plot, and how that structure can be seen as a
template for other similar works performed in the same season, works that also
stage the repression of external threat and civic celebration of military victory.
i. External Threat
The first of these stages centers upon a threat to the polity, the latter usually
being portrayed as an idyllic or otherwise isolated microcosmic community.
The threat always comes from outside (rather than being caused by dissent
from within); the outsider is usually close, such as in a neighboring country,
and is generally threatening because of a perceived superiority of military
78 NGDO, ii.572–73.
79 (Paris: Imprimerie du cercle social, 1792). See also the (separately published)
Argument (n.p.: n.pub., n.d.), 16o. Ars: GD-20940.
80 Histories, trans. Aubrey de Sélincourt, rev. A. R. Burn (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1972), pp. 424–31 [VI.102–119]. Abbé Barthélemy discusses the battle in VJAG,
i.112–17, describing Miltiades as one of the three men destined to “give a new boost to
national sentiments” (p. 112); the others were Aristide and Themistocles.
81 Nicole Loraux, L’Invention d’Athènes: Histoire de l’oraison funèbre dans la “cité classique”
(Paris: Mouton/EHESS, 1981), pp. 157–73 (157).
82 Loraux, Invention, p. 158, 162.

strength—all of which is fairly inevitable when fictionalizing a war. Yet
the emotion is less straightforward: in the earlier works, fear is the dominant
emotion excited by such threat, subsequently indignation, and then a rather
jingoistic zeal.
In Miltiade, this threat is present at the beginning, and the work opens in
the midst of a crisis; the enemy are described as neighboring despots, and the
Greeks are seen as outnumbered (“La liberté chancelle, & la seule Erétrie / A
sa chûte prochaine oppose un noble effort” [Liberty is under threat; Eretria
alone makes a noble effort to save it]). The opening is set in a public square,
and characters are assembled at the heart of a political space, Athens being
described as the sacred soil of liberty.83 The opening atmosphere of Fabius is
also very much one of despair, and it foregrounds group alarm, leading to
panic, not resolution. Not only does this allow for a striking opening scene,
but it foregrounds the unexpected and initially disorienting character of the
war of the first coalition facing Revolutionary France. In particular, the inexo-
rable advance of the encroaching enemy is a matter of alarm. According to
the revised libretto the overture expressed, “in succession, a popular revolt,
songs of victory, a melancholic religious melody. Suddenly, thanks to a bold
bridging passage, dissonant phrases open the prelude to the chorus of the first
scene” (p. 1).
By the time that Toute la Grèce and Horatius Coclès appear, premiered in
January and February, respectively, the dominant emotion appears to have
changed. In Horatius, the funerary opening, where the death of Brutus is
mourned, quickly gives way to a more defiant stance:
VALERIUS
O Brutus! fixe tes regards
Sur les bords désolés du Tibre;
Contemple, au sein de ces remparts,
Rome assiégée & toujours libre.
Des rois les efforts seront vains,
Nous en attestons ta mémoire;
Et la liberté des Romains
Doit durer autant que ta gloire.84
[Brutus, fix your gaze on the desolate banks of the Tiber and see, within the
ramparts, Rome, under siege but still free. The efforts of kings shall be vain, as
your memory attests, and the freedom of Rome will last as long as your glory.]
83 All quotations from MM, I.1, pp. 7–8.

84 HC, 1, p. 8.

Similarly in Toute la Grèce, an opening chorus of workers sings “Préparons,
préparons gaiement / Ces armes qui doivent confondre / L’ennemi que la Grèce
épargna trop souvent” [Let us cheerfully prepare the weapons to combat the
enemy that Greece has spared once too often]; and describes the enemy as “Vils
soldats, qui sur nous ensemble venez fondre. . . . Esclaves égarés, qui vendez
aux tyrans / Vos cœurs, vos bras & vos serments! [Vile soldiers who descend
upon us, misguided slaves, who sell your hearts, your arms, your oaths, to
tyrannical masters].”85 And this chorus takes place against the backdrop of a
tableau-stase, to borrow Pierre Frantz’s terminology: a static arrangement on
stage against which action can begin (rather than the tableau-comble where an
apex of emotional development is frozen in time):86
The theater represents Piraeus, a port [city] of Athens, vessels being
prepared for sailing, others under construction, forges in the back-
ground under a wide portico where steel blades, javelins, and lances are
being made. On one side, the streets of Athens, on the other, the tree-
lined city walls with a triumphal arch; and in the background is the sea
with vessels. There are busy workmen everywhere. (TlG, p. 3)
This tableau of cheerful manual work is derived not from the history of serious
opera but from mid-century opéra-comique, where it is a common image on the
raising of the curtain (Favart’s Les Moissonneurs, and many others besides). It
may be explained by the previous career of the librettist, Beffroy de Reigny,
more familiarly known as le cousin Jacques, who had written comic works
until then. In all three cases, an original sense of community is established,
before the presentation of external threat.
ii. Galvanizing
In a second strand, this threat galvanizes the polity (sometimes only after
exhortations by leaders), leading to ensemble passages that make much use of
choruses; these passages may feature any or all of the following characteristics:
the election of a leader (often the title role of the work: Fabius, Miltiade), the
leaders haranguing the people and encouraging their loyalty, an oath by
(ordinary unspecified) individuals to defend the “fatherland,” an explicit refusal
of private interests of family in favor of the common good. In such aspects, the
85 TlG, 1, p. 3.
86 L’Esthétique du tableau dans le théâtre du XVIIIe siècle (Paris: PUF, 1998),
pp. 157–66.

chorus foreshadows developments in Grand Opera: as an echo of the moral
forces seen on stage.87
In Miltiade, Callimaque’s aria “De vos fils, de vos femmes / Entendez les
plaintifs accents” [Hear the plaintive accents of your sons and your wives] (I.1)
invokes emotional bonds and absent comrades in order to encourage action. It
is unclear what is meant by the aria’s reference to oppressed brothers (“Vos
frères opprimés réclament vos secours”): probably the subjects of the enemy,
described as tyrants, although reference has previously been made to dead
comrades (“Vos frères sont tombés sous le fer des Persans” [Your brothers have
fallen to the Persians]). In any case, an exhortation is usually present where fear
or panic need to be overcome (and absent where the polity is already galva-
nized), and leads to a language characterized by imperatives and by oaths.
“Volons aux remparts d’Érétrie” [Let us run to the walls of Eretria], sing the
soldiers in Miltiade, for instance (p. 8). Indeed determination is explicitly seen
here as the emotional counterpart of terror (“que le péril même échauffe vos
courages” [May peril itself inspire courage in you]). Such determination is
expressed in characteristically stark terms, usually borrowing the Jacobin
slogan “la liberté ou la mort” or a variant thereof (for instance, here it is ren-
dered as the alexandrine line “Jurons de les défendre ou d’y perdre la vie”). The
nomination of a leader then follows: in the case of the character Miltiade, his
legitimacy is symbolically established by his receipt of a sword and by his
verbal acceptance of the role. The remainder of this scene is given over to a
detail that is historically accurate but framed rather questionably: the dispro-
portionate military might of the enemy and the need for Athens to appeal for
help, presented here as Miltiade’s offer that the people themselves should
decide on his course of action.88 This scene ends with the aria “Lâche trans-
fuge, infidèle Hippias, / Tremble! ta ruine est certaine” [cowardly defector,
unfaithful Hippias, your end is near], an aria characterized by a mixture of
bravura and defiance, tinged with the moral superiority of Republican
jingoism: the enemy, we are reminded, may well be militarily stronger, but is
morally weaker, being merely a group of “esclaves” (p. 11).
87 Mark Darlow, “L’esthétique du tableau dans les ballets de Tarare, version de 1819,”
in Musique et geste de Lully à la Révolution: Études sur la musique, le théâtre et la danse, ed.
Jacqueline Waeber (Bern: Lang, 2009), pp. 249–61 (254). James Parilakis, “The chorus,”
in David Charlton (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003), pp. 76–92.
88 On the magnitude of the threat, see passage beginning “Arrêtez un moment.
Avant que de combattre” [Wait one moment, before engaging combat.]; cf. Herodotus,
pp. 425, 427.

In Fabius, the role afforded to the “people” is also great. In particular, eloquence
inflames the people’s “enthusiasm” (L2, p. 9), and the chorus is musically and dra-
matically integrated by echoing the speech of individual leaders. For instance, it
defines glory, following the injunction of Métellus, as the glory of dying in defense
of the state, which leads directly to an oath scene to end act I (musical example 4).
Indeed, the review in the Journal des spectacles praised this item especially.
example 4
Jurez de rétablir l’autorité des lois
Fabius
loix, ju - rez de ré - tab - lir l’au - to - ri - té des loix
Nous le ju -
T
B
Vln. I
Fl. Vln. I
Vln. II, Vla. Vln. II, Vla., Fl.

Keyboard Vlns., Vla., Cl.
reduction
Vc., Fg.
f Cl.
Fg.
Vc.
Cb.
Cb.
ju - rez au prix de votre vi - e de sau - ver la pa - tri - e,
rons
+ Vln. II,Vla.
Fl. Vlni.
ff Cl.
Vla.
Vc.

example 4 Cont’d
2
11
ju - rez que les pro - pri - é - tés que les hom - mes par
Nous le ju - rons
Vlni.
Vlni., Fl. Cl. Vlni.
Fl. Cl.
Vla. f ff
Vc., Fg. Vla.
Vc.
Cb.
15
vous ser - ont tous re - spec - tés et de la li - ber - té pour- ront gou - ter les char - mes
18
nous le ju - rons, nous le ju - rons, nous le ju - rons.
Vlni.
Fl. Cl.
ff ...
Vla., Vc.
Cb.
358
Finally, in Toute la Grèce the leader is already named (Demosthenes, the
sublime defender of Athens, p. 4) and does not need to be selected, but he is
nonetheless given a scene where he encourages his co-citizens to action, includ-
ing an aria which has a flavor of opéra-comique in its short lines, rhyme-scheme,
and personification of an abstract concept (“la Patrie”), in a refreshing move
away from the rather bombastic Republican rhetoric of other works (musical
example 5):
[When the fatherland calls, all citizens rally around from all sides and form
a rampart. In their zealous effort nothing stops them, honor itself is their
example 5
Quand la patrie appelle
Moderato
Démosthène
Quand la pa - trie ap - pel - le
Vlni. Vln. I
Vla. Vln. II, Vla.

f p ff
Ob., Cl., Hn. 1

Keyboard
reduction
Tpt., Hn. 2
ff
f p Vc. + Fg.
Vc.
Trmbn.
4 f
On voit tous ses en -fants frap - pés de ses ac-cents se ran - ger au -tour d’el - le Vo -
p cresc.
Hns. + Ob., Cl.
f cresc.
p
(Vc.) cresc.
Fg.

example 5 Cont’d
2
8
- lants de tou - te part se ran - ger au - - tour
11
d’el - - le, vo - lants, vo- lants de tou - te part au - tour

f p f p
(Vlni., Vla)
Tpt.
ff
ff
Ob., Cl. Tpt., Ob., Cl., Hn.
Hns.
f (Vc.) ff
ff
Fg., Trmbn.
(Vc.)
f p f p Fg., Trmbn.
15
d’e - le ils s’em - pres - sent vi - ve - ment ils la
p
(Vc.)
360
example 5 Cont’d
3
18
pres- sent au - tour d’elle ils la pres- sent vi - ve - ment ils la pres- sent vi - ve - ment ils la
pp cresc.
Ob., Cl.
p
Hn. p cresc.
pp p Fg.
21
pres- sent et lui font un rem - part et lui font, un rem - part et lui font, un rem-
cresc. ff ff ff
cresc. ff ff ff
25
- part et lui font un rem - part.
ff ff
Ob., Cl.
Tpt., Hn.
ff
361
guide, and their intrepid air terrifies the servile enemy who flees. From
one combat to the next, a free man is carried by his zeal and nothing can
stop it.]
The following scene extends this in a dialogue between Eucharis and
Démosthènes, where the latter can be described as the “Oracle du Sénat, dont
la mâle éloquence, / Comparable à la foudre, entretient parmi nous / Le feu
sacré qui nous embrâse tous.” [Oracle of the Senate, whose male eloquence like
lightning stokes the sacred fire which enflames us all] (p. 6), and where Eucharis
can encourage the people in more traditional fashion by referring to the
encroaching external threat of Philip (II of Macedon). This leads, as did a
comparable movement in Fabius, to a scene of patriotic donations by the women
(p. 7) and the arrival of the twelve phalanxes of troops who are to fight. They
come from various Greek states, and each is described as carrying a banner
bearing a word or slogan characteristic of the Republic.89
iii. Peripeteia
In a third series of moments, the resolve of characters is tested: generally bad
news is first received (in Miltiade, the fall of Eritrea to the Persians in I.2), often
also accompanied by the realization of internal villainy90 (usually described as
a betrayal of liberty: MM, p. 12). This generally leads to expressions or excla-
mations of national shame, because against this backdrop of despair, the nar-
rative of an individual act of heroism with an exemplary dimension appears
stronger (in Miltiade, the passage of I.2 beginning “Nitoclès n’a point part à
cette perfidie” [Nitocles has no part in this perfidy] would be an example).
This exemplary dimension, and subsequent victory and celebration, is expanded
to create a whole dramatic work in L’Apothéose de Beaurepaire and Le Siège de
Thionville. The act of heroism in question is presented in narrative, and news is
89 “Vive la République!,” “La liberté ou la mort,” “Ordre et discipline,” “Obéissance

aux loix,” “Respect à l’Éternel,” “Sûreté, propriété,” “Honneur aux beaux-arts,” “Haine aux
tyrans,” “Mœurs et fraternité,” “Bon exemple à nos enfants,” “L’union fait la force,”
“Courage, Républicains.” [Long live the Republic, Liberty or death, Order and discipline,
Obedience to the laws, Respect for the Eternal, Security, property, Honor to the arts,
Hatred for tyrants, Mores and fraternity, Example to our children, In union there is
strength, Courage, Republicans.]
90 MM, p. 13: “Darius a déjà soumis toute l’Eubée. / J’ai vu l’excès de honte où la
Grèce est tombée, / J’ai vu d’indignes Magistrats / Vendre à l’or des Persans l’honneur
de la patrie.” [Already Darius has vainquished Euboia. I have witnessed the excess of
shame into which Greece has plunged. I have seen unworthy magistrates sell the honor of
the fatherland for Persian gold.]

often brought in by a messenger, changing the rhythm and tone of the scene to
create maximum dramatic effect (musical example 6).
At this point we may distinguish two variants. In one sub-category, the
individual is successful and will subsequently be celebrated personally; in
another equally important category, he sacrifices his life, but his death is deci-
sive toward future French victory (compare works dealing with child-martyrs
example 6
Ô malheureuse patrie!
Andante
Choeur de
femmes,
enfants, Ô mal - heu - reu - se pa - tri - - e, ô
vieillards
Ô mal - heu - reu - se pa - tri - - e, ô

Ob., Cl.
Vlni.,
Keyboard Vla.
reduction f f f f f
Trmbn.
Vc. f f
f f f f
...
crime, ô li - ber - té tra - hi - e!
crime, ô li - ber - té tra - hi - e!
...
f f f ff
f f f ff

Bara and Viala, as well as Beaurepaire).91 In the case of Nitoclès, one of the
heroes in Miltiade, he is overwhelmed by enemies, and commits suicide amid
perfidious Greeks and Persians (MM, pp. 13–14). This action often leads to a
second oath—for instance, to emulate this example—or an invocation prior to
battle, and these will often be placed at the end of an act for maximum dra-
matic effect (Callimaque’s air: “A ses mânes sacrés ne donnons point de pleurs”
[Do not cry for these sacred shades], MM, p. 14). In Miltiade an additional
scene to end act I introduces an aspect not seen elsewhere but entirely congru-
ent with the preceding material: the child Télèphe (son of Heracles,
but here described as the son of Callimaque) asking to fight despite being of
insufficient age (a detail not found in Herodotus nor Barthélemy).92 This
allows for some rather obvious material on the primordial duty a man owes to
the state before his family (“Votre sang et le mien, dans ses veines transmis, /
Est un don qu’avant tout il doit à son pays. / Nous ne pouvions lui faire un plus
grand sacrifice” [Our blood is a gift we owe to our country, and we cannot
make a prouder sacrifice] p. 15). It is followed by an ensemble scene of invoca-
tion to Minerva which ends the act. Hence act I of the two-act depiction
of Miltiade à Marathon charts an emotional trajectory culminating with a
departure for battle.
iv. Confrontation
In a fourth stage, a battle or test takes place, usually in a liminal space or on
the threshold of a space that has been defined as sensitive, and in all cases
I have seen, ending with victory, for self-evident reasons (though we should
note that there is no military defeat preceding this). In Miltiade, the setting for
act II was described in the libretto as follows:
A plain close to the gates of Athens. City walls fill the left of the stage.
The citadel is in the far left. The background and the right represent the
landscapes of Attica. On different levels, here and there one sees torches
to signal out to sea. The statue of Minerva next to the gate is covered.
91 I discuss these briefly in “Staging the Revolution: The Fait historique,” in

Revolutionary Culture: Continuity and Change, ed. Darlow, Nottingham French Studies, 45.1
(Spring 2006), 77–88.
92 Compare the lengthy scene (5) in Toute la Grèce, where a phalanx of child-soldiers
joins the other troops, carrying a banner “L’espoir naissant de la Patrie” [The nascent hope
of the fatherland] (p. 12), and singing “le courage / N’attend pas l’âge / Chez les
Républicains” [Republican courage does not depend on age] (p. 13).

It is night, and the theater is lit only by two large lanterns either side of
the gate. (MM, p. 19)
The Bibliothèque de l’Opéra possesses a sketch by Pierre-François-Léonard
Fontaine (1762–1853) for what was almost certainly this décor. It shows, among
other elements, a triumphal arch, seemingly at the gates to a city, and two
statues, one equestrian and the other probably that of Minerva, as noted by the
libretto; in this case, however, the plane is reversed (the city is on the right)
and some material details do not match: possibly, the sketch was abandoned
and superseded by a plan that has not survived.93 However, the quality of
the staging was confirmed by the reviews, both with regard to costume and to
décor.94 Here, the action is set just outside the city gates, and it is noteworthy
that the act dealing with crisis and its resolution is set in a liminal space:
that is, the point of entry to the city is also the point of crisis, and its major
vulnerability.
The triumphal battle is generally told, not shown, partly for material rea-
sons of staging; though two important exceptions (and seen as exceptions by
contemporaries) are Toulon soumis and Horatius Coclès. In this case, as battle
takes place elsewhere, a feminine scene will foreground the emotions of those
left behind: a wait doubled by worry over the military imbalance of power,
particularly in the context of Athens’s failure to engage help (and its fighting
therefore for a wider constituency of absent Greek city-states). This is the
most obvious example of the wider phenomenon of the gendering of the libret-
to’s structure, constructing masculine and feminine spaces and emotional
scenes, according to a dichotomy that seems hardly to have changed since
David’s Horaces. During this scene, a further invocation to Minerva takes place
93 Po: Musée.1925(2). Fontaine’s best known work is probably, with Charles Percier,
the Arc de Triomphe du carrousel (standing at the eastern end of the Tuileries gardens),
and his work has been seen as a self-consciously “archaeological” version of neoclassicism,
a trend which this sketch seems to bear out. Little has survived on Fontaine’s designs for
the Opéra. They are not mentioned at all in his Journal, which covers only the years
1799–1853 (2 vols., Paris: Ecole nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, 1987), nor in his
published work with Percier, such as their Recueil de décorations intérieures (Paris: Didot,
1829). Pâris left the Opéra by December 1792, according to Pierre Pinon, p. 563. Nicole
Wild shows that he resigned from the Opéra after Adrien: “Costumes et mise en scène à
l’Opéra sous la Révolution: Un témoin: Jean-Simon Berthélemy,” in Le Tambour et la
Harpe, p. 241, citing Po: Arch.19(56). A contract was signed with Baltard, Percier, and
Bassant on 8 March 1792; Fontaine joined at the end of the year: ibid., p. 242, citing AN:
AJ/13/44.
94 JdesS, 128 (7 November 1793), p. 1016.

(“O toi, dont l’image voilée” [Oh thee, whose veiled image], MM, p. 22). The
second scene brings news of victory from Callimaque, after a march (and
the musical contrast with the previous invocation is, again, efficient, if rather
lacking in subtlety). This is accompanied by offerings, and it is striking that
the librettist introduces a footnote here to justify reference to what sounds
suspiciously like a supreme being (“agent inconnu que l’Univers adore”
[unknown being adored by the universe]), arguing:
Some people have been surprised to see the first Magistrate of Athens
invoking an unknown being, above the gods. I ask them to remember
that this philosophy was emerging in Greece at that time. Anaxagoras,
a contemporary of Miltiades who went on to be the teacher of Pericles,
openly taught this particular doctrine. They say that this led to his
ostracism, and everybody knows that it cost Sophocles his life around
fifty years later. I was forced to introduce variety into my work, whose
main action happens far off-stage, and I felt that this invocation would
save interminable invocations to Minerva and would offer material that
would strike lovers of Antiquity. (MM, p. 23n)
It is instructive to compare with the octosyllabic hymn “Puissant moteur de
l’univers” [Mighty force of the universe], a movement singled out by the press
for being below the rest of the score as not sufficiently “saintement sublime”95
(musical example 7).
Oddly, a third scene then stages a second peripeteia in the form of renewed
threat; the watch has spotted Persian standards approaching, and this excites
very similar reactions of fear followed by defiance, though in much more com-
pressed form. Télèphe’s arrival signals final victory; followed by a stophic diver-
tissement (beginning “Sois toujours libre & triomphante” [Be forever free and
triumphant]). Interestingly, Toute la Grèce ends with this stage, refusing to
close the work with victory, because of the contemporary French situation (in
October 1793, when this work, one of the earliest of the set, was performed,
France was still very much at war); Beffroy’s text promises a third conclusive
act when victory has been achieved!:
It was neither appropriate, interesting, or even possible to end this
little play in any other way. That was my opinion and also that of the
committee of the Opéra when we decided to change the dénouement,
95 JdesS, 128 (7 November 1793), p. 1015; however, the columnist asks whether this
hymn should not instead have been addressed to a god the Athenian people would have
recognized: Mars, Minerva, or Jupiter.

example 7
Puissant moteur de l’univers
Lento
Théonice
Puis -
Callimaque
Puis - sant mo - teur de l’u - ni -
S
A
Puis -
T
B
Vlni. ten.
ff p ff p cresc. ff p
Fl, Ob. Cl.
Keyboard
reduction
Vla.
ff p ff p p
ff
Hn., Fg., Trmbn.
Vc.
5
- sant mo - teur de l’u - ni - vers, ô
- vers, ô loi dont l’es - sen - ce su -
- sant mo - teur de l’u - ni - vers, ô
ten. ten.
ff p cresc.
ff ten. ten.
ff cresc.
367
example 7 Cont’d
2
9
loi dont l’es - sen - ce su - prê - me as - su - je -
- prê - me
loi dont l’es - sen - ce su - prê - me as - su - je -
ten.
ff p Vla.
(Fl.) ff
ff ten. p ff
13
- tit le des - tin mê - me, que sur nous les yeux soient ou -
- tit le des - tin mê - me, que sur nous les yeux soient ou -
que sur nous les yeux soient ou -

(Vln. 1)
(Vln. 2, Vla)
ff pp
(+ Hn.) (Fl.)
ff pp
(Fg.)
(Vc.)
368
example 7 Cont’d
3
18
- verts, que sur nous les yeux soient ou - verts, sur
-verts, que sur nous les yeux soient ou - verts, sur
-verts, que sur nous les yeux soient ou - verts,
cresc.
(Fl., Ob. Cl.)
pp
(Hn.)
22
nous, sur nous que les yeux soient ou - verts, sur
nous, sur nous que les yeux soient ou - verts, sur
pp
pp
369
example 7 Cont’d
4
26
nous, sur nous que les yeux soient ou - verts.
nous, sur nous que les yeux soient ou - verts.
Vln. I
pp Vln. II
pp
pp Vla.
pp
Trmbn.
30
+ Fl.
pp
33
Vlni.
Vla.
Hn.
370
which was originally quite different, because Philip of Macedon
appeared on stage and shattered his crown at the sight of the virtue and
courage of the Republicans and swore eternal friendship for them. But
following the case of Porsenna in Mutius Scævola we realized that it was
impolitic and dangerous to put a king on stage.96
v. Celebration and Reintegration

In a final series, borrowing from a wide range of plots, celebration features the
reintegration of individuals within the polity, a reaffirmation of the moral
order (copied from operatic divertissements), which differs from classic precedent
by borrowing from opéra-comique and usually ends with some kind of explicit
motto, lesson, or emblem. That of Miltiade is relatively short and is composed
of verses by Miltiade repeated by the chorus; others are longer. That of Horatius
Coclès is short but explicitly links refound liberty to regicide. In most cases, the
hymn, invocation, oath, or similar moment is placed at scene ends where the
exit aria would have been in Baroque Italian opera, ending a dramatic segment
with a particularly showy or stirring movement: the structures of the Terrorist
repertory are grown out of earlier material.
4. Democratic Opera? The Role of the People

If the works can be seen to have structural elements in common and dramatize
historical material according to a schema which is politically expedient, it is
worth concluding this discussion by asking whether this makes of the works a
type of propaganda; we can look briefly at the role accorded to “the people” in
the works, and the institutional dimensions of their production and reception.
Fabius will serve as a useful example of the first point. Rome had won the first
Punic War against Carthage in 241 bc, leading to its possession of Sicily; the
weakening of Carthage; the consequent Roman seizure of Sardinia, Carthage’s
conquest of Spain (under Hamilcar); and the constitution of an empire from
which Hannibal would launch the second Punic War in 218. The action of the
opera centers on the events of 217, the year in which Hannibal crossed the
Apennines and defeated the consul C. Flaminius in an ambush at Lake
Trasimene: this event terrified Rome into appointing Quintus Fabius Maximus
dictator. Fabius has become known as the cunctator [Lat.: delayer, from cunctari]
for his actions in that year: he decided not to engage immediately in pitched
96 JdesS, 116 (26 October 1793), p. 920.

battle with Hannibal, given the military superiority of the Carthaginians; and
he engaged instead in a longer war of attrition, the purpose of which was to
harrass Hannibal’s army and wear it down while limiting direct attack on
Rome.97 This temporizing strategy, which has subsequently become known
as the “Fabian” strategy98 and which was at first much criticized, provided
much of the dramatic tension of the libretto, since in this respect Fabius
was opposed within Rome by the patrician consul Lucius Æmilius Paullus
(Paul-Emile in the opera) and plebeian consul Caius Terentius Varro (Fr:
Varron) who were elected in 216. Ancient and modern sources on Fabius
and on this war, of course, abound: much of the material on his character
and actions is derived from Plutarch as well as the many historical sources
that discuss the war itself (principally, Livy and Polybius); but the librettist
pointed explicitly to the recent French historiography—in this case, Charles
Rollin’s Histoire romaine—and quoted specific passages from the 1741 edition
in support of his treatment.99 Two aspects of the material were particualarly
relevant to the French situation: the widespread panic sweeping through
the polity at the sudden likelihood of external threat from a militarily stron-
ger army, which could easily have been compared with the concept of la patrie
en danger; and the Republican overtones of liberty emerging triumphant
from a position of military threat, although the opera adds an extra layer
of “relevance” by describing Carthage as a coalition of kings, a historically
dubious detail that aligned it with the European coalition threatening France
in 1792.
The Mercure noted that contemporary allusions were frequently developed
at the expense of historical accuracy and stylistic correction, and that poetic
license was justified by the moral purpose of the work.100 It is difficult to judge
97 For an overview of the second Punic War, see CAH, viii.44–80, esp. 44–56.
98 References to this temporization abound in the libretti: cf. L2, p. 25 where a
chorus of Guerriers and Peuple sings “Seul en temporisant il sauva la patrie,” [Temporizing,
he alone saved the fatherland], or Fabius’s own line “Ménageant votre sang, j’ai toujours
évité / De combattre de front cette armée ennemie.” [Sparing your blood, I have always
avoided frontal conflict with this enemy army.] See also L2, p. 25: “J’ai cherché mon salut
dans de sages lenteurs.” [I have sought glory in wise restraint.]
99 Histoire romaine, depuis la fondation de Rome jusqu’à la bataille d’Actium, c’est-à-dire
jusqu’à la fin de la République, par M. Rollin, 16 vols. (Paris: Vve Estienne, 1738–1748).
Rollin had died in 1741: the work was continued from volume 8 by Jean-Baptiste-Louis
Crevier. Martin quotes from volumes 4 and 5. See particularly Rollin’s own summary of
livre 14, which shows to what extent the libretto has selected and conflated episodes in its
creation of a coherent drama.
100 MF, 31 August 1793, 393–94.

the rhetoric of theater reviews in the Terror, but the positive aspects of this
review read suspiciously like lip service to the Terrorist ideal: the review’s con-
current singling out of the historical inaccuracy of describing Carthage as a
kingdom, although phrased as a concession, is surely intended to undercut the
polite comments the critic elsewhere makes. Whatever the intention behind
this point, however, the use of license to make some occasionally questionable
historical parallels is beyond dispute. For instance, an explicit link is made by
Martin between the role of the women’s donation in II.1 (scene 4 of the origi-
nal version) and that of twenty-one wives and daughters of artists at the
Assemblée Nationale on 7 September 1789.101 Although that explicit parallel
was removed from the 1793 preface, the allusion remained in the libretto text.
As this demonstrates (and it is a point Martin makes elsewhere), the inclusion
of contemporary referents followed a dual imperative. On the one hand, the
selection of events and episodes needed to be based on documented fact; but
on the other, the treatment of those episodes could well be given a particular
flavor to better suit the context of performance. As Martin put it, “I am con-
vinced that my work is a failure if, at every line, the audience does not feel that
what I have written could equally have been written one hundred years ago”
(L1, preface, p. 3, a phrase removed in L2). Yet in spite of that dual imperative,
all references to the proximity of ancient and modern history were removed in
1793, although the episodes were often retained; perhaps the decision was that
such parallels should be discovered by the audience (or reader of the printed
libretto) rather than being stated.102 It would also be fair to say that the 1793
version waters down the historical detail to a more picturesque setting. Hence
Martin claims: “I thought that the audience would enjoy seeing the Roman
Senate in all its splendor” (L2, p. iv). He also claims, in a discussion of the
advantages of opera that it is composed of “splendid accompaniments, festivals,
choruses” which “are often sufficient to determine the fate of a work, and which
spoken tragedy cannot offer” (L2, p. iv). In other words, the work’s political
parallels are progressively reduced to offer a more picturesque treatment of
Antiquity and a more sober historical opera.
Beyond the punctual cases of congruency, the subject was important to the
contemporary situation in a wider sense. The librettist believed that Fabius’s
two qualities were his patriotism and his restraint toward his personal enemies;
101 A scene illustrated by Jean-Louis Prieur and engraved by Pierre-Gabriel Berthault:

“Offrandes faites à l’Assemblée Nationale par des dames artistes le 7 septembre 1789,” in
Collection complète des tableaux historiques de la Révolution française, 3 vols. (Paris: Auber,
1802), vol. 1, plate 26 facing p. 101. On this event, see RdP, ix.19–21.
102 See note 75.

and the 1793 libretto points to the phrase of Vigil’s Æneid “Unus Homo nobis
cunctando restituit rem.”’103 However, the librettist pointed to a potential
tension between operatic treatment (which required strong expression, not
restraint) and this temperance of his character, while claiming that Fabius’s
persecution at the hands of Hannibal and his enemies makes for a tragic
subject. (This point was similarly removed in 1793.) Certainly much is made
of the possibility of strong passions allowed by the libretto.
The place of the people is, however, not straightforward. After this chorus,
Métellus encouraged the people not to flee but to stand firm. But the 1793
version added a section in which Métellus urges restraint against the enemy, in
the face of popular and rather impulsive emotion against the “tyrant” enemy,
and exclaims at the people’s “blind anger.” Quintus Caecus Metellus, consul in
206 bc, was from one of the principal great families of Rome [ gentes]; he was
elected dictator, that is, an extraordinary magistrate generally elected by the
consuls with full powers during periods of trouble, in 205 bc. This revised
scene thus extols not the virtue of popular insurrection but the virtue of strong
leadership of the people. It is a Republican work but strongly paternal in its
approach to the people.
Moreover I.1 insists on correcting a citizen who had exclaimed that “[l]a
clémence aujourd’hui, loin de nous être utile, / Allume le flambeau de la guerre
civile” [clemency, far from being helpful, now lights the torch of civil war] (L2,
p. 5): the Terrorist refusal of clemency is explicitly rejected as a guiding prin-
ciple in the work. Much is left implicit, but the arrival of Paul-Emile signals a
different view on the matter, since he was in favor of reinstating the offensive
against Hannibal and was thus against the policy of temporization favored by
Fabius. A debate follows, replacing a stronger duo from 1792, where Corbulon
and Paul-Emile accused one another of insolence and pride. However Paul-
Emile now cries “N’imitez point ces brigands révoltés, / Portant partout et le
fer et la flamme” [do not imitate these brigands brandishing their swords and
setting fire indiscriminately], while assuring the people that the enemy is
known and is being targeted, a similar opposition to indiscriminate popular
revenge and anger. Hence opposition over policy was now removed from
opposing senators and placed in the realm of the people’s moral ambivalence
(by contrast, the leaders are markedly less ambivalent in the new version).
Central to this depiction was a continuing insistence upon the ways in which
103 L2: iii. “One man, by delaying, restored the state to us,” one of the best-known
lines of Ennius’s Annals [line 363 Sk], frequently imitated and quoted, including by Virgil,
Æneid, VI.846, which sums up what was to become known as the “Fabian strategy.”

the rule of law would safeguard the advances to date of the Republic, or acqui-
sitions made by liberté. France is rather simplistically elided with a historico-
political ideal in its description as “la terre de la Liberté” (L2, p. 25),104 and
after the expulsion of external threat, attention shifts to internal dissent to
foreground the ways in which domestic politics were essential to the continued
health of the polity. For this reason Métellus cautions the people: “Ainsi nos
ennemis sont enfin disparus, / Mais les plus dangereux ne sont point à Carthage.
/ Ces lâches Etrangers, du Peuple adulateurs, / Ces coupables agitateurs” [Our
enemies have disappeared at last. But our most dangerous opponents are not
the Carthaginians, those cowardly outsiders, adorers of the people, guilty agi-
tators] (p. 26). He likewise insists upon the role of law in defending the patrie
against internal enemies, as had the 1790 Tarare: “Fermez à ces ambitieux / La
route qui leur est ouverte. / Que, sous l’autorité des Loix, / On voie enfin fléchir
toute Magistrature. / Comme autrefois, qu’une austère censure, / Des calomni-
ateurs, punissant l’imposture, / De notre Liberté garantisse les droits” [Bar the
route of these ambitious individuals, let all magistrates bow to the supreme
authority of the laws, and let an austere censorship guarantee our liberty by
punishing the calumnies of our enemies] (pp. 26–27). Accordingly Fabius
abdicates the dictatorship and reference is made to the sovereign people,105
while using terms sensitive to the French Revolutionary situation and long
associated with counter-revolution, such as agitateur, calomniateur, to stigmatize
the enemy. So the revised work refuses excessive military zeal, expresses some
ambivalence about the role of the people, and insists upon strong leadership.
In order to underscore this trajectory whereby the progressive expulsion of
threat and the resolution of social conflict could lead to renewed social integra-
tion, the festive dimension of this and other works was crucial. The Saturnalia
was introduced at this time, in 217 bc in order to raise citizen morale. It was
originally a one-day celebration, gradually becoming a longer event that ran
between 17 and 23 December.106 Martin had pointed both to the importance
of fêtes on the stage of the Opéra (unlike spoken theater), and the particular
role of the act II celebrations in this context: the reestablishment of the
Saturnalia dated precisely, he pointed out, from the second Punic War, and
104 In similar vein, the victory of liberty is also the victory of the patrie that favors it:
L2, pp. 28–29.
105 A detail probably derived from Livy: Erich S. Gruen, “The consular elections for
216 B.C. and the veracity of Livy,” California Studies in Classical Antiquity, 11 (1978),
61–74.
106 On the Saturnalia, see CAH, vii/2.606.

these were all concerned with celebrating equality. Hence the Grand-Prêtre
declaims in II.2:
Les Dieux sont satisfaits de votre dévouement,
Et pour prix de vos sacrifices,
Les destins vous seront propices.
Bientôt vous jouirez des douceurs de la paix.
Ses ineffables bienfaits
Seront la moindre récompense
Que Saturne, dans sa clémence,
Aujourd’hui vous dispense.
Par les liens de la Fraternité,
Une parfaite Egalité
Accroîtra vos vertus, et leur douce influence
Fera, suivant votre espérance,
Dans l’Univers entier, régner la Liberté. (L2, pp. 16–17)
[The gods are satisfied by your devotion, and as a reward for your sacrifices
you may expect a happier future. Soon you shall enjoy the sweetness of peace;
its unspoken benefits are but the least of the rewards which Saturn, in his
clemency, shall accord you. Fraternal links shall allow perfect equality to
augment your virtues, and their happy influence shall permit the reign of
Liberty throughout the whole universe, as you hoped.]
It is impossible to determine how this was staged, although we can note
the tableau presentation implied by the preceding didascalie (musical
example 8).107 I cannot find historical evidence that the Saturnalia included
patriotic donations; these festivals were seen more as a form of tightly
controlled carnival in order to enhance popular morale. But in his Histoire
romaine Charles Rollin insisted upon their importance in underscoring the
ideal of equality.108 Hence two separate historical referents are combined into
the same scene: the patriotic donations of 1789, and the festivities of 217 bc.
Similarly, although act II is set in a feminized space, and one where personal
regrets can be dismissed as unpatriotic (akin to the Horaces and Brutus
107 (On entend gronder le tonerre.—Des feux souterrains se manifestent autour de la Statue.—
Le Grand-Prêtre reparoit environné d’autres prêtres, entre la Statue & les portes du Temple.)
[Thunder is heard; fire surrounds the Statue. The High Priest appears surrounded by other
priests, between the statue and the temple doors.]
108 cf. Histoire romaine, depuis la Fondation de Rome jusqu’à la bataille d’Actium, V (Paris,
1741), livre 13, § III, pp. 489 and 508–16; esp. p. 509.

example 8
Les dieux sont satisfaits
Le Grand
Prêtre
Les Dieux sont sa - tis - faits de vo - tre dé - voue ment, et pour prix de vos sa - cri
Keyboard
reduction Vc. & Cb.
- fi - ces, les de -stins vous se -ront pro - pi - ces, bien - tôt vous jou - i - rez des dou - ceurs de la
8 Larghetto espressivo
paix. Les i - nef - fa - bles bien - faits se - ront la moin - dre ré - com-
Fl.,
Vln. I
Hn.
pp
mf
Vln. II + Vla.
Vln. II
Vla. Vc.
Vc.
14
- pen - se que Sa - tur - ne dans sa clé - men - ce au - jour-d’hui vous dis - pen - se au - jour
Fl., Vlni.
Fl.
Vla.
Vlni.
Vla.
rinf
377
example 8 Cont’d
2
19
- d’hui vous di - spen - se par les li - ens de la fra - ter ni - té, u - ne par - fai - te_é - ga - li -
Fl. 1, Vln. I
Vln. II
Hn., Vla.
p Vla. col
Vln. II
rinf p
25
- té ac - croî - tra vos ver - tus ac croî -tra vos ver - tus et leur douce in - flu
(Vla.) p
cresc. poco a poco ff
Hn. stacc. sim.
(Vla. col Hn.)
31
- en - ce fe - ra sui - vant vo -tre_es - pé - ran - ce, dans l’u - ni - vers en - tier, ré - gner la li - ber
Vlni.
Fl.
(Hn.)
f ff
Vc., Vla Vla.
Vc.
38
- té dans l’u - ni - vers en - tier, ré - gner la li - ber - té, la li - ber -

Fl.
Fl. Hn.
Hn. Vlni.
legato espressivo rinf f
378
example 8 Cont’d
3
43
(Les Prêtres rentrent dans l’intérieur du temple.)
- té. Fl. 1, Vln. I
Fl. 2, Vln. II
p
depictions of feminity),109 the opera ends with the reunion of Valérie and Fabius
her husband against the odds. (See the end of II.5: “Fabius m’est rendu! /
Bonheur inattendu, / Qu’à peine je puis croire!” [Fabius has been returned to
me! Oh what unexpected joy which I can barely believe] [L2, p. 21]). Unlike
David’s famous canvas, where a moment is frozen in time (and where the
legend says the Horaces and Curiaces will fight and some will die), the opera
is morally ambivalent: patriotic determination is rewarded with personal hap-
piness, and the dilemma turns out not to be tragic. These works of the Terror,
then, are about moral uplift, not genuine tragedy (which ends with a sense of
waste).
There are extrinsic generic determinants and internal political reasons for
this non-tragic treatment. The non-Gluckian strand of opera had long con-
cluded with a non-tragic ending; an example from the revised repertory in this
period would be Rameau’s Castor et Pollux. Also, it was widely accepted outside
the Opéra that musical and dramatic works should encourage with positive
exempla, as these endings clearly do. For one thing which is noteworthy here
is the sheer length of time it takes to resolve the plot. Indeed, the whole of act
III is given over to a collective celebration and analysis of the conflict, in one
long celebratory tableau set in the Senate; indeed the didascalies of III.1 show
to what extent masses of characters are placed in order to frame a tableau for
the final celebratory act, seated and standing to either side of a large interior
space (the Senate assembly chamber; pp. 23–24). The tableau is divided into
109 Valérie: “Souvenirs trop cruels! O regrets superflus! / Amour, plaisir, bonheur,
qu’êtes vous devenus!” [Cruel memories, pointless regrets! Love, pleasure, happiness, what
has become of you?] Fulvie: “Qu’entends-je, et ces soupirs sont-ils d’une Romaine?” [What
do I hear? does a Roman woman sigh in this way?] L2, p. 13.

four movements. First, the assembled polity congratulates both its leader and
its self in the expulsion of external threat. The victory has taken place over
Hannibal between the acts and off-stage, and this leads both to public praise
of Fabius’s temporizing and patient mastery of a situation, and to his own nar-
rative of action, as is common (“Des Romains, qu’enflammait le désir de la
gloire, / Contenant les transports; j’assurai la victoire” [I assured the victory of
the Romans by moderating their zeal which a desire for glory had enflamed],
L2, p. 25). Central to this scene is the consuls’ own dictation to the assembled
people of the lessons to be learned from the conflict (“Ainsi nos ennemis sont
enfin disparus” [Thus our enemies have disappeared at last]) and Fabius’s abdi-
cation of the dictatorship (“En adoptant cette sage mesure” [Adopting this
wise policy]), after which the people are pronounced sovereign again (p. 27),
and an oath of renewed unity is taken. Hence the first movement of this
tableau celebrates the moment of renewed integration of the community.
The polity being once reaffirmed, the integration of allied heroes can be
safely undertaken, in a second scene strongly reminiscent of the regular
practice, in the Convention, of receiving heroes and honoring them in public.
In this case, Roman citizenship is bestowed in these allies, in a reciprocal ges-
ture of homage: the heroes had honored Fabius and those he commands
(“Consuls, et vous, illustres Sénateurs” [Consuls and illustrious Senators]), and
the Senate responds with the ultimate honor, which is integration within the
polity (“Invincibles héros”). The third segment then integrates women into
this tableau, by honoring Valérie specifically, but in a reciprocal movement
where she sings, and offers a crown to Fabius (“O toi, qui comblas nos Souhaits”
[You, who satisfied our wishes]). Interestingly, the score removes the segment
of this scene where Valérie speaks on a more personal note, as if all had to be
subsumed within the national; the early passage was as follows:
Momens délicieux pour ma vive tendresse! . . .
Mais je succombe à la foiblesse
Qui subjugue mon cœur . . .
L’aspect de mon Epoux vainqueur,
Ces chants, cette allégresse,
Ce Peuple, ce Sénat, tout accroit mon ivresse.
Eclatez mes transports... Tu le sais, Fabius,
L’amour dans les grands cœurs enfante les vertus.
Il pénétra le mien de leurs célestes flammes . . . (L2, p. 35)
[What delightful moments for my tender soul! But I cannot resist the weak-
ness which overpowers my heart. . . . To see my husband victorious, these
songs, this joy, the people, the Senate, everything augments my joy. Fabius,

you know well that in noble hearts love gives rise to virtue. Its celestial flames
have overcome my own heart.]
The fourth and final segment features Fabius’s freeing of the Carthaginian
prisoners of war, which bears comparison with Tarare’s freeing of the slaves
in the 1790 revision of that work, and it seems that what Fabius points to
particularly is not just magnanimity but one based upon human compassion
(“Soldats, traitez avec moins de rigueur, / Des prisonniers dont le malheur /
Doit désarmer votre fureur” [Be less harsh with prisoners whose misfortune
should disarm your anger]) and the respect of human rights in peace.
More classic magnanimity is thus given a more humanistic flavor, in which
context Fabius can exclaim (the final lines before the return of a chorus): “Leur
défaite, Romains, assura votre gloire. / Pouvant les vaincre encore, en générosité,
/ Accordez-leur la Liberté. / Et vous remporterez une double victoire.” [Romans,
their defeat assured your glory. You can vainquish them again, in generosity:
give them their freedom, and your victory shall be twofold.] (L2, p. 36).
The works of the Terror apparently leave little space for ambiguous readings,
for their very purpose is to crystallize an interpretive consensus around key
events, men, and themes, although we have also seen that their aesthetic value,
and the criteria for judging them, were far from universally agreed upon. As
we saw in Chapter 6, this is still a theater of extrinsic determinants and situa-
tions, which retains a happy end, which remains non-transcendent because it
steadfastly affirms the capacity of human agents and the reassertion of the
moral order, albeit here via the expulsion of others. Characters are not changed
by the processes of the operas, but essences are restated and refound, and con-
nections are restored. One can see obvious congruencies with how the
Revolution self-conceptualized as the rediscovery of a supposed original liberty
that had been lost during the “era of servitude.” But for the works to be propa-
ganda requires, further, that they were produced to persuade an audience and
that they were instrumentalized officially. However, more often than not, these
works were often exercises in self-fashioning offered by individuals in the con-
text of what they believed to be a dominant ideology and were moreover vic-
tims of confused institutional factors. There was not consenus between
regulator, institution, and creator, as seems to be required by the term.
If we take the case of Toute la Grèce, d’Estrée describes the work as an
attempt by Beffroy to improve his official image (he was seen as reactionary),
but d’Estrée also shows that the plan backfired when Beffroy included the lines
“O belle Humanité, sans toi / Il n’est ni bonheur, ni patrie!” [Oh humanity,
without you, there is no happiness, no State], to which the procurator of
the Commune Chaumette took exception, since they could potentially be

construed as a reference to clemency.110 The work is, however, indeed filled
with patriotic references: the dedication to the Convention, the Commune, and
the authors’ respective sections (Guillaume Tell and Bonne Nouvelle); and the
note confirming that they had decided not to include Philip of Macedonia in
the cast, since kings should not be shown onstage, even as tyrants. Beffroy’s
letter to the Journal des spectacles of 19 Nivôse An II also justified this stance.
Fabius’s librettist Joseph Martin offered the work as an act of patriotism, in an
act of self-definition that was to become typical of writers during the Terror.
Martin was also député for Sedan (present-day Ardennes), in which capacity he
had written an open letter to the press in 1790, suggesting an extension of
festivities in the capital following the Festival of Federation to include a massed
public ball, a series of open-air concerts, and illuminations on 22 July.111
Suggestively for the present context, his plan included a demand that “all the-
aters give free performances of those repertory works most appropriate to the
Revolutionary situation,” and that “in all these institutions of entertainment,
I would like to see nocturnal balls.” The plan is an early example of thinking
about the repertory in its relevance to the contemporary political situation
(analogue being the term he uses), and in similar vein his libretto for Fabius
published two years later was described on the title page of the 1792 printing
as dedicated to the Académie de Musique, in order to be performed after the
first victories of the Republic112—a similar conception of patriotic theater as
celebratory of contemporary events, and explicitly dedicated to a public theater
for that purpose, in an explicit act of self-definition as a patriot. These works,
then, were indisputably political, but were subject to the same forces discussed
in Chapter 4.

111 Lettre à MM. les rédacteurs des feuilles périodiques qui s’impriment chaque jour dans
Paris, 16 July 1790.
112 Fabius, opéra en un acte par Joseph Martin (Paris: n.pub., 1792/an premier de la
République Françoise); Fabius, tragédie-lyrique, en trois actes, dédiée à l’Académie de Musique,
représentée pour la première fois, sur son théatre le Vendredi 9 Août 1793 (Paris: Imprimerie de
l’Académie Royale de Musique, 1793/An 2e de la République Française).

c o n cl u s io n
My cover illustration is taken from an engraving of an illustration by Jean-

Louis Prieur, showing “the people forcing the closure of the Opéra on 12 July
1789.”1 The immediate context was the dismissal of France’s Controller-
General of Finances Jacques Necker on 11 July: crowds flocked to all the
theaters of Paris to close them by force out of respect for the much-loved public
figure whom the state had expelled from power, to considerable popular dis-
content, the day before. The event is interesting because it is a popular seizure
of authority over an Old Regime practice: theaters were routinely closed to
mourn the passing of members of the royal family throughout the eighteenth
century, the entertainment they offered being considered incompatible with
national mourning. To avoid making tendentious comparisons with the more
famous popular insurrection that happened only two days later on 14 July
1789 (was the Opéra some kind of Bastille of Old Regime cultural privilège,
assailed by the urban populace? not really), the engraving might therefore
be seen as emblematic of one of the present book’s research hypotheses: the
spontaneous popular assumption of control over an institution previously reg-
ulated by Old Regime royal authority, and therefore a contestatory politics that
grew out of previous cultural forms, reinvesting them with new significance,
rather than inventing anew.
1 Jean-Louis Prieur, Le Peuple faisant fermer l’Opéra de Paris pour la retraite de M. Necker,
engraved by Pierre-Gabriel Berthault, in Collection complète des tableaux historiques de la
Révolution française, 3 vols. (Paris: Auber, 1802), vol. 1, plate 4, facing p. 13.
If we return to my opening questions,2 one significant feature of the Opéra
is its continuous service in a period of trouble: all authorities agreed not only to
retain the institution, but concurred on its pre-eminent importance. By taking
a material approach to the problem, I hope to have shown a close imbrication
of procedural continuity and political change, of stability of repertory tempered
with tentative reform, alongside a discursive rupture in the conceptualization
of the institution. I hope to have demonstrated that from 1789 a multiplicity
of different entities could claim legitimate authority over culture, and that
there was some confusion and competition between them, suggesting that
ideology in the theater is contested between these different bodies, whether
municipality versus state, or different factions within the public, or different
organs of the state itself, and is improvised rapidly in response to a changing
situation. This conclusion meshes with a recent development of economic and
material-cultural studies of theater and literature in early-modern France
which recognize that a tension between the ideals of what would later be
labeled “art-for-art” and economic factors is embedded in French culture
well before the Revolution.3 The Opéra is an ideal site to study these tensions,
not just because of La Ferté’s obsession with balancing the books while main-
taining a prestigious cultural institution, but because of the extent to which
the genre of opera is bound up with luxury, and the institution with courtly
culture. Unlike Bourdieu and others who have suggested that art remained
tied to structures of patronage and the control of the monarch until the
nineteenth century,4 as early as 1784, if not before, La Ferté and others
clearly thought in economic terms. One consequence of this for the “political”
dimension, is that repertory decisions were made as much for practical and
material reasons as for reasons of ideology. René Tarin has suggested a coherent
view of theater as a school for the people in the period of the Constituante,
where other critics have argued for a free market.5 However, both arguments
are based only on a thematic study of the works and run the risk of
inferring policy from a cultural trend; I hope to have shown that no discernible
2 I asked what were the organs of state regulating the theaters and what was the rela-
tionship between them; what degree of compliance or freedom could be observed in the
Opéra’s interaction with them; and how politics affected reception and fed back into deci-
sion making.
3 Martial Poirson (ed.), Art et argent en France au temps des premiers Modernes (XVIIe–
XVIIIe siècles) (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2004).
4 Les Règles de l’art (Paris: Points Seuil, 1998 [1992]), p. 193n; Alain Viala, Naissance
de l’écrivain: sociologie de la littérature à l’âge classique (Paris: Minuit, 1985).
5 Le Théâtre de la Constituante, passim.

overriding policy yet exists, whatever patterns we might read from the
works themselves.
That leads to a question about the link between 1789 and the Terror,
and the role we accord to the latter, since it is based upon a long-standing
assumption best demonstrated by the subtitle of d’Estrée’s work (“un théâtre
de la peur”): that the Revolution ushered in the “freedom of the theaters,” only
to reverse its policy two years later when the need for a closely controlled the-
atrical culture became paramount. In this account, the period of the Terror
represents a hiatus in an otherwise morally satisfying development toward free
expression and literary deregulation. Certainly the Terror has been the object
of renewed scholarly attention in recent years and raises several methodological
issues. Patrice Gueniffey’s insistence that the Terror is a political phenomenon,
not a cultural one,6 represents a valuable shift of attention back toward high
politics (whatever we think of his disdain for cultural approaches), but that
shift of focus does not preclude the possibility that the Terror introduced new
structures of control over cultural institutions and works, as all commentators
have tended to assume. In Part One, I have tried to untangle the structures
of authority over culture, and the legal and economic constraints operating.
Since censorship and unofficial control continued after 1791 and since the
enforcement of the 2 August 1793 law was weak, I conclude that there is
not a sudden change of practice in September 1793—in fact, no clear policy at
all. There is instead a gradual tightening of procedures of repression, which
nonetheless leaves many loopholes. Only later into the period—around April
1794—do we see the organization of a structure of repressive and preventive
control that promised to be genuinely efficient, were Thermidor not suddenly
to reverse the trend just three months later. Indeed, I hope to have demonstrated
that for legal as well as political reasons, the state did no more than “encour-
age” the Opéra to perform certain types of work, by tying necessary funding
to scrutiny over repertory. The assumption has been, I think, that the verb
“encourager” was a Revolutionary euphemism, and that what it meant was a
threatening requirement. But as the cases of Adrien and L’Ami des lois show, the
legality of preventive censorship remained dubious until August 1793, and
6 “C’est le lien qu’elle entretient avec la question du pouvoir, comme avec celle de la
souveraineté, qui se dissout, remplacé par des fables sur l’émergence de nouvelles façons
de vivre et de penser, la régénération de l’art, l’approfondissement de l’égalité ou les
avantages décisives de l’intégration sociale ou politique des exclus de tout acabit.”
La Politique de la Terreur (Paris: Gallimard/tel, 2000), p. 13. A helpful overview of scholar-
ship to 2001 may be found in Jeremy D. Popkin, “Not over after all: The French
Revolution’s third century,” Journal of Modern History, 74 (December 2002), 801–21.
conclusion | 385
the lines of authority were confused thereafter. That selective subsidy remains
a form of coercion is not in doubt, but it is not the same thing as propaganda,
classically construed, nor of preventive censorship; in the scenario I have
sketched the institution retains agency and is obliged to bid for funds and to
self-position with respect to what it perceives to be dominant ideology.
Equally questionable is the view of the Terror as a breach with former prac-
tice. While Bonaparte’s reinstatement of a cultural system akin to that of
Old Regime Paris has accentuated the impression that the Revolutionary
experiment was both a failure in its own period and of little relevance to the
periods that followed, conversely, this study suggests that the way in which
theater is perceived, discussed, and judged at the end of the century is con-
tested and negotiated. The works may well have been cleansed of ambiguity
and aimed to crystallize interpretative consensus, but their trajectories and
reception suggest a more nuanced picture, even in the Terror. That is, rather
than a univocal propaganda element or an entertainment devoid of political
import, theater is a locus for competing discourses on patriotism, society, the
role of the arts in the Republic, and the articulation of the Revolution’s relation
with the Old Regime. It is thus an essential key to the understanding of public
opinion and publicity at a crucial historical moment and would be better con-
sidered as an exercise in patriotic self-fashioning by individual writers than as
state propaganda. To that extent, it is interesting that it is for propagandizing
uses of the arts that the Revolution attacks the Old Regime, pointing to what
it calls the “slavery” of arts subject to patronage. As Antoine-François Fourcroy
put it in a lecture before the Lycée des arts in 1793:
Languishing, divided by despotism, subject to forms which repressed
the leaps of the imagination, the arts tried in vain to break the chains
imposed on them by slavery under the guise of protection.7
By contrast, Revolution is seen in his text as bringing the liberty that frees the
arts and sciences from this “slavery”: “How can we refuse the sweet hope to see
the arts and sciences flourish everywhere, once they have been freed from so
many obstacles which constricted them and can move forward together and
work toward the perfection of human reason” (p. 5) he asks. The truth-value of
his claim is not the issue here; more the commonly held view that liberty was
a necessary precondition to the renewal of the arts.
7 A. F. Fourcroy, Discours sur l’état actuel des sciences et des arts dans la République
française. Prononcé à l’ouverture du Lycée des arts, le dimanche 7 avril 1793, l’an second de la
République (Paris: Imp. Patris, 1793), p. 4.

To this extent, my work has much in common with Laura Mason’s path-
breaking study on song, Singing the French Revolution, which also insisted that
Revolutionary song culture was heterogeneous and accessible to “competing
uses and interpretations.”8 Her book traced the divisions of the Revolutionaries
themselves and the oppositional culture that grew up during the Revolution,
and discussed the concept of popular culture as it emerges from a distinction
between practices and representations. The theater does not pose quite the
same problems because the agency and indeed activity afforded to individuals
is surely less—although audiences intervened in the theater, as Jeffrey Ravel
has shown, they did not routinely control programming—and because my
focus is less the divided culture of the Revolution than the ways in which an
institution found its place within that landscape. But the ambivalence of the
works’ reception is surely similar.
In the absence of uniform policy, how then might we think about the
imbrication of ideology, the workings of the institution, and the artistic work
itself? First, unlike Kennedy’s team,9 I would argue that the impact of the
work is not just to be traced in its thematics but also in the discourses sur-
rounding. So a close reading alone will not answer the question of a politicized
art; neither will the statistical analysis of “old” versus “new” works, since this
binary ignores the meaning “old” works can acquire in a new context (as I have
suggested with Castor et Pollux). Moreover, since the Opéra was embroiled in
debates over cost cutting, the performance of so many pre-1789 works cannot
be put down to apolitical motives alone: there are financial imperatives equally
operative. Second, on a discursive level, pre-existing demands and tensions
from the pre-Revolutionary period were able to be re-expressed after 1789
when a new conceptual language provided a heuristic for those tensions, such
as the principals of the Opéra learning the language of liberty as a vessel to
express a long-standing animosity for court administration. This, too, is a
mixture of rupture and continuity, for latent animosities could thereby be
given new impetus around a cultural fault line. We also see the continuing
coexistence of value hierarchies applied to works and institutions and an ideal
of freedom that would seem to deny that hierarchy, since the assumption that
freedom is a prerequisite to progress coexists in uneasy tension with a growing
realization that the major institutions of national theatrical culture needed
support. But more important, we see constant problems of temporality; works
8 Laura Mason, Singing the French Revolution: Popular Culture and Politics, 1787–1799
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), p. 3.
9 Theatre, Opera and Audiences in Revolutionary Paris, passim.
conclusion | 387
take such a long time to be created that the context can shift before they reach
the stage, giving them a dated, often politically reactionary feel. This is a
supplementary reason that thematic mapping will not function as a means of
reading the works, as they were created in a context very different from the one
in which they came to be performed. They could of course be touched up
during the production process, but not radically changed, nor usually discarded.
This constant speeding of time has been identified as a product of modernity.
Reinhardt Koselleck, for instance, sees the period around the Revolution as a
watershed in the sense that what he identifies as different planes of historicity
slide apart. As he explains, the more a particular time is experienced as a new
temporality, as “modernity,” the more demands made of the future increase:
ever-accelerating change left people with briefer intervals of time in which to
gather new experiences and to adapt.10 This accounts, I think, for the bewil-
dering speed at which events overtook human expectations and took historical
actors by surprise; it explains also some of the cultural phenomena we have
seen, such as the frequent cases when an author or theater found themself on
the wrong side of an ideological boundary that was constantly shifting.
One might be tempted, on some of the evidence presented here, to claim
that the model I am presenting has various features of a modern liberal
cultural system. But rather than “liberalism,” the state adopted crown institu-
tions rather than abolishing them, and operated official selective support while
proclaiming liberty and deregulation, because its ideal remained at odds with
the realities of cultural control. The fault line between regulation and freedom
was present as early as 1789 and was not an invention of the Terror. The idea
that the political culture of the Terror grows out of the unresolved dilemmas
of the Constituent period is a central theme of Revolutionary historiography;
this study draws similar conclusions in the cultural sphere, in the sense that
the ideal of freedom of the arts, as defined by Le Chapelier, was that it would
sweep away those segments of the theatrical culture of which he and his fellow
deputies disapproved. With hindsight, it would surely not be an exaggeration
to say that the opposite proved to be the case. Although Vivien argued, in
Etudes administratives, that state control freed the theaters from a mercantile
speculation incompatible with artistic quality and progress, holding up
Napoleon’s 1806–7 reforms as instigating a flourishing theater industry, the
extent of mercantile speculation between 1791 and 1806 is also doubtful.
10 Futures past: on the semantics of historical time [Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik
geschichtlicher Zeiten] (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006 [1966]), chapter 1:
“Modernity and the planes of historicity.”

Research on Revolutionary censorship (whether of print or performance) has
questioned a liberal analysis of the breakdown of the book guild, suggesting
that laws on literary property gave authors “temporally limited ‘property
rights’ in exchange for their service to public enlightenment” and hence
made of them “model citizens worthy of special recognition,” not “bourgeois
property-owning private individuals” in a morally indifferent free market.11
This is hardly the “birth of the author” as defined by Michel Foucault. Nor, in
theater, was the effect of deregulation to produce a relativistic and morally
neutral level playing field as required by Quatremère de Quincy, where public
success decided the destiny of works, writers, and institutions. Undercut from
the start by subsidy, the freedom accorded to Revolutionary opera was about
shifting the burden of meaning onto the audience, and the burden of responsi-
bility onto playwrights and institutions (Chapters 4 and 7). It was, in short,
the beginning of a process whereby different interest groups began to debate
the question of what it would mean to create culture for the commonality of
citizens and how to ensure that freedom which was an indispensable condition
for the flowering of a shared theatrical culture, while withstanding a slide into
barbarism. To this extent, my study meshes with the last decade’s return to a
mainstream tradition in which the period’s conflicts are seen as competing
efforts to deal with real problems and promote concrete interests,12 rather
than fundamentally illiberal characteristics from the start. It has been com-
monplace to see the Revolutionary theatrical experiment as a failure. But given
that the period witnesses the invention of educative structures and cultural
institutions that survive to this day, this degree of negotiation and improvisa-
tion has the potential to elucidate the uneasy relationship between “national
culture” and the Republican state, which has been identified as central to
French culture of the Third Republic and much of the twentieth century
besides.13
11 McMeekin, p. 240, summarizing Hesse, pp. 99–124. Upstream from this process,
Hesse pointed to an epistemological tension in the eighteenth century between the “radi-
cally individualistic” model set out by Diderot in his Lettre sur le commerce de la librairie,
according to which ideas emerge sui generis from the mind, and the Condorcet model,
according to which ideas inhere in nature and should be freely accessible to all, set out in
his Fragments sur la liberté de la presse and borrowing from an essentially Lockian theory of
knowledge, two positions that were “awkwardly synthesized” by La Harpe and Le
Chapelier.
12 Popkin, “Not over after all: The French Revolution’s third century.”
13 Marc Fumaroli, L’Etat culturel: Essai sur une religion moderne (Paris: Fallois, 1992).
Although I find its political bias and its tone distasteful, Fumaroli’s book did much to
recognize the educational ideals of the Third Republic, albeit in order to chart the slide,
conclusion | 389
Why, then, a cultural history of opera? First, the attention to the discur-
sive level most obviously links my study with the strand of cultural history
undertaken since the so-called linguistic turn around 1990, and my approach
owes much specifically to Furet’s claim that the collapse of royal authority
around 1787 abruptly freed French society from the power of the state and
replaced genuine conflicts with a competition of discourses for the appropria-
tion of legitimacy.14 The primacy of the discursive has been part of Revolutionary
historiography since Furet, Keith Baker’s well-known definition of political
culture being “the set of discourses or symbolic practices by which [the com-
peting claims that individuals and groups in society make upon one another]
are made.”15 These are quite long-standing debates in the historical sphere and
seem somewhat dated. But they are worth discussing as concerns culture,
because although institutional history is thoroughly embedded in historical
musicology, only recently have studies begun to consider the partisan and
divided cultures in which such institutions function, making them less tools
of the state than vessels in which factional cultural interests are played out. It
is important to recognize how the artists’ language grows out of the dissident
rhetoric of patriots, investing the national Opéra with a set of cultural ideals
that were actually far more radical than the state required in 1793, and which
appealed instead to popular, urban sympathies. The Opéra became not just
orthodox, but came close to the Hebertist atheism of which Robespierre disap-
proved. In no sense therefore, can it be adequate to describe it, at any point in
its Revolutionary history, as a tool of the state.
As well as the constraints regulating culture in the period 1789–94, I have
also tried to shed light on the institutional structures that mediate the produc-
tion of the work of art. It is a truism that works both shape and are shaped
by mentalities; that they both reflect a political context, and amplify or
codify interpretations on certain events and themes, as I have tried to show in
Chapter 8. Some years ago, Robert Darnton encouraged a reconsideration of
around 1940, into a new “religion of culture” of which he disapproves. More recently, and
more relevant to this study, Jann Pasler’s monumental study of music in the Third Republic
has confirmed how much that period owed to the Revolution: Composing the citizen,
passim.
14 François Furet, Penser la Révolution française, summarized by Keith Baker (ed.),
Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth
Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 7. See also Lynn Hunt,
“Introduction: History, culture and text,” in The New Cultural History (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1989), pp. 1–22.
15 Keith Baker, Inventing, p. 4.

the relationship between men of letters and politics by exploring mediating
structures, including theaters. His call was made against a wider background,
following Bourdieu’s work on the literary field, of renewed interest in the
socio-historical ground of cultural production, as exemplified in different
ways by “New Historicism,” depth hermeneutics, studies of the institutional
framework of literature and literary criticism, and, in a broad sense, cultural
studies.16 These approaches help us to shift literary study away from Kantian
notions of the universality of the aesthetic and ideologies of artistic and
cultural autonomy, with the consequences for our understanding of authorship
I discussed earlier. Nor, however, can we consider the realities of power
as purely discursive in the Revolution; and the role of popular force and intim-
idation on the institution, via the Commune, has also been traced to show that
the Opéra found itself in a genuinely threatening position, caught between the
rival demands of municipality and state.
But the main recent developments with which I have been concerned center
upon language and theatricality. As early as the 1990s, Lynn Hunt claimed
that one important facet of Revolutionary culture was its transformation of
language “into an instrument of political and social change”—for instance, in
ritual forms, such as the swearing of oaths that offered a means to reaffirm
social bonds and become a replacement charisma to that of kingship.17 The
extent to which this is special to the Revolution has since been questioned, but
its relevance is indisputable. More recent studies of theatricality have traced a
specific Revolutionary aesthetics in the last decade of the century. Paul
Friedland has claimed that the Revolution is a watershed in concepts of repre-
sentation and sees a merging of the political and the theatrical; Susan Maslan
has suggested that we look at theater as offering a radical popular sovereignty,
building on Jeffrey Ravel’s pioneering work The Contested Parterre.18 I have
attempted elsewhere to make some points about Revolutionary theatricality,
including disputing the suggestion that the Revolutionary theater ushered in
a more passive public, excluded from the representation (Friedland), or that
16 “Pierre Bourdieu on art, literature and culture,” editor’s introduction to The Field of
Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (Cambridge: Polity,
1993), p. 1.
17 Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution, passim.
18 Paul Friedland, Political Actors: Representative Bodies and Theatricality in the Age of the
French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002); Susan Maslan, Revolutionary
Acts: Theater, Democracy and the French Revolution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2005); Jeffrey Ravel, The Contested Parterre: Public Theater and French Political Culture,
1680–1791 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999).
conclusion | 391
“antitheatricalism” was an ideal of the Jacobins (Maslan).19 I have tried instead
to build upon certain insights of The Contested Parterre to consider some of
the ways in which theatrical culture is contested both inside and outside the
playhouse, and is often the scene of factional demonstration and sometimes
intervention (Tarare, particularly). In a different period, the ability of Grand
Opera to be seized upon by segments of a public of different political persua-
sions has recently been emphasized.20 We also know from Laura Mason’s
Singing the French Revolution that the public’s involvement with song became
progressively polarized into different political persuasions throughout the
decade. Alongside this, I have also considered some of the strategies of
self-fashioning and career definition of men of letters to demonstrate that what
the Revolution gradually creates is a system where individual authors or insti-
tutions need to position their works in order to attract approval and subsidy.
Because this imperative is combined with a culture that is ready to project
political meaning onto certain passages of the works irrespective of wider dra-
matic context, this leads to a situation where the moral structures of works are
systematically cleansed of ambiguity. For this reason, I believe that speaking
of propaganda is quite wrong, as this implies a stable and unified ideology to
which works need to subscribe in order to survive. Nor can we decide upon a
close textual reading of the works alone where they were positioned politically.
A performance of Gluck’s Iphigénie en Aulide in 1791, attended by the royal
family, is a very different cultural event from its premiere in 1774, or a perfor-
mance in the 1780s, which revises a classic work after Gluck’s departure from
Paris, and so on. That is, I have tried to look at these works both in their own
right and as subject to historical forces, because they only have meaning
as cultural-political artifacts if the context of their production is properly
reconstructed. This does not mean reducing them to epiphenomena, but it
does mean remembering that opera is a collaborative venture, irreducible to
individual creative sensibilities and worth considering as a product of muli-
farious forces, which is both shaped by and itself reciprocally shapes its own
cultural context. Indeed, we might usefully think about writers and institu-
tions self-defining with respect to a multiplex system of controls: by an urban
popular public, an erstwhile cultural elite, political papers of various stripes,
but most important, municipal versus state organs; and of works both reflect-
ing events and being cultural and political events in their own right. To do so
would also be to repudiate a distinction according to which we think about
19 “The French Revolution’s paranoid aesthetics.”

20 Hibberd, French Grand Opera and the Historical Imagination.

separate categories such as a political “context,” a closed work of art, written to
reflect or influence that context, and a creative individual constrained, in order
to be performed, to produce what was likely to be approved. The material we
have examined here is neither patron-client oriented, nor market-driven, but
has features of both. It is an experiment in cultural regulation and artistic
creation which, although end-stopped by Napoleon’s reforms, would bear some
fruit when its guiding principles were explicitly revived in Third Republic
France.
conclusion | 393
b i b l io g rap h y
Manuscript Sources
archives nationales
AD/VIII/10, 44: Collection Rondonneau: instruction publique.
AJ/13/2, 5, 44, 47, 54, 55, 56, 60: Opéra de Paris.
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notaires parisiens.
O/1/613–629, 432–3, 484: Maison du roi, Dépêches ministérielles.
archives de paris
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bibliothèque de la comédie-française
2 AE / 2: Entrées gratuites: Echanges avec l’Opéra (1778–93).
2 AG 1789—25, 27: Pétitions diverses.
2 AG 1794—2: Lettre du Comité de salut public aux artistes dramatiques.
bibliothèque historique de la ville de paris

ms. C.P.4418: Papillon de la Ferté.
Rés.10358: Recueil d’acquarelles: projets d’un nouvel Opéra par Labrière.
bibliothèque de l’opéra
AD/4–7: Meetings of the comité (April 1788–29 fructidor An III).
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“Journal de l’Opéra” [MF.305–6].
besançon: bibliothèque municipale

Fonds Pierre-Adrien Pâris: ms.23, 24; 451, 483.
Periodicals (abbreviated in the text)

Almanach royal/national, 1789–An II
Almanach général de tous les spectacles, 179 [AGTS]
Almanach général des spectacles de Paris et de la province, pour l’année 1791 [–1792] [AGSPP]
Année littéraire [AL]
Journal de musique [JdM]
Journal de Paris [JdP]
Journal des spectacles [JdesS]
Journal des théâtres et des fêtes nationales
Mémoires secrets pour servir à l’histoire de la République des lettres [MS]
Mercure français [MF]
Moniteur universel, ou Gazette nationale [Moniteur]
Petit Almanach des grands spectacles de Paris
Les Spectacles de Paris et de toute la France, 1792
Les Spectacles de Paris, ou Calendrier historique & chronologique des théâtres (Duchesne)
[SdP-Duchesne], 1789–1794.
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index
Académie Royale de Musique, see Opéra, Bélanger, François Joseph, 46, 55

Paris Belloy, Pierre Laurent Buirette de
Amelot de Chaillou, Antoine-Jean, 40, Le Siège de Calais, 26, 218–19
46–48, 80 Berthélemy, Jean Simon, 126, 282, 365n
Andrieux, François (librettist), 214, 252, Berton, Pierre-Montan, 43, 60n, 70,
259 77, 218
Applications, 14, 147–49, 150, 155, 216, Boissy d’Anglas, François Antoine de, 287
227–29, 273–74 Quelques idées sur les arts, 28
Boquet, Louis René, 282
Bail and redevances, 15, 39, 41, 94, 97, 103, Boulevard du Temple, theaters on,
116–18, 124, 187, 320 8, 38, 45–46, 166, 187, 277,
Bail emphitéotique, 41, 83 308–10
Bailly, Jean Sylvain, 87–90, 109, 115, 133, Boullet, Pierre, 46, 96–97
299, 300, 402 Bouquier, Gabriel, 168, 181n, 326, 333
Barentin, Charles Louis François de Bourdon, Honoré (also known as
Paule de, 69 Neuville), 167
Barère, Bertrand, 171, 174, 181n Bourdon, Léonard
Barthélemy, Abbé Jean-Jacques Tombeau (Le) des Imposteurs, et l’inauguration
Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grèce, 281, du temple de la vérité, 165
283, 295, 353n, 364 Brousse-Desfaucherets, Jean Louis, 90–92,
Baudrais, 159, 165, 173, 175n 100, 103, 112
Beaumarchais, Pierre Augustin Brutus
Caron de, 33 character in Horatius Coclès, 354
and the Society of Dramatic Authors, 40, painting by Jacques-Louis David, 32,
119, 232 220, 274, 295, 376
Le Mariage de Figaro, 186, 278, 320–1 tragedy by Voltaire, see Voltaire
see also Mozart, Notaris treatment of, 215–16, 325
Tarare, see Salieri
Beffroy de Reigny (librettist), 326, 351, Ça ira, 302, 344
355, 361, 381–82 Cahier de Gerville, Bon-Claude, 148
Candeille, Pierre 87, 90n, 92, 93, 101, 102, 103,
L’Apothéose de Beaurepaire, ou la patrie 108, 119, 120, 124, 126, 132, 142,
reconnaissante, 326 151n, 155, 162, 165, 167, 220,
revised version of Castor et Pollux, 57, 233, 298, 309, 312n
196, 204, 205, 207, 213, 214, 217, and calls for second spoken French
221, 222, 223, 225, 229, 379 theater, 38, 94
applications in, 225–29 Comédie-Italienne, 10, 36, 37, 39, 40, 42,
Hebertist revisions to, 176, 229–31 45, 63, 75, 91n, 94, 101, 103, 110,
production, 223–25 117, 132n, 187, 208, 263, 264n,
Carrousel, place du, 49, 50, 51, 53, 55, 278n, 308, 309, 312, 314, 320
133, 365n Commission des six, 168–69
Caumartin, Louis François le Fèvre de, 48 Commission of Public Instruction, 13, 171,
Cellerier, Jacques, 18, 99, 132–36, 138, 172–79, 180, 229–31, 337
141, 143, 144, 171, 184, 185, 186, Committee of Public Instruction, 13,
188, 200, 206, 306, 321 145–48, 151, 160, 165, 166, 168,
arrested, 154–62 169, 170, 177, 179, 334
Censorship, 16, 36, 38, 86–91, 101, 102, Committee of Public Safety, 146n, 152–55,
108, 116, 141, 163, 172, 173, 159–61, 163–68, 170–81, 333,
175, 176, 177, 180, 230, 375, 337, 340, 344
385, 389 Commune of Paris, 13, 14, 16, 24, 28, 85,
negative, 29, 145–9 86, 88n, 89n, 90n, 91, 93, 94, 95,
positive, 29, 152, 159 100–06, 109–18, 127, 128, 133,
preventive and repressive, 87, 122–3, 186 141, 142, 144, 149–79 passim, 229,
and Adrien, 149–52 230, 301, 305, 307, 336, 381,
Champein, Stanislas 382, 391
Le Portrait, ou la divinité du sauvage, 204, Assemblée générale, 86
205, 208, 278, 308, 312–16 Conseil général, 153, 158, 160,
Chartres, Louis Philippe Joseph d’Orléans, 167, 168n
duc de, 55, 95 Concert spirituel, 60, 64
Chaumette, Pierre Gaspard, 144, 165, 167, Concession, 132–35
168, 173, 178, 381 Condorcet, Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de
Chénier, André, 104 Caritat, marquis de, 145, 389n
Chénier, Marie-Joseph Constitutional monarchy, 227, 228, 251,
Le Chant du 14 juillet, 330 257, 258, 262, 297, 301
Charles IX, ou L’Ecole des rois, 26, 27, 33, Contagion, 28, 219, 220, 257
39, 86–88, 91, 115–16, 166, 215, Convention, 141, 142, 145, 146n, 151–53,
256, 300 158–60, 165, 166, 168, 169, 172,
Timoléon, 173 177, 181, 307, 329, 333, 334, 344,
Le Triomphe de la République, ou le Camp de 348, 380, 382
Grandpré, 212, 326, 329, 332 Corneille, Pierre, 122
Chéron, Anne, 25n, 59, 78n Corneille, Thomas
Chéron, Auguste-Athanase, 25n, 59, 78n, Camma, 221, 234–36, 242, 249–50
80–81, 126, 162, 263, 339 Crébillon, Prosper Jolyot de, 122, 284
Cherubini, Luigi, 32n, 218
Démophoon, 59, 198, 207 Danton, Georges, 156, 340
Cloots, Jean-Baptiste Anacharsis, Dauberval, Jean, 96–97
165, 166, 168 Dauvergne, Antoine, 38, 43n, 58, 59, 61,
Collot d’Herbois, Jean Marie, 157 62, 66, 70, 71n, 77n, 78, 110n,
Comédie-Française, 9, 10, 15, 16, 26, 27, 218, 222, 232n, 252, 286,
36, 38, 40, 41, 45, 46, 63, 75, 81, 298, 299
416 | index
David, Jacques Louis, 32, 104n, 168, 216, Festival, 29, 162, 164, 168, 169, 175,
220, 274, 290, 295, 331, 334, 335, 176–78, 205, 210, 211, 229, 278,
365, 379 299, 302, 303, 328–32, 334–35,
Declaration of the Rights of Man and 373, 376, 382
the Citizen, 75, 77, 78, 87, 101, Fête de la Fédération, 215, 229, 251, 299,
108–09, 120, 305 301, 302, 382
Deregulation, 9, 15, 31, 94, 97, 99, 101, Fête de la Raison, 159, 164–65, 337
102, 107, 109, 110, 122, 123, 127, Fête de l’être suprême, 176–78
130, 138, 175n, 186, 187, 278, Fontaine, Pierre François Léonard, 365
311, 385, 388, 389 Forgeot, Nicolas Julien (librettist),
Desentelles, 66 278, 312n
Desriaux (librettist), 214 Framery, Nicolas Etienne, 9, 42, 102,
D’Holbach, Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron, 29 109–10, 120
Diderot, Denis, 5, 29, 31, 389n Francoeur, Louis Joseph, 18, 99, 112–13,
Divertissement, 205, 208, 210, 212, 221, 125–26, 132–39 passim, 141–44,
222, 233, 240, 254, 268, 273, 279, 154–61, 162, 171, 184–85, 186,
280, 285, 295, 302, 312, 326, 328, 188, 200, 206, 306
331, 332, 366, 371 Fréron, Elie Catherine, 5n, 116
Dorfeuille, Pierre Paul Gobet, known as, 38, Froidure, Nicolas André Marie, 159, 165,
81–84, 95–96, 100, 111n, 134 173, 175n
Droit des pauvres, 84, 101–03, 118,
130, 131n Gaillard, Félix, 38, 81–84, 95–96,
Duprat de la Touloubre (librettist), 214, 100, 111n
264, 274 Garat, Dominique-Joseph, 180, 330, 343
Dutilh (librettist), 326, 343 Gardel, Maximilien, 75, 80, 126, 161n,
Duveyrier, Honoré Nicolas Marie, 101 162, 181n, 214, 278, 285, 299,
306, 326, 329, 332
Egypt, 232, 233, 235–41, 253–55, Génissieu, Jean Joseph Victor, 151
258, 335 Genre, 101, 107, 137, 173, 186, 187, 205,
Electricity, 28, 87 206–12, 215, 219, 278, 296, 311,
Emphyteusis, see Bail emphitéotique 320, 337, 345
Emulation, 3, 43, 65, 68, 75, 76, 103–04, Gentil-Bernard, Pierre Joseph Bernard,
120, 124, 130, 218, 336 known as (librettist), 214, 229
Energy, 28, 155, 247, 338, 343 Ginguené, Pierre Louis, 42, 180
Enlightenment and Revolution, 31, 32, 275 Gluck, Christoph Willibald, 24, 26, 55,
Enthusiasm, 28, 57, 154, 218, 220, 58, 139, 197, 198, 200, 203, 207,
247–48, 257, 286, 303, 332, 335, 217, 220, 240, 246, 247, 254,
337–38, 342, 348, 357 300, 352
Estates-General, 32, 39, 86, 289, 302 Iphigénie en Aulide, 149, 160n, 207, 392
Evolutions militaires, 331, 347 Gossec, François Joseph, 43n, 198, 222,
279n, 326
Fabre d’Eglantine, Philippe-François- Le Triomphe de la République, ou le camp de
Nazaire Fabre, known as, 116, grandpré, 212, 329–33
156, 157 L’Offrande à la liberté, 208, 326
Fabre d’Olivet, Antoine (librettist), 326, Governance, 14, 18, 22, 36–42 passim, 43,
345, 346 77–98 passim, 99, 110, 111, 114,
Faro, Jean Léonard, 173, 176 119, 125–30, 138, 177, 185
Fenouillot de Falbaire de Quingey, Charles Grand Opera, 9, 25, 217, 356, 392
Georges, 90 Gratifications, 22, 70n, 138
Festal operas, 211, 280, 295, 328–37 Gregorian calendar, 194
index | 417
Grétry, André Ernest Modeste, 57n, 79, La Force, prison of, 157, 160, 161
198–99, 222, 227, 278, 299, 330 La Passion du Christ, 156–58
Aspasie, 279–96 La Suze, 161, 126
and historical reconstruction, 282–84 Lainez, Etienne, 59, 80, 126, 149, 233, 263
and mixed dramaturgy, 281–82 Langlé, Honoré François Marie,
and regeneration, 279–80, 286–88 Marquis de, 222
and visual effect, 284–86 Corisandre, ou les fous par enchantement, 278,
depiction of Philosophes in, 289–95 316–19
La Caravane du Caire, 58, 199, 207, 253, ‘La Patrie en danger’, 348–50
279, 281 Lasalle, Nicolas le Bourgignon de, 76n, 80n,
Panurge dans l’île des lanternes, 58, 199, 129, 285n
208, 237, 279n, 281 Law of 2 August 1793, 16, 124, 141, 142,
Gudin de la Brenellerie, Paul Philippe, 299 152–54, 165, 173, 179, 385
Guillard, Nicolas François (librettist), 57n, Laya, Jean Louis
214, 252, 259, 260, 326, 352 L’Ami des lois, 151–52, 385
Lays, François, 59, 126, 161n, 162,
Hébert, Jacques René, 144n, 159, 160, 164, 318, 322
167, 172, 178 role in Castor et Pollux, 227–29
Hebertism, 159, 178, 179, 229, 336, Le Bailly, Antoine (librettist), 278
337, 390 Le Camus, bursar, 126, 134n, 184, 185, 334
Henry-Larivière, Pierre François Joachim, Le Chapelier, Isaac René Gui, 15, 32, 93,
146–48 97, 99, 107–09, 118, 119–24, 131n,
Historical theater, 219–20, 232, 253, 348 146, 150, 152, 186, 187, 278, 307,
Hoffman, François Benoît (librettist), 388, 389n
9, 149, 150, 214, 218, 231–37, Leboeuf, Jean Joseph (librettist), 164n, 326
240–41, 245, 249, 264 Lefroid de Méreaux, Nicolas-Jean
Fabius, 164, 205, 207, 326, 350–52,
Inflation, 184 354–55, 357, 362, 371–82
Oedipe à Thèbes, 214, 262–74,
Jacobin club, 15, 77, 166 Kingship in, 270–74
Jacobinism, 15, 121, 172, 178, 336, 341, sensibility in, 267–70
344, 356, 392 Lelièvre, Jacques Mathurin, 173, 176
Jadin, Louis Lemoyne, Jean Baptiste Moyne, known as,
L’Heureux Stratagème, 278, 308 59, 213, 299
Le Siège de Thionville, 157, 158, 162, Louis IX en Egypte, 204, 205, 207, 214,
204, 205, 208, 301n, 326, 337–44, 216n, 217, 240, 250, 251–62, 270,
346, 362 281, 300
Joly de Fleury, Jean François, 46, 47 and history-writing, 254–55
Joly, Etienne de, 89, 123, 149 and Kingship, 255–59
Jussieu, Antoine Laurent de, 101 Miltiade à Marathon, 205, 207, 326, 335,
350–56 passim, 362, 364, 371
Kornmann, Frédéric Pierre, 47, 114n Nadir, 59
Nephté, 35n, 58, 204, 205, 207, 214, 217,
La Ferté, Denis Pierre Jean, Papillon de, 18, 218, 221, 231–50, 252, 253, 257,
24, 35, 40, 46–48, 49, 58, 60–62, 258, 264, 270, 272, 287, 310, 312
65–84 passim, 103, 118n, 127, 129, Egyptian setting of, 235–40
197, 200, 205, 213, 218, 252, 263, ideal of funerary sobriety in, 240–45
274, 298, 299, 384, oaths in, 245–48
Précis sur l’opéra, 24, 57n, 58n, 60n, 61n, neoclassicism and, 249–50
79n, 80n, 83n, 84–85, 127, 197, Les Pommiers et le moulin, 204, 205, 208,
252, 263n 278, 308, 310–12
418 | index
Les Prétendus, 204, 205, 208, 262n, 278, Horatius Coclès, 205, 207, 326, 348, 351,
308, 309–10, 312, 314 354, 365, 371
Toute la Grèce, ou ce que peut la liberté, 205, Mélodrame, 208, 209, 210, 278, 300, 327
208, 326, 350–51, 354, 355, 359, Menus-plaisirs, 22, 40, 42, 48, 79, 83, 85,
364n, 366, 381 129n, 282, 286, 300
Lenoir, Samson Nicolas, 44, 46, 47, 53, Mercier, Louis-Sébastien, 26
113n Metastasio, Pietro, 150
Leroux des Tillets, Jean Jacques, 48n, 68n, Millin de Grandmaison, Aubin Louis,
85n, 113, 119, 125–30, 134, 136, 107–08, 120, 121
144n Miltiades (Athenian general), 353
Leroy (theater director), 109 Molière, Jean Baptiste Poquelin,
Lescène des maisons, Jacques, 89–90, known as, 122
109, 115 Moline, Pierre Louis (librettist), 181,
Levacher de Charnois, Jean Charles, 150 326, 333
Liberty, 15, 28, 31–32, 39, 64, 75–85 L’Inauguration du Théâtre des arts, 181
passim, 86, 87, 88, 92, 95, 100–13 Le Tombeau des imposteurs, see Bourdon,
passim, 117, 120, 122, 123, 128, Léonard
130, 131, 152, 158, 179, 228, Montansier, Marguerite Brunet, known as
252, 257, 258, 296, 304, 306, Mlle, 95, 117, 167, 171
330–32, 334–35, 338, 340, 341, Morel de Chédeville, Etienne (librettist), 66,
343, 345–50, 354, 362, 371–72, 79, 278, 279, 284, 285, 295, 296
375–76, 381, 386–88 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus
Lieutenant-général de police, 36, 74, 86, Le Nozze di Figaro, trans. as Le Mariage
88, 89 de Figaro, 186, 205, 207, 278, 308,
Linières, comte de (librettist), 278 319–23
Louis, Victor, 96 Music and the Ancients, 28, 247, 287, 338
Lully, Jean Baptiste, 22, 37, 195, 317
Napoleon Bonaparte, 9, 23, 63, 88, 184,
Maillard, Mlle, 59, 232n, 233, 263, 332 388, 393
Maison du roi, xi, 4, 18, 36, 40, 43, 63, 67, National Assembly, 13, 15, 18, 39, 105,
70, 74, 75, 80n, 82, 84n, 85, 186, 116, 117, 119–20, 124, 132, 141,
188, 298 145–48, 151, 156, 177, 200, 215,
Manuel, Louis-Pierre, 88n, 89n, 307 251, 262, 302, 349
Marat, Jean Paul, 77, 162, 305 National history, see Historical theater
Maréchal, Sylvain, 164 National opera, 21–28, 50, 240, 390
La Fête de la Raison, ou La Rosière National theater, 6, 63, 75n, 92, 94,
républicaine, 164–65 106–07, 108n, 154, 170, 278
Marie-Antoinette, Archduchess of Austria, National tragedy, 26–27, 39, 218
Queen of France and Navarre, 64, Necker, Jacques, 65, 67, 71n, 73, 81,
225, 227, 246 118n, 383
Marmontel, Jean François, 5n, 42, 59, 196, Neoclassicism, 24, 25, 33, 220, 235, 240,
227, 214, 221, 227, 240, 274, 249–50, 365n
288n, 298 Neufchâteau, François de, Paméla, 16, 142,
Martin, Joseph (librettist), 326, 351, 372n, 155, 158, 165, 167, 180
373, 375, 382 Nicolet, Jean Baptiste, 38, 277
Maurepas, Jean-Frédéric Phélypeaux, Notaris, François (librettist), 278, 320
comte de, 46–47 Noverre, Jean Georges, 10, 50, 79n, 285
Méhul, Etienne-Nicolas, 8
Adrien, 149–52, 306, 365, 385 Oaths, 245–46, 302, 311, 334, 356, 391
Cora, 35n, 204, 205, 207, 213, 214, Opera and sobriety, 24, 220, 233–36, 245,
231, 245 254, 264, 268–69, 282, 350
index | 419
Opéra-comique, 9, 39, 65, 186–87, 210–11, ‘Petits spectacles’, 94, 102, 108, 118, 203n
219, 227, 278, 300, 308–23 passim Peuchet, Jacques, 88n, 105, 110, 114
Opéra, Paris, Peyre, Marie-Joseph, 46, 167
Accounting, 183–85 Piccinni, Niccolò, 24, 57n, 132, 199, 200,
Appointements, 69, 80, 113n, 138 207, 218, 221, 222, 247
Deficit, 24, 38, 62, 66–69, 73, 84n, Pièce de circonstance, 16, 18, 137, 164,
103n, 104, 110, 116, 119n, 127, 177–78, 209–10, 212, 337, 344
129, 132, 143 Plancher Valcour, Philippe Aristide Louis
Takings (recettes à la porte), 188–90 Pierre
Ballet corps, 59, 240, 285, 312 Le Tombeau des imposteurs, see Bourdon,
Concours for new opera libretti, 57 Léonard
Financial crisis of, 4, 15, 38, 62, 117, Porta, Bernardo
118, 145, 184, 298 La Réunion du 10 août, ou l’Inauguration de
Frequency of performances 190–94 la République française, 163n, 166,
Honoraria, 58, 137, 188 181, 204–05, 326, 328–29, 333–37
Orchestra, 59–61, 82n, 126, 138, Porte Saint-Martin, 44–48, 51, 53, 79, 83,
330–32, 339, 345–46, 355, 359, 96, 111n, 134n, 135, 143–44, 165,
371 168–69
Premises of, see Porte Saint-Martin Poyet, Bernard, 50, 53, 55–56
change to, 46, 48–55, 79, 83n, 95–97, Pre-Revolution, 173, 220, 295, 297, 346,
143–45, 167–72 387
Principals, xi, 10, 14, 18, 38, 42–43, 49, Privilège, 6, 9, 15, 22n, 36–39, 41, 65, 76,
58, 61, 63, 67–69, 73–84, 94–95, 78, 84, 91–92, 94, 101–08, 110–11,
100, 103, 111–12, 129, 138, 184, 114–15, 117–22, 135n, 146n, 153,
263, 285, 322, 387 186–87, 278n, 383
Profit-sharing initiative, 10, 43, 68–69, Propaganda, 7, 12, 13, 16, 19, 21, 28–31,
75–76, 78–80, 83, 114, 116, 131n 36, 123, 142, 145, 147, 159, 178,
Repertory policy, 195–205 328, 371, 381, 386, 392
Diversification of genres, 207–12 Public opinion, 13, 27, 67, 75, 97, 103,
Repertory works, 35, 57–58, 195, 121, 131, 147, 150, 152, 155, 386
197–98, 201, 203, 215, 221,
231–32, 282, 392 Quatremère de Quincy, Antoine
and Royal domain, 40–42 Chrysostome, 93, 101–11 passim,
Salaries, see appointements 115–16, 120–21, 145n, 389
See also: droit des pauvres, privilège, Querelle des Bouffons, 10, 24, 222
subsidy
Racine, Jean, 122, 149, 220, 235n, 241,
Pâris, Pierre-Adrien, 50–54, 213n, 224–25, 244, 316
233, 235, 237 Rameau, Jean Philippe
Patriot criticism, 22, 25–27, 33, 43, Castor et Pollux, see Candeille
147, 155, 295, 297, 301–03, Platée, 281, 285
305–07, 382 Rehearsal, 57–61, 85n, 136–37, 164n,
Payan, Claude-François, 173, 174 213, 320
Payan, Joseph, 174, 177 Republican calendar, 188, 194
People, role of, 15, 64, 128, 163, 170, 217, Rey, Louis Charles Joseph, 80, 126, 161
227–28, 244, 245, 247, 256–58, Robespierre, Maximilien, 122, 145n, 165,
264, 268–69, 271, 273, 297, 301, 173, 179, 303, 336, 390
303, 306, 331, 334, 341, 344, 349, Rochefort (composer), 185n, 326
355–57, 362 Toulon soumis, 344–48
in Fabius, 371–84 Rochefort (double-bass), 80n, 126, 161
420 | index
Rochon de Chabannes, Marc Antoine Théâtre de Molière, 131, 132n, 163n,
Jacques (librettist), 278, 309 333, 345
Roland, Jean Marie, 132 Théâtre de Monsieur, 8, 10, 15, 37, 39, 60,
Rousseau (principal), 59, 126 64, 94, 103, 188, 277–78
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 247, 287, 288n, 312 Théâtre des Associés, 38
Lettre à d’Alembert sur les spectacles, 29, Théâtre des Beaujolais, 38, 117
102, 108 Théâtre des Variétés-Amusantes, 38, 96
Rozoi, Barnabé Farmian de Théâtre du Palais-Royal, 44, 96–97,
Dissertation sur le drame lyrique, 219–21 167n, 283
Théâtre du peuple, 170–71
Sacchini, Antonio, 57n, 199–200, 222 Théâtre Montansier, 167, 169n
Saint-Huberty, Antoinette, 218, 232, 233 Thiroux de Crosne, Louis, 74, 88
Saint-Marc, Jean-Paul-André des Razins, Thuriot de la Rozière, Jacques Alexandre,
marquis de 93n, 101
Adèle de Ponthieu, 199, 218, 220, 221 Tombeau (Le) des Imposteurs, see Bourdon,
Saint-Priest, François Emmanuel Guignard, Léonard
comte de, 40, 81, 83n, 111, 233 Trial of Louis XVI, 141, 262, 325, 328, 330
Salieri, Antonio, 57n, 199, 222
Tarare, 278, 296–307 Utilité publique, 23, 31, 105
and the Federation, 298–300
Beaumarchais’s self-fashioning in, Valadier (librettist), 213–14
300–01, 303–07 Valcour, Aristide, 154
Saulnier, Guillaume (librettist), 278, 308, Valdruche, Arnould, 165, 168
326, 333, 343 Vaudevilles, 39, 308, 345
Sedaine, Michel Jean, 55, 255 Vestris, Gaëtan, 80, 126, 401
Guillaume Tell, 16, 142, 152, 154 Villedeuil, Laurent de, 3n, 40n, 49–50,
Seven years war, 26, 218 65–67, 69–76, 80n, 81, 84n, 118n
Sophocles, 348, 366 Viotti, Giovanni Battista, 14, 64–75, 76,
Oedipus the King, 264–66, 268, 270, 272 78, 79–81, 83–85
Suard, Jean Baptiste Antoine, 57n, 70, Vismes du Valgay, Anne Pierre Jacques de,
89, 146n 10, 14, 37, 39, 42–43, 68, 79, 80,
Subsidy, 22, 24, 66, 68, 71, 76, 92, 103, 82n, 85, 95, 277, 308
106, 110, 114, 116, 118, 124, Vogel, Johann Christoph
127–28, 103–04, 138, 143, 163, Démophon, 204, 207, 214, 217, 233, 310
166, 171, 184, 330, 333–34, 386, Voltaire, François Marie Arouet, known as,
389, 392 122, 131, 220, 229, 251–53, 255,
260, 264, 296, 316–17
Taste, 3–6, 11, 22–25, 28, 32, 34–35, 103, Brutus, 16, 142, 152–54, 216
106, 114, 121–22, 179, 197, 223, La Mort de César, 175
230n, 231, 332 Mahomet, 31
Terror, 11, 15–16, 18, 27, 31–32, 43, 104, Oedipe, 264–74 passim
121, 130, 138–39, 141–81 passim, Tancrède, 219n
184, 187, 202, 229, 230, 241, 256,
274–75, 295, 299, 302, 328–29, Wailly, Charles de, 46, 167, 169, 237
348–82 passim, 385, 386, 388 War with Austria, 150, 328, 349, 351–52,
Théâtre de la Nation, 27, 151, 155, 354, 366
165, 167
Théâtre de la République, 153, 162, Zingarelli, Niccolò Antonio
167n, 169 Antigone, 35n, 204–05, 207, 213, 214,
Théâtre de l’Odéon, 9, 45–46, 167–71 216n, 217, 250–51, 281
index | 421

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Staging the French Revolution

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AP: Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860, recueil complet

x | sigla and abbreviations

One of the complexities of Revolutionary culture, which makes it such a rich

4 | staging the french revolution

5 See, for instance, Jean-François Marmontel, Eléments de littérature, ed. Sophie le

6 | staging the french revolution

12 Les Infortunes de la Raison, 1774–1815 (Paris: Hatier, 1992), p. 94.

8 | staging the french revolution

20 Music Drama at the Paris Odéon, 1824–1828 (Berkeley: University of California

23 Hemmings, Theatre and State, p. 17.

10 | staging the french revolution

27 Susan Desan, “What’s after political culture? Recent French Revolutionary

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14 | staging the french revolution

16 | staging the french revolution

18 | staging the french revolution

Central to any investigation of the theater in the period of the Revolution is

1. Theater and the State: The Concept of a National Opera

22 | staging the french revolution

4 “Avant-propos,” Philologiques III: Qu’est-ce qu’une littérature nationale? Approches pour

the outlook in 1789 | 23

24 | staging the french revolution

8 Mémoire pour les sieur et dame Chéron, p. 24n1.

the outlook in 1789 | 25

26 | staging the french revolution

the outlook in 1789 | 27

2. Was Revolutionary Culture Propaganda?

18 JdP, 1789, p. 500.

28 | staging the french revolution

the outlook in 1789 | 29

27 JdesS, 156 (15 Frimaire An II / 5 November 1793), p. 1238, citing Révolutions de

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30 Composing the Citizen, p. 30.

the outlook in 1789 | 31

4. Rupture and Continuity

33 The Nation’s Image, p. 5.

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the outlook in 1789 | 33

34 | staging the french revolution

the outlook in 1789 | 35

36 | staging the french revolution

47 Clarence Brenner, The “Théâtre-Italien”: Its Repertory. With an Historical Introduction,

the outlook in 1789 | 37

38 | staging the french revolution

55 Carla Hesse, Publishing and Cultural Politics in Revolutionary Paris, 1789–1810

the outlook in 1789 | 39

58 di Proﬁo, La Révolution des Bouffons, p. 31.

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the outlook in 1789 | 41

6. After the de Vismes season, 1780–1789

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