Staging Civilization: A Transnational History of French Theater in Eighteenth-Century Europe

By Rahul Markovits, Jane Marie Todd and David A. Bell

Eighteenth-century France is understood to have been the dominant cultural power on that era’s international scene. Considering the emblematic case of the theater, Rahul Markovits goes beyond the idea of "French Europe" to offer a serious consideration of the intentions and goals of those involved in making this so. Drawing on extensive archival research, Staging Civilization reveals that between 1670 and 1815 at least twenty-seven European cities hosted resident theater troupes composed of French actors and singers who performed French-language repertory. By examining the presence of French companies of actors in a wide set of courts and cities throughout Europe, Markovits uncovers the complex mechanisms underpinning the dissemination of French culture. The book ultimately offers a revisionist account of the traditional Europe française thesis, engaging topics such as transnational labor history, early-modern court culture and republicanism, soft power, and cultural imperialism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Jul 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9780813945552

Book preview

Staging Civilization

Winner of the Walker Cowen Memorial Prize for an outstanding work of scholarship in eighteenth-century studies

Staging Civilization

A Transnational History of French Theater in Eighteenth-Century Europe

Rahul Markovits

Translated by Jane Marie Todd

University of Virginia Press • Charlottesville and London

University of Virginia Press

Originally published in French as Civiliser l’Europe: Politiques du théâtre français au XVIIIe siècle © Librairie Arthème Fayard, 2014

Translation and foreword © 2021 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2021

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Markovits, Rahul, author. | Todd, Jane Marie, translator.

Title: Staging civilization : a transnational history of French theater in eighteenth-century Europe / Rahul Markovits ; translated by Jane Marie Todd.

Other titles: Civiliser l’Europe. English

Description: Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2021. | Translated from French. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020055766 (print) | LCCN 2020055767 (ebook) | ISBN 9780813945545 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780813945552 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Theater and state—France—History—18th century. | Theater—France—History—18th century. | France—Cultural policy—History—18th century. | Europe—Civilization—18th century.

Classification: LCC PN2044.F72 M3713 2021 (print) | LCC PN2044.F72 (ebook) | DDC 792.094409033—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020055766

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020055767

This work received the French Voices Award for excellence in publication and translation. French Voices is a program created and funded by the French Embassy in the United States and FACE Foundation. (French Voices logo designed by Serge Bloch)

Cover art: The French Comedians, Antoine Watteau, ca. 1720. Oil on canvas. (The Jules Bache Collection, 1949, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; www.metmuseum.org)

To my parents, Claude and Piyali

Contents

Foreword

by David A. Bell

Introduction

Part I. French Theater and the European Courts

1. The European Space of French Theater

2. A Europe-Wide Labor Market

3. Onstage: Appropriations of a Repertoire

4. Behind the Scenes

Part II. From the Army Theater to Cultural Imperialism

5. Gallantry and Soft Power

6. A Theater in Geneva?

7. Exporting Revolution?

8. Theater and Acculturation in the Annexed Departments

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Appendix

Notes

Index

Foreword

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, France had greater cultural influence, beyond its own borders, than at any time before or since. Men and women in Europe and Europe’s overseas colonies saw fluency in the French language as a mark of social distinction and followed French fashions closely. They read French books and they saw French plays. This influence received considerable notice at the time—including from nationalists across Europe who sought to diminish it—and scholars have remained fascinated by it ever since. But all too often, work on the subject has focused on famous writers and on a handful of canonical texts that either celebrated or protested French dominance. Rahul Markovits’s remarkable book is different. It brings a massive amount of new information to bear on the subject and offers an important new interpretation. Drawing material from twenty separate archives in seven countries, Markovits has, for the first time, brought to light the history of French-language theater troupes that worked outside of France during the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic period. The book shows that the spread of French theater throughout Europe was a fascinatingly multifaceted phenomenon. It cannot simply be explained by the renown and high quality of the French theater itself, as some recent critics have implied. In some cases, the French monarchy sponsored troupes as an element of cultural policies consciously aimed at increasing French influence. In many other cases, the establishment of French-language theaters outside of France responded to the internal political and social dynamics of the societies in question, notably serving as a means to raise the prestige of particular cities or courts. Sophisticated in its use of cultural theory, the book brings together multiple historical approaches, including work on the history of literary transfer and the transnational circulation of texts; theories of cultural hegemony and soft power; histories of labor and migration; and histories of court culture and diplomacy. It is a model of transnational history. As Lauren R. Clay of Vanderbilt University concluded in her review of the French edition for the Journal of Modern History: This book is invaluable not only to scholars of theater and French literature and historians of the Enlightenment era but also to those interested in court cultures, international relations, and the origins of nationalism.

David A. Bell

Princeton University

Staging Civilization

Introduction

ON FEBRUARY 10, 1763, with the signing of the Treaty of Paris, which ended the Seven Years’ War against Britain, France lost an empire. But if we are to believe Nicolas Bricaire de La Dixmerie’s argument in a short book published two years later, France still possessed a different kind of empire: an empire of language and culture, as embodied in its theater. At the moment he took up his pen, Pierre Laurent de Belloy’s Le siège de Calais (The Siege of Calais), a tragedy that celebrated the heroism of the bourgeois of the city of Calais during the Hundred Years’ War, was enjoying unprecedented success throughout the country, placing theater in the service of a patriotic movement whose aim was national regeneration.¹ According to La Dixmerie, although theater could ease the suffering caused by the defeat, it did so in a unique way. Reviewing the most prestigious Parisian theaters, he described the Comédie-Française in the following terms:

I begin with the spectacle that has most distinguished our nation, the one that in this respect renders it superior to all other peoples, ancient and modern. By that I mean the Comédie-Française. The masterpieces that enrich it cannot be praised enough; they will perish only with our language, and it now seems that our language will perish only with the world. Its empire continues to expand day by day. It encompasses north and south. It has become the idiom of all the princes of Europe. In this beautiful and rich language, they dictate the laws and treaties that ensure the happiness or peace of mind of their subjects. Our dramatic masterpieces are applauded on the banks of the Danube and of the Vistula, just as they are applauded on the banks of the Seine. There would appear to be no more Sarmatians among whom a French Ovid could believe himself a stranger.

Such is the power of genius when it knows how to speak to the human heart, even as it charms the ear. Only with difficulty were all the conquests of the Roman Empire able to spread its language to the conquered peoples. And yet five to six peaceful writers have spread our language to climes where our weapons never penetrated.²

On the surface, this text is a mere statement of fact. La Dixmerie notes the broad diffusion of French theater in Europe, sustained by the acting troupes performing the French-language repertoire in the princely courts. He mentions only Vienna and Warsaw, but he might just as well have added Berlin, Stockholm, and even Saint Petersburg. The European diffusion of French theater, intrinsically linked to that of the French language, was an emblematic manifestation of a historical phenomenon. Ten years later, Louis-Antoine de Caraccioli would give the phenomenon its distinctive name: French Europe.³ But La Dixmerie does not confine himself to making an observation. It is because French theater is superior to the theater of all other peoples, ancient and modern, that it has become so widespread. And whereas Ovid, exiled by Augustus to the banks of the Black Sea, came painfully face to face with barbarian otherness, the presence of French theater on the banks of the Danube and of the Vistula was a sign that a civilizing process was under way in Europe. The adoption of French theater in the remote lands of Eastern Europe marked the transition from barbarism to civilization.⁴ To account for that phenomenon, La Dixmerie uses the metaphor of empire. He contrasts the Roman armies’ imperialism of conquest, ineffective in the linguistic domain, to the almost miraculous effects of a soft imperialism, said to have been spearheaded by five to six writers, namely, the trinity of Molière, Pierre Corneille, and Jean Racine plus Voltaire and perhaps Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon. He contrasts a linguistic diffusion resulting from military expansion and occupation to a different sort, practiced peacefully and at a distance—spontaneously, so to speak—merely through literary prestige. The empire of the ancients, in short, is contrasted to the civilization of the moderns.⁵

La Dixmerie’s observation of the diffusion of French theater in Europe thus bears within itself an interpretation of the phenomenon in terms of its causes (its intrinsic superiority), its modalities (it happens spontaneously), and its effects (civilization). As it happens, that account has persisted with remarkable stability and with only a few variations down to our own time, having become a historiographical commonplace. From Ferdinand Brunot’s monumental Histoire de la langue française (History of the French language)—truly a national lieu de mémoire—to Louis Réau’s major survey in the Évolution de l’humanité series, to Marc Fumaroli, who elaborated it in the nostalgic register, an entire historiography of French Europe has been constituted.⁶ From that standpoint, Caraccioli’s book may have been only the symptom of a phenomenon that, in essence, he had the merit of being the first to name. True, such an expression might have seemed presumptuous had it been invented by a Frenchman, but was not the best guarantee of its objectivity the fact that Caraccioli was Italian?⁷ Actually, despite his last name and the Neapolitan origins of his family, Louis-Antoine de Caraccioli, born in Paris in 1719 and reared in Le Mans among the Oratorians, was French. At the start of his book, Louis Réau confuses Caraccioli with his namesake and very distant relative, the Italian diplomat Domenico Caraccioli, ambassador from Naples to the court of Louis XV.⁸ That initial blunder—that original blunder, I would be tempted to say—reveals from the outset the assumptions behind Réau’s book. He is anxious to establish French Europe as a fact, by any means necessary. Although not exactly a myth, perhaps,⁹ French Europe is above all a coherent discourse that confers a precise meaning on the phenomenon it names. That discourse has a history, which calls for an assessment.

The passage quoted from La Dixmerie is a variation on an older theme. In Les entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène (1671; The conversations between Aristo and Eugene), Father Dominique Bouhours emphasized the superiority of the spontaneous expansion of the French language over the coercion exerted in that regard by the Romans. According to Bouhours, the diffusion of French to the Low Countries prefigured and even justified their annexation as part of Louis XIV’s expansionism.¹⁰ A century later, by contrast, the cultural empire was a mere substitute. Let us love the theater; it is the only glory we have left, sighed Voltaire in 1761, upon learning of the loss of Pondicherry, the latest of the disasters suffered during the Seven Years’ War.¹¹ At the same time, Voltaire’s monumental edition of Corneille’s works, sold by subscription to European princes and aristocracy, shifted the fight against Great Britain from the military realm to a literary theater of operations via an opposition between the universality of Corneille and Racine and the barbarism of an insular Shakespeare: "When you see the beautiful parts of Cinna and Athalie applauded on all the stages of Europe, from Petersburg to Parma, you may conclude that these tragedies are admirable even with their flaws; but if yours are never performed except in your own country, what can you conclude from that?"¹²

By the 1730s Voltaire, in the preface to his tragedy Zaïre (Zara), had become the theorist of the autonomous cultural greatness of states, or what he called the empire of the spirit, an infallible mark of an empire’s greatness.¹³ His speech upon his acceptance to the Académie Française, a subversion of the genre, was one of the first elaborations of the theme of French Europe.¹⁴ Then, having moved to Berlin to be near Frederick II, he experienced the life of a French Ovid in exile. His apprehension about finding himself cast into the darkness of barbarism was followed by joy upon observing that Berlin, where only French was spoken, was all in all only a colony of Paris.¹⁵ Fundamentally, Voltaire attributed the European diffusion of French language and culture, which he had seen with his own eyes in Prussia, to what he had named the century of Louis XIV:

From the last years of Cardinal Richelieu to those following the death of Louis XIV, a general revolution took place in our arts, our minds, our mores, and our government, a revolution that must serve as the eternal mark of the true glory of our nation. That auspicious influence was not even limited to France; it extended to England; it sparked the emulation needed at the time by that bold and spiritual nation; it brought taste to Germany, science to Russia. It even brought a languishing Italy back to life, and Europe owed its civility and social spirit to the court of Louis XIV.¹⁶

The focal point of the immanent civilizing process characteristic of the history of modern Europe, designated as a combination of civility (politesse) and social spirit (esprit de société), was thus the court of Louis XIV, whose auspicious influence had spread subsequently to the continent as a whole.

That was the narrative Caraccioli adopted in L’Europe française, coining the formula as well as expanding it over the course of a whole book. Where Voltaire, haunted by the specter of decadence, had ended his book in 1715, for Caraccioli, buoyed by an optimism whose source lay in apologetics, the history of civilization continued beyond that date, culminating in the eighteenth century.¹⁷ L’Europe française opens with a very dark portrait of Europe in 1600, a Gothic Europe marked by difficulties in communications and by material discomfort, ignorance and pedantry, widespread isolation, and the segregation of the sexes. The opposite of that Europe of 1600 was implicitly the Europe of 1750: on one hand, chaos; on the other, a century and a half later, a "civilized [policé] world.¹⁸ Caraccioli’s French Europe, which, as for Voltaire, was an effect of the revolution set in motion by Louis XIV, resulted from a reduction in the temporal distance between different peoples: When the eighteenth century made its appearance, bedecked in its grace and gentility, there was more than one nation in Europe that, in terms of its customs and knowledge, was still in the fifteenth century. The distances have narrowed, and but for a few nuances, every European is now French.¹⁹ To be European, to be French, and to belong to the eighteenth century were one and the same thing. The equivalence of those three identities, rooted in an evolutionary view of history, crystallizes the meaning of French Europe," according to which Frenchification is the equivalent of the civilizing process.

As the American historian David Bell has argued, French identity, in contrast to British identity during the same era, tended to be constructed in terms of the open notion of civilization rather than the closed notion of homeland (patrie).²⁰ Every man is a potential Frenchman, including the savage, who is capable of improving himself and, in the end, of joining civilization. France is portrayed as the symbolic center of Europe, a new Rome, the focal point of an open civilization radiating outward.²¹ In the past, everything was Roman; now everything is French, said Caraccioli, thereby interpreting French Europe as the result of a translatio imperii. Antoine de Rivarol did the same in 1783, in the introduction to his famous discourse, written in response to the competition launched by the Berlin Academy on the universality of the French language. "The time seems to have come to say the French world, as was formerly said the Roman world, and philosophy, weary of seeing men ever divided by the various interests of politics, is now delighted to see them forming themselves, from one end of the earth to the other, into a republic under the rule of a single language. A spectacle worthy of philosophy, that uniform and peaceful empire of letters extends across the variety of peoples and, longer-lasting and stronger than the empire of arms, increases both through the fruits of peace and through the ravages of war.²² Rivarol reactivates the cosmopolitan model of the republic of letters, which originated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but he transforms it into the empire of letters. It is by that imperial measure that the universality attributed to French must be understood: It is no longer the French language, it is the human language, he writes,²³ thus recycling one of the formulations characteristic of Roman universalism attributable to Suetonius: The Roman people, or I may say . . . all mankind.²⁴ But where the inclusive character of the Roman Empire, able to encompass humanity as a whole, was rooted in a definition of citizenship,²⁵ the fact of belonging to the French cultural empire as Rivarol defined it lay in the speaking of French. Hence the superiority of that peaceful empire, which no people has ever commanded, over that of the Romans, who sowed their language and slavery everywhere, grew fat on blood, and destroyed until they were themselves destroyed!"²⁶

The notion of France as the vehicle of civilization in Europe, though stripped of its imperial trappings, would survive the fall of the Grande Nation and the collapse of the Napoleonic empire to become a fundamental element of the collective national imagination. In the course François Guizot offered at the Collège de France in 1828, titled Histoire de la civilisation en Europe, the premise stated in his first lecture, that France has been the center, the focal point of civilization in Europe, was validated in the fourteenth and last lecture: As soon as one casts a glance at the history of Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it is impossible not to recognize that France marches in the forefront of European civilization.²⁷

Within the context of the two world wars, the first scholarly efforts to account for the phenomenon of French Europe were also imbued with that notion. In his Histoire de la langue française, Ferdinand Brunot was anxious to dismiss the hypothesis of a proselytizing policy on the part of the monarchy:

If the king served the brilliant destiny of our language, it was by the splendor of his court, not by his victories or his politics. The real victor was the genius of the race, which blossomed magnificently during that era, in a burgeoning elegance that made Paris and Versailles the capitals of the civilized world and centers of attraction, to which many undoubtedly came out of snobbery, but which an elite of men and women from every nation also wanted to frequent, eager to become more refined [se polir] in contact with a superior civilization.²⁸

There was nothing trivial about such views, published in 1917, which closely linked the spontaneous nature of France’s influence to its embodiment of civilization. The anticipated publication of volume 5 of Histoire de la langue française was explicitly conceived as a patriotic act in the context of a war in which, in the face of William II’s Germany, civilization itself was in peril.²⁹ The hydra of pan-Germanism was rising up against French influence.³⁰ In 1938 Louis Réau, confronting the integral nationalism of the Fascist and Nazi regimes, logically rallied behind Brunot’s thesis. According to Réau, in the eighteenth century the expansion of French culture, in contrast to more drastic forms of national propaganda, had come about "spontaneously, without the slightest political constraint, without the slightest government pressure . . . without violence and without proselytism, solely by virtue of a universal consent."³¹

The threat of pan-Germanism may have disappeared after 1945, but the French Europe of the eighteenth century still has not lost its function as a countermodel. More insidiously, at a time of nagging questions about the declining place of French in the world, some now see the eighteenth century as a bygone golden age, the elitist flip side of triumphant Americanization and mass culture. Marc Fumaroli contrasts English, the language of a simple, handy, elementary, passive kind of communication, to French, the language of conversation, which carries with it a style, a way of life, and beyond that, civilization:³²

Like America at the present time, eighteenth-century France and its language, without resorting to a willful cultural or linguistic policy, were quite simply contagious and irresistible, because they conveyed the image of the small share of happiness and intelligence of which men are capable during their brief passage through this earthly vale of tears. It is as ridiculous to believe that Colbert ever imagined or anticipated or planned long-term the seductiveness of such an image as it would be to suppose that there is a secret plan of persuasion on the part of the State Department, whose aim would be to imprint America the pin-up girl in the universal imagination.³³

Let us leave aside the contradiction of attributing only a use value to English while at the same time recognizing it as the vehicle for a mode of life exerting an irresistible attraction. In a recent book called, precisely, Irresistible Empire, the American historian Victoria de Grazia describes the triumph of consumer culture in twentieth-century Europe as the construction—by businesses, trade associations, and marketing experts—of what she calls the American Market Empire.³⁴ Within that context, she shows how the American film industry, consolidated in 1922 into the powerful Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (the Hays Office), methodically organized the conquest of European markets after World War I. There was, then, nothing spontaneous about Hollywood’s world domination, and although it is not possible to speak of a secret plan of persuasion on the part of the State Department, that is quite simply because the interventions of the US government on behalf of the film industry’s interests took place in the open. The interventions took the form of a relaxation of antitrust laws (the Webb-Pomerene Act of 1918) or of a regular and institutionalized collaboration between the representatives of industry and the State Department, expressed, for example, in the famous clause appended to the Blum-Byrnes agreements (1946) concerning the movie industry, which opened the French market to American films.³⁵ What the passage quoted from Marc Fumaroli reveals above all is the fundamental and persistent theoretical assumption made by the historiography of French Europe, which conceives of cultural diffusion only as a binary alternative between spontaneity and constraint. It is either one thing or another: either there is government action and cultural policy, that is, greater or lesser constraint, or there is not, in which case cultural diffusion is spontaneous. By contrast, studies such as that of Victoria de Grazia show the role that a whole series of diverse actors played in building the American empire.

The pervasiveness of the discourse on French Europe is also evident in an attenuated form, stripped of prior assumptions, in international historiography.³⁶ And, in one last incarnation, traces of it can be found in the literary sociology influenced by the writings of Pierre Bourdieu, which in recent years has taken on the task of proposing a world history of literature. In The World Republic of Letters, Pascale Casanova describes the transnational literary space as a field polarized between the rulers and the ruled on the basis of their unequal accumulation of literary capital.³⁷ The main substance of her book is devoted to the domination exerted in the nineteenth century by Paris, the Greenwich meridian of literary time and the location of the fabric of the universal. It is only in the guise of a prelude that she mentions the symbolic domination exerted by the French language in the eighteenth century, whose driving force is said to have been the belief on the part of Europeans in the perfection of the French language, achieved in the era of Louis XIV. But though she has moved away from the assumption of the superiority of the French language, attributing it instead to a belief prevalent at the time, the idea of the spontaneity of its diffusion is central to her thesis: French came to be generally established, without the assistance or cooperation of any political authority, as a common language—the language of cultivated and refined conversation, exercising a sort of jurisdiction that extended to all of Europe.³⁸

As a historiographical object, then, French Europe would appear to be a trap. At a time of exacerbated nationalism in many countries, it created the image of an acculturation through influence and consent. Even today, according to some, it holds up the mirror of France’s former greatness to a country in decline, a country undergoing Americanization. Even without these ideological assumptions, the problem with the historiography of French Europe is that it says both too much and too little about the phenomenon: too little because it simply notes the presence of French works, forms, or artists in Enlightenment Europe; too much because, on the basis of that presence, duly inventoried, it concludes that a French cultural domination or hegemony truly existed. It is that interpretive leap that I wish to challenge in this book. The idea is not to dispute the reality of that presence but, with the help of new archives and new methods, to bring to light the dynamics of a complex phenomenon of cultural dissemination. (By dissemination, as opposed to diffusion, I mean a multisited presence to which it is not possible to assign a single origin and meaning.)

All the same, it is not possible simply to brush aside the discourse of French Europe by invoking the necessity of an epistemological break. The demonstration would not be complete if one omitted a genealogical dimension that takes into account cultural domination as an idea and a project of the actors of the time. The discourse on French Europe, derived from a Voltairean vision of civilization that focused on cultural products, marked a step on the road leading from the immanent civilizing process characteristic of the history of Europe as described by Enlightenment thinkers to the imperial project of imposing on Europe a civilization that had become French.³⁹ We need to understand that transition from a metaphorical cultural empire to a policy of cultural imperialism.

To accomplish that end, I propose both an object and a method. The object is French-language theater, and more precisely, the public theater performed by troupes of professional actors.⁴⁰ Theater, relegated in our own time to the rank of an occasional leisure activity, should be thought of as the principal cultural practice of the courtly and urban elites in the eighteenth century. At certain times of the year, they attended it on a daily basis. In that respect, its dual dimension—literary and social—makes it a privileged observation post: French theater would appear to encapsulate everything appealing about a French way of life based on commerce between the sexes and the art of conversation, on whose gallant urbanity Racine seems to have patterned his heroes of antiquity, making them naturalized Frenchmen and Frenchwomen.⁴¹

Above all, compared with other potential markers of French culture circulating in eighteenth-century Europe (artifacts and various products, books, periodicals, and forms of sociability such as Freemasonry or the salons),⁴² public theater was a political object. How it circulated was always in the end, and very concretely, the result of decisions. The hiring, subsidizing, and dismissing of an acting troupe are actions well circumscribed in time and space. The engagement of an acting troupe was the occasion for official (especially diplomatic) correspondence, which gives us the means to assess the political issues linked to the circulation of actors; it sometimes led to the formation of shareholder companies, indicative of the financial and social foundations of French theater; and it culminated in the signing of contracts. The dismissal of actors sometimes led the injured parties to file grievances and the authorities to provide justifications. These two operations (hiring and dismissal) necessarily delimited the presence of the troupes, which left numerous traces in their wake: lists of repertoires, playbills, bookkeeping documents, legal documents as well, associated with the conflicts to which their presence did not fail to give rise. The presence of French theater, finally, produced a whole set of printed works, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Lettre à d’Alembert sur les spectacles (Letter to M. d’Alembert on the Theatre) to theater criticism in the local press in the annexed départements of Napoleonic France. Sometimes the plays themselves can serve as sources, from the perspective of a social and political history of culture distinct from literary history.

The choice of theater, then, will allow me to apply a contextual and pragmatic method that consists in both decentering the analysis and changing the focus. In the first place, what has remained largely unexamined in the historiography of French Europe and is inherent in the opposition between spontaneity and constraint is the idea that the diffusion of French culture occurred in only one direction, from France to the rest of Europe, an idea conveyed through the metaphor of a radiating influence.⁴³ In contrast to that diffusionist paradigm, the method I propose entails, first, reversing the perspective by adopting the point of view of those who introduced French theater to European cities. The decentering begins in the sources, which sometimes bear the mark of the historiography that produced them. An emblematic case is the literary correspondence between Count Giacomo Durazzo, director of spectacles for the court of Vienna, and Charles-Simon Favart, his theatrical agent in Paris. In the edition published in 1808, the seventy-three letters from Durazzo were for the most part omitted, thus giving the impression of a one-directional movement, from Paris to Vienna.⁴⁴ Once the full import of the letters written by Durazzo—who in reality initiated the correspondence—is restored, a change of viewpoint is possible. More broadly, the key to the dissemination of French theater throughout Europe is to be found in the archives of European courts and cities from Stockholm to Parma and from Brussels to Vienna and including Geneva, Mainz, Brno, Turin, and Genoa.

As for the change of focus, instead of considering from the outset the phenomenon of French Europe on a European scale, I propose to approach it on a case-by-case basis, in the various contexts in which French theater was introduced, at the initiative or through the intermediary of a multitude of individuals: princes and ministers in the courts of Europe, diplomats and military leaders, literary agents, troupe managers and actors. Rather than seeing the introduction of French theater as the univocal sign of a generalized belief in the superiority of French culture and thus of submission to a symbolic domination, I will construct it in each case as a series of actions driven by motives and producing effects—some of them unexpected—on several levels. Consonant with the diversity of agents who came into play in the circulation of French theater was a whole range of practices to which that theater could profitably be put in different contexts.

The selection of cases from among the dozens of cities that welcomed French actors inevitably entails a certain arbitrariness. That is why, to guard against the risk of dispersal, I use some examples as guiding threads (Geneva first and foremost, plus Brussels and Parma). They reappear from one chapter to the next and, notably, both before and after the French Revolution. Within that framework, how are we to set the limits of the investigation? French theater, both in actuality and in discourses, acquired in many respects a European dimension beginning in the age of Louis XIV. At the other end, though the cultural supremacy exerted by French theater may have continued through the nineteenth century, that supremacy took on a different form with the conversion of French theater to industrial literature, when the logic of commerce tended to supplant the political framework presiding for the most part over its dissemination in the eighteenth century.⁴⁵ I therefore terminate this study in 1814, with the fall of the French Empire, which also sounded the death knell for France’s cultural empire.

In many ways, the approach I have chosen is indebted to studies of cultural transfers, which have breathed new life into the old history of influences. They have done so by placing the emphasis on the creative dimension of reception, which reinvents the object it seizes.⁴⁶ But my approach is distinguished from such studies in that it rejects the national framework of analysis and the rigidity of the notion of transfer, which postulates a starting point, a point of arrival, and a path between the two.⁴⁷ My focus on the different actions covered by the circulation of French theater breaks up the linear perspective of that focus, bringing to light the roundabout paths taken and the feedback effects produced. Instead of considering the dissemination of French theater throughout Europe as a series of cultural transfers, whether binary (from Paris to Vienna, from Paris to Brussels) or potentially more complex (from Paris to Vienna via Brussels),⁴⁸ which would simply have to be added up in a certain way, I consider it a single phenomenon, a configuration in Norbert Elias’s sense, that is, a dynamic network of interdependence that exerts its effects on all its components.⁴⁹ My methodological hypothesis is that French theater in eighteenth-century Europe was not merely a juxtaposition of more or less heterogeneous objects (French theater in Vienna, French theater in Geneva, etc.) but rather a historical object possessing unity on a European scale.⁵⁰ Conversely, description on a macroscopic scale is possible only if it is rooted in the precise case studies that sustain it. In that respect, this book is a work of transnational history, not because I posit from the outset the existence of nations in the eighteenth century but in the sense that the transnational approach, in combining approaches on different scales, brings to light a network of dynamic interrelationships that would otherwise be invisible.⁵¹

This methodological choice explains the approach I have adopted, which is more thematic than strictly chronological. In part 1, I focus on the concrete modalities and underlying reasons for French theater’s acclimation to the princely courts of Europe. In chapter 1, a survey of the space of French theater, I seek to describe its institutional, social, and economic density. In chapter 2, I approach synthetically the mobility throughout Europe of French actors, inquiring into the contradiction of royal policy in that area. I then analyze the French repertoire in the courts of Europe in chapter 3. What plays were performed there? How were they received? The practices underlying these appropriations are the object of chapter 4, where, based on the examples of Vienna and Parma, I raise the crucial question that guides part 1 as a whole: Why did princes and ministers bring in French actors, at great expense and incurring endless difficulties?

In part 2, I turn to other practices, either diplomatic or military, to trace an evolution from the army theater to cultural imperialism. In chapter 5, three case studies (Geneva, Brussels, and Hanover) show how, in the hands of diplomats and military leaders, gallant theater was used to promote French soft power. Above all, it was in the very particular context of Geneva, and under Voltaire’s iron rule, that theater, in the face of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s political opposition, came to be understood as a real instrument of acculturation, shored up by the idea of a civilizing mission (chapter 6). In the last two chapters, I consider the incarnations of that function of acculturation during the revolutionary and imperial periods, during which French theater in Europe, with only a few exceptions,⁵² was overwhelmingly linked to French political control. In chapter 7, I examine the expedition of Marguerite Montansier’s troupe to Brussels in 1792–93, in which the contradictions inherent in the project of a redeployment of theater (an ancien régime practice) for the purposes of revolutionary proselytism become apparent. Finally, in chapter 8 I show how French theater policy in the departments annexed between 1798 and 1814, a policy grounded in an avowed objective of Frenchification, ran up against serious limits in practice.

Part I

French Theater and the European Courts

1

The European Space of French Theater

CARACCIOLI DISCUSSES SPECTACLES in chapter 25 of L’Europe française. He distinguishes between two complementary modalities for the diffusion of French theater in Europe, echoed in the dual title of the book’s second edition: Paris le modèle des nations étrangères ou L’Europe française (Paris, model for foreign nations, or, French Europe). The first modality was associated with the attractiveness of Paris, theater capital of Europe, from which foreigners came away literally conquered: It is astonishing how many conquests the Comédie-Française makes every year among the various nations. Danes, Italians, Swedes, all return from Paris enchanted with the plays being performed there, and even the boulevard shows captivate them.¹ The second modality entailed the opposite movement, which took the material form of French acting troupes in the courts and cities of Europe. Over the course of his chapter, Caraccioli, piling on the details and playing on stereotypes, draws a somewhat impressionistic map of French Europe, from Cádiz to Warsaw and from the German courts to Genoa.²

Is it possible to substitute for the vague enumeration that might lead us to believe in the continuous and, as it were, irresistible expansion of French theater a precise geography and chronology? What audiences did French actors address? To what extent was French theater economically viable? Beyond the geographical dimension, I seek to describe this theatrical space in all its institutional, social, and economic density.³

From Saint Petersburg to Parma

From the first half of the seventeenth century on, traces can be found of itinerant French troupes in Holland, Germany, Italy, and England.⁴ Beginning in the 1670s, some settled in for lengthy stays in foreign courts, remaining for several consecutive seasons. Samuel Chappuzeau, a seasoned traveler who wrote on a great variety of subjects, bore witness to the beginnings of that phenomenon. In 1671, in the Suite de l’Europe vivante (Living Europe, continued), a description of Protestant Germany, he mentions a troupe of French actors, richly outfitted, who perform their parts admirably. This troupe was shared over the course of the year by three brothers, heirs to the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg: George William of Zell, John Frederick of Hanover, and Ernest Augustus, bishop of Osnabrück.⁵ Each brother had the troupe for four months of the year. Three years later, in Le théâtre françois (French theater), Chappuzeau described the composition of the three troupes supported by foreign princes (the Duke of Savoy, the Elector of Bavaria, and the Dukes of Brunswick-Lüneburg).⁶

A century later, in 1762, L’observateur des spectacles, a periodical newly created by François-Antoine Chevrier to embrace all the spectacles of Europe,⁷ published an overview of the foreign courts where there is French theater, which allows us to measure the expansion of French theatrical performances in Europe.⁸ Nineteen cities are listed, compared with Chappuzeau’s three. Chevrier distinguishes between court theaters, of which there were thirteen (in Parma, Saint Petersburg, Stockholm, Vienna, Berlin, Bayreuth, Stuttgart, Mannheim, Bonn, Munich, Hanover, Regensburg, and Brussels), and the six other troupes in foreign countries, defined in negative terms as those not attached to courts (Düsseldorf, Liège, Frankfurt, The Hague, Ghent, Leuven). The list is unreliable, however. Chevrier seems to have been trying to inflate artificially the total number of French theaters in Europe. Of the nineteen he lists, four were not active at the time he was writing.⁹ This overestimation must be evaluated in terms of the content of the periodical itself, which relayed more particularly the performances given in French and the openings of French spectacles in Europe, linking them to a recognition of the superiority of French theater.¹⁰

Beyond that single survey provided by L’observateur des spectacles, it is possible to draw a map of French theater in Europe for the entire century. I have composed it based on Max Fuchs’s pioneering studies and on a first synthesis provided by Ferdinand Brunot in volume 8 of Histoire de la langue française. Without claiming to be exhaustive, I have also incorporated, as much as possible, the advances of scholarship on the question.¹¹ It is clear that because of the lacunae in the sources and bibliography, not all the stops made by the French troupes could be documented. Furthermore, even when there are traces left by a troupe that passed through, the exact duration of its stay is often difficult to determine. Figure 1, which provides a partial visualization of appendix table 1, is only a starting point, the beginning of an analysis that attempts to distinguish several levels of practices. That is what differentiates it from, for example, the famous map of the satellites of Versailles, created by Louis Réau in 1938, a true fetish of French Europe, adopted as the cover for his book when it was reissued in 1971, then by Fernand Braudel in Civilization and Capitalism. That map created a dual impression of ubiquity and uniformity and seemingly summed up, in and of itself, the thesis of Réau’s book.¹²

Figure 1. Cities where French theater troupes performed in eighteenth-century Europe

Among the eighty-one cities that welcomed a French troupe, a first distinction can be made between the twenty-seven cities that were home to a permanent troupe and the others, where itinerant troupes performed more or less regularly. The second major distinction is between court cities and the rest. Of the twenty-seven cities that were seats of a permanent French theater, twenty—the overwhelming majority—were court cities. Apart from the cases of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Antwerp, Ghent, Maastricht, Geneva, and Cádiz, princely courts constituted the acclimation environment for French theater. As figure 1 indicates, the heart of the French theatrical space was formed by the German lands on one hand and the Austrian Netherlands and United Provinces on the other. Two other spaces also welcomed French theater: first, northern and eastern Europe (Stockholm, Copenhagen, Saint Petersburg, and Warsaw), by virtue of which French theater attested in its own way to the transition from a small to a greater Europe in the eighteenth century;¹³ and second, to a lesser degree, Italy. In Italy, though permanent troupes were few in number (except in Turin in the late seventeenth century and Parma between 1755 and 1758), tours by French actors became more common beginning in the 1760s. On the margins of this French theatrical space, two countries were impermeable, as it were: Spain, where the only French