The Frightful Stage: Political Censorship of the Theater in Nineteenth-Century Europe

By Robert Justin Goldstein

In nineteenth-century Europe the ruling elites viewed the theater as a form of communication which had enormous importance. The theater provided the most significant form of mass entertainment and was the only arena aside from the church in which regular mass gatherings were possible. Therefore, drama censorship occupied a great deal of the ruling class’s time and energy, with a particularly focus on proposed scripts that potentially threatened the existing political, legal, and social order. This volume provides the first comprehensive examination of nineteenth-century political theater censorship at a time, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, when the European population was becoming increasingly politically active.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Mar 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781845458997

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Preface

This volume is the second in what has been conceived as a trilogy of edited collections about political censorship in nineteenth-century Europe. Its origins date to my 1983 book Political Repression in Nineteenth- Century Europe , which was, in retrospect, a rather foolishly ambitious attempt to survey all aspects of political repression for all of Europe between 1815 and 1914. As the general subject continued to interest me, I decided to focus thereafter especially upon one key aspect of the overall topic: political censorship. This led to two further books published in 1989, Censorship of Political Caricature in Nineteenth-Century France (Kent State) and Political Censorship of the Arts and the Press in Nineteenth-Century Europe (MacMillan). They were based on both archival research and extensive readings in secondary sources in English and French, the two European languages accessible to me.

The further and deeper I explored the general subject of nineteenth-century European political censorship, the more it became clear that this was an issue of enormous significance both to the ruling elites and to opposition movements, each of whom invested extraordinary amounts of time and energy in attempting to, respectively, implement and resist it. It also became increasingly clear that my language limitations were a serious impediment to further research, since most relevant publications, not to mention archival materials, have not been translated into English or French. Therefore, I decided to recruit a group of multilingual scholars who could penetrate materials for all of the major countries of nineteenth-century continental Europe—namely France (which I could handle), Germany, the Habsburg Monarchy, Italy, Russia, and Spain—to create a book that focused especially on print censorship in nineteenth-century Europe, which resulted in the 2000 publication of The War for the Public Mind: Political Censorship in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Praeger). Although focusing on censorship of newspapers, books, and journals, this volume touched briefly on censorship of other media, including theater, opera, caricature, and cinema—just enough to make clear that, although in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries we tend to think of print censorship as especially important, in nineteenth-century Europe, when large segments of the population were illiterate, censorship of the stage and the visual arts was perhaps even more significant. Thus, as detailed in this volume, most European regimes continued prior censorship of such media long after ceasing print censorship. Therefore, a second book, focused on censorship of the stage (including both spoken and musical theater, such as opera)—the one that is now in your hands—seemed called for. A third and final volume, focused on censorship of the visual arts (such as caricature, posters, sculpture, painting, and early photography and cinema) is now in the planning stages.

As with The War for the Public Mind, the primary purpose of this volume is to provide reliable and comprehensive summaries, for an English-language audience, of the latest research available from the most important countries of nineteenth-century Europe. In most cases a large (and sometimes overwhelming) literature (in non-English languages) is available on this topic, and the contributors to this book were therefore not asked or required to do archival research (although they were certainly not discouraged from such). To hold the number of endnotes down to a reasonable level, they have generally been grouped together, in the appropriate order, at the end of paragraphs; in addition, each chapter includes an extensive bibliographical essay, including whatever sources are available in English, designed to highlight the most important sources.

The War for the Public Mind received overwhelmingly positive reviews in a wide diversity of academic journals, with the primary criticism that it lacked a chapter on England. The reason for this, and why there is no England chapter in this book either, is simply that material on English censorship—of the theater in particular—is both abundant and easily accessible to English-language readers, and this book seeks to make available to them material that is not. However, I have included many references to England, as well as to other countries that do not have individual chapters devoted to them, in the introductory and summary essays, which attempt to point out similarities and differences in nineteenth-century theater censorship across the European continent. The introductory chapter seeks primarily to provide some brief general background context for readers more knowledgeable about (or interested in) theater than European history in general, and to briefly summarize both the reasons why European political authorities feared especially the theater and the history of pre–nineteenth-century European political theater censorship. The heart of the book consists of individual country chapters on Germany, France, Russia, Spain, Italy, and the Habsburg Monarchy. A summary seeks to recapitulate major themes about the substance of nineteenth-century European drama censorship. Although the introduction and summary are massively informed by the country chapters, they also draw heavily on my own research. Inevitably there is some duplication of both general content and specific incidents/quotations between the introduction and (especially) the summary and the country chapters. I have tried to keep this to a minimum, but have deliberately erred on the side of repetition in certain cases, both because I view the information as particularly apt and/or eloquent and because, realistically, some readers will examine some, but not all, of the country chapters, and would otherwise miss some critical material. The introductory and summary chapters lack bibliographic essays because there is virtually no significant comparative or summary literature dealing with nineteenth-century European political theater censorship, as opposed to material on individual countries; what little is available is included in endnotes 19 in the introduction and 2 in the summary. In writing the introduction, in particular, I have liberally borrowed from my earlier publications, which are mentioned in the latter endnote.

I am deeply indebted to the chapter contributors, who have of course made this book a reality, and have exhibited seemingly limitless patience as the delays that inevitably impact all multi-authored collections came into play. I also want to thank Janice Best, professor of languages and literature at Acadia University (Canada), and Robin Lenman, formerly history professor at the University of Warwick (UK), for reading a draft manuscript and providing many helpful suggestions. I am also much indebted to Berghahn Books and to my editor, Marion Berghahn, for her confidence in this work from its early days and, more generally, for keeping the faith at a time when marketplace pressures are probably a greater and more ruthless censorship threat to academic freedom and publication than anything wielded (or dreamed of) by the authorities.

Introduction

ROBERT JUSTIN GOLDSTEIN

The Social and Political Context of Nineteenth-Century European Theater Censorship

In studying political theater censorship in nineteenth-century Europe, what is especially striking is how similar were the concerns and practices of authorities across the continent, as well as the responses of those who suffered from the censorship. Throughout Europe the theater was viewed by ruling elites as a form of communication that had enormous importance, and therefore drama censorship occupied a great deal of their time and energy, with a particular focus on proposed scripts that were viewed as potentially threatening to the existing political, legal, and social order. Moreover, given the especial fear of the poor and illiterate throughout Europe following the French revolution, and the far greater access of this element of the population to the stage as compared with print media, the authorities tended to pay particular attention to productions presented in venues that were especially popular among the lower classes. An examination of precisely which material the authorities sought to ban or circumscribe provides an unusually detailed glimpse into their mentalities, and especially their fears. In response to similar attempts by ruling elites across Europe to control the theater, dramatists and theater audiences throughout the continent developed common techniques of evasion and resistance.

Political controls over the theater were part of a much broader network of attempts to maintain the social and political status quo in nineteenth-century Europe, a fact that makes it very difficult to isolate its specific impact. For example, among the major countries or regions of Europe (Italy before 1860 and Germany before 1870 were each divided into numerous small states), the printed press (with the exception of England) was generally subject to prior censorship before about 1850. National elections and legislatures did not exist in Russia before 1905 and in the Habsburg Monarchy before 1860, while in those countries that had elected parliaments, the right to vote was generally restricted to, at most, the wealthiest 5 percent of the population before 1850, with universal adult (male only) suffrage generally dating at best from 1890 or later. Even then broader suffrage was often made meaningless by massive vote rigging (as in Spain, Portugal, and Hungary) or complicated electoral schemes that heavily weighted the votes of the rich (as in Austria, Belgium, Rumania, Russia, and the dominant German state of Prussia). Most European countries also outlawed or strictly limited freedom of assembly and association until mid century or thereafter, and harsh restrictions on the right to form trade unions and/or to strike were generally enforced until late in the nineteenth century or beyond.¹

Another form of extremely important, if indirect, control maintained by European rulers over the ability of their citizens to effectively voice their views or otherwise participate in public affairs was that most countries did not provide even free elementary education until 1830 or after, and virtually none provided free education beyond that level. The result was that in 1850 over half of European adults were literate only in France, Germany, Switzerland, England, the Netherlands, and the Scandinavian countries, while adult literacy rates were 20 percent or less in Iberia, Italy, the Balkans, and Russia. As late as 1914 fewer than 3 percent of children between the ages of fourteen and eighteen across Europe were enrolled in secondary schools, and less than 1 percent of the university-age population in any country attended institutions of higher education. Moreover, when and where free education was made available (or required), it was generally designed to keep the poor in their place by depriving them of any knowledge beyond the basics required to provide a minimally adequate work force or that might upset the existing social structure. Thus, even in advanced France, leading politician Adolph Thiers (president, 1871–73) defined the purpose of education as teaching that suffering is necessary in all estates and that when the poor have a fever, it is not the rich who have sent it to them. Russian minister of education Ivan Delianov decreed in 1887 that state-supported secondary schools should bar children of coachmen, menials, cooks, washerwomen, small shopkeepers and the like since it was completely unwarranted for the children of such people to leave their position in life.²

Despite such restrictions, the seemingly unstoppable tide of modernization in nineteenth-century Europe, especially marked by rapid growth of literacy, urbanization and industrialization, and breakthroughs in communication and transportation (particularly the invention of the telegraph, the railroad, and technical breakthroughs in printing, which greatly reduced costs) led to the emergence—for the first time in world history—of a large mass of ordinary people with at least the potential for the desire and capacity to participate in public life. Thus, as the result of the greatest and fastest transformation until then in world history, in Europe as a whole between 1815 and 1914, adult literacy increased from under 30 percent to over 70 percent, the population living in towns of twenty thousand or more jumped from about 5 percent to about 20 percent, and the industrial labor force increased from about 15 percent to about 30 percent of the total labor force (as suggested above with regard to literacy rates, these overall figures hide massive variations among countries, with central, southern, and eastern Europe generally lagging substantially behind). This development deeply frightened traditional and emerging elites, especially due to the extraordinary number of political rebellions during the 1789–1850 period (the French Revolution of 1789, revolts in Spain, Portugal, and Naples in 1820–21, uprisings in France, Poland, Belgium, and parts of Switzerland, Italy, and Germany in 1830–32, and revolutions almost everywhere in Europe in 1848), generally led by elements of the emerging middle class, but typically supported by significant segments of the poor. In a statement that has become famous among modern historians because it so well captured both the political emergence of ordinary citizens and the horror such provoked among ruling elites, French legislative deputy Saint-Marc Girardin warned his colleagues in the early 1830s that the barbarians which threaten society are [the working classes] in the outlying districts of our manufacturing towns, not in the Tartary of Russia [a reference suggestive of Mongol hordes].³

Most Europeans, as earlier, lived in or on the margins of poverty during the nineteenth century. As the two best overall measures of social wealth and health, the infant mortality rate (about 5 per 1,000 in the wealthiest countries in 2007) was approximately 200 per 1,000 for all of Europe in 1815 (although it dropped substantially to about 150 by 1914), and life expectancy (today about 80 in wealthy countries) was under 40 years in 1815 (although jumping to almost 50 by 1914). Of course, such indicators were far higher than average for the relatively small European elite. Despite the generally impoverished state of the European masses, the rapid growth of literacy, industrialization and urbanization, and improvements in transportation and communication, as well as improved living conditions by 1900 (especially in western and northern Europe), for the first time gave large segments of the poor both an increasing awareness of their condition and a sense that change was possible. This contrasted sharply with the many centuries during which Europeans typically lived their entire lives encased in narrow geographical, vocational, and ideological frameworks that made it almost impossible to envision, much less demand, better lives from their rulers, who had not only far better material conditions of life, but alone enjoyed any significant freedom and power. Thus, on the eve of the 1905 Russian revolution, jurist A. F. Koni wrote to a friend: The current situation in Russia is strange, and…frightening. Society is bursting out of its swaddling clothes, in which it was forcibly kept [by poverty and repression] and which dulled the mind and atrophied any feelings of self-dignity. But it already wants to run, although it doesn’t yet know how to walk, and indeed to stand on its own feet. Similarly, John Stuart Mills observed in 1848 in England, where the social and economic transformation of Europe was especially advanced, that the working classes would no longer accept a patriarchal or paternal system of government and had irrevocably taken their interests into their own hands once they had been taught to read, brought together in numbers to work socially under the same roof, and enabled by railways to shift from place to place. Or, in the astonishingly eloquent words of Hungarian peasant Albert Szilagi, testifying before a government commission investigating outbursts of rural unrest in his country in the 1890s, The rightful demands of the laborers increased because the people of the land study more, know more, see more. How can you blame us? We have learnt how to read and write. We would now like to wear better clothes, eat like human beings and send our children to schools.⁴

The Authorities’ Fear of the Theater

In an age before the development of radio, television, cinema, and the internet, when large segments of adult populations were illiterate, and when political assembly and association were strictly regulated or completely banned, the theater provided the most important form of mass entertainment, and the only arena, aside from the church, in which regular mass gatherings were permissible in nineteenth-century Europe. Thus, as historian Eda Sagarra notes for Austria, the theater was the center of public life before 1850, a substitute it was aptly said for [the lack of a] parliament; similarly, in Russia, which lacked an elected national legislature before 1905, as Anthony Swift notes in his chapter below, one drama critic remarked in 1899, for us plays and theaters are the same things as, for example, parliamentary events and political speeches are for a Western European. According to early nineteenth-century Bavarian reformer Wilhelm Riehl, public life stormed and raged in the theater and concert hall because there was nowhere else it was allowed to storm and rage; German theater historian Monika Steinhauser endorses this view, writing that the proverbial theater mania of the pre-1848 period is explained by the fact that public opinion could not express itself except via the theatre because there was no [national] legislature, no free press and no right of assembly. With regard to France, F. W. J. Hemmings writes that the theater engaged the attention of every class of people throughout the length and breadth of the land, serving as the one and only purveyor of excitement, amusement and pathos that the mass of the population knew, as well as the one and only escape from their usually laborious and lackluster existence. The mid-century Parisian theater industry alone employed over 10,000 people, with over 32,000 seats available nightly. According to contemporary observer Pierre Giffard, the population of Paris lives at the theater, of the theater and by the theater. Similarly, according to historians of nineteenth-century Italian opera, to all intents and purposes there was no other amusement whatever available, so everyone's attention focused on the theater, which served as a kind of club where all sections of the population met to discuss both business and private affairs, and a new opera's success was a capital event that stirred to its depths the city lucky enough to have witnessed it, and word of it ran all over Italy.⁵

While the authorities’ fears of the printed press were unquestionably substantial and intense, they were even more alarmed by media such as the theater (as well as caricature, and, subsequently, cinema), which communicated with a far wider public than that reached by the press, including even the dreaded dark masses, who, if often illiterate, were rarely blind or deaf, and were able to afford at least cheap theater tickets far more easily than they could buy newspapers or books. This was especially true before 1850, when press circulations rarely exceeded several thousand, due both to the general practice of selling newspapers only via long-term and expensive subscriptions and to the high illiteracy rates. That the stage was perceived as posing a far greater threat than the printed word by European authorities is clearly demonstrated by the fact that prior (or preventive) censorship of theater generally continued long after the press was freed from prior restraint (although usually remaining subject to potentially severe post-publication penalties). The most extreme example was England, where the press was freed from prior restraint in 1695, yet preventive drama censorship continued until 1968, or for almost another 275 years (!). In other countries the gap between the end of press and theater censorship was far shorter, but the differential treatment always favored the press: in France prior censorship was never enforced for the printed word after 1822, but preventive theater censorship continued until 1906; the Russian press was largely freed from prior press censorship in 1865 (although not entirely until 1905), yet theater censorship continued until the very end of the tsarist regime (only to be quickly reimposed by the Bolsheviks); Austrian press censorship ended in 1867, yet drama censorship continued until 1926; prior Swedish and Dutch press censorship were abolished by 1815, yet preventive theater censorship ended, respectively, only in 1872 and 1977; and prior German and Danish press censorship were abolished by 1850, yet drama censorship continued, respectively, until 1918 (before being restored by the Nazis) and 1953.⁶

The theater was viewed as so important and so potentially subversive that it was not unusual for rulers to personally intervene in establishing censorship regulations or even in making determinations concerning individual plays. The stage was deemed more threatening than the press not only because of its ability to reach even the illiterate, but also because it was generally perceived as more powerful and direct in impact, and because, unlike with the printed word, the audience was a collective one that, it was feared, might be stirred to immediate mob action. Print was perceived as consumed primarily by relatively educated people, often in private, who would not be immediately affected even by subversive matter; therefore, if a publication proved dangerous, unsold copies could be confiscated before their ill effects were evident. The impact of subversive theater, however, could apparently be virtually instantaneous: according to a French prison director, When they put on a bad drama, a number of young new criminals soon arrive at my prison. The fact that the theater addressed a collective audience was also stressed: according to a French stage-censorship advocate speaking in 1830, the press only addresses each reader in isolation, separately; dramatic works present themselves to ardent spectators, gathered together in great numbers, upon whom the actors’ craft produces impassioned spontaneous sensations which could be translated immediately into outbreaks of disorder, violence, public unrest. Similarly, the governor-general of Moscow, explaining in 1805 why he was forbidding a play based on a tolerated book, declared that the average person reads to himself alone, while a theatrical performance is attended by the masses, who might be swayed by occasional daring expressions and thought against the government. A supporter of stage censorship made essentially the same argument before a 1909 British parliamentary inquiry, testifying that the intellectual pitch of the crowd is lowered and its emotional pitch is raised, thus making theater audiences typically irrational, excitable, lacking in self-control. Throughout the nineteenth century, drama-censorship supporters cited the widespread (if probably highly exaggerated) belief that presentation of the opera La Muette de Portici triggered the successful 1830 Belgian revolution against Dutch rule (the opera originally had been banned in Brussels and German towns near France). Similarly, French theater censor Victor Hallays-Dabot wrote in 1862 that plays that had provoked opposition demonstrations in the 1840s provided a sort of dress rehearsal for the 1848 revolution and, as Anthony Swift points out in his chapter below, a Russian minister declared in 1858 that in all revolutions privately-owned theaters served as a means for arousing passions.⁷

Such arguments and fears were common throughout Europe. As Gary Stark notes in his chapter below, French social scientist Gustave Le Bon's tremendously influential 1895 book, The Psychology of the Crowd, argued that theatrical performances have an enormous influence on the crowd and nothing arouses the fantasies of people as strongly as when the audience simultaneously feels the same emotions, which were sometimes strong enough to translate themselves into action, especially as theater spectators had a remarkable inclination not to distinguish between the real and unreal. When French minister of justice Jean-Charles Persil successfully urged legislators to reimpose prior censorship for the theater (and caricature, but not for the written word) in 1835 (all such censorship had ceased after the 1830 Revolution), he characterized the stage as posing a special danger, because, rather than addressing the mind, it spoke to the eyes, thus amounting to a deed, an action, a behavior, rather than the expression of an opinion. He declared, Let an author be content with printing his plays, he will be subjected to no preventive measures, but when opinions are converted into acts by the presentation of a play they must be subject to the high direction of the established power. A high-ranking Austrian official explained in a 1795 memorandum that drama censorship should be much stricter than for print due to the different and infinitely more powerful impression which can be made on the minds and emotions of the audiences by a work enacted with the illusions of real life, by comparison with that which can be made by a play which is merely read at a desk; he added that this was especially so because printed material could be restricted only to a certain kind of reader [i.e., the middle and upper classes], whereas the playhouse by contrast is open to the entire public, which consists of people of every class, every walk of life and every age. Such views were reflected in drama censorship rules in Austrian-ruled Lombardy in the early nineteenth century, which warned that theatrical performances can exercise the strongest impressions on those who watch them and are frequented by every sort of person, and an 1822 decree in the Austrian-dominated (if technically independent) Italian duchy of Tuscany, which ordered that restrictions applying to printed matter that disseminated subversive ideas threatening to weaken or destroy veneration for Religion or for the Throne be applied more strictly to theatrical performances. An 1890s German court upheld the police power to ban plays for political reasons, not only because audiences might be incited to disturbances of order through rowdyism and other excesses, but also because they might be inwardly misled to views that endanger public well-being and order, such as the disturbance caused by the thought that the existing political order does not grant the individual citizen his rights (thus inadvertently literally demonstrating the accuracy of such perceptions!).⁸

In mid nineteenth-century Spain even book publishers, who bitterly protested against the censorship of novels, viewed the theater as entirely different: they declared that although it was undeniable that the abuse of cleverness in novels could be very harmful and warrants the vigilance of a wise and prudent government, there is no way that it can have as much influence in subverting good ideas and even less that it can cause as immediate damage as an ardent dramatic presentation. The president of the French Society of Dramatic Authors, Baron Isidore Taylor, supported theater censorship based on similar arguments before an 1849 state inquiry, declaring that the stage produces, among all those watching, a sort of electric communication, even more seductive for the masses than a speech, and one thousand times more dangerous than the most vehement article in the daily press. Similarly, the Viennese actor Friedrich Ziegler argued in 1820 that drama that attacked religion, law, and monarchy had done more damage than all the political pamphlets together, as the inspiration of the spoken word, heard by many thousands, strikes more deeply than any cold political writings read only by a few. In Russia an interior ministry official warned in 1905 that theaters were among the most powerful instruments of influence on the public and were penetrating the widest possible circles and becoming available at a price everyone can afford; he echoed the 1868 words of a minister of the imperial Russian court, who lamented that popular theaters would become the most powerful and simplest means to cultivate in the people ideas hostile to the existing order, especially since the press influences only the educated class, which is capable of discerning the truth and is not easily carried away, but the stage could distort the comprehension of the simple folk and install in them the germs of disorder. The London Times, too, in a 1907 editorial backing a ban on a play about abortion, was particularly concerned about theatrical influence on the unwashed masses. It declared that although the play provided probably the most authentic presentation we have yet had on the English stage of great social and political questions, its subject, and the sincere realism with which it is treated, makes it in our judgment wholly unfit for performance, under ordinary conditions, before a miscellaneous public of various ages, moods and standards of intelligence.⁹

Such concerns over the perceived power of the stage led most European governments to not only censor the theater before presentations, but also to require theater owners to undergo police scrutiny, to obtain licenses, and to post sometimes extremely heavy bonds to be forfeited in the case of legal violations. For example, the director of the Vaudeville theater in Paris had to deposit a bond of 300,000 francs in 1846, a staggering amount equivalent to approximately $60,000 in 2000. Theater licensing requirements were in effect, for example, in Britain until 1843, in France until 1864, in Germany until 1870, and in Russia until 1882. The number of theaters generally increased dramatically after licensing requirements were lifted in each of these countries, suggesting that, when enforced, they substantially limited the number of stage venues. Thus, in Germany the abolition of theater licensing led to the estimated immediate founding of almost ninety new theaters.¹⁰

Fear of the theater's potential subversive power was especially marked before the advent of free, compulsory primary education (around mid century outside of southern and eastern Europe), because the stage was so widely considered to be the most important forum for education of the lower classes. Thus, during the 1830–48 reign of French king Louis-Philippe, theater inspectors were directed to report in great detail about what they observed in theaters in which the coarsest classes of people gather, since such venues had become the only school in which the lower class of society goes to learn its lessons. An 1819 decree in Wallachia, the Turkish-controlled province that later formed part of Romania, declared that theater censorship was required because while theaters could be a school for good morals, able to combat wickedness and make virtue, showing us how to distinguish between vice and virtue, when the selection of plays is poorly made, they abuse the law, become a school for laxity and bad habits and defile civic custom. Similarly, as David Gies notes in his chapter below, the Madrid theater censor defined his job in the 1830s as ensuring that a school of customs not become a house of prostitution. In 1888 Russian interior minister Dmitrii Tolstoi told Tsar Alexander III that since the theater unquestionably has an important educational significance, it would seem necessary to ensure that the people receive from it sober and beneficial impressions and nothing that would promote their moral corruption. Earlier, eighteenth-century Russian tsarina Catherine the Great had termed the theater a school for the people, with potential for fostering children's moral education, while adding that it was absolutely essential that it be under my supervision, as I am the teacher in charge of this school and mine is the prime responsibility to God for the nation's morals.¹¹

Hopes for the Theater

As some of these quotations suggest, while the potentially subversive power of the theater was deeply feared by European elites, the stage was also perceived as potentially enlightening the masses (especially—although not only—by private, rather than government, elites), or at least diverting them from even more dangerous activities. Thus, among leading eighteenth-century European Enlightenment figures, France's Voltaire (who spent much of his life in exile for his political views) termed the theater a powerful instrument of civilization, a great school for the people, while Germany's Friedrich Schiller, in a famous 1784 lecture on theater as a moral institution, declared that the stage could open up infinite horizons to the spirit thirsting for an alternative to the bestial condition and monotonous, often oppressive affairs of daily life, providing nourishment to the soul's every power and uniting the acculturation of mind and heart with the noblest sort of entertainment. In a 1789 book, Discourse on Freedom of the Theater, French author Marie-Joseph Chénier labeled the theater the most active and quickest means of invincibly arming the forces of human reason and shining a great deal of light simultaneously upon the people. The oft-censored Russian playwright Nikolai Gogol termed the stage a kind of pulpit from which much good can be spoken to the world, while a Russian magazine that supported inexpensive theaters wrote in 1886 that such venues would provide ennobling artistic impressions to the masses and become a higher school from which Russia's greatest talents could teach us goodness and truth, until now only a luxury accessible to the prosperous classes. Similarly, even a late nineteenth-century Russian provincial governor wrote that no moral book, no moralistic lecture can have the kind of powerful corrective influence on a person as a play, while the great Russian director Konstantin Stanislavsky told his Moscow Art Theater company in 1898 to never forget that we are striving to brighten the dark existence of the poor classes, to give them minutes of happiness and aesthetic uplift to relieve the muck which envelops them. In Germany in 1890 the founders of the socialist-oriented Freie Volksbühne similarly viewed the theater's benefits for the lower classes, declaring that the stage should be a source of high artistic gratification, moral uplift and a powerful stimulus to thinking about the great topics of the day, potentially serving as a source of emancipation and social regeneration unlike the existing stage, which, subjugated to capitalism, corrupted mass tastes by presenting plays on the level of society small talk…the circus and comic papers. A proponent of the social theater in Belgium called for dramas that celebrated working-class virtues by describing all the devotion, all the self-abnegation, all the sacrifices and all the heroism of the proletariat, while a similar advocate in France, Louis Lumet, who founded a popular Parisian stage in 1897, declared his purpose to elevate man, to give him joy, not from gayety but to support in him ideas of justice and independence, and to provide immortal light that would provide the means to become a free people.¹²

Other proponents of the educational role of the theater argued that drama could instruct and invigorate the middle classes or prove the salvation of entire societies. Thus, the German liberal newspaper Grenzboten, hailing the foundation of the Leipzig Stadttheater in 1868, declared that the stage produced an immeasurable effect on the thought and sensitivity of the people and termed the theater the conscience of the nation, the integration-point of middle-class desires and hopes, the seat of self-identity of middle class society. The great French republican historian Jules Michelet, who was twice dismissed from university professorships for his political views, declared that the theater, the true theater, will revive the world, and that an immensely popular theater would in the future unquestionably be the most powerful means of education and the best hope perhaps of a national renovation. Victor Hugo, perhaps his country's leading opponent of theater censorship, termed the theater a crucible of civilization that forms the public soul and that, if subsidized and uncensored by the state, could reconcile class differences in France by developing moral sentiment and education in the lower classes and thus make calm reign in that part of the population. He added, The rich and poor, the happy and unhappy, the Parisian and the provincial, the French and the foreigners will meet each other every night, mix their souls fraternally and share in the contemplation of great works of the human spirit. From that will result popular and universal improvement.¹³

If an unregulated and politicized theater was seen by European rulers as threatening subversion, a controlled and frothy stage was perceived as potentially shoring up the establishment by diverting the minds of the potentially discontented middle and lower classes to non-political matters. Thus, in 1775 a French official declared that

spectacles [i.e., the theater and other entertainments] in large cities are necessary in order to divert the man of affairs, in order to amuse upstanding people and well-to-do persons and finally to occupy the people who, when not attached to any spectacle, can be induced to factionalism. You know that the populace is stirred up, thrown into confusion, flighty; it is necessary then to stabilize it; well, one cannot do it except by spectacles.…For that reason, legislators have established different ones in every age, and I dare to suggest that it is sound politics…even to increase them.…The days of the Virgin and the solemn fetes that the church dedicates to the grandeur of religion, in which our theaters are closed out of respect…there is committed in the capital more evil on these days of every kind, whether debaucheries, drunkenness, libertinage, thefts and even assassination.

In Austria in 1806, during the Napoleonic wars, when price increases were about to be announced and economic problems led the authorities to consider closing the theaters, the police sent the emperor a similar report urging that the theaters should remain open, because in times like the present, when such manifold sufferings depress the character of the people, the police must co-operate more than ever before in distracting the citizens in every moral way. The most dangerous hours of the day are the evening hours. They cannot be filled less harmfully than in the theater.…Prudence demands…since entertainment and distraction of the people have always been a state maxim…that an entertainment familiar for years should not be closed down just at such a moment.¹⁴

Austrian police continued to stress the same points during the 1820s, declaring that lacking moral entertainment the poor could easily be mis­led, while providing respectable cheap entertainment such as the theater led people, especially the lower classes, away from the more expensive, often unsalubrious pubs, coffeehouses and gambling houses to better amusements, with some influence on education and morals, while also keeping them under public observation and order for the duration of the performance. Government support of the theater, the police stressed, tended to restrain those activities endangering morality and public order, while bringing variety to daily conversation and supplying for the latter material that is as abundant as it is harmless. The chief minister of Austrian-ruled Lombardy Venetia during the 1815–48 period similarly urged that Milan's famous La Scala opera house be kept busy as it attracts to a place open to observation during the hours of darkness a large part of the educated population, and, as John A. Davis notes in his chapter below, in 1820 a leading Neapolitan minister termed theaters a political and moral necessity that keeps the multitude from engaging in more pernicious gatherings. A Papal advisory committee reported in 1837 (a period of general unrest in Europe and especially in Italy, where the Papal States occupied the central portion of that then-divided country) that particularly at this time the distraction and entertainment of the people is the healthiest cure for the wounds that have been inflicted in almost every part of the world, and that a suitably distracting theater, decently entertaining and soberly diverting had been confirmed by the experience of centuries to be the means most fitting and conducive to help create a people more calm and content with the government to which it finds itself subjected. French authorities in 1852 expressed a