Theater, War, and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France and Its Empire 1009431218, 9781009431217

Citation preview

T H E AT E R , WA R , AND RE V O LU T IO N IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE AND I TS EMPIRE

This is the first study of French theater and war at a time of global revolutions, colonial violence, and radical social transformation. Analyzing France and its largest Caribbean colony (SaintDomingue), and spanning the Old Regime and Revolution, Logan Connors presents an ambitious, richly interdisciplinary argument, grounded in theater and performance studies, literary analysis of drama, and cultural, military, and gender history. Demonstrating how war and soldiering catalyzed new drama types and fostered theater’s expansion into France’s geographical and social peripheries, the study also shows how theater emerged as a dynamic space in which military practices could be reimagined. This major scholarly intervention provides unparalleled insight into theater’s engagement with international and domestic war efforts during a transformational period in global history. logan j. connors is Professor and Chair of the Michele Bowman Underwood Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of Miami, where he also serves as Co-convener of the Interdisciplinary Research Group in Theatre and Performance Studies and Cooper Fellow in the College of Arts and Sciences.

“This is a genuinely rich, compelling, and informative study, which offers an appealing and informative perspective of its own while also inviting future research. The topic has long been overlooked by both theater experts and military historians, yet Connors demonstrates that it is an immensely rich and rewarding line of exploration. His book stands to make an important mark on the fields of both military history and eighteenth-century theater, but it also holds transformative insight for students of the eighteenth century, the Revolution, and colonialism.” Joseph Harris, University of London

“Theater, War, and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France and Its Empire makes a major contribution to Enlightenment and French Revolution studies, as well as to the broader domains of theater history and performance studies. While it expertly exploits the most recent scholarly advances in the arenas of performance practices, gender studies, and colonial francophone world studies, it also proposes an original reading of the interface between the military and theater at a crucial moment in the history of both European warmaking and theatrical aesthetics.” Larry Norman, University of Chicago

THEATER, WAR, AND REVOLUTION IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE AND ITS EMPIRE LOGAN J. CONNORS University of Miami

Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge cb2 8ea, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781009431217 doi: 10.1017/9781009431224 © Logan J. Connors 2024 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published 2024 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data names: Connors, Logan J., author. title: Theater, war and revolution in eighteenth-century France and its empire / Logan J. Connors, University of Miami. description: Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. identifiers: lccn 2023034040 | isbn 9781009431217 (hardback) | isbn 9781009431248 (paperback) | isbn 9781009431224 (ebook) subjects: lcsh: Theater – France – History – 18th century. | War and theater. | War and theater. | Theater and society – France – History – 18th century. | French drama – 18th century – History and criticism. | Theater – Political aspects – France. classification: lcc pn2633 .t47 2023 | ddc 791.094409033–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023034040 isbn 978-1-009-43121-7 Hardback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations

page vi vii ix

Introduction: Performance, Revolution, and the Military–Theatrical Complex 1

From tragédie nationale to pièce militaire: Pierre-Laurent de Belloy’s Le Siège de Calais

1 19

2 Military Masculinities, Dramaturgical Manipulation, and the Desertion Play

56

3 Performing on the Periphery: Military–Theatrical Experiences at the Théâtre de la Marine (Brest) and the Comédie du Cap (Cap-Français)

92

4 Total Theater for Total War: Military Dramas and Performances of the French Revolution

140

5 Femmes soldats and Militarized Domesticity: Women at War in French Revolutionary Theater

176

Conclusion: The Military–Theatrical Complex of Revolutionary Saint-Domingue 220 232 250

Bibliography Index

v

Illustrations

3.1 Nicolin, “Plan de Brest,” in Lutte contre les incendies à page 105 Brest (1777). Archives municipales de Brest 5Fi614. 3.2 Choquet de Lindu (and co.), “Élévation sur le cours Dajot.” 111 Projet de foyer pour les troupes (n.d., 1764 or 1765). Archives municipales de Brest 2S-8 (1). 3.3 Choquet de Lindu (and co.), “Coupe sur la longueur.” Projet 112 de foyer pour les troupes (n.d., 1764 or 1765). Archives municipales de Brest 2S-8 (5). 3.4 Choquet de Lindu (and co.), “Coupe sur la largeur.” Projet de 113 foyer pour les troupes. (n.d., 1764 or 1765). Archives municipales de Brest 2S-8 (4). 3.5 Choquet de Lindu (and co.), “Plan du rez-de-chaussée.” Projet 114 de foyer pour les troupes (n.d., 1764 or 1765). Archives municipales de Brest 2S-8 (2). 3.6 Le Théâtre et la Rue d’Aiguillon. Postcard. Brest: Grand Bazar 118 (n.d., 1880–1888). Bibliothèque nationale de France. Collection Bibliothèque numérique de Brest, BNF45904429. 3.7 René Phélipeau, Plan de la ville du Cap François et ses environs 124 dans l’isle St. Domingue (Paris: Phélipeau, 1786). Collection Bibliothèque nationale de France, GESH18PF149DIV4P22D. 5.1 Cazenave, J.-F. (artist) after Thouvenin, J. (engraver), Trait de 210 courage héroïque: Des brigands de la Vendée, s’étant rendus maîtres de Saint-Mithier (Paris: Pezard, 1793 or 1794). Bibliothèque nationale de France Département Estampes et photographie, RESERVE FOL-QB-201 (134). C.1 Image of Sarah Bernhardt’s visit to Boucq, near Verdun, where 230 she gave six performances for troops during the First World War. Agié, Jacques. Le théâtre dans le parc du château. Boucq (Meurthe-et-Moselle, 1916). ©Jacques Agié/ECPAD/Public Domain/Images de la Défense/SPA 21X775. vi

Acknowledgments

This book was completed with the support of several institutions and many colleagues, friends, and family members. The project got off the ground thanks to a fellowship at the Institut d’études avancées (Collegium) de Lyon, which provided a generative space and context to think, write, and collaborate with an intellectually stimulating cohort of international scholars. In Lyon, I am particularly grateful to Olivier Ferret, Olivier Bara, and the IHRIM research group (ENS de Lyon/Université Lyon 2/Université Lyon 3). My project later received significant support from Sorbonne Université and its Centre d’étude de la langue et des littératures françaises (CELLF) in Paris, where I benefited tremendously from my time as an invited professor and research associate. At the Sorbonne, I owe sincere gratitude to Renaud Bret-Vitoz for hosting me and for opening his seminar to me in 2022–2023. Thanks are due as well to Jean-Christophe Abramovici, Sophie Marchand, Christophe Martin, and Virginie Yvernault. I’m also grateful for other colleagues in France with whom I’ve shared ideas from this book: Jeanne-Marie Hostiou, Dario Nicolosi, Fanny Platelle, Thibaut Julian, Pauline Beaucé, Cyril Triolaire, Philippe Bourdin, Justine Mangeant, and the late (and sorely missed) Christian Biet. I was also assisted in France by wonderful resource librarians and archivists at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (especially at the Arsenal site), Archives nationales d’outre-mer, Service historique de la Défense (Vincennes), SHD-Brest (Marine), Archives départementales du Finistère, Archives municipales de Brest (with special thanks to Françoise Wanner), Musée Carnavalet, and Bibliothèque-Musée de la Comédie-Française. My project was supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and with numerous forms of institutional support from the University of Miami, including a research sabbatical, a Provost’s Research Award, and a generous Cooper Fellowship from the College of Arts & Sciences. In Miami, I was and continue to be supported by a great team in the Michele Bowman Underwood Department of Modern vii

viii

Acknowledgments

Languages and Literatures, and particularly, by three former chairpersons who helped my project in different and multiple ways: Lillian Manzor, Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, and Andrew Lynch. Thanks as well to Arianne Collins and to Nancy Wielert for their administrative acumen. Other colleagues and friends in Miami who helped this book along and to whom I owe gratitude include Ómar Vargas, Allison Schifani, Patoimbasba Nikiema, Susanna Allés-Torrent, Gema Pérez-Sánchez, Jason Pearl, John Funchion, Nathaniel Cadle, Ashli White, Hugh Thomas, Mary Lindemann, Guido Ruggiero, Laura Giannetti, and Michael Miller. I’m also grateful to Mauro Cazzolla, Rim el Belkacemi, Pauline La Burthe, Alexis Stanley, and to other graduate students who have engaged with some of the texts and ideas in this book. Special thanks as well are owed to colleagues around the globe for their feedback at various conferences, roundtables, and meetings the past few years: Julia Prest, Jeff Leichman, Tracy Rutler, Annelle Curulla, Jeff Ravel, Greg Brown, Pannill Camp, Paola Perazzolo, Vincenzo De Santis, Yann Robert, Laurence Marie, Scott Sanders, Masano Yamashita, Síofra Pierse, Tom Wynn, Joe Harris, Emily Sahakian, and many others. I would also like to thank Emily Hockley, George Laver, and Nicola Chapman at Cambridge University Press as well as Cheryl Lenser for her help with the index, Steven Holt for copyeditorial support, and the two anonymous readers of my manuscript who provided insightful feedback. Special thanks to Simon Harrison, Hervé Bernard, Kate Jensen, John Protevi, Alexei Evstratov, Lucie Brenot, Bérénice Loiseau, and John Enyeart for their support and friendship. I am deeply appreciative of my family, both near and far: Quinn Connors and Benoit Aymonier-Newman in Sydney; Alain and Catherine Palanchon in Montmorot; Don and Alison Connors in Traverse City; my two energetic children, Amaury and Joséphine, and my better half in every sense of the term, Élise. Lastly, I am forever grateful to Pierre Frantz, now Professor emeritus at Sorbonne Université. Pierre has always been an advocate of an “eventful,” performance-based approach to eighteenthcentury French theater. I am one of many colleagues across the globe who have benefited from his erudition, generosity, and warmth. If nothing else, I hope this book shows Pierre’s continued influence in eighteenthcentury French Studies and, particularly, his drive to uncover, interrogate, and celebrate the dynamism of eighteenth-century theatrical events by situating them in larger institutional, political, and social contexts.

Abbreviations

AD: AM: AN: ANOM: BC-F: BM: BNF: SHD:

Archives départementales Archives municipales Archives nationales de France Archives nationales d’outre mer (France) Bibliothèque-musée de la Comédie-Française Bibliothèque municipale Bibliothèque nationale de France Service historique de la Défense

ix

introduction

Performance, Revolution, and the Military–Theatrical Complex

The separation of the stage and auditorium is something to be transcended. The precise aim of the performance is to abolish this exteriority in various ways: by placing the spectators on the stage and the performers in the auditorium; by abolishing the differences between the two; by transferring the performance to other sites; by identifying it with taking possession of the street, the town or life. Jacques Rancière1

After storming the Bastille on July 14, 1789, Joseph Arné had little time to reflect on the significance of his actions. Earlier that day, the young soldier had led a daring assault, neutralized several guards with his bare hands, and supposedly disabled a cannon that was pointed at his charging comrades.2 As the sun set, Arné was cheered by throngs of Parisians, who joined the young grenadier in patriotic songs, chants, and dances. The next morning, Arné was back in the streets, this time paraded triumphantly through the city on the back of a horse-drawn cart. Just six weeks later, he was portrayed on stage as the protagonist in La Fête du Grenadier, the first theatrical work dedicated to the July events.3 On opening night, the real Arné was called up on stage to enthusiastic cheers. The Orateur du peuple, one of the many newspapers to emerge during the French Revolution, reported that Arné again made a curtain call, this time in early 1791, following the premiere of Harny de Guerville’s La Liberté conquise, a play featuring a Bastille-like siege.4 Arné the soldier, Arné the character, Arné the spectator, and Arné 1 2

3 4

Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (London and New York, NY: Verso, 2009), 16. For an account of Arné’s role in the storming of the Bastille, see Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink and Rolf Reichardt, The Bastille: A History of a Symbol of Despotism and Freedom, trans. Norbert Schürer (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1997), 87–93. La Fête du Grenadier, pantomime nationale et militaire mêlée de chants, de danses, et à spectacle (Paris: Cailleau, 1789), performed at the Théâtre de l’Ambigu-Comique on September 3, 1789. L’Orateur du peuple 18 (1791), 171.

1

2

Introduction

the national hero were all part of a powerful military–theatrical experience that flourished at the end of the eighteenth century. This book describes how the Arné phenomenon and related military– theatrical interactions emerged, transformed, and proliferated in France and in parts of its colonial empire during the second half of the eighteenth century. With close readings of plays and analysis of militarized performance environments, I trace the interrelation of the French military, dramatic literature, and theatrical performance from the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) through the French Revolution’s most turbulent months in 1794. It should be stated from the beginning that eighteenth-century Francophone locales were not the only places in history with robust bonds between armed conflict and theatrical performance. Theater and war have always shared lexicons, strategies, and objectives. Military leaders discuss “theaters of war” and “theaters of operation”; theater professionals have deployed conflict themes in their plays to provide therapeutic support to civilian and soldier audiences,5 bolster patriotism, and critique the status quo. The most obvious overlap between war and performance – the display of military power in front of domestic constituents and foreign enemies – from fêtes at Louis XIV’s Versailles palace to North Korean parades, creates a specific form of what Baz Kershaw calls an “ideological transaction between a company of performers and the community of their audience.”6 War has served as a potent commonplace – an immediate subject of community concern – that theater professionals, military officers, and government officials have mobilized to push geopolitical agendas and sell tickets to the playhouse. War and soldiering in eighteenth-century France and in parts of its colonial empire, I argue, catalyzed new types of drama and theatrical performance, and fostered the expansion of theater into what were believed to be the geographical and social peripheries of the kingdom, and later, the Republic. Theater, in turn, emerged as a dynamic space in which French subjects (then citizens) could (re)imagine and (re)live armed conflict and military concerns as well as theorize new relationships among soldiers and 5

6

A recent example of drama’s therapeutic mission is Theater of War Productions, a New York-based company that stages dramatic readings of classical Greek tragedies (among other plays) for audiences of former soldiers. They have worked with the US Department of Defense, the Department of Veterans Services, and other organizations to use theater to discuss the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder, substance abuse, and gun violence in veteran communities. For more information, see https://theaterofwar.com/about. Baz Kershaw, The Politics of Performance: Radical Theatre as Cultural Intervention (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 1992), 16. Emphasis original.

Introduction

3

between military and civilian populations. As France moved into revolutionary processes of political, military, and cultural “regeneration,” theater and war, but also civil and military societies, converged into a powerful force of repetitions, performances, and totalizing experiences: total theater for total war. Here I present an interdisciplinary framework, grounded in Theatre and Performance Studies, in literary analysis of drama, and in cultural, military and gender history, for interrogating the theater’s engagement with military cultures and for reflecting upon the military’s influence on eighteenth-century drama and theatrical performance. The dimensions of military–theatrical interaction explored in this book are numerous and diverse: plays depicting soldiers, performances in navy theaters and in other military venues, policies to compel soldiers to attend the theater, repertories of public theaters in provincial and colonial cities with significant military populations, the evolving relationship between theatrical diplomacy and armed conflict in colonial and occupied zones, soldier-actors and soldier-writers, the role of both theater and the military as “civilizing” and “urbanizing” forces, dramatic depictions of gender roles in battle and on the home front, public performances of coloniality and military rule, and theater as a tool for teaching combat skills, nationalism, sexuality, xenophobia, and more. Ultimately, I show theater’s relationships with international military endeavors and domestic war efforts during a transformational era in global history. Theater, War, and Revolution is the first study to treat war and soldiering as a category for eighteenth-century French-language theater productions. The book is nevertheless indebted to recent work that reassesses traditional value claims that scholars have made about the period’s dramatic literature and performance practices.7 Resisting the notions that tumultuous moments of conflict are barriers to artistic creation and that innovative 7

Scholars of eighteenth-century British, German, and Dutch theater have demonstrated more of an interest than scholars of French-language productions in analyzing the relationship between theater and war. For example, on Britain, see, among others, Gillian Russell, The Theatres of War: Performance, Politics, and Society, 1793–1815 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995) and Neil Ramsey and Gillian Russell (eds.), Tracing War in British Enlightenment and Romantic Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015). On dramatic depictions of war in German-language plays, see Anne Feuchter-Feler, Le drame militaire en Allemagne au XVIIIe siècle (Bern: Peter Lang, 2005); Martin Kagel, “La Chercheuse d’esprit: Gender, Mobility, and the Crisis of Authorship in J. M. R. Lenz’s Conception of Soldiers’ Marriages,” German Life and Letters 61, no. 1 (2008): 99–117; James Gibbons, “Politics and the Playwright: J. M. R. Lenz and ‘Die Soldaten,’” The Modern Language Review 96, no. 3 (2001): 732–46; and Cornelis van der Haven, “Military Men of Feeling? Gender Boundaries and Military– Civil Encounters in Two German Soldier Plays (1760–80),” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 41, no. 4 (2018): 511–26. For a take on the Dutch context, see the critical review of studies in Cornelis van der Haven, “Patriotism and Bellicism in German and Dutch Epics of the Enlightenment.” Arcadia 47, no. 1 (2012): 54–77.

4

Introduction

dramatic practices disappeared in France during the late eighteenth century with the Enlightenment and returned only in the nineteenth century with Romantic renovations to the stage, I articulate the ways in which war and soldiering participated in and, at times, transformed the period’s popular and experimental theater cultures. My analytical readings and contextual analyses are informed by several critical practices and subdisciplines: military and gender histories; theories of engagement, reenactment, and “event” from Theatre and Performance Studies; historical analysis of theater building and theater administration initiatives; and close readings of dramatic literature and theatrical performances in France and in its most prosperous and brutal Caribbean colony of mostly enslaved black laborers, Saint-Domingue. My interdisciplinary approach draws from several key works in those domains. I follow recent scholarship that presents France’s eighteenth-century armed forces as inseparable from its cultural institutions and experiences.8 The late Old Regime was witness to an intense period of military introspection and reform, particularly after France’s devastating loss in the Seven Years’ War. Theater came under the gaze of reform-minded army and navy administrators, who argued that theatrical performances and the culture of attending theater could educate servicemen and “improve” their behaviors. Military leaders at the highest ranks, such as the commander and Secretary of State Étienne-François de Choiseul-Beaupré-Stainville (the comte, then duc, de Choiseul), joined local commandants and intendants in the French provinces and colonies to argue for what they perceived as the social, cultural, and operational benefits of dramatic literature and, more acutely, theatrical performance. The military’s optimistic take on dramatic performance led to theatrical building, financing, and programming initiatives. At the same time, French playwrights developed or 8

The most recent of these works include Ilya Berkovich, Motivation in War: The Experience of Common Soldiers in Old-Regime Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Christy Pichichero, The Military Enlightenment: War and Culture in the French Empire from Louis XIV to Napoleon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017); Julia Osman, Citizen Soldiers and the Key to the Bastille (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015); and Arnaud Guinier, L’honneur du soldat: Éthique martiale et discipline guerrière dans la France des Lumières (Ceyzérieu: Champ Vallon, 2014). This scholarship is indebted to “new military history,” which encouraged historians around the turn of the twentieth century to engage more with broader cultural practices and problems in addition to the history of military strategy and policy. Works in this vein are numerous and too many to list here; key books discussing eighteenth-century France include but are certainly not limited to Alan Forrest, Conscripts and Deserters: The Army and French Society during the Revolution and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989) and Soldiers of the French Revolution (Durham, NC and London: Duke, 1990); Rafe Blaufarb, The French Army, 1750–1820 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002); Jeremy Black, Rethinking Military History (Routledge, 2004); and David A. Bell, The First Total War (New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin, 2007).

Introduction

5

expanded upon dramatic genres and modes that depicted with increasing detail the plight of the soldier, the complexity of military relationships in battle, and the role of both women and men on, especially insofar as the Revolution was concerned, an increasingly militarized, anxious, and vigilant home front. Storied theatrical institutions such as the ComédieFrançaise, but also new and ephemeral venues in provincial and colonial cities and towns, performed works about military patriotism, desertion, specific battles, child heroism, female soldiers, and sacrifice to the war cause. With attention to military-themed drama and performances in places with significant soldier populations, I follow recent studies on the role of theater in urbanization, colonization, and geopolitical expansion.9 Military patrons, whether they were avid theatergoers or obliged to attend performances by government decree, transformed the environment inside the playhouse. A tight lens on specific audiences informs several of this book’s chapters. For example, I detail the successful performance history of Pierre-Laurent de Belloy’s Le Siège de Calais (1765), a popular tragedy with military and patriotic themes. Included in this analysis is a reflection on parodies of de Belloy’s play that focus on military recruitment strategies and on readings of Le Siège de Calais at military bases and barracks on the northern front. Soldiers who had witnessed de Belloy’s tragedy wrote that they identified with the characters and contexts, and that they were encouraged by the play to reenlist and recommit to France’s armed efforts. Old-Regime military–theatrical overlaps evince flashpoints of change to dramatic generic norms and military traditions. But the performances and associated media generated by Le Siège de Calais or by any ancien régime production paled in comparison with what would happen during the Revolution. Joseph Arné’s celebrity status in 1789, for example, would have been politically and aesthetically unthinkable several decades earlier. 9

On the relationship between theatrical performance and geopolitical expansion, see Lauren R. Clay, Stagestruck: The Business of Theater in Eighteenth-Century France and Its Colonies (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013); Ellen Welch, A Theater of Diplomacy: International Relations and the Performing Arts in Early Modern France (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017); and Rahul Markovits, Civiliser l’Europe: Politiques du théâtre français au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2014). On the rise of military themes in dramatic literature and on the relationship between military or patriotic themes and state building and colonization, I follow in the wake of Philippe Bourdin ’s Aux origins du théâtre patriotique (Paris: CNRS, 2017), Renaud Bret-Vitoz ’s L’Éveil du héros plébéien, 1760–1794 (Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 2018), Clare Siviter ’s Tragedy and Nation in the Age of Napoleon (Liverpool: Oxford Studies in the Enlightenment and Liverpool University Press, 2020), and the multiple authors who contributed to Jeffrey Leichman and Karine Bénac-Giroux (eds.), Colonialism and Slavery in Performance: Theatre and the Eighteenth-Century French Caribbean (Liverpool: Oxford Studies in the Enlightenment and Liverpool University Press, 2021).

6

Introduction

This book describes a path to the Revolution’s outpouring of military events, plays, and performances – a holistic program, which sought to use theater to strengthen “the bond between the civilian and military worlds, between war and nation.”10 Military plays depict battle strategies, cataclysmic attacks, stunning victories, and debilitating losses. Many of these works are packed with action and most reflect on the qualities of men and women who endure and “succeed” in war. Another domain of research that informs my project is early modern and modern European and transatlantic gender studies, particularly scholarship on masculinity, rights feminism, and theatrical representations of gender norms and subversions.11 Playwrights and military administrators shared questions and concerns about men and women at war, for example, what kind of man leaves or stays at his post? What are the most essential attributes of a soldier, and are they innate or can they be taught? How should women contribute to violent, armed conflict? I ask and attempt to answer these questions and others related to gender in my examination of drama written and performed at a moment when opinions regarding manhood and womanhood – but also pedagogy, political participation, and the individual’s affective relationship to new ideas of “nation” – were called into question both by the turbulent domestic politics of the Revolution and by the proliferation of France’s armed forces across Europe, the Caribbean, and beyond. I thus combine several crucial strands of eighteenth-century scholarship – cultural military history; theater, drama, and performance studies; and gender studies of militarized men and women – into an analysis of theater’s influence on military norms and practices as well as the military’s role in creating new forms and experiences of drama and theatrical performance. My focus on military–theatrical overlaps, including plays from 10 11

Marie-Cécile Thoral, From Valmy to Waterloo: France at War, 1792–1815, trans. Godfrey Rodgers (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011), 2. The list is long, but seminal works on eighteenth-century masculinity include Robert Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), George Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of the Modern Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), and sections of Sarah Meltzer and Leslie Rabine (eds.), Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). I am also indebted to more recent works in women, gender, and sexuality studies that pertain specifically to theater or to the military: Wendy Nielsen, Women Warriors in Romantic Drama (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2013); Annelle Curulla, Gender and Religious Life in French Revolutionary Drama (Liverpool: Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment and Liverpool University Press, 2018); Michael Hughes, Forging Napoleon’s Grande Armée: Motivation, Military Culture, and Masculinity (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2012); and Brian Martin, Napoleonic Friendship: Military Fraternity, Intimacy, and Sexuality (Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2011).

Introduction

7

outside of the traditional French-language dramatic canon and productions at theatrical venues that have been rarely discussed (or discussed as an ensemble) by scholars, enables me to delve into what is often considered the French “periphery.” While many books about eighteenth-century French theater focus exclusively on Paris, this study presents performances in militarized ports and border cities around metropolitan France and in the crown’s most theaterphilic plantation-based colony, Saint-Domingue. The reasons for and the difficulties of conducting research in provincial and colonial spaces are discussed at length in the introduction to Chapter 3. I only state here that my intention is to follow soldiers, wars, actors, and plays to locales of intense interaction. Contexts with large soldier populations (or significant soldier populations in comparison with civilians) and specific objectives regarding theater and soldier leisure were often far from the French capital and in places of geopolitical desire, strategy, and conflict. The close readings and critical reconstructions in this book connect aspects of theater (texts, performances, actors, authors, managers, and spectators) to military entities and structures (soldiers, orders, sanctions, policies, garrisons, anxieties, and strategies). These mechanisms, both the material and the symbolic, converge most forcefully in the military–theatrical complex, a term I coin based on another, more famous neologism, the military–industrial complex. More information on the complex will help illustrate its heuristic potential. The US President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a five-star general and commander in the Second World War, described the military–industrial complex in his Farewell Address to the Nation on January 17, 1961: A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction [. . .] This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military–industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist.12 12

“Eisenhower’s Farewell Address,” January 17, 1961. Reprinted in the American Experience series by PBS, www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/eisenhower-farewell. Eisenhower was the

8

Introduction

Eisenhower used the term during the throes of the Cold War, a context with technological, social, and cultural characteristics that were patently different from France’s conflicts of the eighteenth century. But his notion of the military–industrial complex connects to my idea of the eighteenthcentury French military–theatrical complex in several ways. First, Eisenhower identifies a productive relationship between military and non-military government entities for the purpose of harnessing a more powerful and efficient fighting force. Government bureaus, including civilian administrative units, are subsumed into the military endeavor. Defense protocols and structures are assisted and rendered more pervasive by harmonizing the efforts of the country’s social, political, and economic organs. The military then channels the energy and resources of people, structures, and mechanisms that were previously unrelated or more loosely linked to the military. Second, the relationship described by Eisenhower includes characteristics of totality and an almost uncontrollable proliferation of the military, and the military state, into all aspects of life. Eisenhower questions, and ultimately comes to fear, the military’s “acquisition of unwarranted influence,” even in locations and institutions that were far from conflict zones. And third, the complex is highly performative. In addition to neutralizing the enemy on the ground, in the air, and across the seas with advanced technology and superior strategy, a goal of the complex is to project outward a performance of power so that “no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction.” Through tight relationships among government offices, the military, academic research, and private manufacturing, the United States has gained, according to Eisenhower, a total performance of power with influence abroad, but which can also be felt in the smallest towns at home. The complex’s performance, in short, should prevent, even negate, the utilization of its destructive weaponry. By the end of his presidency, Eisenhower had turned against the complex’s powerful reach. But, in the immediate post-war years, he and others were optimistic about its effect on US wartime capabilities and its potential to help academic research, fill the coffers of emerging technology companies, and rebuild the country’s post-war, post-depression economy. Faith in the military’s role in civilian domains and structures also characterized the government officials, military officers, playwrights, and other operatives first to use the term, but the speech was most likely penned by his speechwriters at the time, Ralph E. Williams and Malcolm Moos. For more information, see Charles J. G. Griffin, “New Light on Eisenhower’s Farewell Address,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 22, no. 3 (1992): 469–79.

Introduction

9

who used artistic, political, and financial strategies to construct a French military–theatrical complex during the second half of the eighteenth century. From implicit, even unintended relations between theater and the military to explicit uses of drama and performance by army and navy administrators, this study provides a holistic if not comprehensive account of the links between theater and soldiers in the age of the French Revolution. Some terminology should help differentiate among the relations discussed in the following pages. At times, I will address the military– theatrical complex – the conscious, deliberate collaboration between the military and the theatrical world mentioned above. At other times, I concentrate on military–theatrical overlaps, relations, or interactions, which are less structured bonds. And still elsewhere, I unearth the experiences that resulted from military–theatrical complexes and relations, which turn the lens from the entities, actors, policies, and structures themselves to how these aspects were felt, lived, enjoyed, and critiqued both by soldiers and by civilians. The lines between these categories are often faint, and most chapters will include layered analysis of each military–theatrical form. Not everybody supported France’s increasingly visible military culture after the Seven Years’ War. Enablers and detractors of military influence waged cultural war on stage and on the dramatic page. For example, I describe a heated debate on the causes of desertion and on the fundamental traits of the “military man” that was carried out through textual editing and with performances in front of sailors and soldiers at a naval theater. Anti-war writers, such as Louis-Sébastien Mercier, latched on to a vogue of military-themed playmaking to warn spectators and readers of France’s increasingly bellicose ideals. Mercier deployed a specific type of theater, the drame (or drame bourgeois), which was associated with Enlightenment reform and critique, to spread theories of peace and cosmopolitanism and to sow doubt in absolutist and expansionist politics. At the same time, Joseph Patrat, an opportunistic playwright in the French provinces, worked with military administrators to alter Mercier’s anti-war play Le Déserteur by changing the dialogues and characters, and by staging a pro-military version of Le Déserteur at the Théâtre de la Marine in Brest, France’s only public theater to be financed by its navy. Mercier and Patrat diverged on war, but agreed that dramatic performance offered them the possibility to change the values and behaviors of spectators. Belief in the epistemological and communal powers of theatrical performance characterizes the discourses, texts, artistic works, and institutional reforms of a diverse group of eighteenth-century French writers and war administrators. Reformers both of dramatic literature and of the military

10

Introduction

pitched theatrical performance as a socializing process and a way to increase harmony across disparate groups, perfect the French-language skills of spectators, and teach French men and women (as well as foreigners and colonists) valuable historical, military, and political lessons about an increasingly self-aware nation. Although it took on different features in different locales, the military–theatrical complex was a structure that looked both inward and outward. It was part of a larger mission to promote cultural norms and a more coherent “French way of life” at a moment of European conflict and during the rise of the modern nation-state.13 The lofty objectives of administrators and theater professionals were difficult to achieve. A harmonious, pedagogical, and useful military– theatrical complex was more of an aspirational goal than an actual description of the French military’s relationship with theater. Several sections of this book demonstrate that theatrical performances with strong military presences and themes were often locations of disaccord, aggression, and the projection of difference and dispute. Performances were rarely, if ever, ludic moments of community building, learning, and shared aesthetic appreciation. Critics could not help but see stark differences between the intentions of playwrights and administrators, on the one hand, and the dangerous realities of warfare, colonial occupation, and everyday military service on the other. The disparity between the goals of administrators and some of the actual lived experiences inside the theater proved the limits of any universal theories of theatrical experience or performance appreciation. The military–theatrical complex calls for site-specific inquiry and constitutes an alternative model for accessing and defining capacious notions such as eighteenth-century theatrical “experiences,” “cultures,” or “events.” The specificity of military–theatrical experiences is further untangled with more critical definitions of performances as unique types of “events.”14 Christian Biet’s notion of the theatrical séance, a theatrical meditation on apparatus (dispositif ) theories by Michel Foucault15 and 13

14

15

Markovitz, Civiliser l’Europe, 19. Markovitz goes on to show that the popularity of French drama and theatrical performance in eighteenth-century Europe was less of a spontaneous phenomenon or evidence of any “innate” excellence of French literature than a concerted effort to use theater as soft power in France’s military and diplomatic strategies. My definition of “event” is grounded in Keith Michael Baker and Dan Edelstein’s matter-of-fact description of it as “something unplanned, with unforeseeable circumstances.” See Keith Michael Baker and Dan Edelstein, “Introduction,” in Scripting Revolution: A Historical Approach to the Comparative Study of Revolutions, ed. Keith Michael Baker and Dan Edelstein (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), 20. See the interview conducted with Foucault in “Le jeu de Michel Foucault,” Bulletin périodique du champ, in Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, trans. Colin Gordon (New York, NY: Pantheon, 1980).

Introduction

11

Georgio Agamben,16 recovers experiences that are often absent in traditional definitions of theater.17 According to Biet, the flow of information, including feelings of pleasure or displeasure during a theatrical performance, is more complicated than an unhindered, one-directional transfer of the actors’ words and gestures into the consciousness of spectators. Theater is not a purely literary product, nor is it a straightforward audio-visual transmission of a dramatic text, political message, or philosophical viewpoint. Spectators arrive at the theater with disparate goals, sensory information originates from different sources in the auditorium, and stimuli deployed in a theater confront a spectator’s lived experiences, expectations, and biases. One spectator’s engagement with a play can be very different from another’s.18 The experience is informed by features beyond the actors’ performances, including the architecture of the building, political contexts, social class, linguistic proficiency, sounds and distractions, fires, violent disturbances, and more. Theater is an apparatus of discourses, power relations, bodies, expectations, and feelings. Theatrical events “are capable of representing and being influenced by any aspect of the world, in a multitude of modes, means, and manners. They also engage with alternative and possible worlds, the ‘as if’ versions of existence.”19 Fiction collides with material realities (bodies, seats, auditoriums), as well as with symbolic processes grounded in social norms, economics, and geopolitics. About the intersectional discourses and structures at play during the theatrical event, Biet writes that the théâtre, socialement et esthétiquement, serait alors un dispositif qui rassemble, qui permet que des regards se croisent et parfois se focalisent sur un point particulier (la scène, l’orchestre). Il a ainsi une fonction dont on pourrait dire qu’elle est socialement unifiante, ou unificatrice. Toutefois, ce lieu d’où l’on voit, de même que les lieux que l’on regarde, sont absolument partagés, à tous égards non unis – plus que désunis –, et surtout diffractés au sens où chacun ne voit ni ne regarde la même chose.20

16 17 18

19 20

Giorgio Agamben, What Is an Apparatus? and Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). Christian Biet, “Séance, Performance, Assemblée et Représentation: Les jeux de regards au théâtre (XVIIe–XXIe siècle).” Littératures classiques 82, no. 3 (2013): 79–97. In addition to Biet’s article, see Susan Bennett’s discussion of the “universal experience” and its limits: Susan Bennett, “Universal Experience: The City as Tourist Stage,” in The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies, ed. Tracy C. Davis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 76–90. Thomas Postlewait, “Introduction,” in The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Historiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 12. Biet, “Séance, Performance, Assemblée et Représentation,” 81.

12

Introduction theater, socially and aesthetically, would then be an apparatus (dispositif ) that brings people together, that allows eyes to meet and sometimes focus on a particular point (the stage, the orchestra). It thus has a function which one could say is socially unifying, or unificatory (unificatrice). However, this place from which we see, as well as the places we look at, are absolutely shared, in all respects not united – more than disunited – and above all diffracted in the sense that each person neither sees nor watches the same thing.

The tension between belonging and distance, unification and difference, identification and repulsion that is inherent to any theatrical performance was intensified by the military’s presence. This effect characterized theater events throughout the French empire, and especially in Saint-Domingue, where military tensions were exacerbated by the racial and socioeconomic violence of the colony. The reification of difference, combined with the economic and affective dependences that characterize plantation societies, created a context in which the paradox of necessary closeness to radical otherness was played out in the colony’s theaters. The military’s presence in the island’s theaters, at least in part, complicated attempts to aestheticize or universalize a culture of theatergoing. Soldiers negated the white elite class’s desire to distance local theatrical experiences from the constant social performances of the colony’s anxieties and tensions. The military was asked to keep the peace and enable the aesthetic event. And yet, according to many colonial theater patrons at the time, the very presence of soldiers and sailors in the auditorium prevented any normative aesthetic processes (at least as far as eighteenth-century metropolitan France prescribed) from transpiring.21 The colonial context features prominently in this study as an example of the eighteenth-century military–theatrical complex and as a counterexample to normative and universalist claims about theatrical experience. The dispersive, even menacing, features of the military–theatrical complex were most palpable in a colonial context, but provincial theaters in France were not immune to conflictual performances of military behaviors 21

See Chapter 3 for more information on the relationship between colonists and soldiers in SaintDomingue’s theaters. On the topic of normative experiences and eighteenth-century spectator behavior, I am indebted to Jeffrey Ravel’s scholarship on eighteenth-century parterres. Ravel’s study pulls (mostly Parisian) theatrical experience away from notions of courtly politeness and deferential aesthetic appreciation. I transport several of Ravel’s theses into places of even more tumult and raucous behavior by focusing on soldiers (who constituted just one of many groups in the parterres studied by Ravel). For more information, see Jeffrey S. Ravel, The Contested Parterre: Public Theatre and French Political Culture, 1680–1791 (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1999).

Introduction

13

and anxieties. One goal of this book is to establish alternative models for comparing theater and performance between colonial contexts and metropolitan France. Thanks to recent studies by Laurent Dubois, Lauren Clay, David M. Powers, Bernard Camier, Julia Prest, and others, we no longer need to view colonial theaters as lackluster attempts to replicate Parisian polite society and perceived metropolitan aesthetic norms.22 This research, which is indebted to the Haitian historian Jean Fouchard’s groundbreaking work on Saint-Domingue’s stages, highlights a vibrant theatrical culture with innovative practices such as creole-language performances, dramatic depictions of recent political and military events of local importance, and casts of actors from metropolitan France who sometimes performed alongside mixed-race actors from the colonies.23 My intention is to add to this recent burgeoning of scholarship on theater in colonial Saint-Domingue by showing the military–theatrical complex’s development on the island, its links to colonial political and social apparatuses, and its relationship – both similarities and startling differences – to military–theatrical experiences in metropolitan France. This analysis (mostly in Chapter 3) sets up the last two chapters of my book, where I show a concerted effort during the French Revolution to capitalize on but change fundamentally the Old Regime’s military and theatrical cultures. The pre-1789 military–theatrical complex, especially as it was constructed and deployed in a colonial context, provides a framework to study military–theatrical experiences in the métropole. I follow the flow of soldiers and actors in both directions, from “center” to “periphery” and vice versa, to show new theoretical centers and sources of influence.24 The Old-Regime military–theatrical complex becomes a model to both follow and spurn in French Revolutionary military– theatrical efforts, which sought to ramp up interactions between soldiers and theatrical performances but scale down their more divisive and “othering” features. My work on French Revolutionary-era theater takes on historiographical claims about invention and novelty in drama and theatrical performance in the evolving context of France’s war efforts. I describe several 22 23

24

See Chapter 3 for a review of studies on the colonial theaters of Saint-Domingue. See Jean Fouchard, Le théâtre à Saint-Domingue (Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie de l’État, 1955); see also Jean Fouchard, Artistes et repertoire des scènes de Saint-Domingue (Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie de l’État, 1955). It should be noted, however, that the “flow” of mostly white soldiers and actors differed drastically from the “flow” of Saint-Domingue’s most populous group – enslaved black men and women – the majority of whom (or whose parents or grandparents) were kidnapped in Africa and transported in horrific conditions across the Atlantic.

14

Introduction

continuations of the Old Regime’s military–theatrical complex to show the expansion of dramaturgical processes and performance practices that were already in place before the storming of the Bastille. Post- and pre-1789 dramatic authors deployed military themes in their works, depicted battles and conflicts of national importance, and opened dramatic representation to increasingly diverse swaths of French society. But the main argument here is that there was far more invention and creation than stagnation and respect for tradition in Revolutionary theater, and specifically in performances of military themes, events, and concerns. Many plays performed during the Revolution were indeed written before 1789, yet Old-Regime works were deployed through the evolving lens of the Revolution’s volatile political, social, and military endeavors. While I recognize the merits of scholarly works that ground much of the French Revolution’s theatrical practices in Old-Regime models, I depart from this posture with care and precision when addressing the experience of military dramas in the 1790s.25 New plays, performance practices, and programming techniques added to the redeployment of existing theater. I detail more dramatic works, more characters, more themes, more genres, and more theatrical performances during the 1790s – a particularly bellicose decade when France raised one of the largest armies in history and declared war on most of its neighbors. I widen the eighteenth-century military–theatrical complex to show performances of soldiering before, during, after, and even in opposition to theatrical performances in French auditoriums. I describe the interconnectedness of different performances of military plays and reenactments as well as their role in state politics and in the strategic objectives of France’s armed forces. This analysis shows the reach of military drama and influence into civil society by describing the participation of women and children in the complex. What is ultimately revealed is a national–military phenomenon – a totalizing experience of performances, plays, battles, and martial efforts that attempted to replace virtually all features of civilian life and Old-Regime customs and institutions. I am assisted here by performance theories of reenactment, repetition, and circularity,26 as well as by recent 25

26

The Revolution’s debt to Old-Regime drama is described in Emmet Kennedy, Marie-Laurence Netter, James P. McGregor, and Mark V. Olsen, Theatre, Opera, and Audiences in Revolutionary Paris: Analysis and Repertory (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996). See Chapter 4 for a more complete discussion of innovation and tradition in Revolutionary drama. Chapter 4’s discussion of Revolutionary performances and reenactments follows several key works in Theatre and Performance Studies and in French Revolutionary Theater Studies, including Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2011); Yann Robert, Dramatic Justice: Trial by Theater in the Age of the French Revolution (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018); Raphael Samuel,

Introduction

15

scholarly debates over gender roles during the Revolution and, more specifically, in France’s rapid mobilization for war.27 As in the case of most academic monographs, many readers will choose to tackle this book’s five chapters in order. Chapter 1 starts in the 1760s, and the study concludes in the 1790s with performances of the French military’s unraveling in Saint-Domingue, which became the independent nation of Haiti in 1804. I compare several themes across different contexts, and my arguments build in loosely chronological fashion from implicit military–theatrical overlaps at France’s most storied theatrical venue of the Old Regime, the Comédie-Française, to totalizing performances of wartime concerns and military incursions both inside and outside the theaters of Revolutionary France. Or, readers can choose different paths, depending on their goals and interests. For example, Chapters 1, 2, and 5 focus on plays, and include several close, even genetic readings of dramatic works. Students and scholars of literature might start there, while those interested in the material, political, and social features of military–theatrical performances could begin with Chapters 3 and 4. Readers interested in the Old Regime and its theatrical cultures might dwell on Chapters 1, 2, and 3, whereas those who are interested in Revolutionary studies should focus on Chapters 4 and 5. Specialists of gender history and of the performance of gender norms in drama should find compelling discussions of men and masculinity in

27

Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (London: Verso, 1994); Matthew S. Buckley, Tragedy Walks the Streets: The French Revolution in the Making of Modern Drama (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); Susan Maslan, Revolutionary Acts: Theater, Democracy, and the French Revolution (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); Cecilia Feilla, The Sentimental Theater of the French Revolution (London: Ashgate, 2013); Mechele Leon, Molière, the French Revolution, and the Theatrical Afterlife (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2010); and Thibault Julian, L’Histoire de la France en jeu dans le théâtre des Lumières et de la Révolution (1765–1799) (PhD Diss., Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2016) and Un théâtre pour la nation: L’histoire en scène (1765–1806) (Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 2022). See Chapter 5 for a more complete critical survey. Major titles about war and gender in the 1790s (or with significant sections about the subject) that I follow include Karen Hagemann, Gisela Mettele, and Jane Rendall (eds.), Gender, War and Politics: Transatlantic Perspectives, 1775–1830 (London: Routledge, 2010); Ramsey and Russell (eds.), Tracing War in British Enlightenment and Romantic Culture; Dominique Godineau, The Women of Paris and Their French Revolution (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998); Alan Forrest, Karen Hagemann, and Jane Rendall (eds.), Soldiers, Citizens and Civilians: Experiences and Perceptions of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 1790–1820 (London: Routledge, 2009); Thomas Cardoza, Intrepid Women: Cantinières and Vivandières of the French Army (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010); Laura FournierFinocchiaro (ed.), Les Mères de la Patrie: Représentations et constructions d’une figure nationale (Caen: Cahiers de la MRSH, 2006); Annie K. Smart, Citoyennes: Women and the Ideal of Citizenship in Eighteenth-Century France (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2011); and Jennifer N. Heuer, Family and the Nation: Gender and Citizenship in Revolutionary France, 1789–1830 (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2005).

16

Introduction

Chapter 2 and of women, revolutionary domesticity, and militant feminine violence in Chapter 5. And those interested the field of Theatre and Performance Studies will find a lively discussion of reenactment and repetition in Chapter 4 and an examination of performance apparatus theory in Chapter 3. The following chapter outline should help readers decide on a route. In Chapter 1, I describe theatrical responses to France’s defeat in the Seven Years’ War, often described by historians as the first global war. I provide a close reading of the dramatic text and performance history of de Belloy’s Le Siège de Calais, pitched by its author as France’s “first national tragedy” and used by government officials to rally French subjects around their country and their army. I argue that the play was vital in creating through theater a new relationship between French subjects and the nation’s armed conflicts. De Belloy’s success was predicated on his manipulation of new forms of “bourgeois” and “sentimental” drama, and the play went on to inspire more soldier plays and war dramas. The chapter concludes with an examination of the tragedy’s reverberations throughout the French empire by way of parodies and public readings of Le Siège de Calais in fairground theaters and military garrisons. Chapter 2 brings to light a dozen desertion-themed plays and operas that followed in the wake of Le Siège de Calais. I analyze these works, which were performed during the Old Regime’s twilight, alongside recent scholarship on military and early modern masculinities to tease out the theatricalization of an emerging martial culture that drew on emotional brotherhood and feminine exclusion. I perform a comparative analysis on two versions of one play, Le Déserteur, the sentimental anti-war drame by Mercier, mentioned above, and the alternative version that was dramaturgically “militarized” by Joseph Patrat for soldiers and sailors at the navy’s theater in Brest. A close reading of variants, edits, and both textual and cultural manipulation presents war drama as a site of conflict in a larger intellectual battle where different factions in French society argued about reform cultures inside military and theatrical circles. Chapter 3 moves from an examination of plays depicting soldiering, civilian–military interactions, and desertion to a critical reconstitution of pre-revolutionary military performance contexts. First, I describe the development and operations of the Théâtre de la Marine in Brest, the only public theater that was built and financed by France’s war administration and where Patrat’s manipulated version of Mercier’s Le Déserteur made its metropolitan French debut. The chapter’s second part focuses on the Comédie in Cap-Français (now Cap-Haïtien), the largest and most

Introduction

17

frequented theater in the colonial Caribbean. In addition to describing the military, racial, and gendered features of theatrical life in Saint-Domingue, I connect Cap-Français’ Comédie, which was built in 1764 and which catered in part to the city’s large soldier population, to a network of militaryinfused theaters in French provincial cities such as Metz, Besançon, and Brest. In Chapter 4, I combine my analysis of war dramas with military performance contexts to uncover strategies of totality, repetition, and reenactment in battle “event” plays from the French Revolution. The 1790s witnessed, according to some historians, the first “total war” and a deadly proliferation of both battles and casualties, especially after France raised a citizen army in 1793 of over 800,000 soldiers – one of the largest the world had ever seen. The Revolutionary (then Napoleonic) wars were not only massive in size but different in form and intensity. The Revolution was rife with military-themed drama, and this chapter highlights its war plays and performances, and their relations to the country’s evolving military goals and tensions. A corpus of approximately 110 dramatic and musical plays reveals stark differences between the Revolution’s war theater and its Old-Regime equivalent. I propose new ways to describe and critically evaluate war theater, which often depicted recent military endeavors with documentary-inspired precision and an anxious totality of emotionally engaging performance strategies. Chapter 5 shifts from male soldiers and issues of masculinity to the role of women in military plays. I describe the multiple and overlapping roles of women in the military–theatrical endeavor, and I avoid traditional historiographic gestures such as contrasting active (male) citizenship with passive (female) domesticity. This chapter continues an examination of totalizing processes in Revolutionary-era theatricalized conflict by including French citoyennes in the military–theatrical endeavor. I interrogate here three main categories for women and war in 1790s drama: female soldier (femmes-soldats; filles-soldats) plays, works about vivandières and cantinières (women providing service roles to combat units), and plays about what I call the Revolution’s “militarized domestic sphere,” a wartime home front where armed conflict created specific forms of violent domesticity. With particular attention to military plays penned by women about their fellow citoyennes, as well as to recent feminist scholarship on French Revolutionary women and war, I explore a dramaturgical practice whereby women sought to reimagine citizenship after efforts to assert their rights in the Revolution’s political sphere ran asunder.

18

Introduction

Finally, in the conclusion, I return to Saint-Domingue, which by the 1790s was rife with Jacobin sentiment, rebellions of enslaved black laborers and free people of color, and intra-military disaccord. I provide several short case studies of soldier violence and political action, and I introduce several limitations of, and conclusions about, the eighteenth-century military–theatrical complex. Unlike the expansive national–military theatrical phenomenon in metropolitan France, the continued commitment to inequality and segregation in Saint-Domingue led to the disintegration of its white-centric theatrical institutions and practices – an important step in what would become the Haitian Revolution. In this book’s epigraph, Jacques Rancière prescribes a type of performance event that abolishes “exteriority” and “difference.” This study articulates how Rancière’s goal for performance was shared by eighteenth-century subjects-then-citizens with a startling (and problematic) desire for war, violence, and geopolitical expansion. What follows is a selection of case studies, critical readings, and descriptions of performance contexts in which spectators engaged with the French military and its wars. The geographical diversity and the different themes explored in this study should not hide its central argument: French theater and military cultures shared discourses, processes, and procedures during a profound moment of change to both institutions. Military–theatrical experiences culminated in number and complexity during the 1790s, as evidenced by the totality of strategies connecting the military to theater and performance that were deployed by the Revolution’s theater artists, military administrators, and political operatives. In the age of the French Revolution, France moved from a series of skirmishes involving theater, soldiers, civilians, and war to a totalizing experience of armed conflict, politics, and performance. The experience of military theater was attractive to many spectators and novel in its dramaturgical and performative features. From today’s perspective, war theater is disconcerting evidence of the strategies and feelings that promoted nationalistic policies and practices. With war’s grisly persistence and the return of violent nativism to the global stage, the following story of one country’s quest to build community by celebrating conflict might not strike us as distant enough.

chapter 1

From tragédie nationale to pièce militaire: Pierre-Laurent de Belloy’s Le Siège de Calais

The first performance of Le Siège de Calais, France’s putative “première tragédie nationale,” prompted this reaction from the philosophe and literary critic Melchior Grimm:1 Un orage imprévu éclate presque aussitôt qu’il se forme: une catastrophe subite porte la combustion dans le parterre, dans les loges, dans la salle entière; et, après avoir fait lever brusquement le Siège de Calais, ce feu se répand en dehors de proche en proche avec la même rapidité, se glisse dans tous les cercles, gagne tous les soupers, et communique à tous les esprits une chaleur qui produit un incendie universel: tel, au dire des poètes auvergnats et limousins, le nocher, trompé par un calme profond, se trouve assailli par la tempête sans même en avoir soupçonné les approches.2 An unforeseen storm blows almost as soon as it forms: a sudden catastrophe brings combustion to the pit, to the boxes, to the entire auditorium; and, after having caused the Siege of Calais to be raised abruptly, this fire spreads outside step by step with the same rapidity, slips into all the circles, wins over all the suppers, and communicates to all minds a warmth which produces a universal fire: so that, according to the poets of Auvergne and Limousin, the boatman, deceived by a deep calm, finds himself assailed by the storm without even having suspected its approach.

Le Siège de Calais, Pierre-Laurent de Belloy’s tragedy about French bravery in the Hundred Years’ War, rolled into Paris like a gale. Le Siège de Calais was a hit on the stage and among readers of the print version, published just weeks after the February 1765 premiere. Elie-Catherine Fréron, the counter-Enlightenment enemy of Voltaire and editor of the Année littéraire, 1

2

A section of this chapter draws from the introduction to my critical edition of de Belloy’s Le Siège de Calais. I thank Simon Davies and the editorial staff at the Modern Humanities Research Association for granting me permission to reuse parts of that introduction here. See Logan J. Connors, “Introduction,” in Le Siège de Calaisby Pierre-Laurent de Belloy (London: MHRA, 2014), 1–60. All quotations from de Belloy’s play are from this edition. Melchior Grimm, Denis Diderot, Jacques-Henri Meister et al., Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique, vol. vi (March 1765) (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1878), 256.

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20

From tragédie nationale to pièce militaire

praised the play as “unique dans les fastes du théâtre” (singular in the theater’s history), and attested that “jamais tragédie n’a excité dans la nation un enthousiasme aussi vif” (never has a tragedy excited in the nation such a vivid enthusiasm).3 Even intellectual enemies like Grimm and Fréron could agree that de Belloy’s Le Siège de Calais was an unprecedented public event. De Belloy’s play was soon performed all over France and Europe, from Bordeaux to Nancy and from Vienna to Maastricht. It was the first play to be printed in a French colony (Saint-Domingue), and it earned its author the médaille royale for dramatists – a prize that Louis XV created for de Belloy and that nobody ever won thereafter. Appearing two years after the Seven Years’ War with Great Britain, Prussia, and other European foes and representing many important socioeconomic, geopolitical, and dramatic tensions of the time, Le Siège de Calais marks a confluence of art and national military concerns that energized spectators, altered critical discourses, and sought to reassess the role of both theater and wartime service in society. Le Siège de Calais was a popular multimedia event. The play-text subjected spectators and readers to various, and at times contradictory, strands of French patriotism – a term to which we will return and that remains a subject of rich debate.4 This chapter describes Le Siège de Calais as a cultural phenomenon with social and political goals that were reinforced by free performances, group readings in military barracks, mission-focused parodies, and government interventions. Not just one successful play among others in eighteenth-century France, de Belloy’s tragedy was a force of media management, military–artistic programming, and propaganda. Close analysis of the play, its deployment in provincial and colonial spaces, its links to France’s evolving military apparatus, and its contested reception in eighteenth-century elite circles indicates that de Belloy’s historical tragedy was a categorically different phenomenon when compared with previous “nationally themed” plays. The strategies and themes deployed by de Belloy and by government officials served as a 3 4

Clarence Brenner, Histoire nationale dans la tragédie française du XVIIIe siècle (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1929), 260. John Shovlin writes that some writers “believed patriotism would counter what they perceived as the increasing despotism of the monarchy. Monarchists, meanwhile, hoped to harness patriotism to increase the popularity of the Crown. Many commentators believed that society had been corrupted by an excessive interest in wealth and that patriotism would reverse this troubling development. With such stakes attached to it, by the 1760s patriotism had become a powerful legitimating category of French politics.” John Shovlin, The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism, and the Origins of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2006), 5.

A Medieval Conflict Play in Post-war France

21

script for future interactions among dramatic literature, theatrical performance venues, and the French military. The insights that can be gained from the play are earned not only from the dramatic script but also from a host of ancillary texts and experiences: the dozens of letters, parodies, critiques, eyewitness reports, and pamphlets, as well as readings, ceremonies, and events that helped create, disseminate, and even fictionalize the work’s bruit public. This corpus of para-texts and paraperformances was a vital component of de Belloy’s theatrical success and legacy. The deployment and aftermath of the play previewed military– theatrical relationships of the French Revolution and set the stage for a series of overlaps between military and theatrical cultures immediately following de Belloy’s success.

A Medieval Conflict Play in Post-war France According to de Belloy’s biographer, Gabriel-Henri Gaillard, Le Siège de Calais originated in a conversation between the author and EmmanuelFélicité de Durfort, the duc de Duras, a military hero who served Louis XV in campaigns across Italy, Flanders, Bavaria, and elsewhere.5 The duc de Duras, who would later receive the prestigious military honor of Maréchal de France, was a Premier Gentilhomme de la chambre du Roi and the Director of the Comédie-Française in the 1760s. De Belloy began work on Le Siège de Calais in 1763, soon after the end of the Seven Years’ War and the signing of the Treaty of Paris, which transferred large territories of France’s colonial empire to Britain and Spain. Le Siège de Calais was finished in autumn 1764, in the wake of this defeat and during a crucial moment of introspection. As John Shovlin writes, “the [Seven Years’] war stirred the loyalties and national sentiments of French elites” and “patriotic feeling, which had ebbed and flowed in cultural importance over the previous half century, flowered during the hostilities so that by the end of the war patriotism had become a leading feature of public life.”6 Perhaps nobody recognized this cultural change and sought to capitalize on it more than de Belloy. Le Siège de Calais effectively changed his personal and theatrical trajectories, and supposedly, from that point on, “M. de Belloy se consacra, par goût et par reconnaissance, aux sujets Français [. . .] il regardait les Français comme 5 6

Gabriel-Henri Gaillard, “Vie de M. de Belloy, écrite par un homme de lettres, son ami,” in Pierre de Belloy, Œuvres complètes, vol. i (Paris: Moutard, 1779), 31–3. Shovlin, The Political Economy of Virtue, 49.

22

From tragédie nationale to pièce militaire

incontestablement supérieurs à tous les autres peuples”7 (Mr. de Belloy consecrated himself, in taste and in recognition, to French subjects [. . .] he viewed the French as uncontestably superior to all other people). Le Siège de Calais presents the bombardment and subsequent occupation of Calais by the English King Edward III and his army during the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453). By imparting a story of English aggression, de Belloy hoped to connect with audience members who, in 1765, had just witnessed their own share of ill feelings toward the English. The author’s vision of patriotism tapped into the post-war consciousness by representing a new bourgeois intellectual agency, an emotional family-based intrigue, and a defense of the French military and ruling monarchy, which was nervous about its recent defeat and eager to reaffirm the legal underpinnings of its sovereignty through the Salic Law.8 Act one opens with a description of Calais, the often-contested city in northern France. Edward and his English forces have brought the city to its knees after six months of bombardment and starvation. Despite local efforts, Calais is in a desperate state, and its inhabitants are ready to surrender. Early in the play, Eustache Saint-Pierre, the city’s bourgeois mayor, oscillates between what he views as a natural, French patriotic instinct, his “vive flamme” (bright flame) for the country, and his anguish at having a son lost in battle and feared dead.9 Visibly affected at the end of the first scene, Saint-Pierre hesitates between his desire to surrender to Edward’s forces and a drive urging him to fight. Several characters confirm that they last saw Saint-Pierre’s son, Aurèle, wounded on the battlefield. Saint-Pierre assumes the worst and thinks his son is dead. At this point in the play, de Belloy presents an emotional dilemma between patriotism and familial love. At first, it seems as if the author polarizes patriotism and family sentiment by showing that defending the country often comes at the expense of the demise of one’s family. But, toward the end of the first act, de Belloy changes gears by combining the two motivations. Choosing patriotism as a means of mitigating grief, Saint-Pierre unites, rather than separates, his personal and public goals. This psychological process combines private family obligations with France’s public policy into a difficult sublimation that de Belloy hoped would strike a chord with spectators and readers who had recently faced their own wartime sacrifices. 7 8 9

Gaillard, “Vie de M. de Belloy,” 40. The Salic Law refers to the Frankish rules for agnatic royal ascension that prevented women and unrecognized male children from taking the throne. De Belloy, Le Siège de Calais, 1.1, 76.

A Medieval Conflict Play in Post-war France

23

As the play progresses, the spectator learns that the comte de Vienne’s French forces – a last bastion of support against Edward – have been beaten on the battlefield. Aliénor, Vienne’s daughter, arrives in Act one, scene three with news that Saint-Pierre’s son is indeed alive, but that Edward is ready to burn Calais to the ground unless the city’s elected leaders – SaintPierre and his cohort – swear their allegiance to the English crown.10 Aliénor, Aurèle, Amblétuse (Saint-Pierre’s rustic associate), and the other bourgeois calaisiens debate whether they should surrender to Edward. Significantly outnumbered and faced with a city on the verge of destruction, Saint-Pierre concedes.11 The English monarch accepts, but with one condition: that Saint-Pierre and his staff agree to walk the gallows as punishment for all the citizens’ insolence. Now the fates of Calais and Saint-Pierre are united. Act two presents Harcourt, a French noble who has decided to fight alongside Edward instead of with his countrymen. But, after hearing that he was responsible for his own brother’s death and learning about the Calaisians’ bravery in the face of defeat, Harcourt changes course with the following declaration: “plus je vis d’étrangers, plus j’aimai ma patrie”12 (the more I see foreigners, the more I love my fatherland). Harcourt’s reversal comes too late: Saint-Pierre and the other bourgeois dismiss him as a traitor, and Aliénor, whom he had been destined to marry, repudiates him. Adding a layer of complexity to his tragedy, de Belloy refuses to always contrast good French characters with supposedly “evil” English counterparts. The author draws a distinction between Harcourt, a local French traitor of noble birth, and Mauni, a reasonable and compassionate English general with a kind streak for Calais. Mauni cannot help but shed tears when Amblétuse exclaims: “Ce n’est point à mourir que la gloire convie,/ C’est à rendre sa mort utile à sa patrie”13 (It is not at death that glory is bestowed,/ It comes at rendering one’s life useful to the country). For the first time in the play, Mauni questions his monarch’s punishment of SaintPierre and his cohort. The English soldier pleads with his new Calaisian friends to renounce their overt support of Philippe de Valois, the French monarch. But the citizens of Calais are resolute; Act two concludes with a patriotic compact between Aliénor, Saint-Pierre, and the rest of the group that they will not save themselves if it means rebuking France and its Salic law of royal ascension, which, in prohibiting matrilineal succession, 10

Ibid., 1.1, 77–79.

11

Ibid., 1.6, 85.

12

Ibid., 2.3, 89.

13

Ibid., 2.5, 94.

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From tragédie nationale to pièce militaire

means that Edward has no legitimate grounds for claiming the French throne (2.5).14 In Act three, the audience finally meets the English monarch. Here, de Belloy’s strand of emotionally charged and egalitarian patriotism comes to light. Aurèle and Saint-Pierre speak defiantly to the king after Edward claims legitimacy for the French crown: É DOUARD: Perfides! Qui longtemps illustrés par vos crimes, Outragiez le vainqueur et le roi des Français . . . AURÈ LE: l’interrompant. Vous leur roi? SAINT-PIERRE, àson fils: 15 Titre vain, sans l’aveu des sujets! É DOUARD: Traitors! Who, for long have been painted by your crimes, Offend the winner and the King of the French . . . AURÈ LE, interrupting: You, their king? SAINT-PIERRE, to his son: A vain title, without the oath of the people!

Edward may have won a military victory, but he fails to convince Calais’ citizens that he is their sovereign. To Edward’s long tirades on the history of the Plantagenet family, his family’s claim to the throne, or the legality of earning political sovereignty through military spoils, Saint-Pierre and his group remain defiant. The last few scenes of Act three present a desperate English monarch when Edward attempts to either threaten or bribe Saint-Pierre and Aliénor with instant death or worldly riches. Exasperated, Edward exclaims: “Qui peut d’un droit si saint me priver désormais?/ Quel autre doit régner sur la France?” (With such a holy right, who can now refuse me?/ Who else should reign over France?). The answer for the other characters is clear; Aliénor responds, “Un Français.”16 Edward calls for their imprisonment and declares that they shall hang at dawn. Act four takes place in the Calais 14

15

Edward’s “legitimacy” argument hinges on the debate over his ancestor, Eleanor of Aquitaine. Eleanor served as queen of both England and France. Edward issued from the Plantagenet family, Eleanor’s “English” family, and thought this granted him sovereignty over the French land. The Calaisians, defending the Salic Law, view that claim as illegitimate. De Belloy, Le Siège de Calais, 3.3, 101. 16 Ibid., 3.4, 107.

A Medieval Conflict Play in Post-war France

25

jail where Saint-Pierre and his municipal staff await their punishment. The general Mauni watches over the prisoners, and, in an emotional scene (4.2), he and Saint-Pierre trade conciliatory remarks – a strategy that perhaps shadowed the French government’s wish to bolster domestic sentiments of patriotism while at the same time reconciling with England. Saint-Pierre exclaims that the English and the French were never truly enemies, but mere “rivals” and that both nations consist of “magnanimous people.”17 De Belloy presents authentic international bonds as possible among soldiers and more modest officials, rather than between monarchs and nobles. At the end of the Act, Mauni once again doubts Edward’s harsh punishment, and again shares tears with the French prisoners (4.6). The act, however, ends on a grim note after the Calaisians refuse the traitor Harcourt’s offer to secretly free them from Edward’s prison (4.7). In Act five, Edward tries one last time to convince Saint-Pierre that preserving the lives of oneself and one’s family is more important than patriotic ideals. Saint-Pierre responds by calling into question Edward’s character: “Vous me forcez, Seigneur, d’être plus grand que vous”18 (You are forcing me, lord, to be better than you). Furious, Edward is about to send the bourgeois to the gallows, when Valois’ emissary arrives to announce that the French king is ready to dispute Edward on the battlefield if he lets the Calaisians go in peace. At a moment when one might believe that the immediate familial conflict is resolved and that peace is restored in Calais, military history intrudes on fiction. It would be disastrous for the French monarch to face Edward on the battlefield, for he was significantly outnumbered following defeats at Caen, Blanchetaque, and Crecy.19 The French general Melun arrives in scene four to state that Philippe’s sacrifice would be too great and that the French people will not let their monarch take such a dire risk. This conclusion, however, was discerned by Saint-Pierre and his cohort even before Melun’s entrance, and the bourgeois await their death despite the rejoicing around them. In the last moments of his play, de Belloy’s characters show an unyielding commitment to the Valois dynasty, matched by a sentimental devotion to their friends and family. Aurèle, Saint-Pierre’s son and a military hero, throws himself at Edward’s feet, begging the king to kill him first so that he does not have to watch his father die. All the characters immediately burst into tears and after witnessing this tableau, Edward is overwhelmed by the 17 19

Ibid., 4.2, 115. 18 Ibid., 5.2, 129. For more information on the sequence of battles in the Hundred Years’ War, see Anne Curry, Essential Histories: The Hundred Years’ War 1337–1453 (Oxford: Osprey, 2002).

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From tragédie nationale to pièce militaire

bourgeois’ commitment to their patrie as well as to their friends and family. He abandons the harsh punishment as well as his legal claim to the French throne: É DOUARD: Un peuple si fidèle est un peuple indomptable. Lorsque sur les Français je prétendis régner, Je cherchais leur amour, que j’espérais gagner; Mais il faudrait les vaincre en tyran sanguinaire. S’il n’est un don des cœurs, le sceptre peut-il plaire? Je renonce à leur trône.20 É DOUARD: A people so loyal are an indomitable people. When I tried to reign over the French, I went looking for their love, which I hoped to win; But as a bloody tyrant they must be convinced. If it is not by a generous heart, can the scepter please them? I renounce their throne.

Edward frees Saint-Pierre and his council but learns something from his experience in Calais. Although there is cause for rejoicing at the end of the play, any happiness is offset by the fact that Edward and the English are now in control of the city. Calais was a major military defeat, one that would hinder French diplomatic and military aspirations for centuries. Political aspirations cede to a matter-of-fact military logic as Edward wonders whether, now that persuasion and bribery have failed, “le sceptre peut-il plaire?” Sentimental and patriotic, tragic and uplifting, grounded in historical fact yet with pure inventions added by the author, Le Siège de Calais avoids facile theatrical and intellectual divisions and earned significant success upon its debut at the Comédie-Française. Le Siège de Calais was not a typical eighteenth-century theater production. De Belloy did not write a script, submit it to the actors at France’s storied stage, and enjoy his premiere – the traditional route for productions at the Comédie-Française. The first performance of de Belloy’s play was a carefully orchestrated event involving military authorities, government intervention, rumors of paid spectators, and partisan critics. Several of the tragedy’s central themes and strategies – the military heroism of bourgeois characters, the representation of French battles with historical accuracy, and the creation of a masculine militarized space of sentimental 20

De Belloy, Le Siège de Calais, 5.7, 138.

“Un événement remarquable”

27

bonding – provided a blueprint for military drama in France during the late Old-Regime and Revolutionary periods. More analysis of the dramatic text and the successful performance run of Le Siège de Calais show an increasingly salient and attractive relationship between the French armed forces and theatrical institutions at a crucial juncture in the history of an emerging nation.

“Un événement remarquable”: The Premiere of Le Siège de Calais After France’s wartime woes, members of the military elite were concerned that the “nation n’a plus l’esprit militaire” (the nation no longer has a military spirit).21 The dour geopolitical situation after the Treaty of Paris was supposedly the reason why Duras asked de Belloy to remedy the country with an inspiring and patriotic play. The crown’s possible intervention in the staging of Le Siège de Calais was not the first time that associates close to the king had meddled in theatrical affairs. In 1763, the duc de Choiseul, France’s War Secretary, commissioned Charles-Simon Favart to write L’Anglais à Bordeaux to commemorate the end of the conflict with Britain.22 And, as I describe in detail in Chapter 3, it was again Choiseul who played a heavy hand in the establishment and subsequent financing of the navy’s theater in Brest, where military officers were required to attend performances, starting in 1766. The performance history of Le Siège de Calais began in controversy. It was not the only play about the Hundred Years’ War to appear in 1765. Choiseul influenced the premiere of Le Siège de Calais by preventing a rival play, Firmin (or Farmian) de Rosoi’s Décius français, a somber tragedy about the French defeat in Calais, from appearing on the same stage.23 Choiseul wrote several letters in the winter of 1764–1765 to François-Louis Marin, the official censor, and Joseph d’Héméry, the police inspector. In his correspondence, Choiseul criticizes de Rosoi’s Décius français and 21

22

23

“Letter from the comte de Saint-Germain to Joseph Pâris Duverney,” in Margaret M. Moffat, “‘Le Siège de Calais’ et l’opinion publique en 1765,” Revue d’Histoire littéraire de la France 39, no. 3 (1932), 347. For more information on the relationship between the Seven Years’ War and Favart’s play, see Beatrijs Vanacker, Altérité et identité dans les “histoires anglaises” au XVIIIe siècle: Contexte(s), réception et discours (Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2016), 28–35. See Gregory Brown, “Reconsidering the Censorship of Writers in Eighteenth-Century France: Civility, State Power, and the Public Theatre in the Enlightenment,” The Journal of Modern History 75, no. 2 (2003): 235–68. See also Barnabé Farmian (or Firmin) de Rosoi, Le Décius français, ou le Siège de Calais sous Philippe VI, par M. de Rozoi (Paris: Cuissart, 1767).

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praises the uplifting final Act of de Belloy’s Le Siège de Calais,24 which had, at Choiseul’s urging, been read aloud in its nascent forms at military bases around France.25 Gregory Brown argues that the Foreign Minister went so far as to persuade the actors at the Comédie-Française to alter the dates of when each play was received for its official reading.26 By changing the arrival date of Le Siège de Calais to before Décius’ date, the actors could justify performing de Belloy’s play before de Rosoi’s. The author of Décius français was furious about the intervention. De Rosoi quickly published a series of letters proclaiming himself the victim of a conspiracy by Choiseul, Duras, and other members of the First Gentlemen of the Chamber. Then, de Rosoi added fuel to the fire by publishing two illegal editions of Décius, even altering the title to his second version, calling it Décius français, ou le Siège de Calais.27 The government intervened, and the censor, Marin, was asked to decide which Calais-based tragedy warranted a performance at the Comédie-Française. After receiving a flurry of letters from Choiseul, the First Gentlemen, military commanders, and other supporters of de Belloy’s (more optimistic, pro-military, and patriotic) play, Marin ruled in favor of Le Siège de Calais sometime during the first week of February 1765. Marin’s directive was clear: de Belloy’s tragedy was slated for performance and the police inspector d’Héméry was ordered to destroy copies of Décius and throw de Rosoi in prison for insubordination.28 By the 1760s, the military was desperate to stage an uplifting example of French patriotism and support for its armed forces. 24

25 26

27 28

De Rosoi’s Décius is less “political” and “patriotic” than de Belloy’s Siège. In Le Décius, de Rosoi represents an estranged relationship between Saint-Pierre and his wife (Julie), who is condemned to die for allegedly having a secret relationship with Talbot, an English General. Talbot, not King Edward III, is the author of the treacherous plan to hang Calais’ bourgeois citizens. In the play, the Calaisians’ punishment is presented more like a lover’s revenge than as a legitimate penalty for political insubordination. Brown, “Reconsidering the Censorship of Writers,” 252; see also the analysis in Anne Boës, La lanterne magique de l’histoire (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1982), 93–102. The precise date when the actors received de Belloy’s Le Siège de Calais remains unknown. However, de Rosoi’s play was sent in autumn 1762, well before de Belloy would have started working on his tragedy. Brown argues that “a second entry in the theatre’s register records that Siege de Calais had been ‘received’ on June 11, 1762. This second entry follows other entries in the same register dated from January 1765, suggesting that this second register entry, the fictive date for the reception of Belloy’s play, was added just before the premiere.” This strategy made it appear that de Belloy’s Siège was sent and accepted before de Rosoi’s Decius. For more information, see the registers at the Comédie-Française: for the reception of Belloy’s play, see Bibliothèque de la Comédie-Française (BC-F)-124a, f. 66; for the reception of de Rosoi’s play, see BC-F-124a, f. 10; the second, backdated (fictive) entry for Belloy’s play is in BC-F-124–1, f. 86. For analysis, see Brown, “Reconsidering the Censorship,” 251–52. Brown, “Reconsidering the Censorship,” 252. The police reports are in the BNF-Arsenal: AB 10303, f. 333 (February 5–7, 1765) and BNF-Arsenal: AB 12386 (February 15, 1765). For analysis, see Brown, “Reconsidering the Censorship,” 253.

“Un événement remarquable”

29

Despite the meddling of military leaders and government officials, de Belloy’s tragedy was not an example of propaganda forced down the throats of reluctant spectators and critics. As Clare Siviter argues in her work on tragic drama under Napoleon, censorship was often “lateral,” meaning, that it was not always top-down and it originated from multiple and competing forces, including auto-censorship, the opinions of actors, or other entities besides the government.29 The case of Le Siège de Calais, like many examples of tragedies with strong connections to the political establishment, reveals a murky path from conception to performance. The play’s appearance and reception were not devoid of governmental persuasion and influence, yet the tragedy’s triumph was not totally manufactured. The relationship between top-down pressure and genuine public acceptance is central to the play’s initial éclat and subsequent success. For critics, the arrival of Le Siège de Calais required a new lexicon. The play’s premiere and its aftermath had become a state affair, and reviews of Le Siège de Calais reflected a change of tone. Owing to what was now a combination of military–governmental and public support, harsh criticism and even level-headed judgment of the play were viewed as risky endeavors. The critic Manson warned other writers that, in February 1765, “Le Siège de Calais étant devenu, pour ainsi dire, une affaire d’État, il serait dangereux d’en oser dire autre chose que du bien”30 (The Siège de Calais having become, one could say, a State affair, it would be dangerous to dare mention it without praise). And the authors of the Mémoires secrets argued that “le fanatisme gagne au point que les connaisseurs n’osent plus dire leur avis. On est réputé mauvais patriote, pour oser élever la voix”31 (fanaticism is taking over to the point that learned people do not dare give their opinion. One is deemed a bad patriot for daring to raise one’s voice). Critics at the Mercure de France focus more on the atmosphere surrounding the play than on Le Siège de Calais itself: Non seulement les places qui peuvent être retenues le sont jusqu’à la clôture du théâtre; les autres sont remplies de si bonne heure, et avec tant de foule, qu’il y a chaque jour des flots du public dans la rue de la Comédie, comme au parterre dans les plus nombreuses assemblées. Cette nouvelle production de M. de Belloy lui fait d’autant plus d’honneur, que la Nation semble l’avoir adoptée pour sa propre gloire.32 29 30 31 32

Clare Siviter, Tragedy and Nation in the Age of Napoleon (Liverpool: Oxford Studies in the Enlightenment and Liverpool University Press, 2020), 102–9. Manson, Examen impartial du Siège de Calais, poème dramatique de M. de Belloy (Calais: Saintmour, 1765), 11. Les Mémoires secrets, February, 1765 (Paris: Garnier, 1874), 135. Mercure de France, March 1765 (Paris: Duchesne, 1765), 160.

30

From tragédie nationale to pièce militaire Not only are all the seats that can be booked in advance taken until the theater’s closing; the others are filled so early and with such a big crowd that, each day, there are waves of people in the street near the theater, like in the pit of the biggest auditoriums. Mr. de Belloy’s new production is giving him so much attention that the Nation seems to have adopted him for its own glory.

Then, after providing a long excerpt from the fifth act (and after apologizing to readers for not including a copy of the entire play in their review), the writers at the Mercure assert that “après la neuvième représentation, le succès est égal à celui de la première”33 (after the ninth performance, the success is equal to that of the first). The tragedy was a predictable hit among government officials, including members of the royal family. Upon seeing the work, Louis XV ordered Le Siège de Calais to be performed at the Comédie-Française on March 12 at the crown’s expense. According to the Mémoires secrets, this performance was an energetic public showing of patriotism, but with overtones of governmental support.34 Owing to the play’s unique public response, writers were quick to focus on the reception – the bruit and éclat – but slow to comment on plot, character composition, and versification. As soon as the initial burst of energy subsided, however, Parisian critics resurfaced with more sobering opinions of Le Siège de Calais. De Belloy’s dazzling rise to fame was rapid, but increasingly contested, as the energetic atmosphere at the theater subsided and print copies of the play circulated around Paris and the provinces. My analysis of the Revolution’s military theater in Chapter 4 will reveal a similar hesitation by critics to query, at least initially, the poetic merits and aesthetic features of popular patriotic plays, and particularly works depicting cataclysmic battles and wartime concerns. Military-themed theatrical performances pushed journalists and critics outside of their comfort zones and signaled that there was something off-limits to their discerning gaze. Government support of military themes, when combined with a positive response among spectators, detached this type of theatrical production from a purely aesthetic milieu and projected the dramatic arts onto the national political stage in a way that made many critics uncomfortable and incapable of using traditional techniques and vocabularies. The critical establishment eventually would reassert its right to judge Le Siège de Calais. The philosophes Denis Diderot and Grimm saw in Le Siège de Calais less of a patriotic tragedy and more of a continuation of simplistic 33

Ibid., 211.

34

See Les Mémoires secrets, March 1765, 138.

“Un événement remarquable”

31

antagonism, bad writing, and counter-Enlightenment slandering from the previous decade. De Belloy, they argued, had rehashed themes from anti-philosophe works that harped on “enlightened” opinions of anticlericalism, internationalism, and anglophilia.35 In his critique of Le Siège de Calais, Diderot mixes his disdain for de Belloy’s play with broader complaints about contemporary drama, and he attacks the author’s character compositions and dialogues:36 “L’un des principaux défauts de cette pièce” (one of the principal faults of this play), he writes, is that “les personnages, au lieu de dire ce qu’ils doivent dire, disent presque toujours ce que leurs discours et leurs actions devraient me faire penser et sentir, et ce sont deux choses bien différentes”37 (the characters, instead of saying what they ought to say, almost always say that which their speeches and their actions should make me think and feel, and those are two very different things). Diderot, in perhaps the first close analysis of the tragedy’s aesthetic or intellectual merits, criticizes de Belloy for his facile, emotive scenes. According to the philosophe, de Belloy’s characters are too obvious, two-dimensional, and transparent; Le Siège de Calais speaks for spectators instead of letting them work through the complexities of art and life on their own. For Diderot, de Belloy’s tragedy is a mere example of opportunism – an overzealous representation of French fear pitched at the right time and at the right place. Whatever one’s opinion of Le Siège de Calais, de Belloy’s meteoric rise after 1765 is indisputable. Soon after his February premiere, de Belloy emerged as a star in French political, literary, and artistic milieus. He received invitations to balls and parties in Paris and the provinces, and the ways by which the play resurfaced in diverse forms and references were testimony to its novelty. Despite several fears that the play would lose some of its luster in print form, Le Siège de Calais was published in March with praise from several literary journals and personalities.38 It was then 35

36

37 38

For more information on the pamphlet wars between philosophes and anti-philosophes, consult Olivier Ferret, La Fureur de nuire: Échanges pamphlétaires entre philosophes et anti-philosophes (1750–1770) (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2007) and Didier Masseau, Les ennemis des philosophes (Paris: Albin Michel, 2000); on the theatrical arm of this debate, see Logan J. Connors, Dramatic Battles in Eighteenth-Century France: Philosophes, Anti-philosophes and Polemical Theatre (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2012). For example, Diderot argues that de Belloy rehashes anti-philosophe themes and tropes from Charles Palissot’s comedy Les Philosophes (1760). See “Lettre de M. Diderot,” in Melchior Grimm, Denis Diderot, Jacques-Henri Meister et al., Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique, vol. vi (1765) (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1878), April 1, 1765, 243. Ibid., 241. For example, Voltaire wrote to de Belloy on March 6, 1765, congratulating him on his success and encouraging de Belloy to enjoy “votre bonheur, et de votre mérite” (enjoy your happiness, and from

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published several more times and, eventually, it appeared in well-circulated anthologies of dramatic literature. The play was a successful blend of current events, popular sentiments, and governmental intervention in the arts. De Belloy’s tragedy was a community-building experience that placed military themes into concert with theatrical practices. The author and his efforts set the stage for future productions that sought to establish identificatory bonds between French subjects of increasingly modest origins and the nation’s armed endeavors. Le Siège de Calais proves that dramatic depiction of conflict in the 1760s included a new theatrical experience grounded just as much in current events and national concerns as in the artistic patrimony supposedly inherited from antiquity through the aesthetic models of Grand Siècle tragedy.

National Themes with Military Appeal Le Siège de Calais is not exactly a war play. It is different in scope from the more explicit theatrical depictions of battles, sieges, and war ravages of the French Revolution. De Belloy’s play focuses on the aftermath of military action and details the political and emotional threads of a supposedly medieval French patriotism that was transformed through theatrical performance to engage with a related moment of war and suffering in the 1760s. The author represents or alludes to some of the most grueling scenes from the Hundred Years’ War: the English landing on the Cotentin peninsula, the catastrophic French loss at Crécy, the bombardment of Calais, the imprisonment of its municipal leaders, and the eventual fall of the city to English forces in 1347. The version of history that de Belloy communicates is based on Jean de Froissart’s Chroniques, a source that de Belloy acknowledges by publishing passages from Froissart’s text in the “Anecdotes historiques” which accompanied one of the first printed versions of the tragedy. By offering a blend of historical accuracy, contemporary relevance, and poetic invention, de Belloy constructs a dramatic work with a unique interpretation of history reworked for the political goals of his day. At the heart of de Belloy’s dramaturgy is the use of a French setting. By locating the plot in France and by representing the military and political your achievements). See Voltaire to Pierre-Laurent Buirette de Belloy, 6 March 1786. D12439, Correspondance de Voltaire, vol. xxviii, ed. Theodore Besterman (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1972). Reprinted in de Belloy, Œuvres complètes, vol. ii (Paris: Moutard, 1779), 319. Voltaire was, however, less enthusiastic about Le Siège de Calais in letters to Jean-François Marmontel on March 25 (D12500) and D’Alembert on April 3 (D12521). These letters and others are reprinted and discussed in “Appendix II” of Le Siège de Calais, ed. Connors, 163–5.

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actors who participated in the actual events, de Belloy’s hope was to teach French citizens about their own past through tragic fiction, which was viewed by eighteenth-century dramatists and critics as the noblest form of art. According to de Belloy, this new objective for theater was congruent to the goals of ancient Greek and Roman theater, where issues of local and civic importance were regularly subjects of drama. De Belloy writes that he would like to “imiter les Anciens en nous occupant de nous-mêmes”39 (imitate the Ancients by focusing on ourselves), and his dramaturgy is indeed one of proximity and intimacy with cases of French bravado rather than with representations of antiquity or foreign lands. This goal – the use and, at times, manipulation of historical record for the local, often urgent present – was the dramaturgical model for many eighteenth-century military plays. Engagement with the local and, through the local, the national, continued to characterize eighteenth-century military dramas and “battle event” plays, even during the radically different politics of the Revolution. In addition to representing French history, de Belloy reinforced his pedagogical message through other textual tactics, deployed shortly after his play’s premiere. First, he wrote an extensive preface with an explanation of his “nouveau genre” to accompany the first edition of the tragedy.40 Then, and with the hope of publicizing the collective sentiment inspired by Le Siège de Calais, de Belloy published another edition of the play in the summer of 1765.41 This Nouvelle édition included ancillary texts such as historical notes on Edward and Eustache Saint-Pierre, extensive battle anecdotes from the Hundred Years’ War, and eyewitness testimony from spectators who had attended the boisterous first run of performances at the Comédie-Française. For de Belloy, the public’s experience with Le Siège de Calais included more than attending or reading the play. Public engagement with the tragedy was a holistic, multi-textual and multi-event42 campaign with which he was hoping to plaire and instruire Parisians and provincials alike. But what was the message that he hoped to distill through these different efforts? The instances of “Vive le roi” enthusiasm in Le Siège de Calais are ubiquitous. De Belloy paints a positive picture of the French monarchy and its historical struggles with other regimes. Favorable to the king, however, does not mean favorable to the nobility. The French political 39 41 42

De Belloy, “Préface,” Siège de Calais, ed. Connors, 64. 40 Ibid., 64–70. Pierre Laurent de Belloy, Le Siège de Calais, tragédie, dédiée au Roi, suivie de notes historiques. Nouvelle édition (Paris: Duchesne, 1765). De Belloy appeared at “patriotic events” throughout France in the wake of his play. He was given the keys to the City of Calais and named the guest of honor at the unveiling of his bust in his hometown of Saint Flour (Cantal) in summer 1765.

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system placed the noble order at the top of a social pyramid; however, following several examples of the previous generation’s drama, de Belloy presents a more populist patriotic tragedy, showing skepticism toward the nobility’s motivations in court politics and international war.43 De Belloy stages national zeal that emanates from a bourgeois, even popular group of characters. In the author’s schema of projection and identification, “low” characters such as Amblétuse and noble characters like Harcourt possess the same ability to reason and inspire virtue or disdain. De Belloy portrays Calais’ non-noble citizens in a positive light and through the tragic genre, the most “noble” form of drama. De Belloy represents modest classes of Frenchmen and their responses to difficult situations and decisions. The bourgeois heroes are moved less by romantic passion, political ambition, or personal gain than by an innate patriotic love of their friends, king, and country. For Saint-Pierre and for other characters, Philippe de Valois and his country are one and the same, united in patriotic spirit and grounded in both religious and political legitimacy. At first glance, the tearful support of Valois evinces an unquestioning projection of monarchical values and summarizes the straightforward political ideology that several scholars claim characterizes the tragedy.44 But the play also reveals the heterogeneity of Ancien régime discourses on class, agency, and political sovereignty, especially in the context of national emergency and imminent threat. As witnessed in Valois’ dependence on local leaders (who may or may not have been elected), the monarchy and its “monarchisms” depicted in de Belloy’s play “were discourses about essential problems in any political system [. . .] and they illustrate the dynamic character of different monarchisms both in their own terms and concerning their own internal issues, and in interaction with republican ideas.”45 Valois’ monarchy is in crisis, and the king engages traditionally ignored groups for help. Members of the bourgeoisie, such as the mayor of Calais, but also representatives from even lower social 43

44 45

Corneille is notable for his depictions of disaccord between noble generals and sovereigns. De Belloy, however, adds a third element to the equation by grounding patriotic sentiment not in the sovereign or the noble generals, but in local subjects of modest origins. For more information on tensions between sovereigns and military leaders in Corneille, see Christy Pichichero, “Pierre Corneille and Military Drama: Power, Potlatch, mérite,” MLN 132, no. 4 (2017): 1090–117; see also Joseph Harris, “Posthumous Glory and the Frustrated Death-Wish in Corneille’s Horace,” Early Modern French Studies 40, no. 1 (2018): 36–49. Christian Biet argues that Le Siège de Calais was an anti-philosophique and monarchical production about the history of the Valois dynasty. See Christian Biet, La Tragédie (Paris: Armand Colin, 2010), 162. Hans Blom, John Christian Laursen, and Luisa Simonutti, “Introduction,” in Monarchisms in the Age of Enlightenment: Liberty, Patriotism, and the Common Good, ed. Hans Blom, John Christian Laursen, and Luisa Simonutti (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 14.

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classes, consistently praise Valois and his dynasty. This devotion, however, is supposedly returned to them through gratitude and other acts of sentimental, financial, and political recognition. National emergencies and wartime sacrifices alter existing political norms and encourage leaders from different walks of life to perform complementary tasks for the sake of la patrie. This suspension of normal attitudes and practices characterizes war plays and connects examples of the dramatic subgenre across the different political regimes and cultures of the late eighteenth century. The play depicts intellectual agency as a crosscutting skill among different social classes. This equalizing thread in Le Siège de Calais paralleled the meritocratic ideals of some military policies and discourses at the time. A democratization of agency, or what Jay Smith has called a “nationalization of honor” and what Christy Pichichero argues was essential to the rise of a Military Enlightenment, drives many of the actions and dialogues in de Belloy’s play.46 There are few noblemen in the Le Siège de Calais, and those depicted are deplorable, emotionally unstable, or weak. The admirable members of the nobility in the play are women (Aliénor), foreign (Mauni), or absent (Valois and other French generals). Harcourt, one of the only male members of the French nobility represented in the tragedy, is a traitor. Another nobleman is, of course, Edward III, a vindictive and volatile foreign king. By focusing on issues of family, State, and sacrifice, de Belloy provides his war-fatigued public with a therapeutic yet utilitarian message about personal loss in battle. Foreshadowing themes and strategies of the Revolutionary era, Saint-Pierre widens the idea of “family” to include members of Calais’ society who were unrelated by blood but who were brothers-in-arms in war. He infuses the idea of “country” with familial overtones of benevolence, care, and recognition by the sovereign. In Act three, Saint-Pierre refers to Amblétuse and the other citoyens as “ma seule famille” – an opening of familial bonds that shocks Edward (“Quoi? C’est là ta famille?” [What? That’s your family?]) and increases Amblétuse’s patriotic drive (“Oui; quel honneur pour nous!”47 [Yes; what an honor for us!]). The blood relationship between Saint-Pierre and Aurèle is thus projected onto compatriots with less social and political capital. Saint-Pierre might lose his son on the battlefield, but his new patriotic family is now larger, more socioeconomically diverse, and more powerful because of that sacrifice.

46 47

Pichichero, The Military Enlightenment, 171. See also Jay M. Smith, Nobility Reimagined: The Patriotic Nation in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2005), 4–20. De Belloy, Le Siège de Calais, 3.3, 102.

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Saint-Pierre and his son, contrary to Harcourt and his brother, connect emotionally precisely because they are not members of the nobility. Relationships among the play’s modest citizens are sentimental and virtuous, whereas associations among nobles emerge from international politics, cold calculation, and personal ambition.48 Aurèle was valiant on the battlefield, so he has earned his place in society as a patriot and a war hero, and not because of his father’s name. Saint-Pierre and his cohort are admirable members of society, capable of great actions, and important to the war effort because of, not despite, their modest upbringings. At the end of the play, local leaders and citizens of Calais convince Edward that he will “win” France only by force, and not by persuasion, bribery, or specious historical arguments. The bourgeois citizens, not the noblemen, assert “Frenchness” as an inherent otherness to Edward’s own status as an Englishman and monarch, thus asserting a grassroots sentiment, uninfluenced by persuasion from higher classes. De Belloy thus underscores the local and human contours of war. Familial belonging and tales of brotherhood and father–son relationships were, in fact, increasingly popular themes in theater during the middle of the eighteenth century. The “local effects of war” genre existed prior to Le Siège de Calais, but increased in popularity and prominence during the rest of the century.49 As in the case of Diderot, Michel-Jean Sedaine, Mercier, Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, and other dramatists, de Belloy focuses on the lives of bourgeois families by describing the effect of a difficult situation on a community of friends and social peers. De Belloy’s desire to strike an emotional chord with spectators using familial settings reveals the proximity between his patriotic tragedy and the drame or genre sérieux – a rising genre at the time. The drame was a rich aesthetic mode for exploring contemporary social issues through emotionally charged theatrical moments and tableaux. As we will see in the next chapter, politically engaged writers such as Mercier deployed the drame genre not to boost 48

49

It is interesting to note that Harcourt adopts the patrie-as-family metaphor only after witnessing both his brother’s death and the bourgeois’ displays of patriotism. He reengages with this theme in 3.3 when he links the physical pain of his brother’s death with national sorrow. Authors represented sentimental family scenes with increasing frequency during the eighteenth century. An early example is Houdar de La Motte’s Inès de Castro (1724), which inaugurated several decades of both sentimental and family-focused drama; this tradition included blockbuster successes such as André Cardinal Destouches’ Le Philosophe marié (1727) and Nivelle de La Chaussée’s Mélanide (1741). For more information on the development of the sentimental family scene, see Anne Vincent-Buffault, The History of Tears: Sensibility and Sentimentality in France, trans. Teresa Bridgeman (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), esp. Chapter 4, “Tears in the Theatre,” 54–70; see also La Chaussée, Destouches et la comédie nouvelle au XVIIIe siècle, ed. Jean Dagen, Catherine François-Giappiconi, and Sophie Marchand (Paris: Presses universitaires de Paris-Sorbonne, 2012).

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patriotism but to show the limits and weaknesses of the precise military cultures that de Belloy sought to promote in his tragedy. Le Siège de Calais maps the closeness of family relationships onto a pedagogical current that sought to render French subjects more intimate (both in the sense of knowledge and in feeling) with the country’s political past and present. De Belloy wrote at times that his play was for the “nation,” whereas at other times, it was for the “patrie.” In fact, the manuscript of the tragedy reveals that the author first titled his play Le Siège de Calais ou le Patriotisme (this second part of the title was dropped in subsequent editions). And the dozens of successful performances of his play and the reports of eager crowds outside the theater indicate that his version of patriotism pleased spectators during a sensitive, post-war moment. Continued analysis of the different theoretical strands of patriotism, and particularly military patriotism, in eighteenth-century France, including the theater’s engagement with and dissemination of patriotism, will reveal the specificity of the public event that de Belloy hoped to create with Le Siège de Calais.

Patriotisms of the Late Old Regime The word “patriotism” has long been associated with the French Revolution’s linguistic and conceptual invention.50 De Belloy’s multiple deployments of the term, however, were part of a fluid Old-Regime language on national sentiments, traits, and characters. Patriotic discourses from the late Old Regime certainly predated Revolutionary discourses on the nation, and they influenced how the country was conceptualized by revolutionaries, but there were few “Revolutionary” discourses in 1765, and none that appeared overtly at a public, State-sponsored venue like the Comédie-Française.51 Political officials, theorists, and artists at the time used nation and patrie interchangeably. This was a pre-1789 lexical 50

51

One example is Ferdinand Buisson’s take on patriotism at the start of the First World War. Buisson writes that in 1789 “la France cessait d’être un royaume pour devenir une patrie” (France ceased to be a kingdom in order to become a fatherland). See Jacques Ozouf and Mona Ozouf, “Le thème du Patriotisme dans les manuels primaires, 1914: La guerre et la classe ouvrière européenne,” Mouvement social 49 (1964), 7. Baker and Edelstein argue that the French Revolution forever changed the idea of “revolution” because participants conceptualized it as an event and a “mode of collective action directed toward the goal of radical transformation.” Before 1789, however, revolutions were viewed as more transitory, and as a “dynamic and ongoing process of contestation and conflict.” Keith Michael Baker and Dan Edelstein, “Introduction,” in Keith Michael Baker and Dan Edelstein (eds.), Scripting Revolution: A Historical Approach to the Comparative Study of Revolutions (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), 3.

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ambiguity that revolutionaries and subsequent politicians during the nineteenth century would elucidate with the advent of nationalist political platforms and legislative programs. Patriotism (a language, discourse, or sentiment) is not nationalism (a governmental or factional project, or a political platform), despite the conflation of these two terms in a post-Revolutionary context.52 As Sarah Maza argues, “[e]ighteenth-century patriotism should not be confused with later forms of nationalism [. . .] it was described as a feeling that transcended a narrow love of country.”53 Nationalism – the concerted effort to build a new political identity applicable to all citizens in a given cultural zone – was not on the French political radar until 1789 or later; “national sentiment” and “patriotism,” however, were political, aesthetic, and emotional categories for centuries before the Revolution.54 De Belloy’s play appeared at the Comédie-Française following French military defeat. The patriotism espoused in Le Siège de Calais emerged from the reinterpretation of previous theoretical discourses on la patrie, engagement with contemporary political events, and the changing goals of cultural materials, including theater. New definitions of patriotism coincided with new ways that writers sought to deploy those definitions in a rising sphere of public influence, and “love of patrie constituted a vast playing field over which a complicated contest of tug-of-war attracted new participants throughout the [eighteenth] century.”55 The military played a role in forging and manipulating notions of patriotism and patrie, particularly during and after the Seven Years’ War. Recent scholarly interest in pre-revolutionary notions of la patrie has shown that these are complex questions, as various political, social, and cultural events led to disparate authorial postures in which writers would 52

53 54

55

For example, see Eric Annandale’s interpretation of Le Siège de Calais in Eric Annandale, “Patriotism in de Belloy’s Theatre: The Hidden Message,” Studies on Voltaire 304 (1992): 1225–8. Annandale identifies de Belloy’s “patriotism as being of the developing national rather than of the traditional royalist variety” (1225). My goal is to follow a recent line of historiography (David Bell, Peter Campbell), which draws a distinct line between patriotism – a flexible cultural discourse – and nationalism, a clear practice of nation-building. Sarah Maza, The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie: An Essay on the Social Imaginary, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 60. Bell draws a distinction between national sentiment and nationalism in his study on the rise of nationalism in eighteenth-century France: “[N]ational sentiment and nationalism are by no means the same thing, even if modern theorists frequently conflate them. More than a sentiment, nationalism is a political program which has as its goal not merely to praise, or defend, or strengthen a nation, but actively to construct one, casting its human raw material into a fundamentally new form.” David A. Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 3. Smith, Nobility Reimagined, 11.

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use patriotic terms for specific reasons and causes.56 In an essay on the language of patriotism, Peter Campbell argues that The legacy of the War of the Austrian Succession, the emergence of the Pompadour faction which included the reforming contrôleur général Machault, the renewed struggles with the church and the parlements over Jansenism and over fiscal immunities, the war with England from 1756, all generated discussions [about la patrie] made possible by the relaxation of the censorship regime.57

Patriotism manifested itself in different modes and intensities. Discussions about la patrie were sometimes theoretical, rational, and neutral; at other times, they were visceral, sentimental, and persuasive. With de Belloy’s use of theatrical performance, however, discourses on patriotism surpassed the pen of philosophers and the hallowed halls of France’s academies to become increasingly public. There were numerous reflections on French national sentiment in circulation when Le Siège de Calais was premiered. The many references to patriotes and la patrie, however, did not lead to a unification of those references into a distinct ideology or social plan.58 My understanding of patriotism is indebted to studies such as Campbell’s “The Language of Patriotism,” Jay Smith’s Nobility Reimagined, Pichichero’s The Military Enlightenment, and Bell’s The Cult of the Nation – works in which the authors show that la patrie was never conceived en bloc, but rather was seen as “an ambiguous discourse that was exploited rhetorically and strategically from 1750 onwards.”59 This discourse on patriotism, I argue, was also a lead 56

57 58

59

The bibliography on patriotism before 1789 is extensive. See Peter R. Campbell, “The Language of Patriotism in France, 1750–1770,” E-France 1 (2007): 1–43 for the most detailed synthesis of both eighteenth-century writing on la patrie as well as subsequent interpretations by historians. See also Peter R. Campbell, “The Politics of Patriotism in France (1770–1788),” French History 24, no. 4 (2010): 550–75. Besides Campbell’s essays, see Alfonse Aulard, Le patriotism française de la Renaissance à la Révolution (Paris: E. Chiron, 1921); Daniel Mornet, Les Origines intellectuelles de la Révolution française (Paris: Armand Colin, 1933); Robert R. Palmer, “The National Idea in France before the Revolution,” The Journal of the History of Ideas 1 (1940): 95–111; Jacques Godechot, “Nation, patrie, nationalisme, et patriotisme en France au XVIIIe siècle,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française 206 (1971): 481–501; Norman Hampson, “La patrie,” in The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture 2, ed. Colin Lucas (Oxford: Oxford University, 1988), 125–37; Du patriotisme aux nationalismes (1700– 1848), ed. Bernard Cottret (Paris: Créaphis, 2002); David A. Bell and Pauline Baggio, “Le caractère national et l’imaginaire républicain au XVIIIe siècle,” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 57, no. 4 (2002): 867–88; Maza, The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie, esp. Chapter 2; and Smith, Nobility Reimagined. Campbell, “The Language of Patriotism,” 3. For a statistical analysis of references to patriotism and national sentiment in pre-Revolutionary France, see Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 520–1. Greenfeld notes a marked rise in references to patrie, patriote, and nation during the 1750s and 1760s. Campbell, “The Language of Patriotism,” 2.

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characteristic of military drama, a subgenre of theater that gained both popularity and coherence during the final decades of the Old Regime. Patriotism, especially in war plays and in other media describing conflict, is often linked to exclusion and differentiation among competing identities and regimes. Montesquieu, for example, wrote on the differences in “caractères” among various nations, as well as on the link between vertu and patrie.60 In Book V of De l’esprit des lois, the philosophe writes that “amour de la patrie” (love of the fatherland) and “amour de la vertu” (love of virtue) are synonymous, thus providing a sentimental and moral basis for subsequent ideas of patriotism. Using models from both classical republicanism and recent English political theory, Montesquieu attached la patrie to civic, often military duty. His conception of the term in De l’esprit des lois brought la patrie into the moral register, thus raising its status in the society at the time and providing philosophical fodder to justify centuries of military involvement by France’s leading noble families. Montesquieu was joined in theorizing on the moral aspects of la patrie by other philosophes, such as Rousseau and Helvétius, each of whom in the 1750s presented different and sometimes contradictory opinions on la patrie’s relationship to virtue.61 Voltaire demonstrated perhaps the most blatant ambivalence toward patriotism. On one hand, he penned patriotic texts such as La Henriade, expounded the values of English patriotism in the Lettres philosophiques, and critiqued the English from a patriotically French standpoint in his comedies during the Seven Years’ War.62 On the other hand, Voltaire questioned the existence of the patrie in, for example, a 1764 article, which would later appear in the Dictionnaire philosophique: Une patrie est un composé de plusieurs familles; et comme on soutient communément sa famille par amour-propre, lorsqu’on n’a pas un intérêt contraire, on soutient par le même amour-propre sa ville ou son village qu’on appelle sa patrie. Plus cette patrie devient grande, moins on l’aime; car l’amour partagé s’affaiblit. Il est impossible d’aimer tendrement une famille trop nombreuse qu’on connaît à peine.63 60 61

62

63

See Charles-Louis de Secondat de Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois (1748) (Paris: Flammarion, 1979), 167–98. See Rousseau’s Du contrat social ou Principes du droit politique (1762) and Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne (1772). Helvétius specifically wrote against Montesquieu’s link between patrie and vertu in De l’esprit. For more information, see Madeleine Ferland, “Entre la vertu et le bonheur. Sur le principe d’utilité sociale chez Helvétius,” Corpus: Revue de philosophie 23 (1993): 201–14. For example, in Act one, scene one of his comedy Le Café ou l’Écossaise (1760), Voltaire presents an argument between two English cafe patrons, during which one of the men argues that maintaining a steady supply of rum is reason enough to go to war. Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique, vol. ii. Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, vol. xxxvi (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1994), 411.

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A fatherland is composed of multiple families; and because we commonly support our family for reasons of pride, when there are no conflicting interests, we support with the same pride our city or our village, which we call our fatherland. The larger our fatherland gets, the less we love it, because a love that is shared is weakened. It is impossible to love a large family about which we know little.

Voltaire’s negative take on patrie, of course, is questionable, given his own patriotic literary output as well as his praise of de Belloy’s Le Siège de Calais. Nonetheless, Voltaire’s article reveals that not everybody agreed on the merits of patriotism at the moment of de Belloy’s patriotic coup at the theater. One reason for skepticism was that patriotism could also be asserted to support despots. Mercier, who was often anti-monarchical and anti-war in his writings, went so far as to argue in 1772 that patriotism was a pernicious program, foisted upon the masses from above. He explained that “excepté deux ou trois républiques, il n’y a pas de patrie proprement dite [. . .] le patriotisme est un fanatisme inventé par les rois et funeste à l’univers”64 (Aside from two or three republics, there are no fatherlands, strictly speaking [. . .] patriotism is a fanaticism, invented by kings and fatal to the universe). But, as Norman Hampson points out, Mercier must have changed his mind by 1787, when “he maintained that one’s ‘amour de la patrie’ was more important than any more abstract love of humanity.”65 Virtuous, necessary, and sentimental, but also inexistent or despotic: a general history of patriotism from before the Revolution indicates that writers theorized the term with little accord. Even a more synchronic approach on the uses of la patrie during the few years before the appearance of Le Siège de Calais reveals conflicting interpretations and strategies. The 1762 Dictionnaire of the Académie française, for example, defines la patrie as “le pays, l’État où l’on est né. La France est notre patrie. L’amour de la patrie. Pour le bien de sa patrie. Pour le service de sa patrie. Servir sa patrie. Défendre sa patrie. Mourir pour sa patrie. Le devoir envers la patrie est un des premiers devoirs”66 (the country, the State where one is born. France is our fatherland. Love of fatherland. For the good of the fatherland. For the service of the fatherland. Serve one’s fatherland. Defend one’s fatherland. To die for one’s fatherland. Duty to the fatherland is one of our primary duties). The Académie’s definition, appearing at the height of war and three years 64 65 66

Louis-Sébastien Mercier, L’An 2440 (London [Paris?]: n.p., 1772), 267, n. b. Norman Hampson, “La patrie,” 126. Hampson quotes from Mercier’s 1787 Notions claires sur les Gouvernements, vol. i. “Patrie,” in Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, vol. ii (Paris: Brunet, 1762).

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before de Belloy’s play, shows that uses of the term patrie coincided with broader notions of duty, military obligation, and wartime sacrifice. When combined with sentimental overtones and captivating love intrigues, war plays of the 1760s emerged as vehicles to spread this “military sacrificial” thread of patriotism. Diderot and D’Alembert’s partisan Encyclopédie also defined la patrie, albeit from a pro-philosophe stance. The article “Patrie,” written by Louis (the chevalier) de Jaucourt, constitutes a break from earlier conceptions of the term. No longer could writers like de Belloy claim that la patrie simply represented someone’s homeland or a duty to protect that geographical space. Now, la patrie was charged with the partisan rhetoric of the ongoing debate between France’s philosophes and anti-philosophes. Jaucourt begins his article by analyzing the intellectual and affective underpinnings of a patrie: Le rhéteur peu logicien, le géographe qui ne s’occupe que de la position des lieux, & le lexicographe vulgaire, prennent la patrie pour le lieu de la naissance, quel qu’il soit; mais le philosophe sait que ce mot vient du latin pater, qui représente un père & des enfants, & conséquemment qu’il exprime le sens que nous attachons à celui de famille, de société, d’état libre, dont nous sommes membres, & dont les lois assurent nos libertés & notre bonheur. Il n’est point de patrie sous le joug du despotisme.67 The rhetorician who is no logician, the geographer who only looks at the location of places, and the vernacular lexicographer use fatherland for the place of birth, no matter what. But the philosopher knows that this word comes from the latin pater, which connotes a father and offspring, and thus it can express the sense that we attach to the family, society, free society to which we belong and whose laws insure our liberty and our happiness. There is no fatherland under the yoke of despotism.

Jaucourt’s definition of la patrie is familial and political. However, the patrie in this philosophique sense of the term transcends one’s blood by extending into the realm of a legal construct based on a contractual agreement among citizens. Jaucourt allows space for the king, but not the despot, who would violate any freedom in the patrie. The Encyclopédistes were engaged intellectuals, and their definition of la patrie was also a stance against a rising tide of Counter-Enlightenment discourses in the late 1750s and early 1760s (see Diderot’s critique of Le 67

“Patrie,” in Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, etc., ed. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond D’Alembert. University of Chicago: ARTFL Encyclopédie Project, ed. Robert Morrissey, https://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu. Accessed March 9, 2023.

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Siège de Calais, mentioned above).68 But philosophe patriotic discourse, despite the continued attention paid to Enlightenment thinkers today, did not necessarily dominate other conceptions of the patrie at the time.69 The Revolution and subsequent Republican scholarship would eventually put philosophes such as Rousseau and Voltaire on an intellectual pedestal. But, in the 1760s, they were embroiled in a battle to assert partisan meanings and push their agenda. In their attempt to distance la patrie from the political leaders of France, philosophes hoped to persuade readers that a homeland was dependent on both free will and cosmopolitanism. For some philosophes, the patrie was deeply inclusive; France, if it is indeed a genuine patrie, should be a place “où les étrangers cherchent un asyle”70 (where foreigners seek asylum). According to some philosophes, they are patriots precisely because they focus on cross-cultural issues such as world peace and engage with universals like humanity – the true patrie philosophique. The philosophes attempted to sap patriotism of its associations with absolutism and military force, and to bolster an internationalist and pacificist notion of tolerance and cosmopolitanism. This patriotism, grounded in the application of rational principles to a variety of cultures, jarred with the patriotic ideals of the political, religious, military, and cultural establishment in France. Cosmopolitanism, as conceived by Encyclopédistes, also provided the fodder for de Belloy’s most explicit reflection on patriotism in Le Siège de Calais: MAUNI: Je hais ces cœurs glacés et morts pour leur pays, Qui, voyant ses malheurs dans une paix profonde, S’honorent du grand nom de Citoyens du Monde. Feignent, dans tout climat, d’aimer l’humanité. Pour ne la point servir dans leur propre cité. Fils ingrats, vils fardeaux du sein qui les fit naître, Et dignes du néant, par l’oubli de leur être.71 MAUNI: I hate those hearts that are dead and cold towards their country, Who, seeing one’s troubles in a deep peace, 68 69

70

See Masseau, Les ennemis des philosophes. The struggle to control the deployment of terms and ideas in eighteenth-century France would change by the 1780s, as the philosophes effectively won a series of intellectual battles against their adversaries. For more information on how philosophes came to dominate France’s various cultural institutions, including the Comédie-Française and the Académie française, see the groundbreaking study, Robert Darnton, “The High Enlightenment and the Low-Life of Literature in PreRevolutionary France,” Past and Present 51 (1971): 81–115. Jaucourt, “Patrie,” in L’Encyclopédie. 71 De Belloy, Le Siège de Calais, 3.3, 115.

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From tragédie nationale to pièce militaire Honor themselves with the great title of Citizens of the World. Feigning, in any place, to love humanity. To never serving it in their own city, Ungrateful sons, vile burdens of the breast from which they were born, And worthy of nothingness by the loss their being.

Mauni, the compassionate English general, laments the internationalism of several “fils ingrats” in France – “citizens of the world,” who only view the idea of humanity in abstraction and not as applicable to real places and people. Although de Belloy borrowed emotional and dramaturgical strategies from philosophe writers, the patriotism that he presents in Le Siège de Calais is decidedly militaristic and pro-French. This would not be the last time that a dramatic author alters a philosophe intellectual framework to bolster France’s military establishment, for as we will see in the next chapter, Joseph Patrat made use of Mercier’s themes and characters in Le Déserteur (1770) to construct a very different ideological version of the philosophe’s play. Theater and, particularly, plays about the military were weapons in a battle to represent and evaluate France’s societal goals and values. De Belloy’s critique of philosophe cosmopolitanism (and, by association, pacifism) reflects a line of Counter-Enlightenment thought that was popularized in the 1760s. Enemies of Voltaire, Diderot, and other philosophes conceptualized patriotism not as a rational contract or an equalizing moral code among freethinking individuals, but as unquestioning loyalty to the crown. And anti-philosophe writers were as adept at disseminating their ideas in French society as their enemies.72 For example, in Palissot’s Les Philosophes, the author takes his enemies to task for their putative irreverence towards national issues. Palissot claims that philosophes were both atheists and political radicals, and he rebukes them for having cosmopolitan views. Damis, the patriotic hero of Palissot’s satire, laments what he views as the philosophes’ dangerous internationalism and lackluster love of country: “Louant, admirant tout dans les autres pays,/ Et se faisant honneur d’avilir leur patrie:/ Sont-ce là les succès sur lesquels on s’écrie?”73 (Praising, admiring everything in other countries,/ And taking pleasure in lambasting their fatherland:/ Are those the successes about which one boasts?) Not stopping his critique there, Palissot evinces the philosophes’ anti-patriotism by having 72 73

Olivier Ferret tracks the genesis and strategies of debates between these two rival groups in La Fureur de nuire. Charles Palissot, Les Philosophes (1760), ed. Olivier Ferret (Saint-Étienne: Presses universitaires de Saint-Étienne, 2007), 2.5, 54–55.

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the main philosophe antagonist, Valère, attempt to seduce Damis’ love interest, Rosalie, while the young hero is away at war. Paris was rife with anti-philosophe writings against cosmopolitanism, pacifism, and anglophilia in the 1750s and 1760s.74 The anti-philosophe patriotic critique resonated with many people at the time, given that France had just lost a brutal and costly war against England – a land supposedly full of cosmopolitan, “enlightened” thinkers, scientific progress, and rational philosophy. War, perhaps more than Enlightenment thinkers, religious conservatives, or vituperative journalists, skewed patriotism and its artistic reverberations toward themes of French exceptionality, local customs, and military values. As Jay Smith argues, “France’s demoralizing loss to the English and the Prussians in the Seven Years’ War led to a collective soulsearching the likes of which the French had never experienced.”75 French reflections on what it meant to be patriotic were the result of wartime experience so that, in the post-war period, France had an antagonistic relationship with a linguistic and social Other and a way to conceptualize the patrie using difference rather than universalism. Smith elaborates on this shift in some forms of patriotism: “the insistence on the French capacity for patriotism during and after the Seven Years’ War reflected the intensification of a broad and ongoing effort to define a distinctively French, and distinctively postclassical, patriotic morality capable of thriving in modern conditions.”76 Reflections on patriotic difference and cultural particularism were numerous following the war.77 Edmond Dziembowski stresses the importance of battles in general, and the Hundred Years’ War and the Seven Years’ War in particular, in catalyzing patriotic sentiment throughout France. Of medieval struggles with England, for example, Dziembowski writes, “la guerre de Cent Ans déclenche dans l’inconscient collectif une mutation capitale. La prise de conscience d’appartenir à un même pays se manifeste tant par un vif sentiment anglophobe que par des actes marquant un net attachement à la patrie”78 (the Hundred Years’ War launched a 74

75 77

78

Cosmopolitanism was a major theme in the Cacouacs pamphlet attacks, launched by Fougeret de Monbron and Nicholas Moreau. In addition, Monbron penned a satirical “philosophe” treatise, Le Cosmopolite in 1751. This work criticized philosophe proclivities toward travel and international networks and spawned a series of pamphlets and tracts in the 1750s. For more information, see Masseau, Les ennemies des philosophes, 130–40. Smith, Nobility Reimagined, 143. 76 Ibid., 144. The most telling example of historical and comparative analysis is Basset de La Marelle, La Différence du Patriotisme National chez les François et chez les Anglois (1765), 2nd edition (Paris: Rozet, 1766). Edmond Dziembowski, Un nouveau patriotisme français, 1750–1770: La France face à la puissance anglaise à l’époque de la guerre de Sept Ans (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1998), 325.

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major change in the collective unconscious. The realization of belonging to the same country manifested itself just as much by a strong Anglophobic sentiment as by actions that indicated a strong attachment to the fatherland). French patriotism emerged only as French because of the gradual differentiation between the conceptions of “France” and “England” during the early modern period. This insistence by the playwright on a specific patriotic time and place – a charge that was deliberate and repetitive in de Belloy’s tragedy – influenced many works in the corpus of war drama and performances presented in this book. The competition to define patriotism, although interdisciplinary, was no battle among equals: not all definitions of patriotism could earn a place on France’s state-sponsored main stage. Definitions of patriotism that were in line with the political and military policies enacted in Versailles found a natural venue in the theater – an influencing medium that was directly financed, administered, and surveilled by the crown. This institutional “support,” when combined with theater’s inherent ability to affect spectators through an audiovisual experience, enabled de Belloy to experiment with (state-sanctioned) theories of patriotism in an emotional and socially important space. After de Belloy, and this is the sticking point, writers conceptualized patriotic plays as affective experiences and effective tools to promote military and political goals such as recruitment, social cohesion, and antagonism toward the enemy. Theater became another public front in France’s war to define itself domestically and internationally. De Belloy was not, perhaps, the author of “la première tragédie où l’on ait procuré à la nation le plaisir de s’intéresser pour elle-même” (the first tragedy where the nation was given the pleasure of taking an interest in itself); and yet, his normalization and popularization of patriotic theater is irrefutable.79 His brand of inward-focused, sentimental patriotism and his depiction of affective bonds among military personnel influenced military plays for years after the original 1765 éclat.

“On est tous égaux quand on a des sentiments”: Free Performances, Parodies, and Military Responses In the socially stratified culture of eighteenth-century France, the physical space of a public theater was possibly “le seul lieu où la Nation pourra prendre conscience d’elle-même” (the only place where the Nation will come to understand itself).80 Theater performances, and particularly state79 80

De Belloy, “Préface,” Le Siège de Calais, 63. Jean-Jacques Roubine, Introduction aux grandes théories du théâtre (Paris: Armand Colin, 2004), 56.

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sponsored gratis performances at the Comédie-Française and performances at smaller, more popular venues throughout the country, were rare moments when relatively disparate members of society found themselves in the same room and in front of the same audio-visual event. Theatrical and governmental operatives at the time subscribed to the notion that theater could create an affective bond between spectators and the lessons depicted on stage, as well as among spectators who were present for a common experience. Le Siège de Calais was a cultural artifact with different goals for different participants at its performances. Patriotism emerged as a theme in texts about financial policy, European history, and jurisprudence. Notions of what it meant to be “French” run through correspondences, poems, and philosophical tracts. But what happened to patriotic discourse as it was hoisted up onto the stage and presented to a group of French spectators? How efficient is a government’s attempt to persuade its subjects if it is exposed to the ambiguities and multiplicity of spectators’ perceptions and interpretations? Writing on French theater of the late eighteenth century, Jean-Claude Bonnet argues that changes in representations of la patrie and its illustrious leaders accompanied changes to France’s neoclassical theatrical tradition. Bonnet contends that “la principale question qui se posa, au théâtre, du point de vue du culte des grands hommes, fut de savoir quels héros paraîtraient désormais sur les scènes. Les personnages marquants du Panthéon national ne pouvaient y être évoqués sans un renouvellement profond des genres dramatiques”81 (the primary question that the theater asked, from the standpoint of the cult of great men, was to know what heroes would thus appear on the stage. The most important characters of the national Pantheon could not be evoked without a profound renovation of dramatic genres). The changes in heroism depicted in Le Siège de Calais coincided with changes to existing dramatic genres. As Renaud Bret-Vitoz argues, de Belloy’s notion of the hero was a turning point in the history of French theater because the author had produced “une conception originale de l’héroïsme. Selon lui, un héros français présente une évidente proximité et familiarité avec le public”82 (an original conception of heroism. According to him, a French hero shows a clear proximity to and familiarity with the public). With its enthusiastic support of the French 81 82

Jean-Claude Bonnet, Naissance du Panthéon: Essai sur le culte des grands hommes (Paris: Fayard, 1998), 123. Renaud Bret-Vitoz, L’Éveil du héros plébéien, 1760–1794 (Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 2018), 242.

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crown and its claims of legitimacy, de Belloy’s tragedy was politically unpalatable to revolutionary authors and audiences after 1791; however, Le Siège de Calais previewed the héroïsme plébéien that would come to dominate French stages even during the Revolution’s most Jacobin years.83 The next chapter will explore the continued tension between “cosmopolitan” and “nativist” strands of patriotism and military culture through an analysis of Mercier’s drame, Le Déserteur, and of a variant of the play, which was performed at the Théâtre de la Marine in Brest. But, first, I detail here the direct aftermath of de Belloy’s Le Siège de Calais and, most notably, the military’s response to the play as well as a parody of the tragedy that integrates military recruitment objectives and associated tensions into theatrical performance. This, in short, is a brief description of a play’s transformation from a popular tragedy of national concern to a militarized cultural phenomenon. When he died in 1775, De Belloy was working on his Œuvres complètes, including what he viewed as the definitive version of Le Siège de Calais. The works were published in 1778 and 1779 and included a series of letters written by municipal leaders, literary luminaries, and soldiers who had read copies or witnessed performances of the tragedy. De Belloy’s mission in reprinting the letters is clear: to prove to his doubters and enemies that Le Siège de Calais and several of his other works were hits among a diverse swath of French society at the time. Several letters from members of France’s military machine – officers and enlisted men of all ranks – were included in de Belloy’s 1779 tome. For example, in an undated letter (probably from May or June 1765) to the author, “Caporal Primtemps” describes a group reading of Le Siège de Calais that took place at a barracks in the northern territory of Hainaut: MONSIEUR, Les huit Escouades de la Compagnie, assemblées par ordre du Capitaine, pour assister à la lecture qui leur a été faite de votre incomparable tragédie, Le Siège de Calais, m’ont chargé de vous écrire, comme Chef de la première, combien elles partagent avec toute la nation les sentiments de reconnaissance qu’elle vous doit. Les annales du Parnasse ne nous offraient que des faits étrangers, ou fabuleux: l’habitude du courage, parmi nous, semblait dispenser nos auteurs du devoir d’en parler; et les Français gémissaient en silence, de l’oubli des vertus de leurs ancêtres. Que ne vous leur consacrez vos talents, vous chantez leur amour pour leur Roi, vous réveillez le patriotisme, et vous développez le germe de l’héroïsme dans tous les cœurs [. . .].84 83 84

Ibid., 250. “Lettre du Caporal Primtemps de la Compagnie de Destourt, au Régiment de Haynaut à M. de Belloy,” in Œuvres completes de M. de Belloy, vol. ii (Paris: Moutard, 1779), 342–3. Reprinted in Le Siège de Calais, ed. Connors, 166.

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SIR, The eight squadrons of the Company, assembled by the Captain’s orders to attend the reading, which was presented to them of your incomparable tragedy, Le Siège de Calais, charged me to write to you, as the leader of the first [squadron], how they share with the entire nation these feelings of recognition that it owes you. Parnassus’ annals offer us only foreign or fabulous tales: the norms of courage, among us, seem to prevent our authors from speaking about duty; and the French quiver in silence from forgetting about the virtues of their ancestors. Because you dedicate your talents to them, you sing their love for their King, you thus awaken patriotism, and you lay the seed of heroism in all hearts.

According to the corporal, the group reading was both obligatory (“par ordre du Capitaine”) and appreciated by all (“les sentiments de reconnaissance”). Primtemps alludes to the successful completion of the goals that de Belloy articulates in the preface to his tragedy and elsewhere. The play has developed “the seed of heroism” through an “awakening” of patriotism grounded in French military actions. The soldiers were supposedly more eager to combat the enemy and perform heroic acts now that they had experienced de Belloy’s Le Siège de Calais through readings and discussions. Of course, it is impossible to know whether soldiers fought with more feu because they had read de Belloy’s play. What is essential here is the loop that de Belloy creates in this version of Le Siège with his preface, the themes of his play, and this embedded testimony of the play’s mission success in his Œuvres. Colonel Mehegan of the elite Grenadiers Royaux in Versailles echoes the sentiments of his provincial colleague. In a May 5, 1765 letter to de Belloy, Mehegan writes that “nos vétérans et nos jeunes soldats admirent les sentiments élevés de votre âme, et les productions de votre génie. Ce tribut est dû à la vertu et à l’héroïsme qui règnent dans votre pièce”85 (our seasoned and young soldiers admire the elevated feelings of your soul and the creations of your genius. This tribute is owed to the virtue and to the heroism that reign in your play). De Belloy’s tragedy, at least as it is presented in de Belloy’s own anthology of works, was a hit among all ranks and age groups of the French fighting forces. It is unsurprising that Le Siège de Calais was the first French play ever to be published in Saint-Domingue, given that the colony was governed by an administrator with both military and civilian functions. Governor-General Charles Henri Hector d’Estaing, who was also a celebrated war hero and admiral in the navy, had a direct hand in printing and disseminating de Belloy’s tragedy in spring 1765 with the help of the island’s first printing press, which had been brought to the colony several months 85

“Lettre de Colonel Mehegan, d’un Régiment de Grenadiers Royaux à M. de Belloy,” in de Belloy, Œuvres complètes, vol. ii, 341, in Le Siège de Calais, ed. Connors, 165.

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prior. D’Estaing not only gave his accord to print Le Siège de Calais but, “faisant cette nouvelle occasion de témoigner sa bienfaisance” (taking this rare occasion to display his generosity), he decided to print it “à ses frais pour être distribuée gratis”86 (at his expense to be given out gratis). De Belloy’s attempt to bond theatrical moments to military institutions was a success. Whether in Paris or in the kingdom’s plantation-based colonies, Le Siège de Calais was gaining traction in the military ranks. This must have pleased Choiseul and the other commanders who had pushed the Comédie-Française into staging it. Proud to receive the military’s stamp of approval, de Belloy published pro-military para-texts to illustrate the tragedy’s resonance among soldiers and underscore the pervasiveness of his theatrical achievement. It is difficult to know more about these staged readings at military halls and barracks throughout France – a practice that would become more popular at the end of the century. But a parody of Le Siège de Calais, performed at the Saint-Germain fairgrounds in spring 1765, provides a theatrical take on the bonds between de Belloy’s tragedy, theatrical spectatorship, and the goals of the French military at the time. Le Retour et les effets du Siège de Calais by “Monsieur M.” was published in March 1765, “à l’occasion de la tragédie donnée gratis” – a reference to the performance of de Belloy’s play that was sponsored by the king on March 12.87 The short one-act comedy, “mêlée de vaudevilles,” was most likely staged at the fairgrounds before it was published. What is interesting about Le Retour et les effets is not that it was a parody of Le Siège de Calais (parodies of tragedies were typical of fairground theater; there are hundreds of examples), but rather that it parodied the performance environment and aftermath of the March gratis show. The parody was thus a response both to the drama and to the popular reception of a government-sponsored performance event.88 The main characters include M. Vaillant, a former “Bas-Officier” who lost his arm in the War of Austrian Succession; Mme Hareng, a fishmonger; François, a young father and market worker; François’ brother, “le Cadet”; Verloppe, a cabaret owner; and a “Sergent” from the Picardie regiment. There 86

87

88

“Lettre du Cap-Français” (most likely from the Saint-Domingue broadsheet, the Affiches américaines), in de Belloy, Œuvres, vol. ii, 352, in Le Siège de Calais, ed. Connors, 166. The version of the play printed in Saint-Domingue was Le Siège de Calais, tragédie par M. de Belloy, représentée au Cap-Français pour la première fois le 7 juillet 1765 (Cap-Français: chez Marie, 1765). Monsieur M., Le Retour et les effets du Siège de Calais, comédie en 1 acte, en prose, mêlée de vaudevilles, à l’occasion de la tragédie donnée gratis. Par M*** (Paris: Vaugirard, 1765). Reprinted in Le Siège de Calais, ed. Connors, 201–23. Le Retour et les effets is creative in its staging of theatrical reception, but it is not without precedent. For a typology of parodies, including parodies about theatrical performance and reception, see Jeanne-Marie Hostiou, Les Miroirs de Thalie: Le théâtre sur le théâtre et la Comédie-Française (1680– 1762) (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2019).

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are also several minor characters. The comedy takes place at Verloppe’s cabaret and opens with a discussion about the event which has just occurred at the “Comédie”: a rapturous, free performance of de Belloy’s tragedy. M. VAILLANT: S’il vient quelqu’un, tu le feras monter. J’attends trois ou quatre personnes qui sont allées voir la Comédie, que le Roi fait donner GRATIS; je crois qu’elles ne tarderont pas. LE GARÇ ON: Est-ce qu’il y a quelque chose de nouveau? Je n’ai pas entendu le canon de chez vous tirer, j’ai crû qu’on ne la donna GRATIS, que quand il y a des réjouissances. M. VAILLANT: C’est vrai, on ne l’a donné que quand il y en a; mais le Roi qui aime à donner des preuves de sa bonté à son peuple, a ordonné qu’on la fasse voir, parce que c’est une belle pièce qui inspire, à ce qu’on m’a dit, de l’amour pour son Roi et pour sa patrie.89 M. VAILLANT: If somebody arrives, send them up. I’m waiting for three or four people who went to see the play which the King gave GRATIS; and I think they won’t be too long. LE GARÇ ON: Is it something new? I didn’t hear the cannon fire from your place and I thought that GRATIS performances were given only in times of celebration. M. VAILLANT: It’s true that they are given only at those times, but the King, who loves proving his generosity to his people, ordered all to see it because it’s a beautiful play that inspires, so I’m told, love for one’s King and fatherland.

The play in question, Le Siège de Calais, “inspires [. . .] love for king and country,” so it has altered the theater’s programming norms and earned a special status among government officials and French subjects. The crux of the parody surrounds the disappearance of François, whom the other characters have not seen for several days. Also essential to the plot is the Sergeant, described by Mme. Hareng in scene 4 as searching the neighborhood for “un homme qu’il a engagé y a quinze jours, et qu’il n’peut pas r’trouver”90 (a man whom he had signed up two weeks ago and now can’t be found). It is obvious to all (except the characters on stage) that François is the young man in question; what is less clear, however, is 89

Le Retour et les effets, scene 1, 202.

90

Ibid., scene 4, 207.

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whether the play will turn into a burlesque comedy of trickery and escape from the clasps of a greedy recruiter or into something more in line with the goals of de Belloy’s tragedy, which sought to inspire feelings of national belonging and devotion to the French military. Le Retour et les effets is packed with military facts and reflections on even the most violent effects of war. For example, in scene eight, M. Vaillant sings about France’s victory at Fontenoy, a major battle in 1745 and a turning point in the Austrian conflict. Vaillant recounts his mixed emotions that day, when he had helped his king but witnessed the death of his compatriots, losing an arm in the process. He adds that his slight taste of bitterness is not due to pity, doubt in the value of war, or his own physical harm. Vaillant is moved by “le regret [. . .] de ne plus pouvoir servir mon Roi”91 (the regret [. . .] of no longer being able to serve my King). Vaillant realizes that François is the lost recruit in question; the veteran asks François to explain himself. The boy sings an air about the day he had agreed to enlist: FRANÇ OIS, AIR: Le Tambour à la portière: J’entendis battre la Caisse Un matin qu’j’avions du cœur; J’l’y demandis une adresse, P’y je m’en fus chez l’engageur; Il me donni t’une somme Pour servir le Roi LOUIS. Est-c’là comme z’on est un homme? Not’femme m’r’tient par ses cris.92 FRANÇOIS, AIR: Le Tambour à la portière: I heard the drumbeat One morning when I had strength; I asked him for an address, Then I was at the recruiting officer’s; He gave me an advance To serve King Louis. Is this how we become a man? My wife is keeping me back with her cries.

Rather than escape Paris, François has returned to the café, where he knows the Sergeant will find him, to honor his commitment. François explains that witnessing de Belloy’s play has reignited the patriotic drive that had inspired him to enlist in the first place. He now regrets skipping out on his service: “si vous aviez vû c’que j’ons vû à cette pièce; comme c’était beau de servir son Roi, 91

Ibid., scene 8, 211.

92

Ibid., scene 9, 213.

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que j’ferions tout pour lui”93 (if you had seen what I saw at that play; it was so beautiful to serve one’s King that I would do anything for him). However, there is still the matter of François’ wife and children. In this lighthearted genre, even one with serious and patriotic overtones, one goal is to mitigate the complexity and anguish of such an important life decision and propose, by the end of the play, a happy resolution for all. In scene thirteen, François’ younger brother, the Cadet, arrives to declare that he will replace François in the ranks. The Cadet thus fulfills the family’s contract, releasing his older brother from duty so that François can continue working and providing for his family (the Cadet is not yet married and has no children). Mademoiselle Javot, the Cadet’s fiancée, is heartbroken, yet she has also learned from de Belloy’s play that patriotic duty and sacrifice to one’s country are broad social requirements which are not solely defined by a man’s service: MLLE JAVOTTE: Si vous me quittiez pour une autre maîtresse, je ne vous le pardonnerais pas; mais pour servir le Roi, je n’ose m’en plaindre: je viens d’apprendre au Siège de Calais, qu’un homme sans honneur est indigne de l’amour; ce que vous faites pour votre frère, vous rend plus digne de moi; au moment que vous méritez toute ma tendresse, il faut nous séparer! Malgré la raison, mon cœur en murmure.94 MLLE JAVOTTE: If you were leaving me for another mistress, I wouldn’t forgive you; but to serve the King, I wouldn’t dare complain: I’ve just learned from the Siège de Calais that a man without honor is unworthy of love; what you are doing for your brother makes you more worthy of me; just when you deserve all of my tenderness, we must leave each other! Despite the reasoning, my heart still whispers.

Javotte has just seen on stage how the character Aliénor’s love for Harcourt dwindles and disappears when the noble French officer fails to fight for his native France, choosing instead to raise his flag for the English. Although her “heart” continues to “murmur,” Javotte knows that her lover’s sacrifice is the only worthy path forward: “il faut nous séparer!,” she exclaims. Vaillant, the army veteran, and the Sergeant, a seasoned soldier, have now witnessed the young characters come to patriotic conclusions, not through first-hand combat training, military coercion, or parental control, but by witnessing a performance of Le Siège de Calais. In this short comedy about patriotism, obligations, and military engagement, theater changes people. The character attributes and mutations – François’ transformation from a coward to a willing recruit, the Cadet’s brotherly sacrifice, Javot’s eagerness to support wartime duties on the home front – have generational 93

Ibid., scene 10, 214.

94

Ibid., scene 13, 221.

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From tragédie nationale to pièce militaire

importance as well as class value. Their actions display sacrifice, honor, and noble virtues. These ideas and behaviors have now been transferred from traditionally noble spheres to more modest social classes, thanks, at least in part, to the specific codes of the military (and to the theatricalization of those codes in de Belloy’s play): M. VAILLAINT, en prenant la main de Cadet: Allons mon ami, le plaisir que tu fais à ton frère n’est pas commun, soutiens toujours le même caractère de générosité et comporte toi en joli garçon avec tes Camarades; sois ardent à ton service, respectueux envers tes Officiers, si tu veux que l’on estime. LE SERGENT: Oui mon ami, le Soldat est égal aux Officiers quand il a de l’honneur, on est tous égaux quand on a des sentiments. VERLOPPE: Nous allons vous reconduire jusqu’à l’auberge, Monsieur le Sergent, nous boirons un coup avant que de nous quitter.95 M. VAILLANT, taking the Cadet’s hand: My friend, the gift you give your brother is rare, always keep that same spirit of generosity and behave as a nice boy with your fellow recruits, be dedicated to your service and respectful toward your officers if you want their esteem. THE SERGEANT: Yes, my friend, a soldier is equal to the officer when he has honor and we are all equal when we have feelings. VERLOPPE: Let’s go back to the inn, Sergeant, sir. We shall raise a glass together before you leave.

The military, with the service it demands and the horizontal, intimate bonds it supposedly achieves, will be now a source of honor, so the story goes, for previously ignored or unremarkable French subjects. The Sergeant voices several meritocratic and democratic strands in military discourses and reforms at the time. Le Retour et les effets, like in Le Siège de Calais, gestures toward a mission to create unit cohesiveness and solidarity in the military ranks. As Pichichero remarks, “while rigid social divisions persisted during the ancien régime, military officers and administrators of the eighteenth century were not blind to the notion that collective identity and group solidarity were important forces in military success.”96 Military service, 95

Ibid., scene 13, 222.

96

Pichichero, The Military Enlightenment, 66.

“On est tous égaux quand on a des sentiments”

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according to the conclusion of Le Retour et les effets, includes sacrifice and danger, as well as an affective bond to brother soldiers and to the nation. Ultimately, both the parody and de Belloy’s tragedy reimagine French society as a place where service and utility reign, and not (or not just) birth and wealth. If the message in Le Retour et les effets was not already clear, the short play ends with the Sergeant – the king’s representative – sharing a drink with Vaillant, the Cadet, and others. Here, the audience witnesses the continuation of a generational cycle of military service, from veteran, to soldier, to recruit. This “previewing” of future service – a military which will flourish because it will always bring out the service and sacrifice of eager young Frenchmen – is perhaps the most common current in lateeighteenth-century military dramas, and especially those that were penned and performed during the Revolution’s most bellicose years. The depiction of martial sociability and of a process whereby socioeconomic, geographical, and other differences scale down into a unique military identity was the subject of many military treatises and theatrical works during the late eighteenth century. Essential to this type of art and to its accompanying lexicon was an evolving notion of the term “patriotism.” As I hope to have described in this chapter, patriotism was a polyvalent, ambiguous concept before the Revolution. But real war experiences and an increasingly tangible relationship between the military and French theater institutions brought a “military sacrificial” strand of patriotism into prime position. Theater, and especially theatrical performance, helped simplify, organize, and bolster pro-military (and, to a certain extent, anti-cosmopolitan) patriotism, much to the dismay of Diderot, his fellow encyclopédistes and, as we shall see in the next chapter, the anti-war dramatist and polemicist Louis-Sébastien Mercier. De Belloy’s Le Siège de Calais constituted a new kind of military drama and encouraged new types of performance practices that sought to bond French subjects to the country’s military objectives and experiences. The next two chapters tease out late Old-Regime military cultures on stage and detail how military groups and administrative influencers in France and its colonies engaged with theatrical performance and drama. Chapter 2 may strike readers as strange in that it focuses on Mercier, who was highly critical of de Belloy’s Le Siège de Calais, of absolutist political regimes, and of France’s military engagements. Nevertheless, Mercier penned one of the most controversial and complex drames about desertion and soldiering in the history of French theater. The next chapter details Mercier’s dramaturgical engagement with the military as well as the military’s startling theatrical response to his pacificist discourses and institutional critiques.

chapter 2

Military Masculinities, Dramaturgical Manipulation, and the Desertion Play

In his review of the play L’École du soldat, ou Les remords du déserteur français (1768), Fréron remarked that the anonymous author was wrong to think that French military officers should stage the work “dans les garnisons” (in the garrisons) in order to “remplir les vues utiles que l’on a eues en la composant”1 (fulfill the useful goals that we had while writing it). Instead, Fréron sniped, soldiers would be better served by “la lecture des Ordonnances” (reading the command manuals), a text which would make “more impression” than L’École du soldat.2 Austere, simple, and now fallen into oblivion, the play might have warranted Fréron’s criticism. It was no great success when it appeared in 1768, and it was only staged occasionally when performances of L’École du soldat returned as part of a wave of military drama during the Revolution. Fréron, the influential CounterEnlightenment critic, correctly assessed the value of L’Ecole du soldat in 1760s France. But what he failed to realize was that the obscure desertion play was in the vanguard of an international, multi-generic vogue. Within a few decades, theaters in Paris, provincial French cities, European capitals, and colonial outposts would stage hundreds of performances of drames, opéra-comiques, pantomimes, vaudevilles, comédies, and ballets about desertion, its causes, and its effects on individuals, families, military units, local municipalities, and the kingdom’s geopolitical interests. Scholarship on eighteenth-century desertion plays is understandably rare. Critics have tended to focus on the subgenre’s most famous example, Mercier’s 1770 drame, Le Déserteur, or, to a lesser extent, the opéra-comique of the same name, written by Michel-Jean Sedaine and composed by Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny in 1769.3 Mercier’s play evinces dramaturgical 1 2 3

L’École du soldat, ou les remords du déserteur français, comédie, en 1 acte et en vers libres, représentée pour la première fois en septembre 1768 (Paris: Duchesne, 1768), iv. Elie-Catherine Fréron, L’Année littéraire, vol. viii (Amsterdam: Lacombe, 1768), 72. Michel-Jean Sedaine and Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny, Le déserteur, drame lyrique (1769) (Paris: Larousse, 1878).

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creativity, as well as an attempt to democratize the serious genre to include soldiers and representatives of more modest social classes. And, with a searing critique of war, Mercier’s drame shows his adherence to the theory that theater “est le lieu privilégié de l’action politique” (is a privileged site for political action).4 Following the publication of his anti-war texts, Des malheurs et des avantages de la paix (1766) and De la guerre (1769), Mercier’s Déserteur prolongs the playwright’s evolving reflection on the negative effects of combat and military life.5 As a skeptical advocate of several philosophe principles, Mercier was turned off by de Belloy’s royalist, proFrench Siège de Calais and inspired by recent drames and comédies sérieuses by Diderot, Beaumarchais, and other philosophes.6 Mercier, however, had been witness to the public success of Le Siège de Calais and to the play’s ability to bind French men and women together in a common cause. And, like de Belloy, Mercier subscribed to the belief that “plays could be used to transform a heterogeneous audience into a united society.”7 Mercier’s Déserteur was not an isolated case of philosophe pacifism or a rare theatrical exploration of desertion. The drame was one of at least a dozen plays about desertion that were performed in France and its empire from 1768 through the Revolutionary years – a performance phenomenon that brought the soldier’s plight to center stage. After the spring of 1771, which saw dozens of performances of all three Déserteurs (Sedaine and Monsigny’s opéra-comique, Mercier’s drame, and a reworked, pro-war version of Mercier’s play that I discuss at length later in this chapter), a host of smaller, more anecdotal performances of desertion spread throughout the kingdom. In the fall of that year, for example, Antoine-LouisBertrand Robineau (known as Beaunoir) published and performed his Déserteur, ou le contentement passe richesse in the eastern garrison town of Metz, while an unknown author in Lyon produced Les Déserteurs du 4 5

6

7

Martine de Rougemont, “Le Dramaturge,” in Louis Sébastien Mercier (1740–1814): Un hérétique en littérature, ed. Jean-Claude Bonnet (Paris: Mercure de France, 1995), 133. For more information, see Sophie Marchand, “Présentation,” in Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Le déserteur, ed. Sophie Marchand, in Théâtre complet I, ed. Jean-Claude Bonnet (Paris: Champion, 2014), 173–4. While Mercier certainly shared many principles with Diderot, D’Alembert, Voltaire, and other philosophes, he was more of a perpetual outsider than member of the philosophe clan. Annie Cloutier argues, for example, that he was often mocked in the Correspondance littéraire and in other French periodicals and that most of the praise he received at the time came from England, Germany, and other locations outside France. For more information, see Annie Cloutier, Un corps et une plume pour habiter le temps: L’œuvre en miettes de Louis-Sébastien Mercier (PhD diss., Université Laval, 2011), esp. 9–16 for information on Mercier’s reputation at the time. Yann Robert, “Mercier’s Revolutionary Theater: Reimagining Pantomime, the Aesthetic of the Unfinished, and the Politics of the Stage,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 44 (2015), 194.

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Parnasse.8 A few years later, Simon Asselin, a professional dancer in Paris, created La Femme déserteur, a “grand ballet-pantomime” at the Opéra, and the choreographer and dancer Jean Dauberval wrote and performed Le Déserteur, ballet-pantomime tragicomique in Bordeaux.9 The year 1786 was another good year for desertion plays with Jean-François Arnould’s Le Vétéran, ou Le Bucheron Déserteur at Paris’ Ambigu-Comique theater and Maximilien Gardel’s Le Déserteur, ballet d’action, which was staged in front of the king and his family at Fontainebleau.10 Desertion, it seems, was an attractive theme in musical and spoken theater and using a variety of tones and settings. This chapter will discuss a process whereby similarly themed works, some of which have never been studied in modern theater scholarship, borrowed from each other and blended into an impressive theatrical force of entertainment and dissemination of military culture. Altogether, the “Déserteur effect” was a popular, multi-generic vogue in the final decades of the Old Regime that capitalized on the French public’s rising interest in military cultures. Each play differed in its presentation of desertion, the military’s role in civil society, and the daily lives of soldiers. But as an ensemble, the “Déserteur effect” established a new relationship between the stage and the soldier and, as such, the civilian world and military culture. This theatrical intervention into the public’s opinion of the French military was achieved with dramatic representations of authentic military procedures, policies, debates, and lexicons through an enjoyable, multimodal experience. The desertion vogue provided civilian spectators with valuable lessons on the military’s codes and customs, and underscored the increasingly influential role of soldiers and armed conflict in the kingdom’s literary and theatrical cultures. Desertion-themed drama was sometimes lighthearted and enjoyable, but it was often pitched by its creators as offering something “more” than other theatrical works. Mercier’s commitment to pacifism and the anonymous author of L’École du soldat’s desire to have his play read in military garrisons speak to the subgenre’s creators’ belief that, in addition to pleasing spectators and readers, another goal of their art was “to change 8

9 10

Alexandre Louis Bertrand Robineau (Beaunoir), Le Déserteur, ou contentement passe richesse (Paris: Théâtre de Nicolet, 1771) and anon. , Les Déserteurs du Parnasse, comédie par M. M*** (Lyon: Claude Cizeron, 1771). Pierre Asselin, La Femme déserteur, grand ballet-pantomime de M. Asselin (Paris: Cassel, 1778); Le Déserteur, ballet-pantomime, représenté à Bordeaux, le 30 décembre 1785 (Nantes: Mangin fils, 1825). Jean-François Arnould, Le Vétéran, ou Le Bucheron Déserteur, pantomime historique, en trois actes (Paris: Guillot, 1786); Maximilien Gardel, Le Déserteur, ballet d’action en 3 actes (Paris: Ballard, 1786).

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not just the future action of their audiences, but also the structure of the audience’s community and the nature of the audience’s culture.”11 Military dramas of different ideological viewpoints engage French subjects through national themes, socioeconomically diverse (and increasingly identificatory) characters, and plotlines that were characterized by the accuracy and specificity of their time and place. The late Old Regime’s desertion drama provides human contours to current events reporting and serious moral debates over military policy and pushes theater into partisan discussions on national identity, masculinity, cosmopolitanism, and geopolitics. This chapter’s goal is to demonstrate how desertion-themed drama created a distinct military culture in the theater. The specific qualities of eighteenth-century French military culture were forged, represented, and rehearsed through debates on stage over what it meant to be a military man in the king’s army. This theatrical movement, I argue, taught spectators about the French military’s conquests, fears, and tensions, and showed civilian spectators in particular that the military expressed its own codes, practices, and characteristics that were worthy of artistic representation, yet distinct from the norms of civil society. As the end of the eighteenth century approached, the country’s armed forces – and the plays about those soldiers and their missions – gradually expressed social and cultural norms from different and more diverse socioeconomic classes. Military drama of the late Old Regime depicted virtues and values that supposedly connected rich to poor and rural to urban, under the common goal of fighting for a culturally and linguistically delineated zone. Many plays explained shifts in French geopolitical policy, battle strategy, and military organization and reform. These dramatic themes, performance practices, and efforts of textual editing constituted a first step toward the holistic, totalizing practices and experiences that would characterize both the performance arts and theories of armed conflict during the Revolution.

Desertion, Reform, and Military Culture The traditionally aristocratic culture of the French military was not immune to a “democratic” and sentimental reimaging in eighteenthcentury French drama. After the Seven Years’ War, new military characters, plights, and conditions emerged in serious and comic plays. Dramatists 11

Baz Kershaw, The Politics of Performance: Radical Theatre as Cultural Intervention (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 1992), 1.

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of the 1760s and 1770s, particularly authors of the drame genre and of musical theater, opened positive (as opposed to mocking or critical) dramatic representation to new professions, including businessmen, bankers, and lawyers, as well as soldiers. These dramatized soldiers differed from the military characters of the theatrical canon and France’s long tradition of depicting soldiers on stage. For example, comedies with the boastful (and often ridiculous) Matamore (“Il Capitano” in commedia dell’arte) character were popular across Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Plays such as de Baïf’s Le Brave (1567) or Maier’s La Table d’or (1617) were just two of the many comedies inspired by Plautus’ Miles Gloriosus (The Swaggering Soldier), which was itself probably a translation and compilation of several ancient Greek plays.12 This comedic tradition certainly continued into and through the eighteenth century, but the plays discussed here sought to project a different, more humane version of an increasingly geographically and socially aware soldier. The eighteenth century in no way invented the soldier play, but, as we shall see, its playwrights injected soldiers and their stories with seriousness, sentimentality, and complexity. De Belloy’s Siège de Calais was already a watershed moment that linked heroism to new social classes and types of French subjects who had previously not enjoyed representation in tragic drama. The democratization of theater as it pertained to military themes, however, was not just literary but also literal. Also important at the time were democratizing practices in the military–theatrical complex, including required theater subscriptions for soldiers, special seating arrangements, free performances for entire brigades, and “barracks performances” to ensure that soldiers, and increasingly socioeconomically diverse soldiers, were represented not only in the plays but also in the audiences. In the next chapter, I discuss the origins and tensions of several military-infused performance environments and programs. Here, I will tease out the most important dramaturgical features of desertion-themed and other military-themed plays from the last few decades of the Old Regime. The advent of military-themed drama, and especially desertion plays, coexisted with a period of military reform, including the enactment of policies to educate and boost the well-being of officers and enlisted men. In addition to creating captivating theater with new characters and themes, 12

For more information, see Plautus, Miles Gloriosus, ed. Mason Hammond, Arthur M. Mack, and Walter Moskalew (1963), 4th edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), esp. Hammond, Mack, and Moskalew’s “Introduction,” 3–28.

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French playwrights examined military culture at a moment when army and navy administrators were conceptualizing an entirely new “socioemotional approach to creating more loyal and cohesive fighting units.”13 Starting around 1750, these reforms increasingly “drew on moral themes and ideas,” as well as on practical strategies and new technological achievements. Reform-minded commanders sought to enhance combat effectiveness and troop morale by correcting what they viewed as a series of problems that affected soldiers, including commonplace notions that they “were not serious enough; frivolous, inclined always to idleness,” and “failing to work at their professions, or états.”14 Desertion, the most visible and costly proof of a military unit’s collapse, was a constant subject of debate and reform in France from at least the early seventeenth century.15 Until around Louis XIV’s death in 1715, the punishment for desertion in France was facial mutilation, public dishonor, and relegation to a “Mediterranean” fleet for a life sentence of backbreaking labor. Capital punishment was employed as one possible consequence for deserters, but it was only intermittently applied as a norm. In 1716, the death penalty for deserters was codified into military policy with a system of drawing straws: out of every three deserters, one would be hanged and two sent to prison.16 However, death as a punishment for desertion was rarely enforced. Many deserters were never caught, and those who returned to service retained considerable value to armies, particularly in the desperations of war. Many recruiting officers failed to flag known deserters because of the incentives for bringing in new blood, deserter or not. As the anonymous author of the pamphlet Relation curieuse d’un soldat déserteur, très utile et instructive à tous ceux qui font profession des Armes wrote matterof-factly in 1705, “Ils en condament peu à la mort, parce qu’ils en tirent un grand service”17 (they condemn few to death because they extract from them an important service).

13 14 15

16 17

Christy L. Pichichero, The Military Enlightenment: War and Culture in the French Empire from Louis XIV to Napoleon (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2017), 205. David D. Bien, “The Army in the French Enlightenment: Reform, Reaction and Revolution,” Past & Present 85 (1979), 69. See André Corvisier, L’Armée française de la fin du XVIIe siècle au ministère de Choiseul: Le soldat (Paris: Presses universitaires de France), esp. vol. ii, 733–8. For a more recent analysis of the desertion phenomenon across European armies at the time, see Ilya Berkovich, Motivation in War: The Experience of Common Soldiers in Old-Regime Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 55–93. Berkovich, Motivation in War, 69. Relation curieuse d’un soldat déserteur, très utile et instructive à tous ceux qui font profession des Armes (Strasbourg: Rousselot, 1705).

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In the second half of the eighteenth century, and particularly after France’s defeat in the Seven Years’ War (in which 2,000 French soldiers deserted during just the first 2 months of battle), military reformers returned to the reasons behind desertion and proposed a series of programs to prevent it. It was extremely laborious and costly to locate, capture, adjudicate, and execute punishments against deserters. Administrators argued that officers and military constables spent too much time and energy on desertion, and with no clear benefit to deterrence.18 Military leaders looked increasingly to cultural, social, and economic reasons for desertion – a turn in thinking that reflected not only the budding Military Enlightenment described by Pichichero, but also the realization during the 1760s that voluntary domestic troops deserted in fewer numbers than foreign mercenaries or French men who had been forced into service.19 Critics of the French army compared the crown’s soldiers with what were perceived as Prussia’s and England’s more disciplined and battleready troops. Writers deployed cultural tropes of French frivolity versus Anglo-Saxon rigor; many called for harsh corporal punishments (but not death) as a possible solution to France’s “cultural problem” of desertion. Those who argued for more severe desertion policies sourced their claim in a Prussian practice whereby “deserters were to run the gauntlet: a corporal punishment where the culprit was made to walk between two lines of his comrades who would beat him with rods.”20 Other reformers pointed to the importance of bodily maîtrise and group conditioning as a way of training soldiers to have an almost visceral reaction of readiness, rather than fear, to combat situations. A more fit body, it was believed, would provide soldiers with better instincts during battle and a stronger capacity to stave off malnourishment and vitamin deficiency. As Arnaud Guinier attests, the army mandated daily physical exercises in 1767 and gradually introduced programs and competitions in gymnastics, throwing, and other physical activities during the last few decades of the Old Regime.21 18 19

20 21

Berkovich writes that fewer than 7 percent of deserters were captured and tried during the Seven Years’ War. See Berkovich, Motivation in War, 71. See Berkovich, Motivation in War, 60–65. This point about native-born soldiers is also made in the pamphlet Relation curieuse d’un soldat déserteur, in the following terms: “Les Sujets de chaque Nation, pour être heureux, doivent démeurer parmi leur Nation, les François avec les François, les Allemans avec les Allemans, ainsi des autres” (The Subjects of each Nation, to be happy, must remain among their Nation, the French with the French, the Germans with the Germans, as well as others). Relation curieuse, 21. Berkovich, Motivation in War, 57. Arnaud Guinier, L’honneur du soldat: Éthique martiale et discipline guerrière dans la France des Lumières (Ceyzérieu: Champ Vallon, 2014), 160–1.

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French military reforms of the middle of the eighteenth century were numerous and heterogeneous in scope, but they exhibited at least two general principles. First, reforms were designed to be productive, meaning that changes to policy should improve the strategic mission and everyday goals of the French army and navy. This often meant increasing the military’s role in the soldier’s overall identity and diminishing his civil norms and contacts, which gradually began to be viewed by reformers as distractions. Second, it was believed that by fostering more cohesion in the ranks – by building more intimate bonds among men from different geographical, linguistic, and socioeconomic provenances – the military would stem negative outcomes such as loss on the battlefield, desertion, bad behavior in garrisons, and poor recruiting targets. Reforms such as a 1776 règlement stipulating the end of corporeal punishment for desertion (instead, deserters were required to serve longer tours) and the installation of ludic training components and daily physical regimens for all members of a unit (as well as military theater building, as we will see later) were part of this general eighteenth-century reform culture. Writing in 1764, an anonymous French officer summarizes this change in theory and policy as a fundamental transformation of military thought: “Loin de chercher les moyens d’avilir les hommes, nous devrions nous occuper à élever leurs âmes”22 (far from seeking the means to debase men, we should be focusing on elevating their souls). Not all reforms were focused on helping the common soldier, building a shared culture of respect and recognition, and ushering new classes of men into higher ranks of the military. Pichichero details reforms initiated by the duc de Choiseul, Maurice (the Maréchal) de Saxe, Jacques Antoine Hippolyte (the comte) de Guibert, Joseph Marie Servan de Gerbey (General Servan), and other leaders from approximately 1750 through the Revolutionary years and into the First Empire. Pichichero argues that seemingly “technical” reforms of diverse topics from uniforms to medical field hospitals to drill and tactics were catalyzed by a “metadiscourse on war” that “was in part philosophical, contemplating the nature of war and its rightful conduct, ideal martial characteristics, the relationship between military service and citizenship, and the costs of war in economic, political, moral, physical, and emotional terms.”23 With more of a focus on common soldiers, Naoko Serium has examined reforms to enlisted men’s uniforms as well as new sanitary regulations, which testify to a different “relationship” between soldiers and their 22

Ibid., 213.

23

Pichichero, The Military Enlightenment, 3.

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bodies – one that resulted from Enlightenment philosophy and “sensibility” among military thinkers.24 Dominique Julia, Daniel Porquet, and others have brought to light curricular innovations at newly established écoles militaires in the 1760s – plans of study that reveal an increasing emphasis on the emotional health of cadets as well as the “place of bodily exercises” in a new Enlightenment pedagogy.25 These studies of specific initiatives and changes to education and policy complement more comprehensive studies of the French army in the eighteenth century and particularly during the vigorous period of institutional panic and reform after the Seven Years’ War.26 Military culture changed significantly during the second half of the eighteenth century, and yet Lee Kennett’s characterization of the French army in the 1760s as the “last refuge” of the “old nobility” remains true in many respects. Several of the period’s reforms sought to prevent change and class cohesion rather than alleviate tensions among military men.27 Reform-minded philosophes militaires confronted a formidable force of France’s most revered military families, who realized that the kingdom’s political institutions were becoming less interested in supporting their privilege. Martial families of the nobility attempted to sure up their financial and symbolic legacies in the military realm. During this period of intense reflection and reform, war administrators banned upwardly mobile members of the bourgeoisie from obtaining military officer commissions, prevented free men of color in Saint-Domingue and foreigners from continental Europe, Ireland, and elsewhere from gaining important 24

25

26

27

Naoko Serium, “Valeur et pratiques de la propreté dans l’armée au XVIIIe siècle,” in Les discours du corps au XVIIIe siècle: Littérature, philosophie, histoire, science, ed. Hélène Cussac, Anne DeneysTunney, and Catriona Seth (Paris: Hermann, 2015), 193. Serge Vaucelle and John McClelland, “‘Christian Patriotism’ and Physical Education in PreRevolutionary France: The Royal Military School in Sorèze in the Eighteenth Century,” The International Journal of the History of Sport 36, no. 4 (2019), 475. See also Dominique Julia and Marie-Madeleine Compère, “École militaire,” in Les collèges français, 16e–18e siècle, vol. iii (Paris: Institut national de recherche pédagogique, 2002), 413–22; Daniel Porquet, L’École royale militaire de Pontlevoy: Bénédictins de Saint-Maur et boursiers du roi, 1776–1793 (PhD Diss., Université ParisSorbonne, 2011); and Corelli Barnett, “The Education of Military Elites,” Journal of Contemporary History 2, no. 3 (1967): 15–35. See, among others, Jean Chagniot, Paris et l’Armée au XVIIIe siècle: Étude politique et sociale (Paris: Economica, 1985); Lee Kennett, The French Armies in the Seven Years’ War: A Study in Military Organization and Administration (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1967); John A. Lynn, The Bayonets of the Republic: Motivation and Tactics in the Army of Revolutionary France, 1791–1794 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996); André Corvisier, L’armée française de la fin du XVIIe siècle au ministère de Choiseul: Le soldat (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1964); and, more recently, Rafe Blaufarb, The French Army, 1750–1820 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002) and Julia Osman, Citizen Soldiers and the Key to the Bastille (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015). Kennett, The French Armies in the Seven Years’ War, 56.

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roles in the army and navy, and, through a 1752 edict, closed écoles militaires as well as most of the higher ranks to everybody except for the nobility – a policy that was reiterated on numerous occasions up until the very last days of the Old Regime.28 As Julia Osman argues, many reforms at the time were rhetorically democratic, yet structurally hierarchical. “Officers during the reform period of 1750–1783,” Osman writes, “did not intend to institute any sense of equality between themselves and their soldiers [. . .] but they did wish to cultivate a sense of agency among their soldiers.”29 How does theater fit into this rich but ambivalent period of military introspection, tension, and, to some degree, change? Desertion plays and other war dramas of the late Old Regime reveal a novel articulation between governmental and artistic practices at a moment when both institutions – the military and the theater – were in flux and reform. Plays about desertion and barracks life highlight persistent class struggles and socioeconomic problems inside the French military complex. War theater provides intimate glimpses of soldiering and depicts a sort of école du soldat for both military and civilian audiences. Military theater in no way replaced the often cut-and-dry policies of military access and privilege. However, war plays were part of an artistic reinvention of the French military endeavor, and they testify to the military’s recognition that soft power was a legitimate source of normative discipline. Plays, more than the actual policies, provided a space to imagine new military institutions, ideals, and relationships which were slow or impossible to enact under the repressive structures of the French army and navy. I read the following desertion plays as both a symptom of and (at times) critical reflection on this period of institutional reform and introspection. Desertion drama of the eighteenth century illustrated the trials and tribulations of men who fought in French wars, and, in most cases (but not always), the plays supported the idea that intra-military diversity and difference could be wiped away through shared missions and the emotional bonds of soldiering. Military dramas helped create a martial culture that differed from and equaled in value many of the civilian forms of group identity and masculinity at the time. Not all playwrights viewed military culture as a force of virtue. The most renowned desertion play, Mercier’s Le Déserteur, is brazenly anti-war and even, at times, anti-military. Mercier’s play, however, was itself a disputed 28 29

See David D. Bien, “La réaction aristocratique avant 1789: L’exemple de l’armée,” Annales 29, no. 1 (1974): 23–48. Osman, Citizen Soldiers and the Key to the Bastille, 69.

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cultural product. The rest of this chapter brings to light an ideological war that was waged on stage and through dramaturgical editing between two versions of Mercier’s drame: the original 1770 play, penned by Mercier, and the version that was reworked by Joseph Patrat and which debuted with significant textual changes on January 23, 1771 at the Théâtre de la Marine in Brest. Eighteenth-century plays about military culture project a malleable and transformational acculturation of soldiering – a process of personal and group change resulting from the activities, discourses, and symbolic moments of serving in the military. Playwrights differ in their assessments of that culture, but they share a constructivist view of identity, including the decidedly Enlightenment ideal that people can change on the basis of their knowledge and experiences. And it should be noted that the term “military culture” is admittedly slippery, given the vast discrepancies in the geographical origins and socioeconomic statuses both of enlisted men and of officers. Wealthy nobles from Languedoc and new recruits from Paris’ urban poor did not simply shed their civilian identities on the battlefield and in the barracks. Group identity and corporate culture were dynamic systems of understanding the self and others. Culture, which Baz Kershaw defines through a reading of Raymond Williams as a “medium which can unite a range of different groups and communities in a common project in order to make them into an ideological force,” was perhaps determined more at the time by religious upbringing, family relationships, or class than by any particular battle, training operation, or other military experience.30 With difference and separation so ingrained into nearly every Old-Regime institution, what binding experiences could the military have provided? How, if at all, could war and peace experiences in the army or navy create a distinct culture in a society with so much difference, disparity, and inequality? As Michael Hughes points out in his book on Napoleon’s Grande Armée, “military culture” as a category retains some explanatory value because soldiers share certain relationships and experiences: Military culture is not a closed system, nor is it static. It evolves and changes as a result of relationships within military forces, and because of interactions between military institutions and factors external to them such as politics, foreign relations, socioeconomic structures, and technology. Elements of military culture include, but are not limited to, strategic thought, concepts 30

Kershaw, The Politics of Performance, 36. See also Raymond Williams, Culture & Society: 1780–1950, 2nd edition (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1983).

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of military discipline, the role of the army in the state and society, the official goals of the military, and behavioural norms for conduct prior to, during, and after combat.31

Military victories and defeats are tremendous physical and emotional events that cut across social and economic divisions. Many “binding elements” in the military appeared on stage in eighteenth-century desertion plays, which treated the psychological reasons for desertion, the response of a deserter’s fellow soldiers to the act and to its punishment, and the difficulty of quelling desertion that military administrators faced at the time. This was perhaps the first time that France’s national military culture (as opposed to the military culture of a particular general or monarch from antiquity, as in many classical tragedies) served as a central theme in mainstage drama. Desertion plays pleased audiences, civilian or military, and they emerged as a type of “normative power” in eighteenth-century France. Many plays about desertion and its aftermath were pitched as one strategy among others that the government could use to create a form of “moral involvement within a larger collective” whose values were meant to be shared by brothers of the fighting cause and appreciated by civilians on the home front.32 Performed on the eve of the Revolution, desertion plays, like the military treatises, reforms, and educational projects penned by “enlightened” military leaders, played a role in both creating and complicating the “philosophical, social, and emotional dynamics that set the stage for Revolutionary fraternity, Napoleonic friendship, and the military ‘band of brothers’ of the modern day.”33 Desertion plays shared military elements but they were not ideologically coherent, nor were they an act of desperation on the part of administrations to curb actual desertion in French military units at the time.34 Several works, such as Mercier’s original drame, were stridently anti-war; others, such as Patrat’s version of Mercier’s Déserteur in Brest, shadowed discourses of state propaganda and were geared to amuse spectators and increase positive feelings toward military endeavors. Some desertion plays 31 32 34

Michael Hughes, Forging Napoleon’s Grande Armée: Motivation, Military Culture, and Masculinity (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2012), 11. Berkovich, Motivation in War, 11. 33 Pichichero, The Military Enlightenment, 67. With a comparative statistical analysis of desertion in early modern Europe, Berkovich disproves the idea that aristocratic armies were more prone to desertion than later democratic “citizen armies.” For example, Berkovich argues that desertion rates of the French army were 2–2.5 percent in the second half of the eighteenth century. This is a modest problem compared with, for example, the almost 15 percent rate of soldiers leaving their posts in the US army from 1820 to 1860. For more information, see Berkovich, Motivation in War, 55–90.

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sought to boost troop morale by elevating the soldier’s lowly social status; others were comic assaults against the military machine and its inability to persuade anybody besides drunks and convicts to enlist. Whether they depict soldiers as heroes, villains, victims, or something in between, all desertion plays at least agreed that members of France’s fighting forces were worthy of dramatic representation and that soldiers were an evolving but increasingly distinct group with their own set of behavioral norms and rules. These values drew from civilian society, but, by the French Revolution, they would become a version of what George Mosse famously termed “modern masculinity.”35 The polemic surrounding Mercier’s Déserteur and the modification of his play by Patrat provide a window into some of the most complex debates on military culture, masculinity, and the potential power of performance during the Old Regime’s twilight. What follows is the groundwork for a switch in the next chapter when we will move from plays about soldiers to the performance environments of militarized zones in France and its colonial empire. In the next section, I describe the themes and tensions in military desertion plays, with a special focus on two versions of one drame. This sets the stage for Chapter 3’s analysis of military–theatrical events in provincial and colonial contexts and Chapter 4’s description of the energetic and bellicose community-building theatrical missions of the French Revolution.

Emotional Bonds and War Criticism in Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s Le Déserteur Mercier’s drame was not the first play about desertion to appear in France, nor would it be the last. Le Déserteur was published just several months after Sedaine and Monsigny’s popular opéra-comique of the same name. More lighthearted than Mercier’s play, Sedaine and Monsigny’s Déserteur recounts the story of Alexis, a young officer who leaves his post due to a misunderstanding with his fiancée, Louise. Not guilty of cowardice or premeditated desertion, Alexis is pardoned during the final scene, and the play ends with all the characters singing a joyful ode to the king. Perhaps more novel than the plot is the librettist Sedaine’s staging of military customs and realia throughout the play. 35

George L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of the Modern Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Mosse stresses the importance of the second half of the eighteenth century, arguing that after this period “the manly ideal changed very little, projecting much of the same socalled manly virtues, such as willpower, honor, and courage” (4).

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For example, in Act two, scene one, the characters sing a “chanson militaire” about drinking, fighting, and nightlife. In scene ten of the same act, Jean-Louis, Louise’s father, recounts bawdy stories from his own military career, and in Act three, Montauciel, a non-commissioned officer, explains that his inability to rise in military ranks was due to his illiteracy and, by assumption, the continued practice of excluding more modest social classes from the top of the military hierarchy. Military men, and especially enlisted men, have depth in Sedaine’s libretto, and they draw upon previous experiences to explain current problems. Although the opéra-comique’s generic norms of a short duration and light themes prevent any profound inquiry into the characters’ fears and anxieties, the soldiers on stage are by no means quiet guards in the background or sentinels who arrive only to announce off-stage events. Soldiers, in Sedaine and Monsigny’s Le Déserteur, are the focus of the play. They never disappear behind more essential civilian characters or plotlines; they are protagonists who are supposed to interest and intrigue spectators and readers. The military men of Sedaine’s Déserteur have human contours. They evolve, confront conflicts, and work toward resolutions, but they never evoke pity or seek to establish identificatory bonds with the audience. Jean-Louis, Alexis, and Montauciel appear naïve, unassuming, or even duplicitous, furthering a negative, yet comical, portrayal of military culture that mapped on to the imaginaries of many French theater patrons at the time. In a study on interactions between soldiers and civilians in eighteenth-century France, Jean Chagnion writes that à tous les niveaux de la société française, le militaire faisait figure d’un homme enclin à s’affranchir de la discipline qu’il observait seulement sous les drapeaux. Réputé indifférent aux préceptes de l’Église et de la morale, il semblait profiter de son état pour satisfaire sans retenue ses passions en donnant libre cours à son impulsivité et à sa prodigalité. Il est vrai que, sous l’influence de la religion, beaucoup plus forte dans d’autres armées, les Espagnols, les Russes et les Prussiens de naissance se comportaient d’une tout autre façon. Un Allemand remarqua que, la veille de la bataille de Plaisance, en 1746, les soldats espagnols se confessaient et communiaient tandis que les Français blasphémaient et brisaient des vitres dans les tavernes.36 at every level of French society, the soldier gave the impression of a man ready to liberate himself from the discipline that he followed only while on duty. With a reputation for being indifferent toward the ideas of the Church 36

Jean Chagnion, “Les rapports entre civils et militaires au XVIIIe siècle,” in Guerre et société à l’époque moderne, ed. Jean Chagnion (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2001), 231.

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Military Masculinities and morality, he seemed to use his status in order to satisfy without reserve his passions, all the while directed by his impulsiveness and his lavishness. It is true that, under the influence of religion, stronger in other armies, wellborn Spanish, Russian, and Prussian men act in an entirely different manner. A German once said that on the evening before the Battle of Plaisance in 1746, the Spanish soldiers were giving confession and taking communion while the French were cursing and breaking the windows of the taverns.

A soldier’s life was thought to be raucous, dangerous, and violent. When soldiers deserted, it was largely understood as the result of either a harsh military culture or the lowly breed of men who would enlist in the army or navy. Both explanations justify desertion and limit any diversity in military subjectivities or in their cultural representations: soldiers are either systemic victims or lowlifes. But this rigid conception of the deserter, and of French soldiers in general, was destabilized just several months later when Mercier published his drame. Mercier’s Déserteur is more serious, complex, and unnerving than Sedaine and Monsigny’s opéra-comique. Borrowing affective strategies and an aesthetic of proximity from Diderot’s recent drame project,37 Mercier’s play paints a dark picture of military life. Le Déserteur portrays the aleatory and harsh punishment for desertion, and represents the fraught family relations of soldiers, conflicts in the military between different social classes (especially between noble officers and officers of “fortune”), and the effects of military occupation on both civilians and soldiers. Mercier’s deserting protagonist, Durimel, emerges as a sort of anti-hero – a man without kin who fell into soldier life only to then escape “un colonel, le plus dur, le plus inflexible des hommes” (a colonel, the hardest and most inflexible of men) and go into hiding across the Rhine.38 Durimel quickly establishes himself as a worthy member of the peaceful community. He is hardworking and compassionate, and he even falls in love with a young village woman, Mademoiselle Clary, who returns Durimel’s love because “tout ce qu’il dit peint l’honnêteté et la vertu”39 (everything he says illustrates honesty and virtue). Despite his peaceful life, Durimel is never at ease, and when a French patrol shows up in town, he understands that his fate is sealed. When one of the soldiers recognizes Durimel because he had served with 37 38 39

Diderot’s drame was conceptualized in his Le Fils naturel and addenda texts, Les Entretiens sur Le Fils naturel (1757). Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Le Déserteur, drame en cinq actes et en prose (Paris: Le Jay, 1770), 1.4, 14. I will refer to this version of Le Déserteur throughout as “Mercier” or “Mercier’s original.” Mercier, 1.3, 7.

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him under the same colonel, the tragic ending of the play unfolds. SaintFranc, a modest officer who, in a device typical of the drame, turns out to be Durimel’s long-lost father, must make the ultimate sacrifice to king and country by applying the death penalty. Saint-Franc sends his son to his death, and the sentence is carried out in the play’s final scene, indicated dramaturgically with the solemn beating of the military drum. Mercier’s sentimental depiction of a soldier’s humanity in the face of war’s inhumanity was an important break from previous theatrical representations of soldiering and war. Durimel is a sensitive victim of “une furie militaire” (a military fury) that “agite les Nations”40 (agitates the Nations). He is guilty of desertion but only because of his sensitivity toward injustice and his insubordination to a colonel, whose “seul plaisir était d’accabler de son autorité tous ses subalternes”41 (only pleasure was to overwhelm his subordinates with his authority). Durimel exudes a calmness and a soft soul; he recognizes the good in people, even in Germans, the supposed enemies of France in the war depicted in the play. He seeks connectivity in the warmth of individuals and makes no distinction between rich and poor or French and foreign, but only between those with virtue and those with none. Durimel and his father, Saint-Franc, are characterized by a type of masculine sensibility – a compassionate disposition laced with seriousness, and grounded in their modest social class, lived war experiences, and ambiguously Protestant religious persuasions.42 This particular way of being, indicative, at least in part, of a “middle-class need for a code of manners which challenged aristocratic ideals and fashions,” differs from the emotional regime offered by Valcourt, the play’s other military officer.43 Valcourt is a callous member of the nobility and more typical of the Matador-inspired depictions of soldiers.44 Upon his arrival in the village, he tries to seduce Durimel’s fiancée, insults his German hosts, and 40 42

43 44

Mercier, 1.1, 2. 41 Mercier, 1.4, 14. Madame Luzere, Clary’s mother, remarks in Act three that “Durimel est le fils d’un soldat. Élevé dans la même Religion que la nôtre, le Languedoc fut sa patrie.” (Durimel is the son of a soldier. Raised in the same religion as ours, Languedoc was his homeland.). Mercier, 3.3, 47. Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1996), 17. Examples of noble soldier bravado are numerous. For example, in Dancourt’s L’Impromptu de garnison (1693), the soldier Marton asks his superior Clitandre why he is so successful with women: “Martin: Comment diantre, vous êtes aussi prompt à prendre de l’amour, qu’à prendre des Villes, Monsieur?”/ Clitandre: Ne t’effarouche point, Marton, [. . .] commence par prendre ces dix Louis, je te prie” (Martin: What the hell, are you as quick to take love as you are to take Cities, sir?”/ Clitandre: Don’t be alarmed, Marton, [. . .] start by taking these ten Louis, please). Florent Carton Dancourt, L’Impromptu de garnison, comédie (Paris: Guillain, 1693), 1.1, 3.

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declares his indifference toward deserters and even all members of the regular army. State-ordered punishments, Valcourt realizes only later through his relationship with Saint-Franc, are complex and conflictual psychological events that take their toll on soldiers, commanding officers, and civilian communities. At the heart of Mercier’s drame is a tension between middle-class masculinity, with the value it places on kinesthetic and interpersonal phenomena such as sensibility, and more insensitive forms of manliness offered by Valcourt, the Colonel, and, one can assume, other noble soldiers in France’s armed forces. Mercier holds Durimel and Saint-Franc’s version of manhood up as an example: their sensibility persuades and even “improves” more unpleasant characters, such as Valcourt, who ultimately changes course in the final act in an attempt help the deserter and his adopted German family. Durimel shows courage and resolve when faced with death. He feels the emotional outpourings of Clary, Madame Luzere, and other characters at the end of the play, yet he ultimately understands that what he has done is wrong and that he must pay the price with his life. In Mercier’s drame, the deserter is not a coward, drunk, victim of identity fraud, or social deviant – the usual party line that the government (and other desertion plays) used at the time when describing men who had left their posts.45 Through his sensitive soldiers, Mercier boosts the value of the emotional bonds that linked soldier with soldier and civilian with soldier, yet he grounds these emotional bonds in an intellectual recognition of the good nature of a fellow soldier or civilian. This emotional and ethical notion of soldiering both evokes and calls into question the “brothers-in-arms” image that would dominate military masculinity during the Revolution and even into more recent times. This is an important sticking point in Mercier’s drame (and one that will change in Patrat’s version of the play): fraternity among soldiers is possible, but not all members of the military share brotherly love merely because they have some innate military goodness. Conflict among soldiers is real, it is a barrier to group solidarity, and it occurs often, and especially between soldiers of different social classes and religions. 45

For example, in his preface to L’École du soldat, the play’s anonymous author argues that deserters often suffered from a bad childhood and lack of education. He called for French parents to watch his play then “veiller avec soin sur l’éducation de leurs enfants, et d’enflammer, dès l’âge le plus tendre, leurs cœurs de cet amour sans bornes, et cet amour inviolable que nous devons tous si légitimement, et à tant de titres, à la Patrie, et au Roi qui en est le père” (watch over with care the education of their children, and to ignite, from the tenderest age, their hearts with this boundless love, and this inviolable love which we all owe so legitimately, and in so many titles, to the Fatherland, and to the King who is the father). L’École du soldat, iv.

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A military man’s ability to establish emotional channels with his fellow soldiers is an important feature in Mercier’s play. Without Saint-Franc’s friendship, Valcourt would have remained odious until the end. It was only through that military bond – by recognizing that the lower-ranked SaintFranc was a worthy compatriot after seeing his tact on the battlefield – that Valcourt attempts to help save Durimel’s life. Military bonds are not innate but earned. In Mercier’s drame, they are constructed slowly and established through shared experiences. As we shall see, the philosophe’s delicate construction of emotional perspicacity will disappear through Patrat’s edits to the play text. In the version performed for the navy in Brest, emotions abound, but critical thinking is eclipsed behind the soldiers’ unrelenting devotion to the military hierarchy, king, and country. Mercier’s drame was not an isolated case of military–emotional theorization. In some ways, the play matches an equally vigorous inquiry into the emotions by the military officers and administrators, mentioned earlier in this chapter. Philosophes militaires, such as the Maréchal de Saxe, the chevalier d’Arcq, and the comte de Guibert, argued at the time that a more holistic and positive approach to soldier motivation was the key to battlefield success. As Pichichero writes, many senior officers “turned to emotion as a new foundation for military identity and reform. By the middle of the eighteenth century, being a part of the moral elite of the noblesse du cœur was becoming just as important as being a member of the noblesse d’épée for many officers in the French armed forces.”46 The difficulties of war, according to some leaders and theorists, required soldiers to be mentally, physically, and emotionally prepared as well as bound to each other’s wellbeing through the channels of a military sensibility. Moral lessons in Mercier’s Le Déserteur, however, are not earned through the violence of war or from the difficulties of occupation; prosocial ethics continue despite war and its effects. All in all, Mercier’s drame presents an overwhelmingly positive image of human goodness and intercultural, transnational connectivity. However, the philosophe refuses to imbue members of the military with any sort of special emotional skills culled from their status as soldiers. Some members of the military do indeed possess heightened emotional intelligence – Durimel and SaintFranc, for example – but they did not achieve this sensibility by fighting or through shared military experiences, such as training operations, academy 46

Pichichero, The Military Enlightenment, 113. See also Pichichero, “Le Soldat Sensible: Military Psychology and Social Egalitarianism in the Enlightenment French Army,” French Historical Studies, 31, no. 4 (2008): 553–80.

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education, or garrison life. Virtuous characters in the drame maintain their goodness, sometimes with great difficulty, in the face of war’s destruction. Mercier’s theatrical critique of war is a well-traveled road in scholarship, both past and present. It should be unsurprising that an author of virulent anti-war tracts just several years prior would then transfer his critique of conflict to the more public arena of theater. What we will discover next is the surprising second chapter of the drame when it was significantly altered by Patrat for its performance in Brest, France’s primary military port on the Atlantic. No longer an anti-war play attempting to strike an emotional chord with spectators, Patrat’s version was a theatrical weapon intended to boost troop morale, increase intramilitary unit cohesion, define enemies of the state, and educate civilians to be supportive of the country’s soldiers and their exploits. Not quite a “pièce à these,”47 but, rather, a rich site for analyzing competing discourses of nationhood, heroism, and masculinity, Mercier’s drame, its textual variants, and their exciting performance history provide a case study of the most patent tensions at the time. At the center of these tensions was an attempt to define manhood and, more specifically, military masculinity in a supposedly “enlightened” France. A short introduction to the evolving and contested conception of masculinity in eighteenth-century militaries introduces the following comparative reading of Mercier’s original drame and Patrat’s modified version.

Debating Military Masculinity The differences between Mercier’s Le Déserteur and Patrat’s modified version show competing images of soldiers and their military identities. The Déserteur episode in the early 1770s transpired during a period of reflection on the behaviors, motivations, and attributes of men in European armies. Essential to questions of masculinity and the military were evolving opinions on the role of modest-born soldiers (and the cultures they embodied) as unit and platoon leaders. The eighteenthcentury French “military man” can be understood only through a broader discussion of masculinity, social class, and the evolving goals of the crown’s armed forces. In addition to Mosse’s study (mentioned above), which dates the emergence of a new theory of “manliness” to the second half of the eighteenth century, scholars have pointed to this era in Europe, and to 47

Pichichero, The Military Enlightenment, 169.

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the period’s literary and artistic works, as a unique testing ground for new ideas of masculinity and military group identity. In his analysis of German and Dutch soldier plays, for example, Cornelis van der Haven shows that dramatic literature was particularly influential in creating more interest in military gender dynamics. Van der Haven argues that eighteenth-century plays about soldiers “may have invited audiences to cast a more critical glance on the self-evident gendered character of military identity” and that, more broadly, these plays showed civilian spectators that “different models of masculinity” at the time were “tested in the realm of the military.”48 Theatrical depictions of manhood portray debates about what it meant to be a soldier that were far from settled. War plays indicate that several models of masculinity could coexist within military units and in other groups with common purposes. Mercier’s multiple depictions of military men in Le Déserteur contributed to a project of masculinity research in the theater. His goal was to submit different and competing versions of manhood in his play to critical review by the audience rather than assert conformity and unity among the soldiers depicted on stage. As a proponent of critical inquiry and reflection, Mercier subscribed to the notion that spectators could come away from the drame with a more complex idea about the type of man who leaves his post as well as a more nuanced take on the brand of manhood that French soldiers should exhibit in both war and peace. Military masculinity was not a closed circuit of norms and values. Soldiers and their exploits informed emerging theories of manhood in civil society, which, in turn, changed the way artists depicted soldiers in their plays, novels, paintings, and poems. In her research on masculinity in overseas missions of the British army and navy, Karen Harvey argues that military men were highly influential in creating a counterexample to the emerging “polite man” (often called the honnête homme or homme sensé in France) in eighteenth-century civilian society. “Military and naval campaigns,” Harvey writes, “had considerable impact on discussions of masculinity and politeness in particular,” and, although “rarely explored by gender historians, the naval and military contexts in which some men’s masculinity was forged suggest limits to the hegemony of politeness” as a universal framework for discussing manhood, even within elite circles.49 Harvey’s and van der 48

49

Cornelis van der Haven, “Military Men of Feeling? Gender Boundaries and Military–Civil Encounters in Two German Soldier Plays (1760–80),” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 41, no. 4 (2018), 514 and 512. Karen Harvey, “The History of Masculinity, circa 1650–1800,” Journal of British Studies 44 (2005), 308.

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Haven’s studies – as well as scholarship by Rainer Emig,50 Owen Brittan,51 Matthew McCormack,52 Jennine Hurl-Eamon,53 and others – underline an important question about military masculinity and Enlightenment sensibility, especially in regard to emotional drames like Mercier’s Le Déserteur. How does the eighteenth-century “man of feeling” endure the rigors and violence of a soldier’s life? Mercier brings this paradox to the forefront of his play, whereas Patrat, through textual edits, attempts to undo the strong correlations between sensibility and pacifism in the original play. Directing sentiment and connectivity from individual situations and contexts to a supposedly unquestionable war cause would emerge as one of Patrat’s most radical changes to Mercier’s text. In his drame, Mercier engages the consistent tension between the nobility and an emerging bourgeois officer and non-commissioned officer (NCO) class that the French army increasingly leaned on to fill its ranks during the second half of the eighteenth century. Military historians and scholars of military cultures, including Corvisier,54 Forrest,55 and Pichichero,56 have argued that class tension resulted from an increase of officiers de fortune and other bourgeois soldiers in the ranks and from intermittent slaps back from the nobility concerning access to military academies (écoles militaires) and senior officer grades.57 Nevertheless, as Pichichero points out, the military administration had the goal of promoting harmony among its troops because, ultimately, it was “not blind to the notion that collective identity and group solidarity were important forces in military successes.”58 It is easy to see why inter-class harmony and its requirement that disparate men share norms, behaviors, and practices would have been an aspirational goal of military administrators. Group cohesion leads to 50

51 52

53 54 55 56 57

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Rainer Emig, “Sentimental Masculinity: Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771),” in Configuring Masculinity in Theory and Literary Practice, ed. Stefan Horlacher (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 127–39. Owen Brittan, “Subjective Experience and Military Masculinity at the Beginning of the Long Eighteenth Century,” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 40, no. 2 (2017): 273–90. Matthew McCormack, “‘A Species of Civil Soldier’: Masculinity, Policing and the Military in 1780s England,” in A History of Police and Masculinities, 1700–2010, ed. David G. Barrie and Susan Broomhall (London: Routledge, 2012), 55–71. Jennine Hurl-Eamon, Marriage and the British Army in the Long Eighteenth Century: “The Girl I Left Behind” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). André Corvisier, Les contrôles de troupes de l’ancien régime (Paris: CNRS, 1968). Alan Forrest, Conscripts and Deserters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). Pichichero, The Military Enlightenment, esp. 60–70. When Louis XV founded the École militaire royale in 1751, entry was restricted to sons of the nobility who were born without fortune. For more information, see Christian Benoit,L’École militaire: Une histoire illustrée (Paris: Pierre de Taillac, 2014). Pichichero, The Military Enlightenment, 66.

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success, and there is no reason to believe that this was only a top-down call for soldier harmony. Military men from different classes must have had a vested interest in negotiating with each other, in borrowing each other’s coping mechanisms and norms, and in finding new identificatory strategies altogether in order to conduct war more effectively and stay alive. Concerning the way masculinity could have operated in this complex environment of danger, bravery, talent, and class conflict, Robert Nye traces a tenuous process whereby bourgeois men appropriated and changed the honor codes that had originally been developed among noble warriors from the medieval period through the sixteenth century.59 By the eighteenth century, according to Nye, the concept of honor had transformed into “an increasingly important feature of individual identity,” rather than a class-based identity associated with the nobility.60 Nye then goes on to speculate that, contrary to its aristocratic origins in medieval Europe, honor during the French Enlightenment “reflected the bourgeois preoccupation with moral discipline, inner values, and with the control of reproduction and sex.”61 This new family-focused strain of honor was on full display during the 1760s, especially in patriotic theatrical works such as de Belloy’s Le Siège de Calais. Military life under the Old Regime placed a magnifying glass on the social anxieties of men at the time. On the one hand, the proximity – the life-or-death interdependence of soldiers from different social classes – catalyzed a rapid mixing of behaviors and social performances among men. In the army and navy, members of disparate classes worked together on missions and exercises, even if they remained segregated in most civilian circles. Men from different walks of life were required to perform mutually beneficial tasks to win battles and to live to fight another day. These increasingly common acts of military teamwork, according to Nye, were assisted by the gradual demise of the nobility’s reliance on dangerous feats and flashy (and often stupid) acts of bravery to please their king, who, in turn, was supposed to reward noble officers with privileges, cash payouts, and real estate.62 In some ways, military life, owing to its dangers, enabled more democratic decision-making and inter-class co-dependence. 59 60 61 62

Robert A. Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor, 16. Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor, 32. Nye writes that “the decay of the [military] service function of the nobility – rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding – meant a noble patriarch needed only to sire an heir; legal mechanisms then switched on to ensure an orderly succession. By the eighteenth century the need for warrior-heirs to defend castle and fief had long disappeared; noble reproductive strategies tended to consist of

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On the other hand, because of the army and navy’s rigid hierarchy and its strict class rules when attributing high brass positions, military life was also a constant reminder to bourgeois and modest soldiers that no amount of brotherly love would give them a seat at the general’s table. Soldiers with lowly upbringings (or, in the colonial case, even mixed-race officers with family ties to the nobility63) might have gained a window into a more égalitaire life in the military ranks, especially during the urgency of battle. But the ceiling remained firmly in place. It is thus no surprise that, just a few years later, the Revolution’s new citizen-officers banned blue-blooded soldiers from the army,64 thereby accomplishing the transfer of their loyalty from a lord-superior and “his” battalion to the armed forces of the nation – a more abstract and horizontal source for effort and devotion.65 In the 1770s, however, the nobility’s grip on the military’s highest ranks was decidedly secure. Mercier’s Déserteur was a play, not a military treatise or a first-hand account of how soldiers felt while on the battlefield or in the wake of a desertion. The ambiguity of the playtext, the actors’ skills and techniques, and the overall framing of the work as an artistic experience rather than a military training exercise or lesson mitigate Mercier’s or Patrat’s ability to effect change in the military ranks or even provide a clear opinion on any particular issue of military concern. This caveat aside, Mercier and Patrat tap into existing notions of military masculinity, attempt to forge new types of military men in drama, and provide their own opinions about the military’s emotional regime. Contemporary military tensions, including skill versus birth, sensitive souls versus foolhardy bravado, respect of women versus female objectification, and many other debates involving members of France’s army at the time, are “played out” through a comparative reading of the two Déserteurs. At times, the “two” versions share common goals: both teach soldiers and civilians about the (dangerous for Mercier, admirable for Patrat) emerging military sphere and its unique codes, feelings, and lexicon; both strive to boost the role of theater in questions of national policy and international politics. The following close comparative reading of the two Déserteurs nevertheless shows a

63 64 65

minimal agenda unmoored from collateral cultural imperatives.” Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor, 36. See Pichichero, The Military Enlightenment, 185–90. Members of the nobility were banned from serving in the government, the military, and in political societies on 26 frimaire an II (December 16, 1793). For more information see Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor, 32–5; see also Pichichero, The Military Enlightenment, 9–13.

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competition between different forms of masculinity as well as divergent opinions of the army’s influence on French national identity. Patrat’s changes to Mercier’s text help readers today better understand how the military appropriated drama and theatrical performance for specific goals. What we are witness to in Patrat’s effort is theater’s categorical change in the eyes of the military from an auxiliary pastime – one means of stemming ennui among others – to an instrument of soft power, used to create emulative models and influence soldiers’ behaviors and values.

Militarizing the drame With his alterations to the playtext, Patrat’s goal was to render Mercier’s male characters respectful of military hierarchy, less influenced by whispers of the Protestant religion or examples of German goodness, and more inspired by duty to the king. The original play projects a harsh condemnation of war and its effects on soldiers and civilians. Mercier conceptualizes virtuous soldiers as good natured only if they remain kind through the trials of army life. Patrat’s version transforms the play into a patriotic spectacle that attempted to ease soldiers’ fears and convince civilians that French wars were worth fighting. Patrat keeps Mercier’s sentimental threads intact, but provides spectators with an uncritical military man whose bonds with fellow soldiers appear disjointed with the play’s complex situations. Each version presents its own take on the future of French military endeavors and on the type of man the nation should call upon to protect its borders and secure its interests abroad. Patrat’s first line of attack is to prove that the French military is no place for Protestants, warm feelings toward the German states, and Enlightenmentinspired cosmopolitanism. This effort starts with the list of characters on the first page, where Saint-Franc is described as a “major, décoré de la Croix de St. Louis” (major, decorated with the Saint-Louis Cross), France’s highest military honor for an officer at the time. The description of the sensitive officer differs from Mercier’s original, in which Saint-Franc is listed as “décoré de l’Ordre du Mérite, Major d’un Régiment” (decorated with the Order of Merit medal, Major of the regiment). While the “Ordre du Mérite” could be a general category for any type of military honor, it is approximate in name to the medal given to officers inducted into the eighteenth-century Institution du Mérite Militaire. The award was created on March 10, 1759 to celebrate the “grand nombre d’Officiers qui, nés dans des pays où la religion protestante est établie, ne peuvent être admis dans l’Ordre de Saint-Louis” (large number of officers who, born in countries where the protestant religion

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is established, cannot be admitted into the Order of Saint-Louis).66 By taking on the Saint-Louis Cross, Mercier’s Protestant Saint-Franc is dramaturgically converted before the first word of Patrat’s version is pronounced. Saint-Franc must now be a Catholic because he wears that religion’s most prestigious military medal. The transformation of Saint-Franc in the character list previews Patrat’s removal of several references to Protestantism at the Brest performance. For example, upon hearing that Durimel is Saint-Franc’s son in Act three, Madame Luzere exclaims, “Que m’apprenez-vous? Quel presentiment vient me saisir! Mais, Durimel est le fils d’un Soldat. Éléve dans la même Religion que la nôtre, le Languedoc fut sa patrie”67 (What do you say? What presentiment seizes me! But, Durimel is the son of a Soldier. Raised in the same Religion as ours, Languedoc was his homeland). However, in Patrat’s edition, the reference to Luzere and Durimel’s shared faith never finds its way to the stage.68 Patrat again erases Protestantism from the text in Act four during an exchange between Saint-Franc and Luzere. In Mercier’s drame, the French soldier describes an almost mystical connection that binds him to Luzere because of “la Religion de nos pères.” In Patrat’s version, the reference to religion is once again absent.69 Patrat’s removal of Protestantism from the original is part of a larger plan to minimize differences between soldiers and to show that the military is no place for cowards, foreigners, religious minorities, or criticism of war, military hierarchy, and the monarchy.70 The examples are numerous and once again start in the first scene of the play. Madame Luzere and her family live several miles from the French border, in a war-torn German village. Luzere blames the pillages, tortures, and deaths on the nature of 66 67 68

69 70

Ordonnance du 10 mars 1759 portant création d’un établissement sous le titre du Mérite militaire, in Code des Ordres de chevalerie du royaume, dédié au Roi (Paris: Belin-Le Prieur, 1819), 294. Mercier, 3.3, 47. Emphasis added. Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Le Déserteur, drame en prose en cinq actes par Mr. Mercier, mis au théâtre, avec des changemens, par Mr. J. Patrat, représenté pour la première fois à Brest le 23 Janvier 1771, et remise au Théâtre de Lyon, au mois de Juin 1771 (Lyon: Castaud, 1771). This is Patrat’s modified version of Mercier’s drame, which I will refer to as “Patrat” or “Patrat’s version.” Quote here from 3.3, 32. Mercier, 4.3, 58; for the same exchange in Patrat’s version, see 4.3, 39. In perhaps a prescient act of military xenophobia, Patrat insists numerous times on the “Frenchness” of the kingdom’s soldiers. As Christopher Tozzi points out, “foreigners in the royal army routinely declared themselves French on the basis of their military service” throughout the Old Regime. This, however, changed after the fall of the Bastille, when “the efforts very early in the Revolution to purge foreigners from the ranks” demonstrated the limits of the period’s so-called commitment to universalism and equality, “regardless of his [the soldier’s] creed, language, culture, or place of birth.” Christopher J. Tozzi, Nationalizing France’s Army: Foreign, Black, and Jewish Troops in the French Military, 1715–1831 (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2016), 4 and 6.

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war and military occupation, rather than on any specific nation’s soldiers. She laments that [d]epuis qu’une furie militaire agite les Nations, que les Souverains se font un jeu de la guerre, tous les peuples tour-à-tour, attaquent et se défendent. La marche de ces Armées ne se règle point d’après nos avis. Payons en silence, voilà notre lot; heureux si par ce moyen nous échappons aux horreurs qui nous environnent.71 ever since a military fury agitated the Nations [and] Sovereigns made a game out of war, all the peoples, one-by-one, attack and defend themselves. The march of these armies will not stop on account of our opinions. Pay with our silence, that’s our lot . . . and happy if, by doing so, we escape the horrors that surround us.

According to Luzere, a “military fury” originates at the top, with Europe’s kings, who show no concern for the victims of their dynastic squabbles. War, for Mercier, is a destructive force that reduces human beings to killing machines, no matter their upbringing or national origin. Patrat softens the violence and pessimism that shade Mercier’s drame. In Le Déserteur at the Théâtre de la Marine, Luzere says, rather matter-of-factly, “la marche des Armées ne se règle point d’après nos avis. Payons en silence, voilà notre lot. Heureux si, par ce moyen, nous échappons aux horreurs qui nous environnent”72 (The march of these armies will not stop on account of our opinions. Pay with our silence, that’s our lot . . . and happy if, by doing so, we escape the horrors that surround us). Luzere, through Patrat’s edits, remains no fan of war, but she is less universal in her critique and not as cosmopolitan in her hope for peace. The totality of war’s destruction is repeated by Mercier several lines later in an exchange between Luzere and Mr. Hoctau, a local businessman who is in love with Durimel’s fiancée, Mademoiselle Clary: MADAME LUZERE: J’aime mieux que les choses se soient ainsi passées, que d’avoir vu le sang ruisseler dans les rues, et peut-être les quatre coins de notre petite ville livrés aux flammes. Tout considéré, Hanovriens, Allemands, Hongrois, Prussiens, François; tous ces Messieurs, tantôt nos ennemis, et tantôt nos alliés, nous ont tour-à-tour assez également traités pour ne savoir à qui donner la préférence; et s’il fallait choisir, autant vaut des Français . . . MR. HOCTAU: Comment des François! . . . Nos ennemis! J’étouffe . . . Que je les hais! 71

Mercier, 1.1, 2.

72

Patrat, 1.1, 4.

82

Military Masculinities MADAME LUZERE: Qu’entendez-vous par ce nom d’ennemis? J’ai vu dès mon enfance la guerre changer vingt fois de face et d’objet. Les feux de joie succédaient aux massacres; on redevenait amis, après s’être égorgés. Le pourquoi de ces débats sanglants reste toujours inconnu, et je n’ai pas encore rencontré de militaire qui m’ait paru l’avoir deviné.73 MADAME LUZERE: I prefer that things went the way they did than to have seen blood run in the streets, and perhaps the four corners of our little town engulfed in flames. All things considered, Hanoverians, Germans, Hungarians, Prussians, French: all these men, at times our enemies, at times our allies, have one-by-one similarly treated us so that it is impossible to know whom to prefer; and if one must choose, the French are good enough . . . MR. HOCTAU: What! The French! Our enemies! I can’t breathe . . . I hate them so! MADAME LUZERE: What do you mean by enemies? Since my childhood, I’ve seen war change sides and objectives twenty times. Joyous bonfires follow massacres; we become friends again after cutting each other’s throats. The reason for these bloody conflicts always remains unknown, and I have never met a soldier who seems to have figured it out.

Luzere finds a common strand of violence and destruction across different European powers and their military endeavors. War is so absurd, Luzere concludes, that the German people might as well agree to be conquered by their most storied enemies, the French, given that Europe’s nations are in a constant and vicious cycle of political strife into war then temporary friendship to conflict to war, once more. In Patrat’s version, Luzere’s universal critique of war is transformed into rather banal and (in the logic of the text thus far) unjustified praise of the French. LUZERE: J’aime mieux que les choses se soient ainsi passées, que d’avoir vu le sang ruisseler dans les rues, et peut-être les quatre coins de notre petite ville, livrés aux flammes. Puisque nous devions avoir des troupes, autant vaut des Français. MR. HOCTEAU: Vous avez beau dire, je n’aime pas les Français et je suis bon Patriote – M’entendez-vous Madame?74 73

Mercier, 1.1, 2–3.

74

Patrat, 1.1, 4–5.

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Militarizing the drame

LUZERE: I prefer that things went the way they did than to have seen blood run in the streets, and perhaps the four corners of our little town engulfed in flames. Since we must have troops, the French are good enough. MR. HOCTEAU: You might be right [but] I don’t like the French and I’m a good patriot – you understand, Madame?

Luzere, a German mother, sees no difference between French occupation and any of the many occupations her village has suffered at the hands of German-speaking states; however, her rhetoric is far less charged with disdain and universal critique of war. She prefers the French, but it is hard to understand why. A key aspect of Patrat’s remodeling of French soldiers and their commitments is the removal of any pacifist cosmopolitanism from Mercier’s play. The Germans, for Patrat, are almost natural enemies of France. French soldiers share common traits such as fidelity, bravery, and compassion with each other, but not, as in Mercier’s Déserteur, with their enemies. This positive depiction of the French soldier runs contrary to public opinion at the time, which was, as Owen Brittan and others have demonstrated, far less adoring of military men from the lowest ranks to the highest officers. Brittan writes that “many senior officers appeared to revel in a ‘rattling, immoral lifestyle’ and seemingly paid little attention to the livelihood or well-being of the ordinary soldier.”75 For much of the civilian population, “men in the army were symbols of state intervention, with their press gangs violating widely held principles of freedom. Duels were thought to be frequent, and drunkenness was perceived to be habitual throughout the army.”76 Military men, according to many civilians, were in fact nothing more than a group of drunks, victims of the state, or bullies. Mercier avoids binaries of good against bad, polite versus brutish, to reimagine a diverse and complex image of the military man. For example, Saint-Franc is conflicted, yet fair and virtuous; Durimel’s plight is understandable, even if his crime against the state is serious; and Valcourt, the highest-ranking main character in the drame and a member of the nobility, is the most callous and, at times, ridiculous person on stage. This presentation of French soldiers with various goals and attitudes – men with different forms and intensities of militarized masculinity – scales down and harmonizes through Patrat’s edits. In his version, members of the 75

Brittan, “Subjective Experience and Military Masculinity,” 273.

76

Ibid., 274.

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military share common traits, which help soldiers who were potentially different in pre-military civilian life work toward the same mission and group identity. For Patrat, civilian men appear morally ambiguous, but men in the army are always characterized by virtue, bravery, and commitment to goodness. Military service is precisely what “makes” the man. For example, in a debate between Saint-Franc and Valcourt over military policies on desertion, the young nobleman comes off as insensitive to anyone who leaves his post, no matter the reason. Here is the exchange in Mercier’s original play: SAINT-FRANC: Ah, S’il faut un exemple, qu’il est affreux de le donner! Quelle loi terrible! On tourne contre leurs têtes les mêmes armes, qui souvent leur ont valu des victoires. J’ai adhéré il est vrai, à la résolution que nous avons prise de ne plus nous intéresser pour aucun; mais cher Valcourt, vous ne sauriez imaginer le frémissement que me cause ce sanglant appareil. Au seul nom de Déserteur, mes sens sont émus, bouleversés. Songez donc que c’est moi qui suis forcé de donner à chaque fois le signal de mort. Aucun de vous ne les approche de se près . . . Leurs derniers regards fixent les miens, et leur sang rejaillit jusqu’à sur moi . . . Ils sont coupables puisqu’ils ont bravé les Ordonnances du Prince; mais croyez qu’il est plus digne de pitié que de mort: nous parlons à notre aise, nous les condamnons de même. Il faudrait que vous eussiez été tous simples soldats comme moi, pour mieux les juger. VALCOURT: Dieu me garde d’en juger aucun. Qu’on leur casse la tête, qu’on leur fasse grâce, qu’ils désertent ou qu’ils servent, que m’importe? Il s’en sauve aujourd’hui cinquante, demain il nous en reviendra cent de chez l’ennemi. Je conçois que c’est quelque chose de singulier que tous ces enrôlements forcés. Être Officier! Ah! de grand cœur. C’est l’honneur, le courage, c’est l’amour du Monarque, c’est la liberté même qui nous conduit à la victoire; et que nous sert d’être à côté d’une foule d’hommes soldats involontaires, qu’il faut traîner sous le fouet de la discipline. Pourquoi accorder à de pareils gens l’honneur d’être tués dans les Batailles? Que ne les renvoie-t-on plutôt labourer le champ de leurs pères. À nous seuls devrait appartenir la gloire et le danger des combats. Le nom de Déserteur serait certainement un nom ignoré . . . Il me vient une idée. Trente Officiers valent bien je crois un Bataillon? Ne pourrions-nous, unis en bravoure, représenter une Armée entière, former un seul corps audacieux, intrépide, impénétrable? Aussi prompt que terrible, il volerait avec la victoire; elle serait assurée. Pas un ne reculerait d’un pouce sur le terrain, et le Champ de bataille pourrait être couvert de morts, mais ne serait jamais désert.77

77

Mercier, 2.1, 22–23.

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SAINT-FRANC: Ah, if an example is needed, how dreadful it is to give it! What a terrible law! The same weapons are turned against their heads, which often brought them victories. I have adhered, it is true, to the resolution we have taken to no longer interest ourselves in anyone; but dear Valcourt, you cannot imagine the shudder that this bloody device causes me. At the mere name of Deserter, my senses are moved, overwhelmed. Consider then that it is I who am forced to give the death signal each time. None of you come close to them . . . Their last glances fix mine, and their blood spurts even on me . . . They are guilty since they defied the Orders of the Prince; but believe that they are more worthy of pity than of death: we speak at our ease, we condemn them in the same way. You would have had to be all simple soldiers like me, to judge them better. VALCOURT: God forbid I judge any of them. Whether we break their heads, whether we give them mercy, whether they desert or serve, what does it matter to me? Fifty are running away today, tomorrow a hundred will come back to us from the enemy. I understand that all these forced enlistments are something singular. Be an Officer! Ah! with a big heart. It is honor, courage, it is the love of the Monarch, it is freedom itself that leads us to victory; and what use is it to be next to a crowd of involuntary male soldiers, who must be dragged under the whip of discipline. Why grant such people the honor of being killed in Battles? If only they could rather be sent back to plow the field of their fathers. To us alone should belong the glory and the danger of battles. The name of Deserter would certainly be an unknown name . . . I have an idea. Thirty Officers are worth, I believe, a Battalion? Couldn’t we, united in bravery, represent an entire Army, form one bold, intrepid, impenetrable body? Swift and terrible, it would soar to victory; it would be sure of itself. Not one would retreat an inch on the ground, and the Battlefield might be covered with dead, but would never be deserted.

Saint-Franc, a lowborn soldier who has worked his way up the military ladder and is now charged with punishing deserters, faces a moral quandary in sentencing to death a man who had been pressed into army life in the first place. Valcourt, however, seems more concerned by the opening of ranks – and its requisite values of “honor, courage,” and “love of the Monarch” – to “a crowd of involuntary male soldiers who must be dragged under the whip of discipline.” Valcourt cares little whether these soldiers live, die, or leave their posts. What bothers him most is their desecration of the soldier’s supposedly sacred role. According to the noble officer, this constitutes a dereliction of duty that originates in the very presence in the army of lowborn men who lack a particular type of (noble) soul.

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In Patrat’s version, Valcourt is far less critical of modest-born soldiers, even if he is not about to praise their military achievements. His response to Saint-Franc is now as follows: VALCOURT: Ah! Mon ami! . . . Être Officier! être Officier! C’est l’honneur, le courage, c’est l’amour du Monarque, c’est la liberté même qui nous conduit à la victoire. À nous seuls devaient appartenir la gloire et le danger des combats et le nom de Déserteur seraient certainement ignorés (avec beaucoup de feu). Il me vient une idée: trente Officiers valent bien, je crois, un bataillon. Ne pourrions-nous pas, unis en bravoure, représenter une Armée entière? Former un seul Corps, audacieux, intrépide, impénétrable? Aussi prompt que terrible, il volerait avec la victoire, elle serait assurée. Pas un ne reculerait d’un pouce sur le terrain, et le champ de Bataille pourrait être couvert de morts, mais ne serait jamais désert.78 VALCOURT: Ah! My friend! . . . To be an Officer! to be an officer! It is honor, courage, it is the love of the Monarch, it is freedom itself that leads us to victory. To us alone should belong the glory and the danger of battle and the name of Deserter would certainly be unknown (with much fire). An idea occurs to me: thirty Officers are worth, I believe, a battalion. Could we not, united in bravery, represent an entire Army? Form a single Body, daring, intrepid, impenetrable? As quick as it was terrible, it would soar to victory, it would be sure of itself. Not one would retreat an inch on the ground, and the Battlefield might be covered by the dead, but would never be deserted.

Valcourt’s indifference to whether deserters live or die disappears from the play. The noble officer boasts about the loyalty and bravery of the officer class – these pure souls who should be respected and revered by more common soldiers – but he is less caustic toward enlisted men. From a position of military effectiveness, Valcourt seems more concerned about desertion in Patrat’s version. If not all modest-born soldiers are useless and vile, then those military men who desert must be particularly unfit for combat and deserving of punishment. Valcourt refuses to universalize desertion as a quality of low birth and status. Deserters leave their posts because they are exceptionally weak and have made a bad decision. Soldiers are supposed to be patriotic, loyal, and benevolent. Patrat softens Valcourt’s malice by deleting his cruel treatment of women from the play. In Mercier’s original, Valcourt’s justification for not immediately 78

Patrat, 2.1, 17–18.

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exposing Durimel’s desertion is nothing more than a desire to entertain himself and his fellow officers with a perverse trick: Toutes ces femmes, au premier abord, s’effarouchent, crient, tempêtent; peu-à-peu elles s’humanisent, s’apprivoisent, deviennent douces, douces tant qu’on en tombe las! . . . Cet original, avec son air mari . . . Il m’a paru Français . . . C’est quelque réfugié . . . Ma foi, nous jouerons la Comédie . . . Le pauvre diable! Il ne faut pas le tuer . . . Qu’il végète maritalement sous cette zone pesante; je suis seulement curieux de pousser un peu l’aventure. Il faut bien s’amuser à quelque chose en garnison, sans quoi l’on périrait d’ennui.79 All these women, at first sight, are frightened, shout, storm; little by little they are humanized, tamed, become sweet, sweet to the point that we get tired of them! . . . This unique man, with his husband-like air . . . He seemed French to me . . . He is some refugee . . . Well, we will play a Comedy . . . The poor devil! He must not be killed . . . Let him vegetate maritally under this heavy zone; I’m just curious to push the adventure a bit. You must have fun with something while garrisoned, otherwise you would die of boredom.

Valcourt and his friends are bored, and they need to entertain themselves by meddling with Durimel and Clary’s relationship – an action that is justifiable, following Valcourt’s logic, now that everybody knows that Durimel is a deserter and an impostor. Valcourt, in Patrat’s version, provides a more compassionate justification for keeping the deserter safe, not alerting the local military authorities, and easing the German family’s concerns: Elle a raison: j’ai poussé trop loin la plaisanterie. Elle va porter ses plaintes au Major, et je vais entendre un Sermon! . . . Il me l’avait bien dit, cette famille est honnête – allons le trouver. Soyons le premier à lui raconter mon équipée. Qu’il ramène la tranquillité dans cette maison, en assurant ces braves gens que le goût du plaisir n’a jamais étouffé dans mon cœur les semences de l’honneur et de la vertu.80 She’s right: I took the joke too far. She’s going to complain to the Major, and I’m going to hear a Sermon! . . . He told me so, this family is honest – let’s find him. Let’s be the first to tell him about my trip. May he bring peace to this house, assuring these good people that the taste for pleasure has never stifled the seeds of honor and virtue in my heart.

Once again, where there was once a negative representation of noble French officers, there is now, in Patrat’s version, a generous depiction of 79

Mercier, 2.8, 37.

80

Patrat, 2.8, 26.

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their motivations and actions. Valcourt is moved by misogyny, boredom, and disdain in Mercier’s play, whereas he appears contrite and helpful in the version that was performed in Brest. Rather than distinguishing among different types of military men, as in Mercier’s original, Patrat attempts to link foot soldiers and officers through a common mission grounded in benevolence and compassion for the fellow soldier. Patrat modifies the “accessibility” of Mercier’s emotional-identification regime in the original drame. In Mercier’s play, some characters, and particularly officers of the nobility, remain external to scenes of sympathy and good deeds that result from emotional attachment. In Patrat’s version, however, soldiers appear more in concert, and even the most abrasive character, Valcourt, can harness the drame’s pitiful energy. Patrat, once again, affixes personal improvement to the act of joining the armed services. The most shocking difference between the two Déserteurs is that SaintFranc sends his own son to death in Mercier’s version, whereas, through Patrat’s edits, Durimel lives, thanks to the mercy of noble-born officers. In order to better understand this denouement, spectators of Patrat’s version were privy to several new scenes such as one in which Valcourt implores his own father, the Colonel, to pardon Durimel.81 Several scholars have commented on this change, on Mercier’s reluctance to acknowledge Patrat’s version of his text, and on the philosophe’s eventual acceptance of the happy ending into what he viewed as the definitive version of his play in the 1780s.82 But less has been said about the new ending within the context of Patrat’s overall vision and the deployment of the play in front of a largely military audience in Brest. The alternative ending, I argue, is the culmination of a more profound difference of worldviews illustrated in the two versions (and in French society at the time). Patrat prepares for his ending by highlighting his own take on death, nostalgia, and the future of the military earlier in the play. All in all, the version of Le Déserteur that was performed in Brest is not merely the version in which Durimel lives, but rather, a future-focused attempt to boost military optimism and ultimately bury the internecine conflicts of the French military. At the beginning of Act three, Mercier presents a pitiful scene in which Saint-Franc discusses the death and destruction that he has witnessed

81 82

See Patrat, 4.6, for the preparation of the new ending. See Patrat, 5.4 and 5.6 for the new (happy) ending. For more information, see Daniel Droixhe, “Généologie éditoriale et génétique textuelle. Les premières éditions du Déserteur de Sébastien Mercier (1770–1772).” Le livre et l’Estampe 58, no. 187 (2012): 1–42. See also Sophie Marchand, “Présentation,” in Mercier, Le déserteur, 190–2.

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throughout his long military career. In an exchange with Madame Luzere, he laments: Je sens ce que vous dites, Madame. On brûle quelquefois d’épancher son âme, parce qu’on soulage ainsi l’amertume dont elle est remplie. Ce cœur, comme le vôtre, a besoin de s’ouvrir. Je ne trouve guère parmi ceux qui m’environnent de confident intime. La plupart des amis que j’avais, m’ont devancé dans la tombe, et prêt d’y descendre, irais-je encore former de nouveaux liens pour les voir rompre aussitôt. Je ne vois autour de moi que rivaux ambitieux d’un caractère sombre, ou des jeunes gens pleins d’inconséquence, profondément occupés de frivolités: pas un ne m’intéresse assez pour lui confier mes peines; mais vous êtes mère, Madame, votre cœur doit répondre au mien.83 I feel what you’re saying, lady. We sometimes burn to pour out our soul, because we thus relieve the bitterness with which it is filled. This heart, like yours, needs to open. I rarely find an intimate confidant among those around me. Most of my friends have preceded me to the grave, and myself ready to go down there, I would rather go than form new bonds to see them break immediately. I see around me only ambitious rivals of a dark character, or young people full of inconsistency, deeply occupied with frivolities: not one interests me enough to confide my troubles to him; but you are a mother, Madame, your heart must respond to mine.

Saint-Franc confides in Madame Luzere because, as a soldier, he has no one with whom he can share his doubts in the military endeavor. The soldiers in his entourage have been replaced by “ambitious rivals” and “young people full of inconsistency.” Saint-Franc’s vision of the French military’s future is not optimistic because the army is no longer a place for sensitive, honest men. Ultimately, there are no sentimental bonds among French officers. In Patrat’s version, Saint-Franc’s morose take on the past, present, and future of the military disappears. Patrat’s Saint-Franc notes: “Je sens ce que vous dites, Madame: mon âme, comme la vôtre, a besoin de s’ouvrir, et je vais vous donner l’exemple – vous êtes Mère, votre cœur doit répondre au mien.”84 (I feel what you are saying, Madam: my soul, like yours, needs to open up, and I will set an example for you – you are a Mother, your heart must respond to mine). Patrat deletes death and criticism of the military, offering instead an optimistic image of future soldiering in the French armed forces. In his version, soldiers learn to forgive and forget, nobody laments the past or the loss of fallen comrades, and Durimel lives, like 83

Mercier, 3.1, 42.

84

Patrat, 3.1, 29.

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many others, to fight another day. By boosting the optimism of the soldier’s plight, the cohesiveness of intra-military relationships, and the ability of the army to welcome wrongdoers like Durimel back into the fold, Patrat uses Mercier’s play to describe a new military culture in France. This society of brothers has one eye on future endeavors, accepts all types into its ranks, and consistently yearns for more recruits. As we will see later, France found itself quickly at war with virtually every European power during the Revolution, and the country eventually adopted in very real terms this forward-focused, uncritical, and urgently inclusive take on its armed forces. The differences between Mercier’s original Déserteur and Patrat’s edited version are abundant. Each version presents its own take on military masculinity, on the relationship between soldiers and civilians, and on the definition of what it means to be a good officer or foot soldier. Most importantly, the two conclusions diverge: Mercier condemns Durimel to death and, with him, any positive values of war or soldiering. In Patrat’s version, contrite deserters have a future in the French army and the war effort requires a force of French men with a distinct military culture of its own. Unlike Mercier, who insists on class difference and conflict until the end of his drame, Patrat combines disparate members of society into the same military group identity (even if members of the nobility uncritically retain their rank and institutional power). This was a social mission as well as a strategy for military effectiveness not unlike the mid-eighteenth-century attempts, successful or not, at reform in the army and navy. Patrat’s dramaturgical effort also emerges as a case study of how some writers at the time transformed an intellectually diverse movement – the Enlightenment – into a more focused, mission-driven Military Enlightenment. Like military theorists at the time, Patrat’s “exploration of esprit de corps and primary group cohesion, and the new insistence on having the French army function as a utilitarian and egalitarian society were in no way intended to serve the broader pacifistic, cosmopolitan, and humanitarian agendas of philosophers [. . .] Rather, these ideas were proposed by men of the sword who had the opposite goal: the creation of an invincible army, the most effective killing machine possible.”85 In the next chapter, I suspend my analysis of eighteenth-century war plays and their variants to follow soldiers into militarized performance spaces. Theaters with significant military populations reveal local and large-scale attempts to forge a martial culture through dramatic performance and the social act of theatergoing. The military administrators who 85

Pichichero, “Le Soldat Sensible,” 579–80.

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pushed for these performance environments pitched theater to alleviate the rigors of military life, stem boredom, and deter soldiers and sailors from more destructive practices, such as gambling, drinking, and frequenting sex workers. Performances in highly militarized spaces such as the Théâtre de la Marine in Brest and the Comédie du Cap-Français in Saint-Domingue reveal tensions between the desire to teach, entertain, and instill virtue and the reality of those theatrical interventions as they played out on the ground. The following analysis of military–theatrical performance environments shows the evolving role of theater as it was conceptualized by military administrations and experienced by soldiers and civilians at the end of the Old Regime. Military and theatrical professionals attempted to incorporate performance and its processes into projects of militarization, colonization, urbanization, and cultural transfer. If military theorists indeed intended to conceptualize, as Pichichero argues, “the most effective killing machine possible,” then how did the material realities of theatrical performance contribute to or complicate this mission? What role did theater ultimately play in forging military culture at a time when French influence was stretched thin across the Atlantic, and when the kingdom was on the brink of significant political and social upheaval?

chapter 3

Performing on the Periphery: Military–Theatrical Experiences at the Théâtre de la Marine (Brest) and the Comédie du Cap (Cap-Français) The two Déserteur drames discussed in the previous chapter were part of a rich eighteenth-century theatrical production about desertion and military life. With performances throughout France, Europe, and the colonial Atlantic, the “Déserteur effect” – a vogue of about a dozen desertion plays – previewed an intense period of military drama and performance during the French Revolution (the subject of this book’s next two chapters).1 When all of the Déserteur plays and versions were combined, late-eighteenth-century spectators experienced an amalgam of media concerned with military life and soldier manliness, and they engaged with new theories about the theater’s role in promoting patriotism and community values. In this chapter, my goal is to move from symbolic constructions of military masculinity, soldier identity, and national character in dramatic literature to the construction of actual theatrical spaces where those dramas and other works were performed, enjoyed, and critiqued by military populations. I ask here, among other questions, how did army and navy administrators mobilize theatrical performance for specific military goals? How was theater – an ephemeral, unpredictable, and multimodal art form – pitched by its proponents as a venue to build community through shared experiences of militarized patriotism and French “national sentiment”? And to what degree did theater, especially in the militarized zones of provincial France and in its colonial empire, live up to or undermine the expectations of theaterphilic city planners and military administrators? Theater factored into several of the crown’s policies concerning officers and enlisted men. During the eighteenth century, military leaders and government officials increasingly subscribed to theories of the theater’s role 1

A telling example of the “Déserteur effect” occurred on November 28, 1790, when actors in Rouen staged Mercier’s drame followed by Sedaine and Monsigny’s opéra-comique. This was just two days before performing the École du soldat ou les remords du déserteur français.

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in boosting the sensibility and socialization of spectators. Philosophes militaires discussed theater as a beneficial institution for stemming ennui and building collegiality and esprit de corps. However, eyewitness reports from the time, the ambiguity of the plays (and variants of the playtexts), the material conditions and requirements of performances, and more holistic notions of the theatrical event call into question the success of military efforts to use theatrical performance as a tool for inculcating soldiers and sailors with clear political messages and specific behaviors. Playwrights and administrators, armed with a set of Enlightenment practices and beliefs concerning theater and the emotions, came to believe without question “that the movement of affect through the performing body [. . .] ought to be recognized as a primary animator of theatrical experience.”2 Directing, manipulating, and channeling that affect – determining its effects and consequences – however, would prove more difficult. “Sudden, direct, and irresistible processes of contagion,” administrators in Versailles learned, could lead to unintended results and, with hindsight, imagined possibilities that could undermine the regime’s structures, goals, and norms.3 Theater was viewed as an educational and entertaining component of military life, from the early days of a noble officer’s training to the navy’s overt push, as evidenced in the case of Joseph Patrat’s modifications, to deploy specific versions of soldier-themed plays for militarized performance venues. In order to gain a clearer picture of the relationship between government intent and how that intent unfolded in real space and time, I investigate here the performance cultures of two militarized theatrical venues during the twilight of the Old Regime: the Théâtre or Comédie de la Marine in the Breton port city of Brest, where Mercier’s Le Déserteur, edited by Patrat, was performed for the first time in the métropole on January 23, 1771; and Saint-Domingue’s Comédie (Theater) du CapFrançais (now Cap-Haïtien, Haiti), the largest theater in the colonial Caribbean, where, thanks to several new scholarly resources, it is possible to assert that Mercier’s play had its worldwide premiere in late 1770, weeks before Le Déserteur was performed in Brest. Before teasing out the core features of military and theatrical life in Brest and Cap-Français – two very different militarized outposts on the French periphery – it is first important to underscore the relevance of and 2 3

Daniel Larlham, “The Felt Truth of Mimetic Experience: Motions of the Soul and the Kinetics of Passion in Eighteenth-Century Theatre,” The Eighteenth Century 53, no. 4 (2012), 435. Larlham, “The Felt Truth of Mimetic Experience,” 433.

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challenges to research on eighteenth-century theater practices outside of Paris. Most scholarship on French theater focuses on dramatic literature and performance practices in the theaterphilic capital city. But the most deliberate and successful attempts to influence the lives of French soldiers through the dramatic arts occurred in provincial and colonial environments where the military had a stronger demographic presence and where there was usually only one theater to cater to the local population. Research on theater in the French provinces and in its colonial empire, however, remains daunting. In the next section, I describe several obstacles faced by scholars when studying provincial and colonial theater, and I reference a few new digital resources that can help researchers query, at least in part, the complexity of the relationship between theatrical performance and the military. It is, in fact, only through this analysis of the so-called “periphery” that we can get to the center of the military–theatrical complex. After the detailed descriptions of military–theatrical overlaps in Brest and SaintDomingue, the chapter concludes with a short theoretical reflection on theatrical performance in militarized zones – a discussion which frames the next two chapters on the French Revolution’s totalizing military–theatrical efforts.

Research Methods: French Provincial and Colonial Theater of the Eighteenth Century Research on military–theatrical events in colonial cities and in the French provinces is no easy task. Unlike the crown’s subsidized theaters in Paris, such as the Comédie-Française and the Opéra, the livelihood of theater in the provinces during the eighteenth century “owed more to the market than to the court.”4 French provincial theaters, as Lauren Clay and others going back to Max Fuchs have shown, most often relied on private stock holders, local beneficiaries, and a diverse group of supporters, including municipal agents, influential military officers, wealthy widows, and former actors, among others.5 Provincial theaters are notoriously tricky to examine across time. They opened and closed at dizzying speeds, and frequently 4 5

Lauren R. Clay, Stagestruck: The Business of Theater in Eighteenth-Century France and Its Colonies (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), 5. Max Fuchs was the first to take on provincial theaters as a coherent object of study in Max Fuchs, La vie théâtrale en province au XVIIIe siècle: Personnel et répertoire (1933) (Paris: CNRS, 1986). Before Fuchs, there were many studies on individual theaters in provincial cities (Strasbourg, Lille, Arras, Bordeaux, etc.), but Fuchs was the first to describe trends across different regions. Recent works in this vein include Thibaut Julian and Vincenzo De Santis (eds.), Fièvre et vie du théâtre sous la Révolution française et l’Empire (Paris: Garnier, 2019); Cyril Triolaire, Le théâtre en province pendant le

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changed owners and managerial structures. Records of their dramatic offerings, finances, and staging practices have been scattered across various private, municipal, departmental, diocesan, and national archives. In contrast to the Comédie-Française, most theaters in the French provinces had very little interaction with royal agents or other state-run entities. As Clay points out, “most theater building [. . .] was locally motivated and privately funded,”6 which makes any account of theater outside of Paris anecdotal by nature and difficult to discuss in general or comparative terms. Provincial and colonial theaters were not just less prestigious copies of Parisian stages. Their offerings were often more diverse and comprehensive than in the capital, where theaters enjoyed special privileges, but with restrictive rules that sanctioned the selection of plays for performance. Most provincial cities had only one theater, which was to be shared, as in the case of Brest, Metz, Arras, Calais, or Besançon, with military and civilian patrons. Military spectators in the provinces or in the colonies played a significant role in filling the theater’s seats and coffers. This differed from the situation in Paris, where soldiers were often far from the war front and provincial garrison life. Many military men in Paris could reenter civilian social channels, family circles, and previous identities; their presence in the theater was diluted by the capital’s diverse civilian population. With more modest cultural offerings and with hundreds or thousands of soldiers living, training, and fighting together, colonial and provincial cities constitute a more discernible context within which to investigate the overlaps between military and theatrical cultures. The military brought cash and opportunities (and, as we will see later, problems) to theaters across the French empire. On the rare occasions when the royal government did intervene in the business of theaters outside of Paris, insofar as the eighteenth century is concerned, it was nearly always in cities with significant garrisons and strategic military interests.7 In addition to explicit projects in a few locales, military operatives played a role in the development of theater through more implicit channels and with “softer” support. Military intendants (quartermasters)

6 7

Consulat et l’Empire (Clermont-Ferrand: Presses universitaires Blaise-Pascal, 2012); Clay, Stagestruck; Philippe Bourdin, Aux origins du théâtre patriotique (Paris: CNRS, 2017). Lauren R. Clay, “Patronage, Profits, and Public Theaters: Rethinking Cultural Unification in Ancien Régime France,” Journal of Modern History 79 (2007), 737. According to Clay, the only two theaters outside of Paris which “received significant direct financial assistance from the Crown” were in Brest and Besançon. Clay, “Patronage, Profits, and Public Theaters,” 742.

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and commandants were often responsible for leasing venues and granting performance rights (privilèges) to ambulatory theater troupes, stage directors, and individual actors.8 Military officers around the country invested in new theatrical projects as private individuals, and some petitioned local governments as a group to build and fund theaters. In the northern city of Dunkerque, for example, a commander wrote that a new theater would bring resources to the municipality as well as give soldiers something to do, given the sleepy town’s “absence de toute société”9 (lack of social life). The same argument for a theater was made by Bayonne’s military commander, who complained to the War Minister’s office in the 1760s that there was nothing for his officers to do when garrisoned in the city.10 In Metz, as in Valenciennes and Douai, obligatory military subscriptions, which had been enacted through royal decree in 1768,11 kept theaters afloat. This undoubtedly pleased theater directors, but irked some officers, who often viewed the mandatory theater outings as an onerous expense, especially if they felt the performances were not up to snuff.12 A strong military presence was often a necessary condition for creating a permanent or seasonal theater in many French cities. In the Department of La Meuse, for example, the Sous-Préfet in Verdun under Napoleon was confident that his town could sustain a theater troupe because of its “établissements militaires” and “forte garnison en Infanterie et Cavalerie (military establishments . . . large garrison for the infantry and cavalry), which dated back well into the eighteenth century and which the 8

Cyril Triolaire mentions several military leaders who were responsible for attributing performance rights to actors and directors in Cyril Triolaire, “Structures théâtrales et itinérance en province au XVIIIe siècle,” in Diversité et modernité du théâtre au XVIIIe siècle, ed. Guillemette Marot-Mercier and Nicolas Dion (Paris: Hermann, 2014), 346. 9 The Maréchal de Castries made this plea in 1770. See Alexandre Lardeur and Sophie-Anne Leterrier, “Publics,” in Le théâtre en province Arras (XVIIIe–XXIe siècle), ed. Laurence Baudoux-Rousseau, Alexandre Lardeur, and Sophie-Anne Leterrier (Arras: Artois presses université and Théâtre d’Arras, 2007), 175. 10 See Eugène Ducéré, “Le théâtre bayonnais sous l’ancien régime,” Revue de Béarn, Navarre et Lannes, Partie historiques de la Revue des Basses-Pyrénées et des Landes 1 (1883), 161. 11 Article 23 of Titre xx in Ordonnance du roi pour régler le service dans les places et dans les quartiers du 1er mars 1768, cited in Lauren Clay, “Patronage, Profits, and Public Theaters,” 748. 12 In 1779, the “Directeurs du spectacle” in Metz conducted a study to analyze how much military battalions were paying for theater subscriptions in the “garrison towns” of northern and eastern France. Unhappy with what the local officers were contributing, Metz’s directors wrote to the military commanders, arguing that “dans les villes de Nancy, Valencienne, etc. l’abonnement de la garnison est porté à deux cents livres par bataillon, et qu’à Douai, le régiment de Poitou paie trois cents livres par bataillon” (in the cities of Nancy, Valencienne, etc. the subscription of the garrison is increased to two hundred livres per battalion, and that in Douai, the regiment of Poitou pays three hundred livres per battalion). This was far more than the 80–100 livres paid by the military in Metz. Correspondence from the “Directeurs du spectacle” to the Maréchal de Broglie, in Henri Tribout de Morembert, Le théâtre à Metz, vol. i (Paris: Publications de la société d’histoire du théâtre, 1952), 87.

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Department’s actual Prefecture, Bar-sur-Ornain (now Bar-le-Duc), lacked.13 The military also pushed for a theater in Saumur (Maine-etLoire), where the duc de Choiseul had set up a Cavalry school (École des Carabiniers) in 1763 and where, according to Clay, “a group of officers provided much of the impetus for building a new public theater” several decades later.14 Robert Aggéri writes that “à l’époque seules les villes d’une certaine importance ou les ports de guerre, à l’exemple de Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux, Rouen ou Brest, disposaient de troupes” (at the time only cities of a certain size or military ports, for example Lyon, Marseilles, Bordeaux, Rouen or Brest, had troupes), since these were often the only municipalities outside of the capital with enough of an eager public to sustain seasonal theater troupes.15 When soldiers skimped on their subscriptions or left town for other garrisons or the front, there were often dire consequences for the theater. Villeneuve, a theater director in Besançon, one of France’s more militarized eastern cities, wrote that, during most of the 1790s, his city had enjoyed “une garnison de cinq à six mille hommes, qui fournissait un abonnement de 1200 à 1500 francs par mois” (a garrison of five to six thousand men, which provided a subscription of 1,200 to 1,500 francs per month). However, after the soldiers were sent to the front in 1800, Besançon had “point de garnison depuis un an” (no garrison for the last year) and “point d’abonnements des corps militaires” (no subscriptions from the military corps), which explained the theater’s troubled finances.16 Although it is difficult to show causation, there is at least an affinity between military presence and new theater building in France during the second half of the eighteenth century. Nearly every major “military town” in the kingdom received a new (or first ever) theater from 1750 to 1789, including Arras (1752), Metz (1752), Douai (1758), Saint-Omer (1763), Saint-Étienne (1764), Brest (1766), Agen (1767), Strasbourg (1767), Bayonne (1768), Cambrai (1762), Boulogne-sur-Mer (1772), Calais (1774), Besançon (1784), and Lille (1785).17 13

14 15 16 17

Lettre du Sous-Préfet de Verdun, 4e arrondissement du Département de la Meuse à M. le Préfet du Département de la Meuse, September 10, 1806. Archives départementales (AD) de La Meuse 89 T1. Access courtesy of the Thérepsicore team at Université Clermont-Auvergne. See Tableau général de messieurs les actionnaires de halles et salle de spectacle, construites à Saumur par forme de tontine, 1789. AM Saumur 4M 92, in Clay, “Patronage, Profits, and Public Theater,” 748. Robert Aggéri, “Le répertoire du théâtre de Louis-Sébastien Mercier en province,” Dix-huitième siècle 35 (2003), 533. Jacques Rittaud-Hutinet, Des tréteaux à la scène: Le théâtre en Franche-Comté du Moyen-âge à la Révolution (Besançon: Cêtre, 1988), 339. Clay writes that “by 1789 officers and soldiers in at least eighteen of the most significant French garrisons could attend a dedicated playhouse.” Clay, “Patronage, Profits, and Public Theater,” 748. See also Rittaud-Hutinet, Des tréteaux à la scène, 190.

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The French provinces are thus a logical context to study overlaps between military and theatrical cultures owing to a concentration of soldiers and because military men were often far from where they had grown up and thus detached from their usual social circles, structures, and activities. But it remains difficult, even today, to gain any sort of holistic picture of theatrical life in the French provinces. France has 101 Departments, each of which boasts multiple municipal and (sometimes) departmental and specialized archives. Research that incorporates multiple regions around France has traditionally demanded significant travel, material resources, and time, as well as highly specialized knowledge of local libraries and archives. For this reason, most scholarship on provincial theater (which, again, is a small fraction of theater research compared with research on Parisian theaters) tends to focus on one particular theater or municipality. For decades, even centuries, “local scholars” and learned societies have unearthed the most intimate details of theatrical life in municipalities such as Besançon, Strasbourg, Bordeaux, Lille, and Arras. But a more widespread and comparative approach to theater in the provinces remains a formidable undertaking. A breakthrough appears on the horizon, thanks to the Thérepsicore project – a massive digitization effort of theater documents housed in municipal and regional archives throughout provincial France, led by Philippe Bourdin, Cyril Triolaire, Fanny Platelle, Françoise La Borgne, and others at the Université Clermont Auvergne. The Thérepsicore team, boosted by a significant grant from France’s Agence nationale de la recherche, has sent confirmed and emerging scholars into almost every municipal and departmental archive in the country, where they have photographed and catalogued any document related to theater, ballet, opera, and other arts de la scène. Although still under construction and dauntingly large in both scope and breadth, the Thérepsicore site will eventually host online hundreds of thousands of documents related to provincial theater, from tickets to costume receipts to repertoires to advertisements to government edicts, penned from the last few years of the Old Regime through the definitive fall of Napoleon in 1815. The team also plans to include textual analysis and data visualizations of a range of topics related to theater in the provinces during one of the most transformational periods in French history.18 18

This is how the project organizers describe the scope of their work: “Ce travail pluridisciplinaire a réuni des historiens spécialistes de la Révolution et de l’Empire (et particulièrement de l’histoire culturelle et politique), des littéraires et historiens des idées, et des linguistes spécialistes des théâtres français et étrangers de la période” (This multidisciplinary work has brought together historians

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French-language theaters with strong military presences were by no means limited to metropolitan France. Another location of significant military–theatrical interaction was in France’s overseas colonies, and, particularly, in its resource-rich, heavily militarized Caribbean slave colonies. Later in this chapter, I will discuss the reasons why the colonial Caribbean fostered particularly potent theatrical and military cultures, but suffice it to say here that research on Saint-Domingue’s theaters has a short history. The field was effectively launched by the Haitian historian and cultural studies scholar Jean Fouchard. Fouchard’s groundbreaking work on the island’s colonial theaters, published in two volumes in 1955,19 seemed to be of little interest (aside from a few exceptions20) to European and North American theater scholars until the 1990s and early 2000s, when Bernard Camier, David Powers, and others benefited from Fouchard’s erudition for their own works on colonial Caribbean theatrical performances and musical concerts.21 As in the case of provincial France, recently launched digital platforms have the opportunity to significantly revise scholarship on Saint-Domingue’s theaters. A new online database of the island’s dramatic repertoire and performance history, conceptualized by Julia Prest and a team of researchers and technicians at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, has emerged as an incredibly useful resource.22 Drawn from the island’s colonial newspapers and searchable by artist, venue, date, and other criteria, Prest and her team’s site has corrected

19

20 21

22

specializing in the Revolution and the Empire [and particularly in cultural and political history], writers and historians of ideas, and linguists specializing in French and foreign theaters of the period). Philippe Bourdin, Cyril Triolaire, Françoise Le Borge, and Fanny Platelle, Le Théâtre en province sous la Révolution et L’Empire, Université Clermont-Auvergne, https://therepsicore .msh.uca.fr/node/4. Accessed March 30, 2023. Jean Fouchard, Le théâtre à Saint-Domingue (Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie de l’État, 1955); Jean Fouchard, Artistes et repertoire des scènes de Saint-Domingue (Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie de l’État, 1955). See, for example, John G. Cale, French Secular Music in Saint-Domingue (1750–1795) Viewed as a Factor in America’s Musical Growth (PhD Diss., Louisiana State University, 1971). See Bernard Camier, “Les spectacles musicaux en Martinique, en Guadeloupe et à la Dominique dans la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle,” Bulletin de la Société d’Histoire de la Guadeloupe 130 (2001): 3–25; Bernard Camier, “Les concerts dans les capitales de Saint-Domingue à la fin du XVIIIe siècle,” Revue de Musicologie 93, no. 1 (2007): 75–98; Bernard Camier and Laurent Dubois, “Voltaire et Zaïre, ou le théâtre des Lumières dans l’aire atlantique française,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 54, no. 4 (2007): 39–69; David M. Powers, From Plantation to Paradise? Cultural Politics and Musical Theatre in French Slave Colonies, 1764–1789 (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State, 2014); Julia Prest, “Iphigénie en Haïti: Performing Gluck’s Paris Operas in the French Colonial Caribbean,” Eighteenth-Century Music 14, no. 1 (2017): 13–29; and, among others, Julia Prest, “Pale Imitations: White Performances of Slave Dance in the Public Theatres of Pre-Revolutionary Saint-Domingue,” Atlantic Studies 16, no. 4 (2019): 502–20. Online resource, Theatre in Saint-Dominque, 1764–1771, ed. Julia Prest. www.theatreinsaintdomingue .org, accessed April 5, 2023.

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some of the factual errors and accessibility issues in Fouchard’s original study (which is out of print and difficult to find, even in university libraries), providing students of the colonial Caribbean with an exciting new tool for analyzing the island’s eight public theaters.23 And, thanks to the site, we now know (and we are saved from intensive digging) that Mercier’s Déserteur was performed at the Comédie du Cap-Français twelve times from December 4, 1770 to February 5, 1785, and that Sedaine and Monsigny’s opéra-comique of the same name appeared on stage at the same theater at least eleven times during the same period. Prest’s website illuminates a diverse theatrical culture with performances of nearly every genre imaginable. Aided by the information in the database as well as by electronic access to primary sources from the colonial period through the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC),24 scholars can first query the database and then move directly to scanned versions of eighteenth-century broadsheets such as the Affiches américaines and the Supplément aux Affiches américaines. These new research platforms have already yielded some surprising results. For example, announcements for upcoming performances of Mercier’s “Le Déserteur ou Le Nouveau Déserteur” in the Affiches américaines overturn the long-standing idea that the first performance of his drame was of the modified version by Patrat in Brest on January 23, 1771. Over two months prior, on November 21, 1770, the “Spectacles” section of the Affiches américaines announced that La Comédie du Cap donnera mardi 4 décembre, au bénéfice de M. Desroches, une première Représentation du Nouveau Déserteur, drame en 5 actes et en prose, de M. Mercier, Auteur de Barnevelt-Français: après cette Pièce, M. Pisset exécutera sur le Violon un morceau de sa composition; un Enfant chantera une Ariette; et M. Vidal exécutera une Sonate de psaltérion, également accompagnée par M. Pisset.25 The Comédie du Cap will give on Tuesday, December 4, for the benefit of Mr. Desroches, a first Performance of the New Deserter, drame in 5 acts and 23

24

25

During the second half of the eighteenth-century, theaters were constructed in Cap-Français, Portau-Prince, Les Cayes, Léogane, Saint-Marc, Jacmel, Petit-Goâve, and Jérémie. The size of theaters differed, ranging from 200 spectators in the smaller towns to 1,500 in Cap-Français. For more information, see Camier, “Les spectacles musicaux,” 3–4. The Digital Library of the Caribbean is “a cooperative of Partners within the Caribbean and circumCaribbean that provides users with access to Caribbean cultural, historical and research materials held in archives, libraries and private collections.” https://dloc.com/overview, accessed April 20, 2023. Affiches américaines 48 (November 21, 1770), 449. The November 28 edition confirms the upcoming performance on December 4. See Affiches américaines 49 (November 28, 1770), 457.

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in prose, by Mr. Mercier, Author of Barnevelt-Français: after this Play, Mr. Pisset will perform on the Violin a piece of his composition; a Child will sing an Arietta; and Mr. Vidal will perform a psaltery Sonata, also accompanied by Mr. Pisset.

The late November announcement is followed by a note on December 12, which confirms the December 4 premiere of Mercier’s drame as the “première Représentation” and advertises “une seconde Représentation” planned for the end of the year, which was to be followed by a “grand Ballet Pantomime.”26 While it is true that critics sometimes confuse Mercier’s drame with Sedaine and Monsigny’s opéra-comique of the same name, the journalist’s insistence on the genre, author, and five-act structure (Sedaine’s play has three acts), in multiple Affiches announcements, all but confirms that Mercier’s Le Déserteur was premiered in the Caribbean before its first performance in Brest.27 Recent scholarship on Saint-Domingue’s theatrical cultures has been further aided by studies of the social, political, military, and cultural history of Saint-Domingue, which has seen a significant uptick in activity over the past three decades.28 A diverse group of historians, literary scholars, legal experts, economists, and others have tackled the racial, socioeconomic, political, and geographical tensions on the island, producing a body of scholarship that is not explicitly about theater but that can help theater researchers better understand Saint-Domingue’s performance ecosystem, 26

27

28

“La Comédie du Cap donnera mardi 28 du courant, au bénéfice du Sieur Armery, une seconde Représentation du Nouveau Déserteur, drame en cinq actes et en prose, par M. Mercier. Le Spectacle sera terminé par un grand Ballet Pantomime, intitulé Les Charbonniers” (The Comédie du Cap will give on Tuesday 28 of the current month, for the benefit of Sieur Armery, a second Performance of the New Deserter, drama in five acts and in prose, by Mr. Mercier. The Show will end with a grand Ballet Pantomime, entitled Les Charbonniers). Affiches américaines 51 (December 12, 1770), 472. Most scholars take Patrat’s assertion that the Brest version was the first performance of the drame at face value. For example, Robert Aggéri writes that the drame was performed for the first time in Brest in January 1771 before enjoying performances in Dijon (February 1771), Lyon (June 1771), and Montpellier, where it was performed at the count of Artois’ wedding. Robert Aggéri, “Le répertoire du théâtre de Louis-Sébastien Mercier en province,” 524. Several such studies are Trevor Burnard and John Garrigus, The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint-Domingue and British Jamaica (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Paul Cheney, Cul de Sac: Patrimony, Capitalism, and Slavery in French Saint-Domingue (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 2017); John D. Garrigus, Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue (New York, NY: Palgrave, 2006); Stewart R. King, Blue Coat or Powdered Wig: Free People of Color in Pre-Revolutionary Saint Domingue (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2001); Jeremy D. Popkin, “Colonial Enlightenment and the French Revolution: Julien Raymond and Milscent Créole,” in Enlightened Colonialism: Civilization Narratives and Imperial Politics in the Age of Reason, ed. Damien Tricoire (New York, NY: Palgrave, 2017), 269–86; David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2004).

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including its staged drama and public demonstrations of coloniality, racism, power, and conflict. Prest, for example, has recently completed a monograph that reinserts enslaved populations into the theatrical history of Saint-Domingue – a challenging, essential, and impressive undertaking.29 Military historians have added to this growing scholarly discussion about Saint-Domingue by examining the island’s soldiers, sailors, and locally trained militiamen.30 As one might expect, military life on SaintDomingue was difficult and deadly. Members of the militia and the regular French armies and navies were required to ward off foreign attack, help with municipal and colonial building projects, and keep the peace in rural areas and cities – and all this in an environment of tropical disease, insect infestation, hot weather, and violent storms. This unique context – a highly militarized colonial zone with a robust theatrical culture – provides a rich site for the following close and speculative reading of how dramatic works, such as the multiple Déserteurs, engaged with the particularities of the colonial military complex. In what follows, I describe the imbrication of theatrical and military cultures in two very different cities on the eighteenth-century “French periphery”: Brest in Brittany and Cap-Français in Saint-Domingue. A concise history of the development of theater and military forces in both locales reveals common calls to educate and entertain civilians and soldiers in militarized environments as well as the difficulties administrators and theater professionals faced when soldiers attended the theater. Of course, a comparative reading of a western French city and a colonial Caribbean port reveals differences, not just congruences: most importantly, questions of race and slavery were pervasive in Saint-Domingue yet relatively absent from most theater debates in Brest. Second, the Comédie du Cap depended mostly on private funds, whereas the Théâtre de la Marine in Brest was financed, at least initially, by the military 29

30

Julia Prest, Public Theatre and the Enslaved People of Saint-Domingue (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2023). Prest’s book was published after the submission of my manuscript, but I look forward to reading and engaging with it in other publications and contexts. Some of the most important titles addressing Saint-Domingue’s military history are Boris Lesueur, “La garnison de la Guadeloupe sous l’Ancien Régime,” Bulletin de la Société d’Histoire de la Guadeloupe 154 (2009): 29–58; Boris Lesueur, “Le soldat de couleur dans la société d’Ancien Régime et durant la période révolutionnaire,” in Les traites et les esclavages: Perspectives historiques et contemporaines, ed. Myriam Cottias, Elisabeth Cunin, and António de Almeida Mendes (Paris: Karthala, 2010), 137–51; Boris Lesueur, Les Troupes coloniales d’Ancien Régime: Fidetilate per Mare et Terras (Paris: SPM Kronos, 2014); and several contributions to Adapting to Conditions: War and Society in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Maarten Ultee (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1986).

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administration in Versailles. Third, Cap-Français was a far more cosmopolitan, wealthy, and diverse city than Brest, which was considered by most of its officers to be a sleepy backwater town. However, both contexts reveal an effort to assign specific missions to theater and to prescribe behaviors to spectators, and, especially, military patrons of the theater. Although the dirigisme of the monarchy’s military– theatrical complex caused just as many problems as it alleviated, the crown’s impulse to place soldiers in front of live theatrical performance differed from more typical eighteenth-century interactions between Versailles and the regional theaters, catalyzed specific performance environments, and foreshadowed a series of vibrant military–theatrical experiences during the Revolution.

Theater in a port de guerre: Brest’s Théâtre de la Marine Nearly all of Mercier’s plays were premiered in Paris, the kingdom’s center of theatrical performance debuts and literary publishing.31 The philosophe’s anti-war drame, Le Déserteur, however, was altered by Patrat, and then performed for the first time in Brest, where “tout ce qui s’établit [. . .] s’organise dans le souci de servir et satisfaire la marine royale”32 (everything that is established . . . is organized with a view to serving and satisfying the royal navy). This version of Le Déserteur was appropriate for the performance context in which it was deployed. The text was submitted by Patrat for official approval to “St Haoven le Coat, Procureur du Roi, de la Prévôté de la Marine, et substitute de M. le Procureur général au Parlement de Bretagne”33 (St. Haoven le Coat, King’s Prosecutor, Department of the Navy, and substitute for M. the General Prosecutor at the Court of Brittany). Brest was an atypical city for a theatrical debut. Its development was linked to the navy’s goals and driven by a “noblesse militaire” that constituted the “élite sociale de la cité”34 (social elite of the town). By 1700, 31

32 33

34

Mercier’s tendency to first perform his plays in the French capital was representative of a general trend. As Clay points out, “by the mid-eighteenth century, almost all works performed on provincial stages had previously been performed in Paris.” Clay, “Patronage, Profits, and Public Theaters,” 769. Nolwenn Kerdraon-Duconte, “Théâtre et pouvoir à Brest au XVIIIe siècle: Le costume et l’uniforme,” Annales de Bretagne et des Pays de l’Ouest 119, no. 2 (2012), 143. Patrat, 65. The government official referenced is Jacques-Yves Le Coat, baron of Saint-Haouen (father of the famous admiral, Yves Le Coat de Saint-Haouen). Le Coat, père, was a prominent lawyer and judge in Brest from the 1740s until his death in 1779. For more information, see Auguste Aimé Kernéis, “Contribution à l’Histoire de la ville et du port de Brest,” Société académique de Brest 36 (1912), 97–285. Bruno Baron, Élites, pouvoirs et vie municipale à Brest, 1750–1820 (PhD Diss., Université de Bretagne occidentale, 2012), 10.

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Brest had surpassed Le Havre and by 1740 Toulon as the country’s chief naval port, and, as the eighteenth century progressed, it asserted itself as a European hub for naval armament and shipbuilding industries, which brought soldiers, sailors, civilian labor, and bourgeois business owners to the growing Atlantic city (Figure 3.1).35 The Seven Years’ War with Britain and other European foes catalyzed a period of intense military–industrial growth in order to “combler le retard que la France a sur l’Angleterre dans le domaine des forces navales”36 (remedy the delay that France has with England concerning their naval forces). The kingdom’s efforts to compete with the British Royal Navy came up famously short, yet Brest might have actually benefited from France’s embarrassing defeat, as post-war ministers in Versailles committed even more resources to the city, boosted the number of officers and enlisted sailors stationed in the port, centralized efforts on Brest instead of on other Atlantic cities or on French ports in the Mediterranean, and funded more robust classes of cadets at the city’s naval academy.37 By the late 1760s, Brest rivaled eastern and northern front cities such as Metz, Arras, Besançon, and Dunkerque as one of the most militarized places in the kingdom, with nearly every aspect of Brest’s economy either directly controlled or heavily influenced by “les exigences et les commandes de l’armée”38 (the demands and the orders of the army). The rise of theater in Brest mapped on to the growth of its military complex. As in most provincial cities, Brest saw sporadic performances of religious and secular theatrical works going back to at least the sixteenth century. As performed theater gained more currency as a popular and profitable pastime, several itinerant acting troupes attempted to settle for months at a time in Brest’s harbor, with the goal of catering to monied and intellectually curious military officers. Not all the city’s residents, however, were supporters of the stage. In 1685, a group of Jesuits attempted to enlist Brest’s naval officers to rid the town of a recently arrived theater troupe. 35 36 37

38

For more information on the development of Brest’s military–industrial complex, see MarieThérèse Cloïtre (ed.), Histoire de Brest (Brest: CRBC/Université de Bretagne Occidentale, 2000). Baron, Élites, pouvoirs et vie municipal à Brest, 22. For more information on policy changes in Versailles resulting from France’s participation and defeat in the Seven Years’ War, see Edmond Dziembowski, Un nouveau patriotisme français, 1750– 1770: La France face à la puissance anglaise à l’époque de la Guerre de Sept Ans (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1998). Baron, Élites, pouvoirs et vie municipal à Brest, 60. And the power of the navy cannot be overstated. The local Intendant, starting in at least the 1680s, was responsible for resolving nearly every civil and military issue affecting the city and served as an intermediary between the various religious and municipal powers in the town and the region. For more information, see Kernéis, “Contribution à l’Histoire de la ville et du port de Brest,” 100–10.

Figure 3.1 Nicolin, “Plan de Brest,” in Lutte contre les incendies à Brest (1777). Aquarelle. AM Brest 5Fi614. Elarged with arrow showing the Théâtre de la Marine.

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When the officers refused because they in fact enjoyed the company of the actors, the Jesuits turned to Descouzeau, Brest’s naval intendant, who ultimately agreed to remove the troupe because the theater, he wrote, was derailing “les jeunes officiers et gardes de leurs occupations sérieuses” (the young officers and guards from their serious duties) and consuming “le peu d’argent qu’ils ont”39 (the little money that they have). At the turn of the seventeenth century, ambulatory troupes consistently tried to establish themselves in Brest, precisely because the soldiers were a dependable source of revenue.40 Each time, it seems, their efforts were thwarted by naval superiors because of a perceived negative effect that theater had on the attention, training, and financial well-being of officers. Brest’s military hierarchy, however, must have changed its tune during the first few decades of the 1700s, when local administrators gradually came to see performed drama as a positive influence on the behavior, morale, and health of their soldiers.41 Following general trends in Europe at the time regarding the stage’s potentially beneficial qualities, theater emerged in the eyes of Brest’s Naval intendants and other leaders as preferable to the more pernicious (and widespread) pastimes enjoyed by military men in the provinces, namely fighting, drinking, gambling, and visiting brothels. Once an enemy of actors and theater performances, by 1750, Brest’s military administration was directly responsible for leading a campaign to create the city’s first permanent performance space. The most vocal advocate was Aymar Joseph, comte de Roquefeuil, a theaterphilic commandant, who, in December 1762, wrote to the duc de Choiseul, then France’s Minister of the Navy, praising the effects of theatrical performance on his men. De Roquefeuil was pleased by a “petit spectacle qui est ici depuis deux ans” because it “semble y faire du bien; le spectacle détourne le goût 39 40

41

Lettre de Hubert de Champy, seigneur Desclouzeau, Intendant de la Marine à Brest au Ministre de la Marine, Seigneley, December 7, 1685, in Kernéis, “Contribution à l’Histoire de la ville,” 102. On March 10, 1690, Seigneley wrote to Descouzeau, urging the Intendant to remove a troupe of actors that had recently arrived in Brest and that was apparently distracting “les Gardes de la Marine de leurs exercices et leur donnerait occasion de consommer leur argent” (the Marine Guards from their drills and giving them an opportunity to spend their money). Even when Seigneley was replaced by the comte de Pontchartrain, the Ministry’s anti-theatrical position was maintained. Pontchartrain instructed Desclouzeau on April 23, 1690 to remove another troupe because it was attracting “les soldats et les matelots et les ouvriers du port, ce qui cause beaucoup de désordre” (the soldiers and the sailors and the workers from the port, which causes a lot of disorder). Both letters cited in Kernéis, “Contribution à l’Histoire de la ville,” 103. Two Intendants during the first half of the century, Robert-François Roger and Bigot de la Mothe, wrote without prejudice about a small theater that “les officiers de marine sont en train d’établir ici” (the naval officers are in the process of establishing here). Bigot de La Mothe was then responsible for obtaining the theater’s official recognition by the Minister of the Navy, the comte de Maurepas, in 1742. For more information, see Kernéis, “Contribution à l’Histoire de la ville,” 104–5.

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du jeu, de la table, des querelles, ce qui n’a que trop régné ici” (little theater that’s been here for two years {because it} seems to do good there; the spectacle diverts the taste for gambling, taverns, fighting, which has reigned too much here), even adding that he thought it was prudent to expand the theater’s offerings by making it a permanent feature in the military town.42 De Roquefeuil was charged with “la gestion des casernes et le maintien de l’ordre” (barracks management and the maintenance of order) and he viewed the theater as not only a way to deter his officers and sailors from “viles occupations,” such as frequenting the sex workers near the port, but also a means to forge beneficial relationships with Brest’s bourgeois civilian population, which the military relied upon for armament and shipbuilding projects.43 By the 1760s, there was agreement among officers in Brest that theater was vital to the city’s cultural and economic landscape. When municipal officials appeared reluctant to replace several outdated structures used by traveling theater troupes, de Roquefeuil requested a loan from the naval office in Versailles to build a theater on the parade grounds next to the barracks.44 Kerdraon-Duconte describes how this transpired: Dans sa lettre du 13 juin 1764 au ministre, le comte de Roquefeuil se montre bien déterminé, en effet, à le convaincre de remplacer le bâtiment, quelque peu précaire, par un théâtre neuf, solide et officiel. Tout paraît ici pensé de longue date. Le comte commence par rappeler l’urgence de la situation en évoquant l’état délabré de l’actuel théâtre [. . .] Selon le commandant de la marine, les hommes se montreraient très désireux de voir s’élever ce monument, et prêts à contribuer financièrement à l’événement.45 In his letter of June 13, 1764 to the Minister, the comte de Roquefeuil showed himself to be determined, indeed, to convince him to replace the building, which was somewhat precarious, with a new, solid and official theatre. Everything here seems to have been thought out for a long time. The count begins by recalling the urgency of the situation by evoking the dilapidated state of the current theater [. . .] According to the commander of the navy, the men would be very eager to see this monument erected, and ready to contribute financially to the event.

42

43 44

45

“Lettre de Roquefeuil à M. le duc de Choiseul,” December 2, 1762. Services historiques de la défence (SHD)-Brest. 1 A 106. I was made aware of the documents pertaining to the Théâtre de Marine thanks to Nolwenn Kerdraon-Duconte’s article (cited above). Ibid. Clay remarks that funding the Théâtre de la Marine was the first time that “the monarchy consented to experiment with a new level of engagement in provincial cultural affairs.” Clay, “Patronage, Profits, and Public Theaters,” 745. Kerdraon-Duconte, “Théâtre et pouvoir à Brest,” 151.

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De Roquefeuil then creates a financing plan for the future theater with two years of levies on officer salaries above the rank of lieutenant as well as obligatory subscriptions for navy men stationed in Brest to the tune of “4 livres par capitaine de vaisseau, de 3 livres par lieutenant, 2 livres 10 sols par enseigne et de 1 livre par garde”46 (4 livres per ship captain, 3 livres per lieutenant, 2 livres 10 sols per ensign and 1 livre per guard). Any sailors who were perhaps not “eager” to see the theater built, or who were not “ready to contribute financially,” now had skin in the game by military decree. As we saw above, the military’s interest in public theater was not specific to Brest, even if it was the only theater to receive significant financial support from a war department. Officers of the French navy and army were avid theater enthusiasts and integral to theatrical projects throughout the provinces, especially in cities with significant garrisons on the eastern and northern fronts. Writing in the 1760s, de Roquefeuil and other naval officers in Brest had their eyes on a few prize examples of military–theatrical urbanization in the French kingdom. Several years earlier, for example, the army had pushed for the construction of a new theater in Metz,47 a strategic city in the east that de Roquefeuil cites six times in an August 2, 1765 letter to the ministry describing the military’s role in fostering the dramatic arts and, through it, perceived social harmony.48 In their letters justifying the cost and scale of their theater-building projects, naval officials in Brest argued that theaters and, specifically, beautiful and modern theaters like the one in Metz and the plans for a theater in Besançon,49 46 47

48

49

See the analysis in Prosper Levot, Histoire de la Ville et du Port de Brest, vol. ii: Le Port depuis 1681 (Brest: Levot, 1865), 274. Karcher writes that the theater in Metz was constructed in the 1730s and 1740s because of “la forte présence de la garnison, pour laquelle il faut prévoir ce divertissement” (the strong presence of the garrison, for which it is necessary to provide this entertainment). Adeline Karcher, Le théâtre en garnison: L’Hôtel des Spectacles de Metz au XVIIIe siècle (PhD Diss., Université de Lorraine, 2015), 11. De Roquefeuil writes: “Comme j’ai beaucoup entendu louer la salle de Metz, j’ai cru plus certain d’en demander un plan, sauf à le réduire s’il est trop grand. La garnison de Brest, sur le pied de six bataillons, fournit un nombre d’officiers de tous corps aussi considérable qu’à Metz, et il vaudrait encore mieux choisir un plan par excès que par défaut [. . .] Si, Monsieur, vous adoptez le système de la salle de Metz, les enseignes de vaisseau, les lieutenants d’infanterie et grades inférieurs seraient au parterre, comme à Metz” (As I have heard a lot of people praising the theater in Metz, I thought it was safer to ask for a blueprint, and then to reduce it if it is too big. The garrison of Brest, boasting six battalions, provides a number of officers of all corps as numerous as in Metz, and it would be even better to choose a blueprint by excess than by default [. . .] If, Sir, you adopt the theater system of Metz, ensigns, infantry lieutenants, and lower ranks would be on the floor, as in Metz). “Lettre de M. le comte de Roquefeuil à M. le Ministre Choiseul,” August 2, 1765, SHD-Brest, 1A 106. The military was embedded into Ledoux’s famous Besançon theater, which was commissioned in 1768 and finished in 1784. See, for example, this contemporary report of the distribution of seats: “Le centre de la galerie est destiné à MM. Les commandants, chefs de corps, officiers de police militaire et bourgeois [. . .] Les deux côtés seront destinés d’une part aux sergents et soldats et d’autre part aux domestiques” (The center of the gallery is intended for MM. Commanders, corps commanders,

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“participe[nt] à une large politique d’embellissement urbain, qui n’est pas sans conséquence sur les esprits”50 (participate in a larger politics of urban embellishment, which is not without consequence on the spirits). Urban embellishment was indeed at the heart of de Roquefeuil’s cultural project for Brest. In late 1764, the commandant hired the naval architect Antoine Choquet de Lindu to draw up plans for a new Salle de comédie. Choquet de Lindu had planned nearly all the recently built naval structures in the port, including the new École de la marine and the soon-to-be infamous bagne (military prison), a massive panopticon structure which housed forced laborers and other prisoners of the navy until 1858. Working under de Roquefeuil’s careful eye, the architect submitted in early 1765 a Projet d’établissements pour des Récréations des Marins et des Troupes en la Ville de Brest, which, beyond plans for a theater, included detailed drawings of a heterogeneous space of sociability, commerce, art, and leisure.51 The justification for such a large and holistic plan was once again the moral “health” of the town’s military population. Choquet de Lindu laments that Brest has a “multitude des Auberges, Cabarets, Cantines, Caffés, et Billards” (multitude of taverns, cabarets, snack shops, cafes, and billiard halls), which are unfortunate “obstacles au Maintien de la police et du bon ordre”52 (obstacles to policing and the maintenance of order). What the architect proposes is not to ignore the sailors’ desires to eat, drink, and play games, but to bring all these different activities under the gaze of the commandant through a sort of leisure complex next to the barracks – a “petit Wauxehall,” “destiné à rassembler en un même lieu divers sortes de divertissements” (a small Vauxhall . . . designed to bring together in one place diverse types of entertainment). In addition to what he calls “une petite Salle de spectacle,” Choquet de Lindu proposed to build des salles pour les curiosités et autres petits amusements, d’autre pour différents jeux avec un caffé; une guinguette pour les danses et festins avec un jardin ou sera différents jeux champêtres et une Esplanade pour les combats d’animaux, feux d’artifice, illuminations [. . .] une Esplanade entourée de tunnels couverts, et d’autres en verdure; le bâtiment contiendra

50 51 52

military police officers and bourgeois [. . .] The two sides will be intended on the one hand for sergeants and soldiers and on the other hand for servants). In J. Rittaud-Hutinet, La vision d’un futur: Ledoux et ses théâtres (Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 1982), 136–7. Kerdraon-Duconte, “Théâtre et pouvoir à Brest,” 152. Antoine Choquet de Lindu, “Préface,” in Projet d’établissement pour des Récréations des Marins et des Troupes en La Ville de Brest (n.d. [1764]). AM Brest 2S8-2. Ibid., AM Brest 2S8-1.

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Recognizing that soldiers and sailors required a variety of extra-military activities, Choquet de Lindu sought to create an urban garden, theater, commerce center, and outdoor activity venue of a kind that was very much in vogue in 1760s France.54 Vauxhalls had just been constructed in Bordeaux, Lyon, and Nantes, capitalizing on new leisure practices such as walking for pleasure and tapping into a Frenchified imaginary of English urban escapism.55 The issue in Brest, of course, was that most cities with Vauxhalls were regional capitals with upwards of 100,000 inhabitants – much larger and more cosmopolitan than the Breton port, which, had a population of just over 20,000 people in 1769.56 Most of Choquet de Lindu’s leisure structures were never built, aside from the Comédie and a small, attached cafe. Even though the entirety of Choquet de Lindu’s plan (Figures 3.2–3.5) was never put into place, the Salle de spectacle (Theater) was nevertheless impressive for a small city. In 1766, it was built “face au Champ de Bataille” and next to the officer lodgings.57 Brest, thanks to the navy, now had a splendid performance space with around 900 seats and a dedicated venue, so it was thought, to foster urban sociability, prevent “querelles” between seamen and foot soldiers, and provide “l’éducation et les dialogues du monde à tant de jeunes officiers qui ne sortent du département que pour aller à la mer”58 (education and dialogues of the world to so many young officers who leave the department only to go to sea). 53 54

55 56 57 58

Choquet de Lindu, Projet d’établissement, n.p. For more on Vauxhall (or Wauxhall) building in provincial France, see Pauline Beaucé and Cyril Triolaire, “Les Wauxhalls de province en France: Nouveaux espaces hybrids de divertissement et de spectacle d’une ville en mutation,” Dix-Huitième Siècle 49 (2017): 27–42. Ibid, 30–1. See Maurice Bernard, “La municipalité de Brest entre 1750 à 1790,” Annales de Bretagne et des pays de l’Ouest 30, no. 3 (1914): 377–423. Baron, Élites, pouvoirs et vie municipal à Brest, 135. “Lettre de Roquefeuil à Choiseul,” December 3, 1762.

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Figure 3.2 Choquet de Lindu (and co.), “Élévation sur le cours Dajot.” Projet de foyer pour les troupes. n.d. (1764 or 1765). AM Brest 2S-8 (1).

The theater was not an exclusively military enterprise; it served several functions in the city. Prominent members of the Breton nobility were urged to purchase balcony subscriptions. Members of the bourgeois military–industrial complex – the city’s shipbuilding families and weapon makers – were patrons of the Théâtre de la Marine, but, to the dismay both of local military commanders and of budget officers in Versailles, never to a level that would have made the theater sustainable without additional support. The city’s naval cadre was the demographic that was most committed to the theater’s success. Officers insisted on building Brest’s theater and expanding its offerings, even when faced with startling financial burdens.59 Theater, in one of France’s most militarized urban spaces, was primarily geared toward educating and 59

A 1768 letter from de Roquefeuil to the Naval Secretary shows that theater lost money almost as soon as the new building opened: “je prends la liberté de vous faire part cependant d’un inconvénient qui

Figure 3.3 Choquet de Lindu (and co.), “Coupe sur la longueur.” Projet de foyer pour les troupes. n.d. (1764 or 1765). AM Brest 2S-8 (5).

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Figure 3.4 Choquet de Lindu (and co.), “Coupe sur la largeur.” Projet de foyer pour les troupes. n.d. (1764 or 1765). AM Brest 2S-8 (4).

“occupying” members of the French navy, and, most importantly, “pour les hommes de la Royale cantonnés à Brest, se rendre au théâtre est avant tout une obligation”60 (for the [French] Royal Navy men stationed in Brest, showing up at the theater was above all else an obligation).

60

se rencontre à le soutenir décemment ou sur le même pied, Monseigneur, que vous l’avez vu ici. Le directeur d’alors a été forcé de nous faire banqueroute, et nous voyons, par des calculs assez exacts, que celui-ci qui demeure nécessairement aussi en arrière de paiement, sera forcé à la même faillite, si nous ne lui donnons quelques secours pour se soutenir” (I take the liberty of informing you, however, of an inconvenience that is encountered in supporting it decently or on the same footing, Monsignor, as you have seen it here. The director at that time was forced to make us bankrupt, and we see, by rather exact calculations, that the one who remains is also behind in payment, and will be forced into the same bankruptcy, if we do not give him some help to sustain himself). “M. de Roquefeuil au Ministre de la Marine,” August 10, 1768. SHD-Brest 1A 108. Kerdraon-Duconte, “Théâtre et pouvoir à Brest,” 154.

Figure 3.5 Choquet de Lindu (and co.), “Plan du rez-de-chaussée.” Projet de foyer pour les troupes. n.d. (1764 or 1765). AM Brest 2S-8 (2)

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The theater’s weekly programming was determined by naval officers, who received a directive from Louis XVI in 1775 confirming the influence that they had been exercising unofficially for at least several years prior.61 Military men were responsible for the selection of plays, but the repertoire in Brest does not appear more “militaristic” than the offerings in other provincial cities.62 The range of performed works was diverse, with nearly every genre imaginable on the boards, staged by well-known actors and directors of the time.63 According to research by Chantal and Tanguy Daniel, one particularity of the repertoire was the significant number of “pièces françaises contemporaines” (contemporary French plays), which had often been premiered just several weeks earlier in Paris.64 Sources at the time reveal that naval patrons of the theater were eager for the latest modes from the capital and beyond, and that officers at the Théâtre de la Marine fought over seating and subscription perks. The diversity of programming reveals an important feature of militarized theaters on the French periphery. Military-themed plays were not the norm, and performances of works such as Le Siège de Calais or Le Déserteur were few. Soldiers were rarely subjected to overt patriotic indoctrination, but rather, they endured a steady reminder, through their experiences in the Théâtre de la Marine and other provincial theaters, of certain sociability norms and codes of politeness that their commanding officers supported and hoped to instill both in new recruits and among seasoned veterans. The specificity of the military–theatrical performance experience was thus articulated through this unique environment – in the parterres, on the balconies, and in the overall atmosphere of a night at the theater in militarized French towns and cities. Furthermore, the “military element” that countless witnesses describe in the auditoriums on France’s northern and eastern fronts and 61

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A 1775 ordonnance from the king stipulated that the navy would keep its control over the repertoire, but that “la salle de spectacle appartriendra désormais à la ville de Brest voulant sa Majesté que la loge en face du théâtre soit réservée pour sa personne représentée par le commandant de la place, et que les premières loges de droite et de gauche du théâtre soient réservées pour le commandant et pour l’intendant de la Marine” (The theater will henceforth belong to the city of Brest, his Majesty wanting that the box in front of the theater be reserved for his person represented by the commander of the place, and that the first boxes on the right and left of the theater be reserved for the Commander and for the Intendant of the Navy). Cited in Baron, Élites, pouvoirs et vie municipal à Brest, 137 The theater’s playscripts and musical scores were catalogued for auction in 1790 (after the Navy lost its administrative and policing rights). An Inventaire de tous les objets, livres, partitions au Théâtre en avril 1790 is located at the AM Brest, 2R44. In addition to Fonpré de Francansal, an actor who directed the theater in 1769 and into 1770, La Traverse, Tabary, Desicourt, Mademoiselle Dezy, Montroze, Joseph Le Brun, and, of course, Joseph Patrat were all actors of renown who appeared on the boards at Brest in the 1760s and 1770s. Chantal and Tanguy Daniel, “Inventaire,” in Kerdraon-Duconte, “Théâtre et pouvoir à Brest,” 155.

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in port towns interfered with the ludic, “polite” goals that many theater patrons and philosophes militaires projected upon the stage. The navy’s lofty objectives of social harmony and polite behavior were tested by the reality of placing hundreds of young men together in the same space, and sometimes against their will. According to the Chronique d’un Brestois anonyme contemporain de Louis XVI, penned between 1776 and 1778, the theater in Brest was widely known as a place where “tensions [. . .] chaque fois provoquées par des gens de guerre éclatent régulièrement”65 (tensions [. . .], always provoked by the military people, regularly burst out) and where each section of the audience was known by its military unit or commander. Kerdraon-Duconte writes that, in reports about intramilitary spats, “le statut [des soldats] est chaque fois souligné: ‘gardes de la marine’, ‘officiers de la marine’, ‘officiers de terre’, annonçant les tensions qui les opposent”66 (the status [of the soldiers] is always underlined: “navy guards,” “navy officers,” “army officers,” announcing their oppositional tensions). Segregation was often viewed as the only means to quell violent outbursts, especially among competitive officers or between the army and the navy. The behavior of military men seemed to have become so dire that on July 2, 1769 the Théâtre de la Marine came under a new “Règlement,” which parsed out different administrative tasks to different military units and brigades, so that each could have its share of activities and responsibilities at the theater.67 Joseph Patrat, who left Lyon for Brest in May 1770, arrived at a particularly tense moment in the young theater’s history. During the previous season, numerous naval officers had complained to officials in Versailles that, contrary to the ideals at the project’s origin, the theater had become a tremendous source of conflict between the “officiers de l’étatmajor” (army command officers) and the officers of the “corps de Marine”68 (naval corps). Then, just several weeks before Patrat’s arrival, the director who had sent him a contract, Fonpré de Fracanssale, escaped the city on a ship bound for the Caribbean, leaving his wife with treasury debt of 42,741 livres.69 Almost as soon as it had started, the navy’s great theatrical experiment in Brest was starting to sour. Patrat’s version of Le 65 66 67 68

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Kerdraon-Duconte, “Théâtre et pouvoir à Brest,” 159. Kerdraon-Duconte, “Théâtre et pouvoir à Brest,” 160. “Règlement, 2 juillet 1769,” Archives nationales, Fonds marine D 2 25, in Kerdraon-Duconte, “Théâtre et pouvoir à Brest,” 164. “Lettre de l’Intendant Clugny au Ministre de la Marine,” January 8, 1768, in Kernéis, “Contribution à l’Histoire de la ville,” 144. See also letters dating from 1769 and 1770 in Kernéis, “Contribution à l’Histoire de la ville,” 144–6. Ibid., 168.

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Déserteur appeared in this tense environment, where soldiers and sailors created “un constant sentiment d’insécurité” (a constant feeling of insecurity) and where administrators feared, with good reason, that the navy would soon cease funding the entire operation.70 It was in this divisive context – an institutionalized attempt to promote goodwill, cohesion, and civility in an emphatically uncivil space – that Patrat doctored Mercier’s play and staged a different vision of military men and their role in the French kingdom. The military–theatrical complex in Brest informed his dramaturgical decisions and provided an audience for his pro-military adjustments to what had been an anti-war play. It is difficult to know whether Patrat’s efforts were an opportunistic coup by the author or whether military administrators were involved in conceptualizing a play that sought to boost morale and reduce the real and perceived differences among different soldiers. The military stamp of approval that was required to perform Patrat’s version, however, corroborates at least a degree of influence. What is certain is that these institutional and dramaturgical attempts to promote harmony and civility in Brest were not entirely successful. Despite the best efforts of naval commandants, writers like Patrat, and local mayors, the theater was never able to solve the city’s social tensions, cool the soldiers’ tempers, or convince the higherups in Versailles that their sponsorship was worth all the headaches. The divides between soldiers and municipal leaders, local officers and commanders near the king, army and navy men, finally led to the financial disengagement of the naval administration in the 1770s. Then, by edict in 1790, Brest’s naval officers were prevented from renewing their policing privileges and subscriptions; the theater was then leased to private companies, which never managed to turn a profit throughout the decade.71 Local naval officers attempted to once again take control of the theater in 1799, but Charles-Maurice Talleyrand, the Minister of Foreign Affairs under the Directory, refused to entertain their requests, owing to the onerous costs associated with renovating what had by then become a dilapidated performance space.72 By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Théâtre de la Marine was a private theater. After falling into even further disrepair during the First Empire, the municipality took it 70 71

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Kerdraon-Duconte, “Théâtre et pouvoir à Brest,” 161. Baron writes that military officials boycotted the theater after they were stripped of their oversight of the repertoire and responsibility for the security of the auditorium. Baron, Élites, pouvoirs et vie municipal à Brest, 366. Talleyrand’s response was sent by Pierre-Alexandre-Laurent Forfait, his successor, on December 21, 1799. In Kernéis, “Contribution à l’Histoire de la ville,” 280.

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Figure 3.6 Le Théâtre et la Rue d’Aiguillon. Postcard. Brest: Grand Bazar (n.d., 1880– 1888). Bibliothèque nationale de France. Collection Bibliothèque numérique de Brest, BNF45904429.

over in 1817 and ran it until it burned down on March 11, 1866 (after which only the original façade would remain, until another fire in the 1930s).73 See Figure 3.6.

Theater and Society in Saint-Domingue As in Brest, Metz, Perpignan, and many other villes de garnison, theater became a permanent fixture in the cities of colonial Saint-Domingue during the second half of the eighteenth century. And, just like with the Théâtre de la Marine, theater was pitched by its advocates as a catalyst for economic and social improvement and as a means to transform anti-social demeanors into polite behaviors. Originating in the practices and pastimes of plantation owners and other wealthy families, theater on the island developed a particularly powerful urban performance culture marked by racial, social, and military tensions and anxieties. The colony’s theaters, like their counterparts in metropolitan France, were not immune to periods of financial difficulty. These moments of 73

On the theater’s demise, see Kernéis, “Contribution à l’Histoire de la ville,” 284–6.

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stress reveal institutional problems, calls for reform, and justifications for the colonial theater’s existence. For example, in a 1774 letter to ÉtienneLouis Ferron de La Ferronnays, a plantation owner, military commander and French administrator in Cap-Français, several members of the Comédie du Cap’s comité d’actionnaires (shareholders committee) detailed the reasons why their theater deserved a government bailout.74 According to the committee, theater in Saint-Domingue was essential “pour le repos public” (for public calm) and for the softening of colonial “mœurs.” In addition to its psychological and cultural benefits, the theater served an important economic function (despite its own shaky business model75) by providing a space for colonists to discuss “nouveaux projets” and “nouvelles affaires qui tendent à l’accroissement du pays et à l’avantage de ses habitants”76 (new business projects that lead to the growth of the country and to the benefit of its inhabitants). Theater in Cap-Français was considered a civilizing force, a “school of virtue,” a commercial catalyst, and a promoter of the type of metropolitan sociabilité that colonial elites desired to emulate. Theater, they argued, greased the wheels of an immensely profitable colonial machine. Dramatic literature and performance were not, of course, SaintDomingue’s most efficient and widespread means of encouraging “une facilité [. . .] de faire les affaires”; nor was it the theater that enabled France’s so-called perle des Antilles to emerge by the late eighteenth century as the largest sugar producer in the Caribbean and as one of the most lucrative (and horrific) colonial endeavors of all time.77 Slavery, not theater, was the most crucial practice in Saint-Domingue’s plantation economy. The forced labor of black Africans and their descendants determined more than any other institution or practice the relationships, policies, and opportunities (or lack thereof) on the island.78 Aside from 74

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Daniel Dutrejet, Lavanis and Drieux, “Mémoire concernant le spectacle de la ville du Cap,” June 28, 1774, in Fouchard, Le théâtre à Saint-Domingue, 15–18. For a fascinating contextualization of the Ferron de la Ferronays family and the French Atlantic slave trade, see Cheney, Cul de Sac. Le Cap’s theater suffered several blows during the late 1760s and early 1770s, including the theft of its receipts in 1769, an earthquake in June 1770, and the mismanagement of its funds by the director at the time, “Monsieur” Chinon. For more information, see Fouchard, Le théâtre à Saint-Domingue, 10–14. Dutrejet, Lavanis and Drieux, “Mémoire concernant le spectacle,” in Fouchard, Le théâtre à SaintDomingue, 16–17. Saint-Domingue had produced more sugar “than all the other colonies in the West Indies” by 1787. Burnard and Garrigus, The Plantation Machine, 245. Between 1629 and 1791, roughly 850,000 enslaved persons were brought to Saint-Domingue. See Stewart King, Blue Coat or Powdered Wig, xxiv. Garrigus estimates that, by 1789, there were 30,831 white French colonists, 24,848 free people of color, and approximately 434,000 enslaved persons. For more information on the demographics of Saint-Domingue, see Garrigus, Before Haiti, 2.

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the rare exception, the colony’s massive enslaved population was excluded from the theater,79 which catered to several conspicuous yet quantitatively smaller groups: white planters, businessmen, and administrators; white women; free people of color; visitors from Europe and from the greater Atlantic; and, finally, soldiers – a substantial and fluctuating group of men with various backgrounds who were entrusted with protecting the island from foreign attack. Soldiers constituted a significant public in Saint-Domingue’s theaters, and increasingly so, after a series of military education and morale boosting reforms on the island were enacted in the wake of the Seven Years’ War.80 Military presence in colonial theaters, as we will see later in this chapter, elicited ambivalent responses among the white elites who had established the theater in the 1740s and who, by the 1760s, were becoming worried about the military’s takeover of performance spaces such as the Comédie du Cap. As a reminder of both the power and the precariousness of the colonial endeavor, soldiers were a force of mainland (and often perceived as “foreign”) French influence that enabled local practices, including slavery, to prosper. The metropolitan French military’s position of the necessary intruder was played out and intensified in the colony’s theaters. A critical reading of the diverse relations between military and theatrical cultures in Saint-Domingue is justified by the outsized number both of soldiers and of theatrical spectators in the colony. Le Cap, for instance, was inhabited during the 1780s by approximately 10,000 enslaved laborers, 7,100 permanent white residents, 1,400 free people of color, and, depending on the exact year and whether the kingdom was at war or peace, anywhere from 1,000 to 3,400 soldiers.81 As in other cities with strong military presences – Metz, Strasbourg, Lille, Arras, and Brest, for example – theaters 79

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Powers highlights the use of enslaved musicians in the theater. See Powers, From Plantation to Paradise?, esp. 80–100. Burnard and Garrigus mention “slave performances” and gatherings that provoked the ire of colonial administrators in Cap-Français during the 1760s and 1770s. See Burnard and Garrigus, The Plantation Machine, 61–4. France boosted the number of soldiers in the Caribbean after what was viewed as an embarrassing performance of home-grown militias across the region. As Cheney writes, soldiers from Europe were needed because “white planters (grands blancs) were more inclined to cultivate coffee and sugar than the virtues of self-sacrifice and obedience, while the petits blancs crowding the cities of SaintDomingue saw enlistment in the militia as a form of indentured servitude that could only accentuate their resemblance to enslaved blacks.” Cheney, Cul de Sac, 135. For more information on colonial military reform, see Cheney, Cul de Sac, 134–8; see also Lesueur, Les Troupes coloniales d’Ancien Régime, 245–66. For more information on population change in Le Cap, see Powers, From Plantation to Paradise?, 27–8; for more information on the numbers of soldiers in Saint-Domingue, see Charles Frostin, “Les ‘enfants perdus pour l’état’ ou la condition militaire à Saint-Domingue au dix-huitième siècle,” Annales de Bretagne et des pays de l’ouest 80, no. 2 (1973): 317–43.

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in Le Cap, Port-au-Prince, Saint-Marc, Léogane, and other cities in SaintDomingue were established to push metropolitan norms, foster an attachment for polite pastimes, and press a decidedly “French way of life fondé sur le ‘commerce des sexes’ et l’art de la conversation”82 (. . . founded on the “commerce of the sexes” and the art of conversation). The racial, socioeconomic, and demographic particularities of theatrical performances in SaintDomingue, however, produced a set of experiences that differed (quite radically) from theatrical productions in Paris, London, and other European capitals. French administrators across the Caribbean praised the value of theater to quell the adverse effects of colonial occupation, boost learning, and promote sociability. As Laurent Dubois argues, “the wide circulation of theater in the French Atlantic made it probably the most important vector of Enlightenment ideas about virtue, justice, freedom, and other themes that were at once literary and political.”83 Theater in French colonies was pitched as a tool for acculturalization and enlightenment, supported to “établi[r] des liens entre les individus” (establish bonds between individuals), “remédie[r] aux inconvénients de la vie isolée que chacun mène,” and “poli[r] la rudesse des mœurs”84 (remedy the inconveniences of the isolated life that everybody leads {and} polish the coarseness of social mores). Theater, however, was not always a calming intermezzo of metropolitan taste and sensibilité or a pleasant lesson on Enlightenment vertu, but rather, in many ways, it was an institution and an experience that reinvigorated the Old Regime’s and the colonial complex’s social hierarchies and economic inequalities. Theater in French Caribbean slave societies was a set of experiences and discourses that were shaped by racial, social, and, certainly insofar as Saint-Domingue is concerned, military tensions.85 82 83 84

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Rahul Markovits, Civiliser l’Europe: Politiques du théâtre français au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2014), 19. Laurent Dubois, “Minette’s Worlds: Theater and Revolution in Saint-Domingue,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 50 (2021), 102. “Texte paru à propos de l’ouverture de la nouvelle salle de Saint-Pierre en Martinique,” Supplément aux Affiches américaines, Port-au-Prince, January 27, 1786, in Bernard Camier, “Les spectacles musicaux,” 3. On the composition of theater publics in Saint-Domingue, Camier writes: “Le public potentiel des spectacles se compose de citadins et des habitants proches des villes. S’y ajoutent quelques planteurs aisés des campagnes plus éloignées possédant des logements en ville. Ces villes ont des garnisons militaires qui fournissent également leur lot de spectateurs, augmentés épisodiquement par les escadres navales” (The potential audience for the shows is made up of city dwellers and people living close to towns. Added to this are a few well-to-do planters from more distant countryside with accommodation in town. These cities have military garrisons which also provide their share of spectators, supplemented occasionally by the naval squadrons). Camier, “Les spectacles musicaux,” 4.

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As Elizabeth Maddock Dillon argues, theater in the eighteenth-century Atlantic participated in the creation of “colonial modernity” by placing in the same location and at the same time a host of “shape-shifting rogues and tricksters” consisting of “slaves, servants, sailors, soldiers, pirates, planters, players, prostitutes, and projectors.”86 This group played with and played out tensions on the island, assisted by the theatrical medium and its “attention to the mutually informing practices of embodiment and representation.”87 Social groups with different goals and values learned from each other, but it is hard to imagine that they suspended their identities, judgments, and commitments to partake in any sort of detached aesthetic “moment.” The colonial theatrical event calls into question assertions that the theater served as an efficient force to soothe and unify Saint-Domingue’s fractured society, that theatrical performances were escapist divertissements, or that theater was overwhelmingly successful in mitigating the anxieties of military life on the island. Theatrical performances on the island were in many ways a continuation of tense ideological battles among disparate social groups. The fragility of Saint-Domingue’s status in the empire (particularly after the Seven Years’ War) and the paradoxes of life on the island were inseparable from its seemingly metropolitan theatrical culture. The military presence at its theaters signified just how impolite the kingdom needed to be to secure and expand its colonial economy. Soldiers reminded aristocratic planters and bourgeois businessmen of their society’s departure from metropolitan norms and supposed Enlightenment values, while at the same time enabling that society to continue, expand, and prosper.88

Soldiers, Sailors, and Plays in Le Cap Theater in Le Cap started in the early 1740s when a group of wealthy families in Saint-Domingue collaborated to create a sort of théâtre de société, rotating performances among planter family estates and staging amateur productions of French classics and recent successes from the

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Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649–1849 (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2014), 13. Dillon, New World Drama, 4. The colonial paradox was embedded in the very nature of life in Saint-Domingue. For example, even though Cap-Français was in an environmentally challenging location and under constant attack, the rents for city apartments were more expensive than those in central Paris by the 1770s. See Dubois, “Minette’s Worlds,” 103.

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Parisian stage.89 Public theater with ticket sales, large-scale private sponsorship, and professional actors began in the late 1750s and then was bolstered when a new, permanent theater was inaugurated in 1764 with the help of fifty stockholders and considerable philanthropy.90 The Salle du spectacle du Cap was the largest theater in the Caribbean at the time it was built – a massive theatrical enterprise, given the relatively modest population of the city.91 Spectators enjoyed performances almost on a nightly basis. Unlike crown-sponsored theaters in Paris, yet like stages in the French provinces, the theater in Le Cap presented every genre imaginable, from Racine’s and Voltaire’s tragedies and Molière’s comedies to recent parodies, pantomimes, and opéras-comiques. The theater (Figure 3.7) was a gathering point for the city’s noble and bourgeois classes. Numerous eyewitness reports reveal a dynamic, even boisterous atmosphere inside the Comédie and on the plaza outside the theater. Owing to the number of returning customers (the Comédie benefited – or suffered – from a bout of “only game in town” syndrome), actors performed different plays nearly each time they were on stage during a two-week (and sometimes even month-long) period.92 It is difficult to overstate the theater’s imprint on the island. On a typical evening in Paris or Bordeaux, there was approximately one theater ticket for every forty-six city residents,93 whereas Le Cap had a ratio of one to seventeen.94 Several out-of-town spectators critiqued Le Cap’s théâtromanie as producing little more than varied but bad theater; however, most visitors were impressed by 89 90

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See Fouchard, Le théâtre à Saint-Domingue, 10–14. See also Bernard Camier, “Les concerts dans les capitales de Saint-Domingue,” 75–98. The Comédie du Cap’s financial model was like that of theaters in French provincial cities. Clay writes that “new colonial stages [. . .] paralleled their provincial counterparts closely in many respects. In the cities of Saint-Domingue, as in most cities in France, it was local entrepreneurs, shareholders, directors, and actors who took the initiative in establishing and producing professional entertainment.” Clay, Stagestruck, 197. Le Cap consisted of around 18,000 residents in the 1780s, a comparatively modest urban population, compared with the principal cities of metropolitan France. For example, in 1789, the populations of Paris, Bordeaux, and Lyon were 605,000, 100,000, and 110,000, respectively. Even smaller provincial cities had comparatively large populations of 80,000 (Nantes), 54,000 (Lille), and 52,000 (Toulouse) in 1789. For more information, see Données historiques de la Statistique générale de France (Paris: Insee, 2010). www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/2591397. Accessed May 14, 2022. Fouchard writes that “les salles de Saint-Domingue ne pouvaient se payer le luxe, comme les grandes salles d’aujourd’hui, de maintenir à l’affiche un même programme ni pour une saison, ni pour un mois, ni pour une semaine, ni même pour deux jours consécutifs. Il fallait autant que possible une ou deux pièces nouvelles à chaque representation” (the theaters of Saint-Domingue could not afford the luxury, like today’s big venues, of keeping the same show going, neither for a season, nor for a month, nor for a week, nor even for two consecutive days. As much as possible, one or two new plays were needed for each performance). Fouchard, Le Théâtre à Saint-Domingue, 189. Burnard and Garrigus, The Plantation Machine, 77. 94 Clay, Stagestruck, 215.

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Figure 3.7 René Phélipeau, Plan de la ville du Cap François et ses environs dans l’isle St. Domingue (Paris: Phélipeau, 1786). Enlarged with arrow showing the Comédie du Cap-Français. Collection Bibliothèque nationale de France, GESH18PF149DIV4P22D.

the quality of acting and the eagerness of the island’s spectators to see the latest productions from Paris.95 When a printing press was transported across the Atlantic in 1764, the colony began publishing dramatic works intended for its own stage. For example, de Belloy’s Le Siège de Calais was performed and printed in Paris in February 1765; it was then performed and printed in Le Cap in July of the same year, making it, as we saw in Chapter 1, the first play ever 95

Commentators at the time linked the quality of the island’s actors to the higher wages they received in comparison with actors in metropolitan France. For example, in his Essai sur SaintDomingue, the former soldier Delafosse de Rouville writes that the theater was “bien suivi” (well attended) because “les gages des acteurs étaient considérables” (the actors’ wages were considerable). Delafosse de Rouville, Éloge historique du Chevalier Mauduit-Duplessis, suivi d’un Essai sur La Situation de Saint-Domingue à cette époque (Senlis: Tremblay, 1817), 105.

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published in a French colony.96 It is no surprise that de Belloy’s play – France’s so-called “première tragédie nationale,”97 which was pitched to heal the country after its defeat in the Seven Years’ War – received particular attention at the Comédie du Cap, a theater located in the French periphery but at the heart of the kingdom’s recent military defeat. As with marriage, public office, military commissions, and nearly every other institution on the island, the theater operated with fluctuating rules governing the race of those who were allowed to participate. Little is known about the constitution of the public during the first several decades of amateur theater in Le Cap, except that free people of color were not given a legal right to attend until 1766,98 a policy which was vehemently opposed by many of the colony’s white residents, including stakeholders of the Comédie.99 Nevertheless, starting in the 1760s, men, but more emphatically, women of color were integrated into a racialized, gendered, and hierarchical geography of spectators that was modeled after the island’s social practices and legislative segregation. In his account of colonial SaintDomingue, penned during the twilight of French rule,100 Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry, a Martinican lawyer who lived for decades in Le Cap, describes the seating arrangement at the theater: Les deux premières loges du premier rang vers le théâtre, n’en forment qu’une de chaque côté; celle de la droite est pour le gouverneur-général, ceux qu’il y invite, ou les officiers de la garnison; celle de la gauche appartient à l’intendant, et les officiers d’administration s’y placent. Un factionnaire garde l’une, et quelquefois un hoqueton de l’intendance l’autre. En avant de ces deux loges honorifiques, sont deux balcons qui se trouvent sur l’avantscène et qui ont six places sur le devant. Après ces balcons, se trouve une demi-loge de chaque côté; elles sont suivies des coulisses. Des dix loges qui 96

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This was at the request of the Governor-General of Saint-Domingue at the time, Charles d’Estaing. For more information on the publication history of Le Siège de Calais, see Connors, “Introduction,” in de Belloy, Le Siège de Calais, 11–13. De Belloy, “Préface,” in Le Siège de Calais, 77. For more information on free people of color and Saint-Domingue’s theaters, see Fouchard, Théâtre à Saint-Domingue, 180-92; see also Clay, Stagestruck, 216-20; Powers, From Plantation to Paradise, 83-104; and King, Bluecoat or Powdered Wig, 81-82. For example, Clay writes that Hillard d’Auberteuil complained in 1766 that “allowing free blacks to attend performances would have dire consequences, upsetting the social order by giving them dreams that were beyond their ability and station, whetting their appetite for luxury – and by implication their desire to have what whites had. blacks, he wrote, would soon imagine themselves dressed in imported fabric and lace, enjoying a life of privilege that they could not afford. To realize these dreams they would turn to crime.” Clay, Stagestruck, 219. Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l’isle Saint-Domingue, vol.1 (Philadelphia, Moreau de Saint-Méry, 1797).

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The auditorium in Cap-Français boasted dozens of military and naval markings, and included specialized seating for different armed units, as well as for the island’s diverse racial and gendered categories. Moreau de 101

Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description topographique, 361–2.

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Saint-Méry’s depiction of theatrical life in Saint-Domingue has attracted the analysis of several scholars, including Fouchard, Clay, and Powers, among others, who have queried this passage to detail the theater’s racial layout. This line of inquiry illustrates a concentration on race in colonial theaters, as well as in the colony’s broader social spaces and cultural practices, to prove that racial inequality was ingrained into the most ludic experiences and practices in Saint-Domingue. Without in any way seeking to downplay this reading of Moreau de Saint-Méry’s text, I hope to draw attention to an additional group that many white Creole colonists viewed with suspicion: soldiers – “officiers,” “corps militaire,” “corps-degarde,” etc. – a significant and controversial group to which we now turn. The French military established a permanent presence on SaintDomingue in the 1670s, when Louis XIV’s Minister of Finances, JeanBaptiste Colbert, ordered eight companies, each consisting of thirty to forty soldiers, to the Caribbean.102 Disputes between the Ministry of War and the Ministry of the Navy resulted in a slow development of colonial military forces on the island compared with British military operations in Jamaica, Barbados, and other parts of the Caribbean.103 Even as late as 1748, the entirety of the French Antilles, including Martinique, Guadeloupe, Grenada, Guiana, Saint-Croix, and Saint-Domingue, was defended by no more than 2,000 soldiers from France, who joined a hodgepodge group of local militias and armed constabularies.104 In March 1748, Admiral Charles Knowles and his force of several hundred British sailors overwhelmed a pathetic French squad of 191 men to capture Port Louis (now Saint-Louis-Du-Sud, Haiti), the only fort in Saint-Domingue at the time. This embarrassment triggered a series of reforms in Versailles, including an order to establish permanent bases across the region, increase the operational role of the Ministry of War (as opposed to the smaller Ministry of the Navy) in colonial military endeavors, and, most importantly, augment the number of foot soldiers in the Caribbean to almost 9,000. Although this was by no means enough manpower to fight off Britain’s larger forces,105 the reforms reveal France’s increasing focus on military support of the plantation economy. 102 103 104 105

See Boris Lesueur, “Les troupes coloniaux aux Antilles sous l’Ancien Régime,” Histoire, Économie et Société 28, no. 4 (2009): 3–19. Lesueur argues that the infighting among ministries contributed to the significant imbalance of forces in the Caribbean and, ultimately, to France’s defeat in the Seven Years’ War. Lesueur, “Les troupes coloniaux,” 6. For example, in January 1762, a force of 18,000 British soldiers overwhelmed French defenses in Martinique, capturing the island with relative ease. For more information, see Daniel Baugh, The Global Seven Years War, 1754–1763 (London: Bloomsbury, 2011).

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The reforms of the early 1750s came too late. The Seven Years’ War was a devastating blow to the French empire, revealing the shortcomings of governmental policy from Versailles as well as the feeble execution of orders in the colonies. In 1762, France was forced to move most of its Caribbean force to Saint-Domingue, and many soldiers were sent to Le Cap, where local officials constructed a permanent garrison. After the Treaty of Paris (1763), which forced the French to turn over most of their Atlantic territories to Britain and Spain, Le Cap emerged as perhaps the most “French” and most “Atlantic”106 place in the Caribbean, because it was the primary port of entry for businessmen, artisans, and soldiers from the metropole, in addition to enslaved laborers from Africa or from other Caribbean islands. As in the case of Brest, which, as we saw above, also benefited financially and demographically from France’s defeat in the Seven Years’ War, Le Cap witnessed an administrative boom in the 1760s, when it replaced Fort Royal in Martinique as the administrative center of the French military and government in the Antilles. Owing to its proximity to several successful sugar and coffee plantations and its access to the greater Atlantic, Le Cap’s financial success continued well past 1771, when the capital of SaintDomingue was transferred to the more defensible Port-au-Prince. Throughout the second half of the eighteenth century, Le Cap rapidly developed into an economic powerhouse, built on enslaved labor as well as on the efforts of the French soldiers who were responsible for defending the colony’s borders, policing the streets, building canals and bridges, and assisting in a variety of urbanization and defense projects, sometimes much to their own dismay.107 John Garrigus writes that “the region around Cap Français, where so many imperial expeditions landed and were launched, seems to have had a military culture that did not develop in the South [of the island] before the Revolution.”108 Le Cap emerged by the 1760s as a dynamic colonial city with significant military presence and commercial activity. It housed around 1,600 soldiers at the new garrison and could call on thousands of 106

107

108

Laurent Dubois and John Garrigus write that Le Cap was “the place where most French immigrants and African captives first touched Caribbean soil,” making it “a truly Atlantic city.” Laurent Dubois and John D. Garrigus, “Introduction,” in Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, 1789–1804: A Brief History with Documents, ed. Laurent Dubois and John D. Garrigus (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 2006), 11. Lesueur writes that French forces suffered high desertion and death rates (akin to the death rates of enslaved laborers) because of forced labor practices in addition to alimentary, climatic, and disease factors. Garrigus, Before Haiti, 99.

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others to serve in the militia.109 How did the city’s distinctive military culture engage with theater? For example, did soldiers promote or impede a rising call both by French philosophes and by metropolitan government officials to render the spectacle more coherent, more focused, and more “policed”?110 Or did the outsized presence of soldiers, as in the case of Brest, create an even more fractured, disparate theatrical experience? Ultimately, how did military–theatrical relations reify or subvert social, political, and economic discourses in the colony?

The Colonial Complex Fouchard was the first to catalogue the island’s theater performances using announcements that were printed in the Affiches américaines and the Supplément aux Affiches américaines. In addition to drawing from newspapers, Fouchard notes references to performances in eyewitness reports and journals by colonists and visitors, such as Moreau de Saint-Méry, Alexandre de Laujon,111 and the Jesuit père Nicolson.112 Prest’s more comprehensive online database of troupes, theaters, and performances on the island changes the range and scope of scholarly research on SaintDomingue’s performing arts scene. These two resources, in addition to several recent articles about the theater and the military on the island, provide today’s researchers with a clearer picture of the island’s theatrical repertoires and a more complete sense of how theater publics were constituted in the Old Regime’s colonial spaces. Yet, even with these resources, it is difficult to perform any sort of systematic examination of Saint-Domingue’s “military repertoire,” given the ambiguity of the term and the limits of word searches (for example, there are plays with military themes and characters but with no explicit 109

110

111 112

For more information on the demographics of soldiers and militiamen in Cap-Français, see James E. McClellan III, Colonialism and Science: Saint Domingue in the Old Regime (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 41–3. Several philosophes, including Denis Diderot and Voltaire, led calls in the 1750s to remove rich patrons from the stage, seat spectators in the parterre, and render the theatrical performance more absorptive and “natural.” Rich patrons were removed from on-stage seating at the ComédieFrançaise in 1759. For more information, see Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980); for a more precise investigation into absorption and philosophe theater, see Pierre Frantz, L’esthétique du tableau dans le théâtre du XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1997). Alexandre de Laujon, Souvenirs de trente années de voyages à Saint-Domingue, dans plusieurs colonies étrangères et au continent d’Amérique (Paris: Schwartz and Gagnot, 1835). Jean-Barthélemey-Maximilien Nicolson, Essai sur l’histoire naturelle de l’isle de Saint-Domingue, avec des figures en taille douce (Paris: Gobreau, 1776).

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references to soldiers, wars, and/or battles in the title). But, by limiting our inquiry to the island’s most prominent theater (the Comédie du Cap) and by using search terms such as siège, prise, soldat, grenadier, militaire, déserteur, marin, bataille, prisonnier, perte, milice, and guerre, it is possible to get a rough idea of the prevalence and diversity of the Comédie’s military-themed drama. For example, the following plays were performed at the theater from 1765 to 1790: • Arlequin déserteur, délivré par les poissards, pantomime, n.a., 1786 • Arlequin soldat magicien, pantomime, Jean-François Mussot dit Arnould, 1785 • La Bataille et la Mort de Marlborough, pantomime, n.a., 1784, 1789, 1790 • Les Bâteliers de Saint-Cloud, opéra-comique, Charles-Simon Favart, 1765, 1767 • Le Chevalier sans peur et sans reproche ou les Amours de Bayard, comedy, Jacques Marie Boutet de Monvel, music by Stanislas Champein, 1790 • Le Déserteur, opéra-comique, Michel-Jean Sedaine and PierreAlexandre Monsigny, 1770, 1772, 1773 (2), 1774, 1775, 1780, 1783, 1785, 1786 (2) • Le Déserteur, drame, Louis-Sébastien Mercier, 1770 (3), 1773, 1777 (4), 1780, 1783, 1786 • Les Deux miliciens, comedy, Jean-Jacques d’Azémar, music by Alessandro Maria Antonio Frizeri, 1774 • La discipline militaire du nord, drame, Pierre-Louis Moline, 1785 • L’Esclave ou le Marin généreux, intermède, Niccolò Piccinni, 1776 (2) • Le Fameux siège et prise de Grenade, pantomime, 1784 • Le Fameux siège ou La Pucelle d’Orléans, pantomime, Roger-Timothée Regnard de Pleinchesne, 1788 • Les Français à la Grenade ou L’Impromptu de la Guerre et de l’Amour, comedy, Jean-Marie Collot d’Herbois, 1781 • Gaston et Bayard, tragédie, De Belloy, 1770, 1776, 1783 (2) • La Guerre ouverte, comedy, Antoine-Jean Bourlin (Dumaniant), music by Hyacinthe Jadin, 1790 • Henri IV ou La Bataille d’Ivry, opéra-comique, Barnabé Farmian Durosoy, music by Giovanni Battista Martini, 1779 • L’Héroïne américaine, pantomime, Jean-François Mussot (Arnould), 1787 (2), 1788113 113

L’Héroïne américaine was a “pantomime en trois actes, à grand spectacle, ornée de combats et d’évolutions militaires,” according to the Feuille du Cap-Français. For more information, see

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• Le Milicien, opéra-comique, Louis Anseaume, music by Egidio Duni, 1769, 1774 • La Mort de Marlborough, drame (2 acts), n.a., 1783 • La Mort du Chevalier d’Assas ou La Bataille de Clostercamp, pantomime, Alexis Dubois, 1786 • Le Port de mer, comedy, Nicolas Boindin and Antoine Houdar de La Motte, 1766, 1773 (2) • La Prise de la Bastille, pantomime, n.a., 1790 (2) • Le Prisonnier Prussien, drame, Jean-Louis Gabiot de Salins, 1789 • Le Retour de Yorktown ou la Fête grenadière, comedy, Clément, 1782, 1784 (2) • Le Siège d’Orléans ou Jeanne d’Arc, pantomime, Fontaine, 1781 (2) • Le Siège de Barcelone ou les Coups de l’Amour de la Fortune, tragicomédie, Philippe Quinault, 1777, 1791 • Le Siège de Calais, tragédie nationale, de Belloy, 1765, 1769 (2), 1783 • Le Siège et prise de Grenade, pantomime, n.a., 1784 • Le Soldat magicien, opéra-comique, Anseaulme, music by FrançoisAndré Danican Philidor, 1765 (2), 1767, 1773 (2), 1774 (3) • La Valeur recompensée ou La Prise du Fort Saint Philippe, pantomime, n. a., 1786. The number and variety of “military,” “patriotic,” or “national” plays that were performed in Le Cap and around the island justifies further study.114 The Comédie du Cap staged popular works from metropolitan France, such as Le Siège de Calais and the two Déserteur plays (Sedaine and Monsigny’s opéra-comique and Mercier’s drame); but also, spectators enjoyed pièces de circonstance and local hits, such as La Valeur recompensée ou La Prise du Fort Saint Philippe and Le Retour de Yorktown. It is, however, important not to overestimate the significance of military plays in Le Cap’s repertoire. The theater staged dozens of titles each year, and most productions, at least insofar as the play’s content is concerned, had little to do with war, military issues, or soldiers. Nevertheless, Prest’s online database shows

114

Béatrice Ferrier, “From the Abbé Raynal to César Ribié: L’Héroïne américaine on the Stages of Saint-Domingue (1787–1788),” in Colonialism and Slavery in Performance: Theatre and the Eighteenth-Century French Caribbean, ed. Jeffrey Leichman and Karine Bénac-Giroux (Liverpool and Oxford: Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment and Liverpool University Press, 2021), 65–87. French “patriotic” or “national” plays (and not necessarily “military” plays) would include Voltaire’s Tancrède, Adélaïde du Guesclin, and Le Café, ou L’Ecossaise, Le Mierre’s La Veuve du Malabar, Favart’s L’Anglais à Bordeaux, De Belloy’s Gaston et Bayard, Collé’s La Partie de chasse de Henri IV, and countless other popular eighteenth-century productions.

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that the island’s theaters did indeed perform more than several militarythemed drames, vaudevilles, pantomimes, and other plays. The military influenced dramatic works on the island through other means. Another possible “militarization” of the repertoire occurred when local artists modified plays from the mainland to give them more public appeal in the colony. This sometimes meant adding a military element to the work as well as changing the racial and linguistic features of the original metropolitan play. The most striking example is a parody of Nicolas Dezède’s opéra-comique Blaise et Babet ou la suite des trois fermiers. In Clément’s version,115 Julien et Susette, traduction nègre de Blaise et Babet, the author replaces the village lord and count in Dezède’s original with a Commandant du quartier and a Chevalier. According to David Powers, “both characters speak in French, but more often in creole, particularly when addressing their slaves.”116 A next step would be to perform a close analysis of Julien et Susette (if the text exists)117 in order to see how military characters engage with the racial, social, cultural, and linguistic particularities of creole-language theater. Are military characters in this play or in Clément’s other plays (he also wrote a parody of Voltaire’s Sémiramis as well as Jeannot et Thérèse, a wildly popular parody of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Devin du village) portrayed as social and cultural outcasts? Are they in fact somehow more rooted in local cultures and customs? Do these adaptations show that “[m]ilitary service in Saint-Domingue [. . .] was structured on difference and was animated by prejudice and even a spirit of vengeance” or that soldiers shared some sort of fraternal mentality?118 Overall, can theater uncover another layer of how soldiers experienced the colonial endeavor? A third military intervention into the colony’s performance culture occurred inside Saint-Domingue’s auditoriums. Soldiers and sailors played a key role in forging, as in the case of Brest, a unique experience because they were significantly represented in theaters due to special pricing and enticement schemes, mandatory subscriptions, and colonial demographics. Fouchard describes the modalities and politics of payment 115

116 117 118

Clément was also the author of Le Retour de Yorktown ou La fête grenadière. For more information on Clément, see Bernard Camier and Marie Christine Hazael-Massieux, “Jeannot et Thérèse: Un opéra-comique en créole à Saint-Domingue au milieu du XVIIIe siècle,” Revue de la société haïtienne d’histoire et de géographie 215 (2003), 140–2. Powers, From Plantation to Paradise?, 108. Powers quotes from the Feuille du Cap and the Affiches américaines on the first performance of Julien et Susette. Efforts to locate a copy of Juliet et Susette have thus far been unsuccessful. Christy L. Pichichero, The Military Enlightenment: War and Culture in the French Empire from Louis XIV to Napoleon (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2017), 107.

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at Saint-Domingue theaters, proving that the military was fully integrated into the account books of theater directors across the island. For example, in the western town of Saint Marc “on payait deux gourdes aux premières loges et une gourde aux secondes loges et au parterre, les militaires payant la moitié de ces prix” (one paid two gourdes for the first boxes and one gourde for the second boxes and for the pit, with soldiers paying half these prices). And in Port-au-Prince, “les billets de parterre coûtent une gourde et ceux des loges le double, les officiers militaires et les gens de couleur paient demie-gourde”119 (pit tickets cost one gourde and those in the boxes twice as much, military officers and people of color pay a half-gourde). There was nothing short of an islandwide system of theatrical perks for members of the military, who, at least insofar as the officers were concerned, were required to purchase theater subscriptions. Fouchard writes that “le tarif était modifié par ailleurs en faveur des militaires, officiers de garnison ou de marine, capitaines de navires ou commis de l’administration. Ces fonctionnaires de l’administration bénéficiaient de réductions spéciales”120 (the price was in fact modified in favor of soldiers, army and navy officers, ship captains or administrative clerks. These functionaries of the administration benefited from special discounts). In Le Cap, the most militarized place in all the French Caribbean, according to Moreau de Saint-Méry, “l’entrée est gratuite pour l’état-major, les sergents-majors de régiments, [et] quelques officiers de police”121 (entrance is free for General Staff officers, regimental staff sergeants [and] some police officers). He goes on to say that an entire battalion paid 600 livres per month, which is approximately 1 livre per soldier each month and a small fraction of the 66 livres per month paid by a civilian man for a subscription. The military was not just a part of everyday life in the streets of Port-auPrince and Le Cap, but also a specific (and often sought after) theatrical public, not unlike the role of student patrons today: ticket holders who are thought to benefit (educationally, culturally, ethically, etc.) from theatrical performances and who supposedly compensate in aggregate for what they do not pay individually. As in the cases of Besançon, Metz, Arras, Douai, Brest, and other militarized places on the French periphery, local officials brought up the issue of “occupying” soldiers, who often chose less virtuous activities in their free time. Reports indicate that instilling virtue, curbing

119 121

Fouchard, Théâtre à Saint-Domingue, 172. In Fouchard, Théâtre à Saint-Domingue, 177.

120

Fouchard, Théâtre à Saint-Domingue, 177.

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gambling and prostitution, and stemming ennui were prominent justifications for the proliferation of theater in the colony.122 The presence of soldiers in the theater, however, was not supported by all. Military conduct and the perceived differences between that behavior and civilian politeness emerged as another source of conflict on the island. Michel René Hilliard d’Auberteuil, a local notary, wrote this complaint to the Affiches américaines in 1769, after attending a performance at Le Cap’s theater: on n’aime point [. . .] à s’enfermer dans une salle où le nombre des commandants, des officiers militaires et des gardes est souvent aussi grand que celui des spectateurs, où le signal de la joie est presque toujours interrompu par un bruit menaçant; le plaisir en est banni, on n’y voit que la gene.123 nobody likes [. . .] being stuck in an auditorium where the number of commanders, military officers, and guards is often as large as that of spectators, where signs of joy are almost always interrupted by a menacing noise; pleasure is banned, and all that anybody sees there is uneasiness.

For Hilliard d’Auberteuil, a militarized theater impeded what he believed to be normative aesthetic processes, such as the unhindered, singledirectional flow of enjoyment (“plaisir”) from the staged fiction to a supposedly “absorbed” spectator. It is important to note, however, that Hilliard d’Auberteuil had an ax to grind with soldiers, for he had been beaten and “left for dead” by a group of naval officers – men who were subsequently acquitted of the crime by a tribunal composed of fellow military men.124 But, all in all, soldiers, according to the notary, are not the real public, which he argues is both threatened and embarrassed by the military’s dual role of theater patrons and keepers of the peace. In addition to condemning the presence of soldiers at the Comédie, Hilliard d’Auberteuil was a leading voice against the racial integration of 122

123 124

The insistence on the benefits of theater compared with other pastimes was a widespread opinion. For example, the military man and homme de lettres Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Nougaret wrote in 1769 that, without theater, “que de maux se succéderaient les uns aux autres! Que de familles ruinées, si les spectacles étaient abolis! Le jeu deviendrait notre idole favorite, et la débauche aurait des charmes pour nous” (How many evils there would be, one after another! How many families would be ruined if plays were abolished! Gambling would become our favorite idol, and debauchery would be what charms us). Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Nougaret, De l’art du théâtre en général, vol. i (Paris: Cailleau, 1769), b13. In Fouchard, Théâtre à Saint-Domingue, 193. Gene Ogle describes Hilliard d’Auberteuil’s run-in with soldiers in his study on justice in colonial Saint-Domingue. Ogle writes that members of the military “resorted to exemplary beatings” with relative impunity because of their “de facto immunity to court proceedings” on the island. See Gene E. Ogle, “Natural Movements and Dangerous Spectacles: Beatings, Duels, and ‘Play’ in SaintDomingue,” in New World Orders: Violence, Sanction, and Authority in the Colonial Americas, ed. John Smolenski and Thomas J. Humphrey (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania, 2007), 238.

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the theater in the 1760s. It is interesting to note that in that debate he took particular issue with the perceived effect of black and mixed-race women, again, on the aesthetic concentration of white male spectators (le public).125 Soldiers, like people of color, and especially, women of color, were apparently a distraction and a reminder that Le Cap was far away from metropolitan France. These groups jarred with Hilliard d’Auberteuil’s conception of the goals and benefits of theatrical performance. This notion of theatrical experience – a sort of virtual dispositif that in no way actually mirrored metropolitan theatrical practices – was grounded not only in colonial racism but also in a prominent strand of Enlightenment “universalism” that appended white male particularism and preferences onto normative, all-encompassing discourses, practices, and policies. By contrast, according to the Jesuit Nicolson, spectators enjoyed a pleasurable experience that was created by the military presence at the theater. In a gloss of Nicolson’s account of life on the island, Fouchard describes the priest’s positive feelings after seeing soldiers at the theater, boasting that “‘les uniformes galonnées, les teintes variées des habits d’officiers’ ajoutent une ‘note gaie à cette assistance’”126 (“the embroidered uniforms, the various colors of the officers’ uniforms” add a “cheerful note to this attendance”). And in Moreau de Saint-Méry’s account of a military-infused Corpus Christi (Fête-Dieu) celebration in 1769, residents of Le Cap marveled at the “beauty” of a highly organized procession of multiple squadrons and units to the Notre Dame church.127 The military, it seems, elicited disparate reactions in Saint-Domingue’s theatergoing population. But, both in positive and in negative opinions of soldiers in the auditorium, the locus of attention moves away from the actual theatrical performance – the staged fiction, the acting, the dramatic literature – and on to the behaviors and bodies of military men.

Fragmented séances of the Old Regime This glimpse of military–theatrical experiences in Brest and in SaintDomingue reveals unique performance environments caused by soldiers and sailors in the auditorium. These experiences, including the perceived 125 126 127

For more information, see Clay, Stagestruck, 222–4. Fouchard, Théâtre à Saint-Domingue, 193. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Loix et constitutions, 5: 245–6, in Gene E. Ogle, “The Trans-Atlantic King and Imperial Public Spheres: Pre-Revolutionary Politics in Saint-Domingue,” in The World of the Haitian Revolution, ed. David Patrick Geggus and Normak Fiering (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009), 79–96, 82–3. For a close analysis of this procession, see the Conclusion to this book.

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breaks and disconnects from normative spectatorial practices, can be further untangled. To help elucidate the specificity of military–theatrical experiences, we can turn to the socio-cultural underpinnings of “absorptive,” “universal,” or “bourgeois” spectator experiences that were desired by many eighteenth-century philosophes, naval administrators in Brest, and colonial writers such as Hilliard d’Auberteuil. Military presence centers performance discourses on military bodies, behaviors, customs, and practices in the auditorium’s pit and balconies. In eighteenth-century texts about theater in militarized zones, commentators dwell on the possible benefits of spectatorship for soldier audiences or lament the effect of military men on what critics viewed as the entertaining and morally beneficial qualities of theater. Eyewitness reports confirm a complicated, fragmented theatrical experience precisely owing to the presence of soldiers and to their inability to conform to the kind of polite society and aesthetic processes demanded by many civilian theater patrons.128 Ultimately, military performance environments render more complex any notion of a normative eighteenth-century theatrical experience and complicate universalistic claims, made then and now, about the goals and benefits of theater. Christian Biet’s notion of the theatrical séance, which I discussed in the Introduction to this book, is particularly helpful for contextualizing military–theatrical experiences within more recent critical debates. Biet unravels some of the less harmonious features of a theatrical performance to uncover a series of paradoxes concerning coherence and dispersion that are inherent to any trip to the theater, that are usually covered up by the seemingly collective act of theatergoing, and that military–theatrical events seemed to expose and exacerbate. Biet’s description of the intersectional discourses and structures at play during the theatrical event is worth repeating here: le théâtre, socialement et esthétiquement, serait alors un dispositif qui rassemble, qui permet que des regards se croisent et parfois se focalisent sur un point particulier (la scène, l’orchestre). Il a ainsi une fonction dont on pourrait dire qu’elle est socialement unifiante, ou unificatrice. Toutefois, ce lieu d’où l’on voit, de même que les lieux que l’on regarde, sont absolument partagés, à tous égards non unis – plus que désunis –, et surtout diffractés au sens où chacun ne voit ni ne regarde la même chose.129 128

129

Of course, civilians did not always behave politely at the theater, especially, and most famously, in the parterre. See Jeffrey S. Ravel, The Contested Parterre: Public Theatre and French Political Culture, 1680-1791 (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1999), esp. 13–66. Christian Biet, “Séance, Performance, Assemblée et Représentation: Les jeux de regards au théâtre (XVIIe–XXIe siècle),” Littératures classiques 82, no. 3 (2013), 81.

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the theater, socially and aesthetically, would then be an apparatus (dispositif ) that brings people together, that allows eyes to meet and sometimes focus on a particular point (the stage, the orchestra). It thus has a function which one could say is socially unifying, or unificatory (unificatrice). However, this place from which we see, as well as the places we look at, are absolutely shared, in all respects not united – more than disunited – and above all diffracted in the sense that each person neither sees nor watches the same thing.

The different elements that converge to produce coherence or diverge to complicate and compete for the attention of spectators are part of any theatrical performance. This tension between togetherness and separation was intensified by the presence of soldiers in the auditorium. Civilian theater operators, actors, and members of the non-military elite were forced to share a space with military populations, who were often at odds with civilian customs, goals, and values. However, the very same civilians relied on soldiers for ensuring economic prosperity and peacekeeping. In Saint-Domingue, where an already conflictual performance space was injected with racial tension and the reification of difference, affective processes in the theater combined with the economic anxieties and dependences of the colonial economy. Saint-Domingue was a context in which the paradox of necessary closeness to radical otherness was literally played out at the theater, potentially exacerbating, not soothing, the most inflammatory tensions on the island. In Brest and in Le Cap, the military’s presence, at least in part, subjugated attempts to connect the experience of theater to the universalizing aesthetics of Enlightenment philosophes. The soldiers who were responsible for policing the theater in peripheral locales were often asked to keep the peace to enable the aesthetic event. But their presence prevented any normative aesthetic processes from transpiring, according to many civilian patrons at the time. In the end, the great theatrical “civilizing” projects of the late Old Regime had mixed results. The navy extricated itself from the day-to-day operations of the Théâtre de la Marine in Brest, and there was certainly no trajectory in Saint-Domingue from chaos to civility because of the theater’s presence and popularity on the island. Theatrical–military endeavors, however, did bring a more diverse public into the auditorium, as thousands of soldiers from around France and its empire witnessed theatrical performance for the first time, and precisely thanks to mandatory military subscriptions, reduced-priced group tickets, and an acculturalization process whereby theatrical performance became a fashionable, even necessary experience for upwardly mobile soldiers. All in all, the military’s dramatic

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interventions seem to complicate the narrative of theater development outside of Paris. Even if the crown intervened explicitly in only a few cases, military officers and units, as we saw at the beginning of this chapter, helped fund and manage theaters in more implicit ways, and often as cultural intermediaries between the state’s political institutions (and funds) and more local “homegrown” initiatives in leisure and the performing arts. Parisian theaters such as the Opéra or the Comédie-Française would have been abstract institutions for many provincial and colonial officers, foot soldiers, and militiamen. The local theater in Cap-Français, Port-auPrince, or Saint-Pierre – or, for that matter, in Metz, Lille, or Brest – staged virtually every dramatic genre imaginable, often mixing tragedies, opérascomiques, and vaudevilles, but also military balls, soirées, dinners, and meetings into the same week’s programming. Venues in highly militarized locales helped push new genres and theatrical experiments to secure financial resources and please audiences. The goal of bringing the military into harmonious concert with civilian society was never achieved, perhaps insofar as the Old Regime is concerned, at least in part due to the divide between civilian and military cultures and the persistent hierarchical structure of the military’s leadership class. This structure – a reminder of class difference in an organization that was supposed to be creating horizontal links between men so that they could bond and fight more efficiently – was displayed in the segregated balconies and seats of the auditorium. This reification of core Old-Regime values failed to create the polite harmony that was desired by military philosophes at the time. Difference and hierarchy were thus insurmountable barriers to the theatrical–military aspirations of the late Old Regime. The French army and navy never became the large-scale theater sponsors that some members of the military hierarchy advocated for in the 1760s and 1770s. Soldier-spectators, it seems, were not a significant or stable enough group to sustain a successful theater in cities that lacked monied civilian bourgeois and noble populations. Perhaps most of all, the internal conflict among different military groups proved to be far more a dispersive, even alienating force than any bonding elements of performance. During the 1780s, France fought in a series of naval skirmishes in the Atlantic and Indian oceans, but enjoyed a period of relative stability on the European front. As the noble classes appeared less essential to some for France’s military successes, many of the country’s great royal families turned their energies to more profitable enterprises than the sword. The military– theatrical complex appeared less potent in the 1780s than it had during

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the years directly after France’s defeat in the Seven Years’ War. And when a diverse group of soldiers, watchmakers, artisans, students, and others seized the Bastille on July 14, 1789, few would have suspected that the country was on the verge of a prolific period of military–theatrical interaction. The next part of this book moves into the French Revolution. I continue a dual strategy of exploring dramatic literature about soldiers and military life while also querying how soldiers and civilians engaged with militaryinfused performance environments. Two trends that have thus far appeared in my study will come into clearer focus during the Revolution. First, concerning dramatic literature, I will show an increase in strategies of proximity, intimacy, and the depiction of military realia on stage that had started in the 1760s, but which intensified and transformed as France reimagined its social and political core after 1789. Where there was once a struggle to determine the ideal military man or an attempt to depict new relationships between civilians and soldiers, dramatic authors of the Revolutionary years incorporated more democratic swaths of society and more civic pride and status into their representations of soldiers. The Revolutionary battles and heroes on stage were part of an attempt by the period’s playwrights to display historical accuracy and establish identificatory bonds between the theatrical context and the everyday situations on the streets and in the countryside of an emerging nation. Second, concerning performance practices, formal elements from military festivals and actual battle strategies from armed conflicts of the Coalition Wars were integrated into the dramaturgical choices of playwrights, actors, and stage directors. Theater makers of the 1790s went even further than Joseph Patrat in Brest to pitch specific types of military experiences to particular performance contexts. The Revolution eroded Old-Regime notions of stage propriety and custom as well as classical unities of time, space, and action to create a potent, circular theatrical form that mapped on to the holistic, encompassing themes of the Revolution. Ultimately, this example of total theater for total war went beyond dramatic text and stage performances, and into other types of media and experiences, with the goal of invigorating new French citizens into defending the nation against those who sought to destroy it. As the sun set on the Old Regime and its military–theatrical complex, a related, yet decidedly new national–military phenomenon was born, and almost, as we shall see next, as soon as the Bastille’s last wall came tumbling down.

chapter 4

Total Theater for Total War: Military Dramas and Performances of the French Revolution

This book began with the story of Joseph Arné’s storming of the Bastille and its theatrical reverberations.1 The young grenadier led the daring assault on July 14, 1789. The next morning, he participated in a series of parades and celebrations, and he was “drawn through Paris in a triumphal chariot.”2 On September 3, he was portrayed as the protagonist in La Fête du Grenadier, the first play dedicated to the July events. That evening, the real-life Arné was “enthusiastically celebrated by the spectators and at the end of the piece went onstage to standing ovations.”3 In January 1791, Arné was again called on stage, this time at the premiere of Harny de Guerville’s La Liberté conquise – a play featuring a Bastille-like siege.4 Arné the soldier, Arné the character, Arné the revolutionary hero, and Arné the spectator were all part of a particular type of patriotic, military–theatrical experience that flourished in France during the 1790s. The Revolution’s “national–military phenomenon” in theater was an amalgamation of military-themed plays, festivals, war events, propaganda, and journalism. It was a context for theater professionals, army leaders, and government administrators to share characters, slogans, images, and strategies. Dynamic moments of theatricalized battles and war concerns furnished common vocabularies and experiences among spectators, which in turn boosted the complexity and energy of the phenomenon from event to event. This was a totalizing experience for a new era, founded on community-building, knowledge expansion, identity formation, and novel approaches to depicting armed conflict. Authors of war plays, more so than before 1789, deployed images of the very recent past, identificatory plotlines involving characters of modest origins, and strategies of reenactment, liveness, and connectivity to daily life. Theater was brought into 1 2 3

See the Introduction. Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink and Rolf Reichardt, The Bastille: A History of a Symbol of Despotism and Freedom, trans. Norbert Schürer (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1997), 92. Ibid. 4 L’Orateur du peuple 19 (1791), 171.

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concert with France’s expanding war effort. The national–military phenomenon altered norms of dramatic literature and performance, catalyzed new types of theatrical programming throughout the French-speaking world, and provided live-action simulations of the nation’s military endeavors. Not all theatrical performances of war after 1789 broke from the Old Regime’s dramatic traditions. The Revolution’s playwrights utilized classical tragedy and comedy as well as dramatic genres that had been gaining traction in the 1770s and 1780s, most notably, the sentimental drame (or drame bourgeois), opéra-comique, the pantomime, and the vaudeville. Scholars today have been reluctant to address the national–military phenomenon, even with a resurgence of research on the French Revolution’s theatrical cultures that began around the time of the bicentennial in 1989. War plays often promote state violence and many gesture toward xenophobia and a militaristic nationalism that most readers today would find unpalatable. However, they constituted a popular movement with particular aesthetic devices and strategic objectives. The national–military phenomenon in theater, I argue, was not an example of simplistic propaganda. It incorporated strategies, often with tact and innovation, from sentimental (or “bourgeois”) drama, journalism, military spectacles, and battlefield reenactments to “encourage spectators to become active participants” both in the theatrical and in the military event.5 Spectators of war plays, especially works depicting France’s most recent battles and sieges, were compelled to intervene in the new nation’s military efforts almost as they were occurring and through performance strategies that sought to bend time and space to the ever more proximate present. The Revolution’s innovative forms of writing, performance, and spectatorship, as well as the period’s manipulation of past examples and practices, demands a fresh examination of the links between the performing arts and France’s increasingly democratic and martial culture at the time. In what follows, I provide a targeted, critical analysis of military-themed theater of the Revolution and of its place in the period’s evolving political, soldiering, and theatrical cultures. Drawing from scholarship on historical reenactment and the theater’s role in group identity formation, I argue that the national–military phenomenon was a knowledge- and communitybuilding experience that tied French subjects to each other for the (with 5

Yann Robert, Dramatic Justice: Trial by Theater in the Age of the French Revolution (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 41.

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hindsight, very problematic) goal of waging war. French men and women were more active in the Revolution’s military endeavors and in their theatricalized celebrations than during the previous regime. Revolutionaries were encouraged to step into a sometimes dizzying, circular narrative of personal sacrifice and armed commitment. This chain of events led to more plays about soldiers and, administrators hoped, more soldiers for the Revolution’s expanding military efforts. This chapter is organized into three parts. First, I describe the proliferation of theater and war during the 1790s – a critical moment which saw a rapid mobilization of French fighting forces and theatrical venues. Then, I detail the types of drama that emerged from the national–military phenomenon, including cataclysmic battle plays and sentimental “home front” dramas that littered the stages and bookstores of Paris and the provinces. In the last part of this chapter, I show how war theater emerged as part of a holistic pedagogical program whereby revolutionaries and theater makers welcomed new characters, conditions, and geographical locations into a broader notion of the “cultural center.” Ultimately, this chapter seeks an answer to the following question: how was France’s rising thirst for war articulated as a dramaturgical and programmatic mission of the period’s theater?

Proliferations: War and Theater in Revolutionary France France in the Revolutionary decade (1789–1799) presents a dynamic, yet understudied, cultural milieu for investigating the overlaps between war and theater.6 The relative lack of studies about 1790s war drama runs contrary to the decade’s geopolitical reality and theatrical output. The Revolution was a period of widespread warfare. It was witness to a stunning proliferation in the size of armies (and the number of casualties) as well as a transformation in military service and patriotic commitment. As David Bell argues in his study of the emergence of modern warfare, “more than a fifth of all the major battles fought in Europe between 1490 and 1815 took place just in the twentyfive years after 1790.”7 The frequency of battles with armies of over several hundred thousand soldiers was without precedent. The world had never seen a citizen army as colossal as the French force that was created after the Convention declared a levée en masse and conscripted almost three-quarters 6

7

A part of this chapter first appeared as Logan J. Connors, “Total Theater for Total War: Experiencing the French Revolution’s War Play,” Theatre Survey 62, no. 1 (2021): 51–67. I thank the editors at Cambridge University Press for its use here. David A. Bell, The First Total War (New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), 7.

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of a million men by summer 1793 into the famous Armée de l’an II.8 As Jacques Houdaille, Ian Germani, and others have demonstrated, more French soldiers died in 1793 and 1794 (around 95,000 each year) than during any period in French history until the First World War. The losses, according to Houdaille, were particularly devastating to the generation of French men born between 1770 and 1774, who witnessed almost one-quarter of their “classmates” killed or severely injured in the 1790s.9 France’s citizen army was not only larger but also philosophically distinct from the Old Regime’s military force. Although premonitions of change had started before the Revolution,10 the Republican army fought more than previous French forces “for the security of the nation and for ideological principles” rather than “on behalf of kings,” or because of their dynastic squabbles, or for purely economic reasons.11 As Christopher Tozzi notes, during the early 1790s, “warfare and military institutions played a pivotal role in transforming abstract revolutionary policies into facts on the ground.”12 The military became synonymous with the Revolution, especially as France turned its attention outward to its foes. Europe suffered such devastating fighting as had never before been experienced after the entire raison d’être of warfare was transformed from a demonstration of “aristocratic values” and “virtually permanent but restrained warfare” to an almost messianic program of “total war” and “wars to end all wars” that characterized the conflicts of the French Revolution and First Empire.13 8 9

10 11 12

13

Alan Forrest, Conscripts and Deserters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 8. Ian Germani, “Dying for Liberty in the French Revolutionary Wars,” in French History and Civilization, Festschrift in honor of Peter McPhee, ed. Briony Neilson and Julie Kalman (The George Rudé Society and H-FRANCE), H-FRANCE 9 (2020), 98. See also Jacques Houdaille, “Les armées de la Révolution d’après les registres matricules,” Population 38, nos. 4–5 (1983): 842–9. See, for example, Julia Osman, Citizen Soldiers and the Key to the Bastille (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015), esp. 3–33. Gillian Russell, The Theatres of War: Performance, Politics, and Society, 1793–1815 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 3. Christopher Tozzi, “Home Fronts and Battlefields: The Army, Warfare, and the Revolutionary Experience,” in Life in Revolutionary France, ed. Mette Harder and Jennifer Ngaire Heuer (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 103. Bell, The First Total War, 5. Bell defines “total war” as “a war involving the complete mobilization of a society’s resources to achieve the absolute destruction of an enemy, with all distinction erased between combatants and noncombatants” (7). Roger Chickering argues that the French Revolution “laid the moral and ideological foundations of total war, as it blurred the distinctions between combatants and noncombatants. The nation’s defense claimed the participation of everyone, whether as soldiers in the field or as providers of material and moral support at home. This principle henceforth established the basic patterns of military history for the next two centuries, as warfare intensified and expanded radically in scope.” Roger Chickering, “Introduction: A Tale of Two Tales: Grand Narratives of War in the Age of Revolution,” in War in an Age of Revolution, 1775–1815, ed. Roger Chickering and Stig Förster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 3.

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France’s new citizen army did not emerge from a deliberate and coherent set of political initiatives, but rather from panic, provoked by the sudden departure of around 2,100 army officers in late 1791 to join the émigré forces of Louis Joseph, the Prince de Condé, and other disenchanted aristocrats. The émigré army wanted nothing short of the Revolution’s destruction, the return of lands and titles to the nobility, and the reassertion of Louis XVI as absolute monarch of the kingdom. After successful incursions into northern France by Prussian, Hessian, Austrian, and French royalist troops led by the Duke of Brunswick in summer 1792, revolutionaries in Paris believed themselves to be under immediate attack, which instigated, at least in part, the August popular insurrections, the establishment of the First Republic, and the Autumn 1792 decrees, creating ten large fighting armées out of the existing three.14 The citizen army, however, will forever be associated with the famous levées en masse of 1793, which took France’s forces from 200,000 soldiers in February of that year to 500,000 in July to then 723,000 in September, culminating in the autumn levées with 804,000 armed men in what was by the end of 1793 an expanded force of fifteen armées.15 The Revolution’s call for a non-professional, grassroots, and nativist (as opposed to mercenary) approach to fighting was sourced in several prominent treatises and programs from the last few decades of the Old Regime. The Revolution’s army, in some ways, was an expansion of earlier “citoyennisation” theories – ideas and practices espoused by militaires philosophes who argued, as we saw in Chapter 2, that officers should treat their soldiers more humanely, that democratic ideals of skill and merit should factor into officer promotions and soldier compensation, and that the army should create horizontal, emotional bonds among officers and foot soldiers from diverse French geographical origins and socioeconomic classes.16 These Old-Regime interventions into military cultural change created a dynamic framework for 14

15 16

The decree expanded on the three existing armées (Rhin, Nord, and Centre), adding Ardennes, Vosges, Midi, Pyrénées, Alpes, Italie, and Intérieur. See Jean-Paul Bertaud, La Révolution armée: Les soldats-citoyens de la Révolution française (Paris: Laffont, 1979); see also John A. Lynn, The Bayonets of the Republic: Motivation and Tactics in the Army of Revolutionary France, 1791–1794 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996) and Samuel F. Scott, From Yorktown to Valmy: The Transformation of the French Army in the Age of Revolution (Boulder, CO: University of Colorado Press, 1998). In 1793, France added Côtes de Brest, Côtes de Cherbourg, Moselle, Côtes de la Rochelle, and l’Ouest armies to its existing ten. Arnaud Guinier describes this process of Old-Regime military citoyennisation: “Associée aux notions de devoir et de service de la patrie, sa mobilisation sert l’ambition de ‘citoyenniser’ le soldat en renforçant son ancrage au sein de la nation” (Associated with the notions of duty and service to the fatherland, its mobilization served the ambition to “citizenize” the soldier by reinforcing his attachment to the heart of the nation). Arnaud Guinier, L’honneur du soldat: Éthique martiale et discipline guerrière dans la France des Lumières (Ceyzérieu: Champ Vallon, 2014), 357.

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subsequent efforts. As Tozzi writes, “while the pre-revolutionary reforms to army organization did not meaningfully change the way in which soldiers or warfare impacted society, they inaugurated a spirit of military experimentation that helped to make thinkable the more momentous new military policies and institutions that emerged after 1789.”17 Old-Regime reform treatises penned by progressive military leaders had a theatrical counterpart, which imagined new military identities and boosted the value of soldiers and their brand of masculinity in French civil society. The project of military Enlightenment, however, could only go so far, given the real and symbolic limits to social mobility under the monarchy and its armies and the persistent assertion by the nobility that soldiering would remain their purview and lifeblood. The idea of military “citoyennisation” before the 1790s was more stunted and abstract than descriptive of actual reforms and governing processes inside the military complex. The goal was to adhere military men to a particular soldier identity based on the nobility’s preferences and to their benefit, not to annihilate the monarchy or the hierarchy which had ruled French society and its military for hundreds of years. During the 1790s, war emerged as a tangible presence in the lives of French women and men, which complemented the institutional changes inside the army. Before the Revolution, there was very little war-induced bloodshed on French soil for much of the century. This was unlike the two previous centuries, which had witnessed the devastating Wars of Religion, followed by the Fronde. Distance from the front, combined with more restrained battle tactics and smaller fighting units, promoted a situation whereby “warfare during the eighteenth century exerted relatively little impact on the lives of most people in France, especially compared to earlier centuries.”18 The Seven Years’ War brought war and its effects back into the public’s purview, and the period saw an uptick in attempts by playwrights to stage the trials and tribulations of soldiers. This vogue in drama was matched by efforts to engage actual French soldiers with the processes, emotions, and experiences of theater that were deemed positive and constructive by military administrators. But the Old Regime’s efforts to connect theater to military service paled in comparison with the veritable explosion of military-themed drama and military–theatrical experiences that began after July 1789, and especially after 1792, when France entered a near-permanent state of war that lasted until 1815.19 17 19

Tozzi, “Home Fronts and Battlefields,” 107. 18 Tozzi, “Home Fronts and Battlefields,” 104. An intense period of warfare began with the War of the First Coalition (April 1792 to October 1797), followed by the Wars of the Second Coalition (1798–1802), Third Coalition (1803–1806), Fourth

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The proliferation of megawars during the Revolutionary decade was simultaneous to a period of immense theatrical creation, performance, and publication. From 1789 to 1799, in Paris alone, French citizens enjoyed 855 new theatrical productions, attended 40,000 performances, and read 1,600 new published plays.20 On January 13, 1791, France abolished its system of theater privileges, which had been used during the Old Regime to quell competition, enforce censorship of printed and performed material, and prioritize venues such as the Comédie-Française and the Académie royale de musique (Opéra) in Paris. Almost overnight, the number of playhouses in the capital boomed from twelve to thirty-five. Although several recent studies have mitigated the novelty of theater at the time by showing that most plays performed during the Revolution were penned before it had even begun,21 new dramatic genres emerged or came into fruition after July 1789, the most popular and innovative of which, I argue, depicted recent and current events of national and military importance. From Arné and his compatriots’ storming of the Bastille to the liberation of Toulon in 1793 from anti-Republican forces to the stream of successful citizen-army victories during the War of the First Coalition, cataclysmic battles, sieges, and prises were big business for France’s theaters. Spectacles depicting the Revolution’s grande Histoire were complemented by a long list of more intimate plays about conscription, barracks life, and the agonies of desertion. On the basis of a conservative estimate drawn from catalogues of performances and publications of French plays from July 1789 to December 1795, there were at least 110 new productions of military, battle, or “soldier” plays – a theatrical boom that has largely fallen into scholarly oblivion. Historians of the Revolution’s theater have only recently started to unearth the complexity and the diversity of its pièces militaires, faits historiques, divertissements militaires, traits historiques, pantomimes patriotiques, scènes nationales, anecdotes historiques et militaires, and other new military genres and subgenres from the time. For almost two centuries, the period’s war drama suffered a similar fate to the rest of its cultural

20

21

Coalition (1806–1807), Fifth Coalition (1809), Sixth Coalition (1813–1814), and Seventh Coalition or the “Hundred Days” (1815). Emmet Kennedy, Marie-Laurence Netter, James P. McGregor, and Mark V. Olsen, Theatre, Opera, and Audiences in Revolutionary Paris: Analysis and Repertory (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), 6–7. Ibid. See also Emmet Kennedy, “Taste and Revolution,” Canadian Journal of History 32, no. 3 (1997): 375–92. On continuity and rupture of repertoire at the Paris Opéra, see Mark Darlow, Staging the French Revolution: Cultural Politics and the Paris Opera, 1789–1794 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

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productions. It was at best ignored and at worst propped up as evidence that extreme political moments prevented complex and compelling art. As Matthew Buckley writes, “traditional literary history has tended [. . .] to view the decade of the Revolution as a yawning gulf in the drama’s development,”22 and, as Susan Maslan argues, many historians have implied “that in times of great political turmoil we must choose between art and society and that during the French Revolution literature entered a period of dormancy.”23 The idea that French drama went to sleep after Beaumarchais and woke up with Victor Hugo’s renovations to the stage has been all but debunked over the past three decades. More recently, scholars have taken up discussion of the Revolution’s theater head-on with monographs about the period’s drama and performance practices during an extraordinary moment of political upheaval and social transformation. Since Maslan’s 2005 study, scholarship has expanded to query the theater’s engagement with specific genres and themes at the time, such as melodrama, opera and tragedy, romantic and familial comedies, as well as plays about nuns, judicial trials, famous historical figures, and much more.24 The period’s war theater, however, has not attracted the same attention as a category for research, and perhaps for good reason. War drama lacks formal and thematic consistency. Battles appear in every genre imaginable, and war plays depict diverse themes and settings, from international battlefields to the domestic hearth spaces of rural cottages. Moreover, the titles of plays do not necessarily indicate whether the plot centers on war or not. Scholars have thus favored a more anecdotal approach to the phenomenon, with articles about theatrical representations of specific battles or studies of how particular

22 23 24

Matthew S. Buckley, Tragedy Walks the Streets: The French Revolution in the Making of Modern Drama (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 3. Susan Maslan, Revolutionary Acts: Theater, Democracy, and the French Revolution (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 10. On melodrama and opera, see Buckley, Tragedy Walks the Streets and Mark Darlow, Staging the French Revolution; on tragedy, see Vincenzo De Santis, Le Théâtre de Louis Lemercier, entre Lumières et romantisme (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2015) and Maurizio Mélai, Les derniers feux de la tragédie classique au temps du romantisme (Paris: Presses de l’université Paris-Sorbonne, 2015); on sentiment and theater, see Cecilia Feilla, The Sentimental Theater of the French Revolution (London: Ashgate, 2013); on religion, see Annelle Curulla, Gender and Religious Life in French Revolutionary Drama (Liverpool: Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment and Liverpool University Press, 2018); on justice and the law in theater, see Robert, Dramatic Justice; on famous historical figures in drama of the period, see Mechele Leon, Molière, the French Revolution, and the Theatrical Afterlife (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2010); Philippe Bourdin, Aux origins du théâtre patriotique (Paris: CNRS, 2017); and Thibaut Julian, Un théâtre pour la nation: L’histoire en scène (1765–1806) (Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 2022).

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wartime anxieties made their way to the stage.25 The content of plays about the Toulon siege, the great levées en masse, the Vendée rebellion, or the importance of serving the French army as a mother, sister, or wife of a soldier provided human contours to the abstract notions in revolutionary politics, international relations, and military strategy – ideas that littered the pamphlets, newspapers, and speeches of the 1790s. The Revolution’s chief contribution to the war play was just as formal and experiential as it was focused on new content, ideas, and ideologies. The strategies for engaging new citizen-spectators in military dramas – documentary-based dramaturgy, technological innovation, on-stage military formations and battles, dramatic characters or actors who were actual soldiers, patriotic song breaks, the use of various military practices and customs in drama, and more – evince innovative and attractive (at the time) theatrical practices. Many war plays and war play experiences went beyond simplistic and straightforward propaganda. The diverse forms of military plays provided new citizens with geopolitical knowledge as well as a tangible sense of their role in the new nation’s armed endeavors.

Prises, sièges, and batailles: The Military-Event Play The explosion of military-themed drama in the early 1790s did not appear magically after the Bastille fell. Two Old-Regime premonitions of the post1789 vogue were de Belloy’s tragedy Le Siège de Calais and Mercier’s Le 25

On specific military events in Revolutionary theater, see, among others, Suzanne Jean Bérard, “Une curiosité du théâtre à l’époque de la Révolution: Les ‘faits historiques et patriotiques,’” Romanistische Zeitschrift für Literaturgeschichte 3 (1979): 250–77; Hervé Guénot, “Le théâtre et l’événement: La représentation dramatique du siège de Toulon (août 1793),” in L’inscription de l’histoire dans les œuvres directement ou indirectement inspirées par la Révolution française. Annales littéraires de l’université de Besançon, vol. 354 (Paris: Les Belles lettres, 1987), 261–302; Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink, “Événement dramatique et dramatisation théâtrale, la prise de la Bastille sur les tréteaux français et étrangers,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française 278 (1989): 337–55; Erica Joy Mannucci, “Le militaire dans le théâtre de la Révolution française,” in Les arts de la scène et la Révolution française, ed. Philippe Bourdin and Gérard Loubinoux (Clermont-Ferrand: Presses universitaires Blaise-Pascal and Musée de la Révolution française-Vizille, 2004), 381–94; Ian Germani, “Staging Battles: Representations of War in the Theatre and Festivals of the French Revolution,” European Review of History 13, no. 2 (2006): 203–27; Rüdiger Schmidt, “‘Le théâtre se militarise’: Le soldat-citoyen dans le théâtre de la Révolution française,” in Représentation et pouvoir: La politique symbolique en France (1789–1830), ed. Natalie Scholz and Christina Schröer (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2007), 63–82; new edition (online), n.p. 1–35; Paola Perazzolo, “La dramatisation de la prise de la Bastille pendant la Révolution: Représentations et revisions,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française 367 (2012): 49–68; Pierre Frantz, “Entre journal et épopée: Le théâtre d’actualité de la Révolution,” Studi Francesi 169 (2013): 18–26; and Chela M. Aufderheide, “Theater and the Truth: Political and Theatrical Representations of the 1793 Siege of Toulon,” James Blair Historical Review 9, no. 1 (2019): 31–42.

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Déserteur. Both were performed hundreds of times in Paris, the French provinces and, with particular vigor, in the French-speaking Caribbean. Although important forebears to the Revolution’s “event” plays (plays depicting important military events such as sieges, battles, assaults, etc.), de Belloy’s tragedy and Mercier’s drame use dramaturgical strategies that were more typical of the Old Regime. De Belloy displaces French bravery in the face of English attack (an important theme two years after the Seven Years’ War) to the late-medieval siege of the city by Edward III and the heroic sacrifice by the Calais’ bourgeois mayor, Eustache Saint-Pierre. The connections to France’s current moment are not subtle, but de Belloy avoids possible problems with the censors and he respects dramatic tradition with strategies of temporal displacement. Mercier, by staging his play “dans une petite ville d’Allemagne, frontière de France”26 (in a small German town, on the border with France), makes no explicit references to any particular battle, city, or date. He chooses instead a vaguely identifiable space, shared by both French-speaking and German-speaking characters, for a sentimental tale of the tension between military obligation and familial bonds. Historical dramas portraying wars from the medieval period through the early seventeenth century persisted into the Revolutionary decade. For example, plays that celebrated the wartime achievements of Henri IV, the least offensive king to the Revolution’s moderates, were particularly popular from 1789 to 1791, when there was vocal support for a constitutional monarchy in the National Constituent Assembly.27 The most striking difference between the new nation’s artists and their OldRegime counterparts, however, was that revolutionaries were not always compelled to reach back in time or toward distant or ambiguous places for their plays about battles, soldiers, and the effects of war on society. A central element of the Revolution’s war drama, and especially its “eventbased” theater, is the role of contemporary (and often extremely contemporary) military realia, strategies, and discourses in the crux of the play’s plot. In many Old-Regime plays, battles and sieges create a background for more important, intimate, and fictional stories. While not altogether 26 27

Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Le déserteur, ed. Sophie Marchand, in Théâtre complet I, ed. Jean-Claude Bonnet (Paris: Champion, 2014), 205. Plays depicting Henri IV’s victory at Amiens in 1597 were particularly popular in 1789 and 1790. See, for example, Jean-François Villemain d’Abancourt, Une journée de Henri IV (Paris: Théâtre de Molière, 1790). For more information, see André Tissier, Les Spectacles à Paris pendant la Révolution: Répertoire analytique, chronologie et bibliographie (Geneva: Droz, 1991). For analysis of Henri IV on the revolutionary stage, see Julian, Un théâtre pour la nation, 180–6.

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dropping this strategy, authors after 1789 go to greater lengths to “reaffirm[er] leur volonté de sacrifier tout élément fictionnel et dramatique sur l’autel de la véracité historique” (reaffirm their willingness to sacrifice all fictional and dramatic elements on the altar of historical veracity), often relying on newspapers and military dispatches for scenes in their plays.28 A glance at several titles of post-1789 military dramas underscores an important break from the geographical distance or temporal vagary in OldRegime plays. The examples are numerous: Le Patriotisme récompensé, ou l’Arrivée à Paris des sauveurs de la Patrie (1791),29 Les Hussards du 1er régiment de Berchiny, ou L’Exemple de l’armée (1792),30 La Prise de la ville de Mons, victoire remportée par l’armée de la République française (1793),31 La mort du jeune Barra ou une journée de la Vendée (1794),32 La Caserne ou Le Départ de la première réquisition (1793),33 and Le Premier coup de canon aux Frontières (1792)34 were just several of the dozens of military-themed plays that targeted specific battles of the Revolution for performances in front of spectators who were assumed to have participated in or read about those same events. The quantitatively largest and perhaps qualitatively most innovative strand of military theater during the Revolution was the event play, which depicted, sometimes with stunning attention to detail, the main moments of a battle or siege of national importance. The public import of revolutionary “event drama” was profound, as Mark Darlow reveals in his study of at least fifty-four plays with the subtitles “fait historique,” “trait historique,” or “pièce historique” that were published or performed from 1789 to 1799 (there were virtually no plays with those subtitles penned before the Revolution).35 In addition, dozens of tragedies, comedies, pantomimes, and vaudevilles about military sieges, attacks, and battles appeared on stage during the period, yet used genre categories that existed 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

Perazzolo, “La dramatisation de la prise de la Bastille,” 54. Le Patriotisme récompensé, ou l’Arrivée à Paris des sauveurs de la Patrie, pièce nationale et chants à spectacle (Foire Saint-Germain, July 2, 1791). Les Hussards du 1er régiment de Berchiny, ou L’Exemple de l’armée, fait historique (Théâtre de Molière, June 2, 1792) La Prise de la ville de Mons, victoire remportée par l’armée de la République française, pièce historique en deux actes avec les agréments (Théâtre de la Gaïté, January 3, 1793) Briois, La mort du jeune Barra ou une journée de la Vendée, drame historique en un acte (Théâtre républicain, May 4, 1794). Villienne and Bizet, La Caserne ou Le Départ de la première réquisition, tableau patriotique en un acte, en prose, mêlé de vaudevilles (Palais-Variétés, October 11, 1793). Plancher-Valcour, Le Premier coup de canon aux Frontières, pièce nationale à spectacle (Foire SaintGermain, January 26, 1792). Mark Darlow, “Staging the Revolution: The Fait historique,” Nottingham French Studies 45, no. 1 (2006), 77.

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prior to 1789, such as drames, comédies, opéras-comiques, or vaudevilles.36 From grand military spectacles at the Paris Opéra to sentimental tales of provincial requisitions, to a theatricalized attack against a cardboard Bastille “par des paysans armés de vieux fusils et habillés en soldat” (by peasants armed with old rifles and dressed as soldiers) on a plot of land located next to municipal buildings in Saint-Maur (near Tours),37 the national–military theatrical phenomenon, as I treat it here, encapsulates any dramatization of a post-July 1789 armed conflict or national military concern, staged on theaters in France, its conquered territories, and its colonial empire during the Revolutionary decade. The strategies and approaches used by playwrights of military dramas were abundant. For example, in La Liberté conquise, ou le Despotisme renversé (1791), Harny de Guerville combined sentimental overtones with references to living revolutionaries to create a wildly popular production that over 100,000 spectators witnessed throughout France.38 A critic from the Journal de Paris wrote this about the play’s tumultuous premiere (the one featuring the real-life Joseph Arné) on January 5, 1791: Jamais pièce de théâtre n’a excité autant d’enthousiasme. Il a été poussé à un point qu’il est difficile d’exprimer, et la disposition des esprits ne s’est peutêtre pas encore manifestée avec autant de force, ni d’une manière plus entraînante. Dans l’intervalle du troisième au quatrième acte, l’orchestre a exécuté l’air patriotique ça ira, ça ira: toute la salle unanimement a battu la mesure pendant près d’un demi quart d’heure, et de ce moment tous les spectateurs sont devenus acteurs, pour ainsi dire.39 Never has a play excited so much enthusiasm. It’s been pushed to a point that’s hard to put into words, and the disposition of spirits has perhaps not 36

37 38 39

Examples of “event plays” that were published and/or performed using existing genre categories (comedy, tragedy, pantomime, opéra-comique, parade, etc.) include, but are certainly not limited to, Le 14 de juillet (D’Olivet, 1790); La Prise de la Bastille ou La Liberté conquise (David, 1790); La Prise de la Bastille (1790); Les Citoyens Français, ou Le Triomphe de la Révolution (1791); La Prise de la Bastille (Barbot, 1791); Le Patriotisme récompensé, ou l’Arrivée à Paris des sauveurs de la Patrie (1791); Le Siège de Lille ou Cécile et Julien (Joigny, music by Trial, 1792); La Prise de la ville de Mons, victoire remportée par l’armée de la République française (1793); Le Bombardement de Lille (1793); Le Siège de Lille (Dantilly, music by Kreutzer, 1793); La Prise de Toulon par les Français (Lemière, music by Duval, 1794); Toulon reconquis ou La Fête du Port de la Montagne (Aude, 1794); La Prise de Toulon (Picard, music by Dalayrac, 1794); La Prise de Toulon ou La Chasse aux Léopards (Briois, 1794); La prise de Toulon (Mittié, 1794); Les Prisonniers français à Liège (1794); La Bataille de Jemmapes (Devienne, 1794). This anecdote about Saint-Maur is recounted in Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink, “Événement dramatique et dramatisation théâtrale,” 344. Paola Perazzolo, “Autocensure et ré(écriture) pendant l’époque révolutionnaire: La liberté conquise ou le Despotisme renversé,”Papers on French Seventeenth-Century Literature 36, no. 71 (2009), 498. In Perazzolo, “Autocensure et ré(écriture),” 500, n. 31.

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Despite its blockbuster status at the time, Harny de Guerville’s play was not reprinted until 2012, when Paola Perazzolo published a critical edition based on a texte de souffleur archived at the Bibliothèque-Musée de la Comédie-Française.40 The play recounts a border town’s struggle between its counterrevolutionary governor and its citizens. The governor, with the help of local aristocrats, judges, and clergy, is seeking to starve the town’s inhabitants and push them to revolt. This measure, they hope, will lay the groundwork for invasion and occupation by a counter-revolutionary battalion. However, the town’s mayor, Verneuil, organizes a patriotic resistance and, when the anti-republican mercenaries (who are employed by a local count) arrive, the soldiers are so moved by the citizens’ zeal that they lower their weapons to join their brothers and sisters in the revolutionary cause. Harny de Guerville peppered his dialogues with a variety of images and phrases that spectators were accustomed to seeing and hearing in newspapers and political speeches during the Revolution’s early years. Plays of the national–military phenomenon bled into each other as playwrights and festival organizers shared characters, slogans, songs, and revolutionary images. The collaboration across productions produced shared vocabularies and experiences among spectators, which in turn boosted their experiences from play to subsequent play. Military plays were particularly acute examples of théâtre de l’actualité, which, according to Thibaut Julian, sought to “archiver un moment intense [. . .] éprouvé comme historique, et de prouver à la postérité que ce qui ne manquerait pas d’apparaître comme une action inouïe se produisit véritablement et méritait qu’on l’immortalisât”41 (archive an intense moment [. . .] experienced as historic, and to prove to posterity that what would seem to be an incredible action really happened and deserved to be immortalized). Many authors of event plays used reports from the Convention and newspaper articles to create the dialogues and actions of their characters. 40 41

Harny de Guerville, La Liberté conquise ou le Despotisme renversé, ed. Paola Perazzolo (Verona: Fiorini, 2012). Julian, Un théâtre pour la nation, 81.

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For example, in his 1794 opera La Prise de Toulon par les Français, which depicts one of the Republican Army’s first victories against Coalition forces, August-Louis Bertin d’Antilly stages a discussion of battle strategies by the French officers and administrators Paul Barras, Jean-François de La Poype, and Louis-Marie Fréron.42 During the final act, Fréron picks up a French flag and exclaims, “Soldats de la Patrie, ralliez-vous à ce signe!” (Soldiers of the Fatherland, rally behind this sign!), which the “real” Fréron supposedly yelled on the evening of December 18, 1793, shortly before the French army liberated the city.43 This demonstration of historical accuracy, according to Hervé Guénot’s research on revolutionary periodicals, is proof that Bertin d’Antilly used newspaper articles and military dispatches to construct his playtext in January 1794.44 Performed barely a month after the event, La Prise de Toulon par les Français provided current-events knowledge and eyewitness testimony to spectators who had not read or could not read the daily war reporting. Bertin D’Antilly’s example was part of a wave of Toulon-inspired performances that swept into Paris in January, when 8 theaters performed at least 14 different plays about the Toulon events for a total of 210 performances in barely three weeks.45 Many event plays were published and performed as quickly as possible after a military episode. They were also characterized by their technological and spectacular feats. Cannon and musket shots, or pyrotechnics, including explosions and fires, sometimes drowned out sentimental scenes and dramatic dialogues, which disappointed several critics at the time. In February 1794, for example, five plays appeared on Parisian stages depicting the devastating fire that English, Spanish, Italian, and French aristocratic forces left behind before escaping through the port of Toulon.46 Several months earlier, at the Théâtre des Variétés amusantes in Paris, the citizen Boullault had already staged Les Brigands de La Vendée, an opéra-vaudeville “mêlé de combats et incendies” (mixed with fights and fires) about the Vendée uprisings. At the beginning of the second act, Boullault offers a vast and chilling setting of “plusieurs maisons incendiées et plusieurs prisonniers enchaînés” (several homes in flames and several prisoners in chains), 42 43 44 45 46

August-Louis Bertin d’Antilly, La Prise de Toulon par les Français, opéra en trois actes, mêlés de prose, de vers et de chants (Paris: Huet, an II [1794]). Louis-Marie Fréron was the son of Élie Cathérine Fréron, the anti-philosophe critic and enemy of Voltaire. Guénot, “Le théâtre et l’événement,” 269. This analysis is based on Tissier’s catalogue of performances during the Revolution. Guénot, “Le théâtre et l’événement,” 270.

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followed by a massive assault scene in which the local republicans liberate their compatriots from an exploding rebel camp.47 Several military plays represented entire half-battalions, pushing the number of people on indoor stages to levels that spectators would have expected to see at outdoor fêtes, military parades, and large-scale balletspectacles. A journalist from the Décade philosophique noted the presence of over thirty soldiers on stage (in addition to civilian characters) in a 1797 production of La Victoire de Pont de Lodi – a dizzying dramaturgical feature, which, when combined with “douze fusées, marches rapides, l’appareil bruyant d’artillerie, [et] les chocs multiples” (twelve rockets, rapid marches, a noisy artillery apparatus, [and] multiple booms) created, according to the critic, a convoluted and confusing performance.48 In Valcourt and Foignet’s 1794 La Discipline républicaine, “deux divisions sortent par des côtés opposées” (two divisions exit via the opposite sides) while a “colonne de brigands” (column of brigands) storms down from a fabricated “montagne” at the back of the stage.49 And in Macors and Walter’s Le Patriotisme, ou Les Volontaires aux frontières (1792), “le théâtre change et présente à l’instant une forêt” (the theater changes and suddenly displays a forest), where two battalions – a section of Alsatian volunteers and a group of enemy soldiers led by the German general Ethmuler – clash in a “vive” battle with explosions and fires.50 After the stunning victory by the “fils de la Révolution,” the “théâtre change et présente un lieu préparé pour une fête” (theater changes and displays a scene ready for a festival) and the “spectacle finit par un divertissement analogue à la circonstance”51 (show concludes with an entertaining feature worthy of the circumstances). Battles provoked military battle plays, which then transformed into post-performance military spectacles and moments of collectivity and celebration.

47

48

49

50 51

Boullault, Les Brigands de La Vendée, opéra-vaudeville en deux actes, mêlé de combats et incendie, représenté au Théâtre des Variétés amusantes, Boulevard du Temple, ci-devant Élèves de l’Opéra, le 3 octobre 1793, l’an 2me de la République (Paris: Toubon, 1793). La Décade philosophique, 30 frimaire an VI (December 20, 1797), in Philippe Bourdin, “La voix et le geste révolutionnaires dans le théâtre patriotique (1789–1799), ou la transcription scénique de l’histoire immediate,” in La Voix et le Geste: Une approche culturelle de la violence socio-politique, ed. Philippe Bourdin, Mathias Bernard, and Jean-Claude Caron (Clermont-Ferrand: Presses universitaires Blaise-Pascal, 2005), 310. Aristide Valcourt and Citoyen Foignet, La Discipline républicaine, fait historique, en un acte, en prose, mêlé d’ariettes, représenté sur le Théâtre de l’Opéra-Comique national, le primedi Floréal, l’an deuxième de la République française, une et indivisible (Paris: Cailleau, 1794), scene 12. Macors and Walter (music), Le Patriotisme, ou Les Volontaires aux frontières, divertissement en un acte, orné de chants et de danses (Lyon: Faucheux, 1792), scene 12. Macors and Walter, Le Patriotisme, scene 14.

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Another feature of the military-event play was its actual and suspected associations with the propagandistic goals of an anxious and unstable political regime. The navy’s funding of the Théâtre de la Marine in Brest – a rare incursion by Versailles into provincial theater life – was far surpassed by the Revolution’s theatrical–military complex, especially when programming involved military-event plays and community festivals outside of the capital. All of France, from the smallest villages on the southwestern border to the traditional military bastions in the east, fell under the purview of the Revolution’s increasingly selfreflexive cultural program. The explicit and implicit liaisons between governmental or military officials and event plays around France during the 1790s were numerous. Robespierre famously pushed for 100,000 livres in early 1794 to be sent to the “vingt théâtres de Paris qui ont donné des représentations gratuites” (twenty theaters of Paris which have staged free performances) of plays about the Toulon siege.52 In Rouen, the municipal theater was required to show “pièces patriotiques” at least once every two weeks and free of charge. These popular events, according to Serge Bianchi’s research, garnered crowds of around 2,000 spectators at each performance.53 In 1791 and 1792, La Liberté conquise was regularly staged without charge in Paris and around the French provinces. According to the Orateur du peuple, Parisian theaters had already made significant financial sacrifices by providing gratis shows of Harny de Guerville’s play. The journalist argued that venues could do even more at those performances by creating special seating in the auditorium for members of the military and, more specifically, for the Gardes who had participated in the July 1789 events.54 The government supported the writing and the staging of military plays, and it attempted to influence the performance environment in which citizen-spectators were supposed to enjoy these patriotic–military moments. Many plays were written by veterans, soldier–playwright co-authors, and former soldiers who had risen within the ranks of the revolutionary political machine. In addition to building the genre’s reputation as a governmental program, military authorship added first-hand knowledge and boosted the authenticity (or seeming authenticity) of the military customs, events, and personalities depicted in the dramas. 52 53 54

Guénot, “Le théâtre et l’événement,” 263. Serge Bianchi, “Le théâtre de l’an II (culture et société sous la Révolution),” Annales historiques de la Révolution française 278 (1989), 422. See the Orateur du peuple 19 (1791), 143–4.

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A flagrant example is La Guerre de Vendée, a “bon ouvrage du citoyen Thiébaut” (worthy work by the citizen Thiébaut), who was also an “ancien militaire” and the Chief of Administration of the regional government of La Meurthe. It is unsurprising that Thiébaut’s patriotic play was performed for the first time in his own administrative district when it appeared on the main stage in Nancy in 1793.55 Within a few months of Thiébaut’s efforts, Antoine Vieillard Boismartin, the mayor of Saint-Lô (Manche), wrote, published, and staged Le Siège de Rouen at his own city’s theater.56 As soldiers returned from the war effort during the Revolution and later, during the First Empire, it was not uncommon to find them trying their hand at the war play. Works penned by soldiers or coauthored with the help of “standard” dramatic authors were particularly popular in militarized border towns. In the Alsatian city of Colmar, for example, spectators enjoyed several plays by “Antoine (artiste lyrique)” and “P. Broulard, militaire en retraite,” throughout the first decade of the nineteenth century.57 In 1795, shortly after revolutionary forces had wrestled Liège away from Coalition control, the city’s theater staged Les Dragons français et les Hussards prussiens, “petite pièce par le citoyen Villiers, officier au 3e regiment de dragons”58 (little play by the citizen Villiers, officer of the 3rd regiment of dragoons). In Perpignan, near France’s southern border, spectators in 1799 enjoyed Demonville, ou les Vendéens soumis, a drame by “le citoyen Privat, aide-de-camp de feu Lazare Hoche, général en chef de l’armée des côtes de l’océan, et du général Augereau”59 (the citizen Privat, aide-de-camp of the late Lazare Hoche, chief General of the Ocean Coasts Division, and of General Augereau). And in 1805, La Vie du soldat français (1805) by “L’Éveillé, conscript du département de l’Ardèche” was published and performed in Munich, where Napoleon had arrived triumphantly in October of that year.60 Military-event plays were without a doubt of national interest, but they were enabled, supported, and enjoyed through local initiatives, customs, and concerns. 55 56

57

In Bérard, “Une curiosité du théâtre,” 271. See the catalogue of Alexandre Martineau de Soleinne’s extensive collection of plays (with many that were performed and printed outside of Paris) in Alexandre Martineau de Soleinne (ed.), Bibliothèque dramatique de Monsieur de Soleinne, vol. ii: Théâtre français depuis Racine jusqu’à Victor Hugo. Théâtre des provinces. Théâtre français à l’étranger, ed. P. L. Jacob (Paris: Administration de l’Alliance des arts, 1844). The reference to Boismartin’s play in Saint-Lô is on p. 383. Ibid., 348. 58 Ibid., 354. 59 Ibid., 378. 60 Ibid., 375.

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Critical Confusion, Reenactment, and Community Theatricalized depictions of soldiering and war enabled France’s new citizens to learn from and participate in the young Republic’s most pressing concerns and ideologies. The theater’s communication with armed conflict was and remains a powerful source of spectator interaction and discovery. In Theatre and War, Jeanne Colleran argues that theater artists today are integral to “developing a critical disposition toward image and narrative” in a world where war reporting, “total television,” and visual representations of conflict are increasingly unavoidable.61 Theater, Colleran argues, is a valuable medium for understanding complex conflicts that are often “flattened out through hype and spin” in what she calls the “cyberblitz” – a “state of permanently agitated desire” caused by ever-proliferating online platforms.62 As a “live, embodied, communal art form,” theater “can eschew the false objectivity and speculations of minutia-driven reportage in favor of a presentation that acknowledges its own biases.”63 From dramatic depictions of the Ceaușescu family’s fall in Romania to media representations of the supposed American War on Terror, Colleran demonstrates for more recent times that “theatre has responded to the climacteric periods of war as they have affected both states and individuals – particularly when social structures and personal relations are destabilized and inevitably changed as the result of geopolitical conflicts.”64 French Revolutionary theater professionals, despite writing for a very different public than today’s, recognized the salience of drama and performance as vehicles for learning, community building, and political action. During the eighteenth century, many theater professionals and military administrators subscribed to the theory that the dramatic arts, because they are grounded in the body’s response to other live bodies in copresence, engage with war and other phenomena through a particular set of processes and practices, many of which are by no means particular to recent times or to the French eighteenth century. As Will Shüler writes, twentythree out of the thirty-one extant tragedies from Ancient Greece “directly revolve either around war [. . .], the effects of war [. . .], or the possibility of war.”65 In Athenian democracy, the relationship between theater and war 61 62 64 65

Jeanne Colleran, Theatre and War: Theatrical Responses since 1991 (New York, NY: Palgrave, 2012), 2. Soleinne (ed.), Bibliothèque dramatique de M. de Soleinne, 5–6. 63 Ibid., 10 Victor Emeljanow, “Theatrical Engagements in Times of War: An Introduction,” in War and Theatrical Innovation, ed. Victor Emeljanow (London: Palgrave, 2017), xiii. Will Shüler, “The Greek Tragic Chorus and Its Training for War: Movement, Music and Harmony in Theatrical and Military Performance,” in War and Theatrical Innovation, ed. Victor Emeljanow (London: Palgrave, 2017), 3.

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extended beyond the content of the plays. Ephebes, or hoplites-(soldiers-)intraining, “were required to demonstrate their skills in a theatre [. . .] before receiving a shield and spear [because] Athenians were looking to choreographed maneuvering as beneficial to combat skills.”66 Theater was a venue to disseminate military knowledge and patriotic zeal, a training ground for hopeful soldiers, and a display venue for military exercises, prowess, and might. Democratic revolutions and regimes, from antiquity to the present, create lexicons to train, motivate, and represent their citizen armies. The long history and continued currency of military–theatrical overlaps justify the following question: what is specific about Revolutionary France? The previous section of this chapter was designed to introduce readers to the broad brushstrokes – the themes, magnitude, and tensions – of the Revolution’s military drama. War theater was a widespread movement that altered norms of dramatic writing and performance, and catalyzed new theatrical programming throughout the French-speaking world. Here, I provide a more precise inquiry into the specificity of the war play, of its role in creating a new vision of engaged theater, and its evolving relationships with military and political structures of the young Republic. The Revolution’s war drama took one step further a process that had started during the last three decades of the Old Regime. French Revolutionary playwrights and theater professionals increased their dramaturgical efforts of totality and reach. War theater of the period sought to grasp on to more of the realia and experiences that affected both soldiers and civilians, and to reconstruct a holistic vision of how French citizens67 were supposed to engage with the military and ideological war front. The ambiguous critical reception of war-themed plays shows that the national–military phenomenon was somehow “doing” theater differently than other dramatic forms and experiences. From its inception, the Revolution’s examples of collaborative (or amateur) authorship, journalism-inspired dramaturgy, obsessive attention to historical detail, and concern for specific groups of spectators such as young people and soldiers were met with opposition. This was innovative, bold drama that departed from many of the storied traditions and theatrical codes. Dramatic critics from the Revolution’s early years through the Directory often noted a troublesome gap between the importance of the actual event (the storming of the Bastille, the Battle of Lille, the Toulon siege, the Vendée 66 67

Shüler, “The Greek Tragic Chorus,” 7. The limits of French Revolutionary universalism, and notably its exclusion of many women, people of color, and others, are discussed in Chapter 5 and in the Conclusion of this book.

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uprising, etc.) and what they viewed as a lackluster copy of the event on stage. In the Affiches, annonces et Avis divers, for example, the journalist screens a critique of La Liberté conquise behind praise of Harny de Guerville’s patriotism and the unique dramaturgical process of incorporating newspaper articles into his play: L’Auteur, en compulsant le Journal des Débats sans doute, et tout ce qui a été écrit sur la Révolution, a inséré dans la Pièce des fragments de discours et des principes que l’impression nous reproduit tous les jours sous mille formes, ce qui donne souvent de l’élévation à son style [. . .] La Liberté conquise [. . .] doit son intérêt à la véracité et au rapprochement des faits: si l’on n’y reconnaît pas un grand mérite littéraire, on y trouve au moins un très grand Patriotisme, et l’un est maintenant plus sûr du succès que l’autre. Cet Ouvrage a été reçu avec l’enthousiasme d’un Peuple qui est dévoré de la soif de la Liberté.68 The Author, no doubt consulting the Journal des Débats, and all that has been written on the Revolution, has inserted into the Play fragments of speeches and principles that print reproduces for us every day in a thousand forms, which often gives elevation to its style [. . .] La Liberté conquise [. . .] owes its interest to the veracity and the closeness of its facts: if one does not recognize in it a great literary merit, one finds there at least a very great Patriotism, and one is now more certain of success than the other. This Work was received with the enthusiasm of a People who are devoured by the thirst for Freedom.

Celebrating the play’s patriotism, historical accuracy and public success, the review illustrates a “normative” critical response to military-event drama. The critic recognizes the novelty of the dramatic subject, praises the dramatist’s ability to represent historical facts on stage with precision and patriotism, and concludes that the play must have value because (1) the importance of the national events on stage is indisputable; and (2) the public, now composed of new citizen-spectators, responded favorably. The critic deflects judgment of the play on to the exceptionality of the historical moment or to the tastes of (often “new”) theater patrons. A few years later, a critic from the Journal de Paris national makes a similar link between a regenerated French nation and new evaluative

68

Affiches, Annonces et Avis divers (January 6, 1791), in Perazzolo, “La dramatisation de la prise de la Bastille,” 54.

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criteria for theater in a review of Louis-Benoît Picard’s La Prise de Toulon (1794): C’est un de ces sujets de comédie qui sont presqu’entièrement du ressort du machiniste. Des coups de canons, des évolutions militaires sont le fonds de ce genre de pièces, et, quoique faiblement exécutés, ces détails plaisent, parce qu’ils retracent des événements glorieux de la nation française.69 It is one of those theatrical subjects which are almost entirely the responsibility of the machinist. Cannon shots, military movements are the foundations of this kind of drama, and, although weakly executed, these details please because they retrace glorious events of the French nation.

The play is successful because of its patriotic premise and technological features. Several weeks later, a journalist from La Feuille du Salut public sums up the entire relationship between criticism and event plays, arguing that critics should not judge La Prise de Toulon “d’après les règles de l’art” (following the rules of art) because Picard’s goal was not necessarily to create good theater, but rather, to celebrate “un événement heureux pour la patrie”70 (a joyous event for the fatherland). Reviews from the period reveal a critical hesitation when judging the value of military-event plays as well as confusion about the place of the audience’s response in a hierarchy of evaluative criteria. While political posturing or fear of reprisals certainly would explain some critics’ reluctance to condemn military drama, the aesthetic, ideological, and social differences between event plays and most plays of the Old Regime provide a more complete justification for critical ambiguity and departure from norms. Moreover, the critical response to military-event plays may expose their most innovative and pervasive features. The plays were departures from the normal business of eighteenth-century theatergoing, so how can scholars now recognize the value – aesthetic, social, political, or other – of military-event theater of the Revolution? One response is to engage with these sorts of experiences on their own terms and in the context of how they unfolded in revolutionary society. To garner an (albeit incomplete) notion of military-event plays as France’s new citizens could have experienced them, we need to first return to the holistic, “total” programming of military–theatrical performances after cataclysmic national events. These were periods of intense emotion that could last days

69 70

Journal de Paris national 401 (17 pluviôse an II) (February 5, 1794), 1624. La Feuille du Salut public (12 ventôse an II) (March 12, 1794), 4.

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or weeks, where festivals bled into theater performances, soldiers appeared on stage as themselves, and spectators often performed their own military zeal through songs and organized chanting after the plays had ended.71 Spectators moved from one military-inspired event to another, rendering it difficult to distinguish when one had stopped and another had commenced. When taken as a whole, the entire military–theatrical experience engages a deeply inclusive definition of theatrical performance that can be further unpacked with more recent critical frameworks. In his notion of “performance,” Richard Schechner folds into one experience “the whole constellation of events, most of them passing unnoticed, that take place in/among both performers and audience from the time the first spectator enters the field of the performance – the precinct where the theatre takes place – to the time the last spectator leaves.”72 Military-event plays push even further the scope of Schechner’s performance to before the arrival of the first spectator and after the departure of the last. Military performances, as the next few examples illustrate, were total experiences with difficult-to-determine starting points and, for participants involved in the events, no end in sight. Twelve days after the French reconquest of Toulon on 10 nivôse an II (December 30, 1793), Marie-Joseph Chénier, by this time one of the Revolution’s most celebrated dramatic authors, and Jacques-Louis David, the period’s greatest visual artist and event planner, staged the most military festival of the Republic’s young history. In addition to scores of dancers, musicians, children, and other performers, Chénier and David chose to include “un détachement de cavalerie, trente sapeurs, cinquante tambours” (a detachment of cavalry, thirty sappers, fifty drummers) and “deux détachements de la force armée Parisienne”73 (two detachments of the Parisian armed force). The “moment fort,” according to the Courrier républicain and other newspapers, was “l’apparition du Char de la Victoire,” a huge parade float surrounded by over fifty wounded veterans and “cent braves sans-culottes en bonnets rouges” (one hundred sans-culottes in Phrygian caps). The military celebration concluded on the Champ de Mars with a “symphonie militaire,” followed by Chénier and Gossec’s rendition of the 71

72 73

For more information on patriotic and military song in the Revolution’s theaters, see Katherine Hambridge, “Staging Singing in the Theater of War (Berlin, 1805),” Journal of the American Musicological Society 68, no. 1 (2015): 39–98; for a comprehensive history on singing and political action during the Revolution, see Laura Mason, Singing the French Revolution: Popular Culture and Politics, 1787–1799 (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1996). Richard Schechner, Performance Theory (New York, NY: Routledge, 1988), 72. Guénot, “Le théâtre et l’événement,” 263.

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Hymne sur la prise de Toulon.74 The Paris festival was so successful that the Convention issued a decree, claiming that they would turn Chénier and David’s effort into a veritable military road show, with performances planned in “Brest, Bordeaux, Tours, Angers, Montpellier, [and] Perpignan.”75 On the same night as Chénier and David’s Parisian festival, in Lille, a city on the northern front that was no stranger to war, municipal officials built a model city of Toulon “sur l’étendue de la place publique” (on a clearing in the public square). As soon as a crowd had gathered, the National Guard reenacted “les attaques faites par les braves soldats de la République contre les vils esclaves du Roi” (the attacks made by the brave soldiers of the Republic against the vile slaves of the King) and the evening ended with a military parade and dance.76 The layering of military signification must have been dizzying: in Lille, local soldiers on December 30 portrayed soldiers who, twelve days earlier, had attacked enemy soldiers (also played by local soldiers) against whom governmental officials hoped to enlist France’s new citizens (the show’s public) as (real) soldiers. During the first two weeks of January 1794, many of the military dramas about the Toulon siege appeared on the heels of these martial festivals of collective participation. Premieres of military plays such as La Prise de Toulon (January 8; Théâtre du Lycée des Arts), L’Heureuse nouvelle ou la reprise de Toulon (January 9; Théâtre des sans-culottes [Molière]), Beauvais dans les cachots de Toulon (January 14; Théâtre des sans-culottes [Molière]), La Prise de Toulon par les Français (January 20; Opéra-Comique), and others contributed to and were nourished by an atmosphere that was rife with war-themed reenactment, festival, and theatrical performance.77 The “bleed” of the actual battle into the festival, of the festival into military play and of the play into more festival-like experiences as well as more plays is the phenomenon’s most radical feature. The energy and totality created by numerous different but overlapping military performances rendered the national–military mode attractive to spectators yet confusing to most theater critics, past and present, because of the critics’ desire to tease out and distinguish the aesthetic merits and artistic elements of each discrete play. Moving forward in time, most readers today would 74 76

77

Ibid., 264. 75 Ibid., 264. Description de la Fête donnée à Lille à l’occasion de la prise de Toulon par les troupes de la République (Lille, 10 nivôse an II [December 30, 1793]), in Victor Derode, Histoire de Lille, vol. iii (Paris: Hébrard, 1848), 289. Kimberly Jannarone provides analysis of several revolutionary festivals, including their military components in Kimberly Jannarone, “Choreographing Freedom: Mass Performance in the Festivals of the French Revolution,” The Drama Review 61, no. 2 (2017): 117–39.

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find unappealing this state-enabled celebration of war, especially when examined through the almost unavoidable lens of the cultural policies and social practices of twentieth-century totalitarian regimes.78 But at the time, plays about war – and war-inspired festivals and other forms of performance – depicted the most trenchant concerns of the Revolution and encouraged new citizens to participate actively in theatrical as well as, leaders hoped, war-making processes. Critical theories of reenactment can help unpack the energy and value of dramatic works that appear now as examples of simplistic propaganda or, to draw a more contemporary parallel, predecessors to over-the-top battle flicks. The national–military phenomenon in French Revolutionary theater was, at its core, a community-building machine. When they witnessed soldier-actors burn a cardboard Bastille or cheered the actor playing the grenadier Arné while standing in the audience next to the real Arné himself, participants in the Revolution’s military dramas engaged with both “the thing itself (the past)” as well as “not not the thing (the past), as it passes across their bodies in again-time.”79 The liminality of the performance object – its physicality and its artistic fabrication – was a source of audience energy and new aesthetic models, but it was confusing, often unappealing, to critics who continued to read the Revolution’s war plays as departures from classical models of poetic excellence. While reliving France’s recent military past at the theater, spectators of event plays stepped out of linear timelines, subscribing to the notion that “the past is a future direction in which one can travel – that it can stretch out before us like an unfamiliar landscape waiting to be (re)discovered.”80 New citizen-spectators experienced “instability and the dissolution of boundaries as part of the event” as war plays challenged notions of the temporal here and now.81 The melding of events “open[ed] up the liminal space between poles such as presence and representation, and a feeling of in-betweenness dominate[d].” These features ultimately produced a powerful “threshold experience that can transform those who experience it.”82 The Revolution’s war plays were 78

79 80 81 82

The bibliography on the relationship between the Revolution, fascism, and totalitarianism is vast and varied. George L. Mosse provides a concise account of many of the most patent debates and tensions of this comparison in George L. Mosse, “Fascism and the French Revolution,” Journal of Contemporary History 24, no. 1 (1989): 5–26. Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2011), 8. Ibid., 22. Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Routledge Introduction to Theatre and Performance Studies (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2014), 42. Ibid., 42.

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experientially radical and socially important – features that are often missed in poetic analyses of their scripts. Examined in this context, the recent past of the Revolution’s armed conflicts ceases to indicate a completed action, gesturing instead to more directions and possibilities. By blending and repeating over and over the military’s contemporary achievements, war plays departed from the incrementalism and cosmopolitanism of many eighteenth-century French philosophes. Rather than the supposed clarity and moderate progress that was espoused by eighteenth-century thinkers, Revolutionary war drama subscribes to the idea that “recurrence [. . .] contests tightly stitched Enlightenment claims to the forward-driven linearity of temporality, the continuity of time, and challenges, as well, an attitude toward death as necessarily irrecoverable loss.”83 The notion of a successful play, like the notions of death, citizenship, and subjectivity, was not the same in 1794 as it had been before Arné led the charge at the Bastille or after the devastation of the Napoleonic wars and the restoration of the monarchy. The Revolution’s military–theatrical experience through war play programming complicates narratives of continuity and respect for tradition concerning the period’s dramatic output and performance cultures. The fundamental “break” in theatrical culture after 1789 was experiential, emotional, and linked to engaging new citizens in the collective experience of war. What makes military-event plays (and their receptions) unsettling today is the possibility that dramatic literature and theatrical performance were part of a wider push to convince millions of new citizens that death was in fact not the end but rather the beginning of a supposedly “regenerated” society.84 The Revolution’s military plays, implicitly or explicitly, depict the deaths of foreign armies and populations, aristocratic traitors, religious zealots, and sacrificed soldiers of the young Republic. These losses, however, are by no means the end, but rather, the launchpad for a revitalized French Republic, cleansed of its monarchical past through its military feats and aesthetic devotions to those armed endeavors. Reinterpreted as staged reenactments rather than as one-off anecdotes or simplistic acts of propaganda, military plays of the Revolution take on new values and import. When spectators are involved in the process, reenactments “seek less to 83 84

Schneider, Performing Remains, 29. For more information on notions of French revolutionary time, see Sanja Perovic, The Calendar in Revolutionary France: Perceptions of Time in Literature, Culture, Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); see also Lynn Hunt, “Revolutionary Time and Regeneration,” Diciottesimo Secolo 1 (2016): 62–76.

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impart universal laws to them than to enable them to actively intervene in and pass judgment on contemporary events.”85 It is thus the unfinished quality of the moment – an event of national importance that required the active participation of those viewing it for it to come to completion – that was so invigorating to many spectators at the time. Through reenactment and theatricalized strategies that borrowed from reenactment, spectators could inject their subjectivity into the event because the event time (the battle) was continued on stage. Ultimately, as Yann Robert suggests, “a reenactment, like a sketch, openly presents itself as incomplete and indeterminate, as well as, crucially, as always coming into existence for the very first time.”86 If the Revolution’s core values were democracy and participation, then it makes perfect sense that reenactment strategies would be crucial to the period’s socio-theatrical projects. By rereading military plays of the Revolutionary decade through the lens of reenactment, new theatrical engagements with revolutionary politics emerge. Reenactment provides the national–military phenomenon with critical criteria that are more appropriate for its mission and era. Even military dramas following traditional aesthetic norms of the Old Regime – drames and comédies with little or no cataclysmic “event” qualities, for example – take on new meaning because of the performance ecosystem of Revolutionary France. These “standard” examples of the repertoire become exceptional owing to the performance ecosystem of the 1790s and, mainly, to the tight chronology and geography of the events depicted on stage. Reenactment binds together plays from disparate genres that were performed during the Revolution and in which war and its effects were the driving force for theatrical representation.

“Tightening the Bond”: From Republican Pedagogy to the Terror’s Tests of Virtue In the next chapter, I describe how war theater of the Revolution – both cataclysmic battle plays and domestic dramas about the home front – sought to enlist French society, including women and children, into the military and ideological war front. But first, if France’s citizen-spectators were supposed to find meaning and pleasure in these new forms of drama and thus increase their commitments to the war cause, women and men around the country would need to grasp a new patriotic and martial language of liberty, sacrifice, and collective duty. This new language, 85

Robert, Dramatic Justice, 26

86

Ibid., 41.

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revolutionaries believed, could be drawn from diverse pedagogical and cultural programs, including theater. Projects to reform pedagogical techniques and educational structures interested revolutionary thinkers and administrators almost as soon as the Bastille came down. As James Leith, Robert Palmer, Michel Vovelle, Adrian O’Connor, and others have demonstrated, leaders in the National Convention, as well as municipal agents in towns around France, rewrote primary school curricula, reorganized university education, and drew up plans for a new type of citizen learning. In his work on the relationship between the Revolution’s educational reform efforts and those of the Old Regime, O’Connor describes new Republican pedagogy as “an amalgam of éducation and instruction, one that sought to embed the acquisition and mobilization of technical skills within a cultural and affective matrix centered on participatory politics.”87 New school manuals, such as Bulard’s Grammaire française républicaine, which used “Republican” words to teach definite articles, adjective agreement, and other grammatical points, or the Manuel des jeunes républicaines, which provided schoolchildren with “moral” examples of the Revolution and its battles,88 established what O’Connor calls an “émulation-centered pedagogy.”89 Émulation pedagogy came into practice at the end of the Old Regime and was then normalized and bolstered in the 1790s. Practitioners and students combined spectatorship, learning, and performance into what was believed to be a more efficacious and moving educational experience. Pupils were first encouraged to read and hear lessons about what was right or wrong from new manuals and pedagogical supports, and then asked to perform what they had learned through tableaux vivants, allegories, and then, it was hoped, through everyday life practices in a newly regenerated society.90 The lessons originated in a synthetic performance context designed by the Revolution’s new corps of educators, but proponents believed that the separation between pedagogical stage and virtuous society would scale down, as the nation became more committed to the cause. 87 88

89 90

Adrian O’Connor, “‘Source de lumières & de vertus’: Rethinking Éducation, Instruction, and the Political Pedagogy of the French Revolution,” Historical Reflections 40, no. 3 (2014), 21. For more on new school manuals of the Revolution, see James A. Leith, “French Republican Pedagogy in the Year II,” Canadian Journal of History/Annales canadiennes d’histoire 3, no. 1 (1968): 52–67. O’Connor, “Source de lumières & de vertus,” 34. Ibid., 34–46; see also Michel Vovelle’s description of how children were incorporated into revolutionary festivals in southern France: Michel Vovelle, Les Métamorphoses de la Fête en Provence de 1750 à 1820 (Paris: Aubier/Flammarion, 1976), esp. 180–99.

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The Revolution’s lessons for schoolchildren should not be confused with its diverse theatrical works and experiences. As we saw at the beginning of this chapter, recent scholarship on the period’s theater has described and celebrated the ideological and formal breadth of the Revolution’s plays and performances. But, as Thibaut Julian rightly points out, the “dominante émotionnelle” of many revolutionary plays was indeed an “émulation d’enthousiasme” that sought to “modeler des citoyens” of the new Republic.91 Theater was serious business for revolutionaries and, as in the case of school education, it was part of an expansive drive to reach the nation’s social and geographical peripheries. This reach combined with an impetus to blend and adapt media and discourses to create a more encompassing, totalizing message. Republican pedagogical and linguistic innovations were grounded in multimedia experiences and what might be called today a type of “engaged” or “embodied” learning that relied on similar processes in drama and theatrical performance. Lessons and strategies found a natural place in the theater, and they were quickly mobilized by the nation’s dramatic authors for spectators of all ages. Essential to this mobilization – whether in the classroom or in the theater – was a linguistic reordering in which words and principles were redefined and redeployed for the moment. No revolution could transpire if the participants lacked the lexical knowledge of how that revolution was supposed to operate. The period’s theatricalized linguistic revisionism had military overtones and objectives. For example, in Joseph Lavallée’s Le Départ des volontaires villageois pour les frontières (1792), the author distinguishes between “sacrifice” in the Old Regime’s armies and a new type of Republican sacrifice that needed to be defined, then adopted by members of society across France’s diverse geographical terrain. The first scene is a conversation between two illiterate villagers, Alexis and Agathe, who are coming to terms with the Revolution’s lexicon. ALEXIS: Dis donc, dis donc, qu’est-ce qu’ils entendent donc par-là, la République? AGATHE: La République! La République. ALEXIS: C’est du nouveau ça. 91

Julian, Un théâtre pour la nation, 237.

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With light irony and bits of humor, Lavallé shows the propagation of current events (the end of the monarchy) and the spread of new lexical fields and significations. A new era demands new words and ideals that, insofar as the Revolutionary political establishment is concerned, can be mobilized to inspire citizens to enlist in the cause, including its armed front. After learning about the Republic and the role of its citizens, Alexis argues that this semantic shift has emotional consequences: now there are different motivations for soldiering. He contrasts service to the Revolution 92

Lavallée, Le Départ des volontaires villageois pour les frontières, comédie en un acte et en prose (Lille: Deperne, 1792), scene 1.

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with his own military experience as a young man several decades prior: “Je n’avais pour tout bien qu’une mère, veuve, pauvre et infirme, et une sœur au berceau, cette petite Justine que vous voyez dans le village. À 16 ans, je tombai à la milice; alors on n’allait pas à la guerre de si bon cœur qu’aujourd’hui”93 (All I had was a mother, a widow, poor and infirm, and a sister in the cradle, that little Justine you see in the village. At 16, I fell into the militia; back then, we did not go to war in such good spirits as today). Alexis rehashes a typical Revolutionary trope concerning military service before 1789, namely that only the lowest and most desperate men fought, and without inspiration.94 Political change and the theatrical voices of that change alter language, meaning, and feelings. This linguistic evolution transforms the notion of military service – a strategy for recruitment taken up by the local commissaire, who, after seeing the robust volunteerism in the village, remarks that “l’esprit [du corps militaire] est toujours excellent quand le Maire et ses Administrateurs sont de bons citoyens”95 (the spirit [of the military corps] is always excellent when the Mayor and his Administrators are good citizens). One of the goals in Lavallée’s short play and in dozens of other works that depicted military volunteerism during the Revolution is to illustrate a virtuous network of municipal operatives whose roles are to inspire (and not so much cajole) their male residents into defending the nation from foreign attack. The political structure for successful recruiting, following this logic, is locally driven, but then extends outward and across France and beyond: LE TABELLION: Tiens, il est Anglais stila.96 LE HUSSARD: Verivuel, Anglais, London. LE TABELLION: Et vous quittez votre pays.

93 94

95

Lavallée, Le Départ, scene 3. Berkovich rehearses and then dismisses this simplistic view of pre-Revolutionary military service. On the traditional conception of pre-1789 service, he writes: “The rank and file were largely an unwilling lot, recruited among the dregs of society; too drunk, dumb or desperate to resist the recruiting sergeant, or simply kidnapped into what one of the most prolific military historians of the last century has termed an outright form of ‘military slavery.’” Ilya Berkovich, Motivation in War: The Experience of Common Soldiers in Old-Regime Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 1. Lavallée, Le Départ, scene 9. 96 “Celui-là” in the play’s “picard” vernacular.

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Total Theater for Total War LE HUSSARD: J’aime ma pays; mais j’y reste pas; il y a des rois et je n’aime pas les rois du tout. LE TABELLION: J’aime cet Anglais, moi. LE HUSSARD: Anglais, François, la gloire il m’a fait double. LE TABELLION: Gens de bon exemple! [. . .] LE TABELLION (au Soldat): Et vous, de quel pays camarade? LE SOLDAT: De Brest. LE TABELLION: Bonnes têtes. Et vous, cavalier. LE CAVALIER: De Marseille, tron de diou, aux armes, citoyens, formez vos bataillons.97 THE TABELLION: Hey, he’s English that one there. THE HUSSAR: Verivuel [Very well], English, London. THE TABELLION: And you are leaving your country. THE HUSSAR: I love my country; but I will not stay there; there are kings and I don’t like kings at all. THE TABELLION: I like this Englishman. THE HUSSAR: English, French, glory has made me double.

97

Lavallée, Le Départ, scene 10.

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THE TABELLION: Good example, people!

[. . .] THE TABELLION (to the Soldier): And you, from which country comrade? THE SOLDIER: From Brest. THE TABELLION: Good people. And you, rider. THE HORSEMAN: From Marseilles, for god’s sake, to arms, citizens, form your battalions.

The Republic grows from municipal commitments and is reinforced by the distribution of a national vocabulary of sacrifice. Lavallée attaches successful military service to Republican virtues to create on stage a local, then national, then international network for propagating values through a motivated and robust army. The optimism in plays of the early Revolution is patent, and the narrative trajectory is increasingly totalizing and circular: local values mirror national goals, which inspire supposed international attachments to those same values. The circle completes itself because geographical diversity is first acknowledged and then subsumed into the same language, military mission, political ideology, and value structure. Writing in 1792, Lavallée modeled his characters’ actions and dialogues on the French war cause at the time – a project of emergency defense and anxious recruitment, especially after the widespread departures of the French officer class in late 1791. Alan Forrest describes the war effort at this point as “a credible case that the patrie was indeed in danger, and that the forces of royalism and reaction were massing to destroy the Revolution. A national effort was required to protect the frontiers, and, in an era when the French people were sovereign, it would be for the young men of France to respond to the challenge.”98 The enemies were at the gates, and the new nation needed to boost its recruitment efforts. The prevailing idea was that, if new citizens learned about, committed themselves to, and then emulated the ideals espoused in (mostly urban) political clubs and institutions, then more young patriots would enlist. This optimistic take on republicanism, political engagement, 98

Forrest, “The Lived Experience,” 87.

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and military voluntarism characterizes military dramas of the “early Revolution” (approximately 1790–1792) such as Harny de Guerville’s La Liberté conquise (1791), Plancher-Valcour’s Les Patriotes provençaux (1790), the anonymous Les Hussards du 1er régiment de Berchiny, ou L’Exemple de l’armée (1792), and the plays dedicated to the 1792 Lille siege, including Kreutzer and Bertin d’Antilly’s Le Siège de Lille (November 14, 1792) and Joigny and Trial’s Le Siège de Lille ou Cécile et Julien (November 21, 1792). These works, and many others, push the notion that the spread of revolutionary ideas boosts virtue and promotes pro-social attitudes and behaviors. Increasing knowledge of and adherence to the cause, military and political operatives thought, would create commonalities among citizens from disparate walks of life, lift military recruitment initiatives, and, ultimately, save la patrie. Following the August uprisings in Paris, Brunswick’s incursion into France, and the Revolutionaries’ first big victory at Valmy on September 20, 1792, many leaders in France called for a more aggressive foreign policy. Forrest writes that late 1792 and early 1793 witnessed a transformation in military strategy and that, “as the months passed, the case for maintaining a state of military emergency became weaker, as the French succeeded in pushing back the enemy and fighting the war on foreign soil. What had started as a defensive war rapidly turned into a war of conquest, annexation, and often brutal imperialism.”99 French policies and ambitions were very different in 1793, 1794, or, of course, later with the rise of Napoleon, than during the first few years of the Revolution. Dramatic literature and theatrical performances follow (but do not mirror) these changes. But as the country moved toward a more deliberate “war of conquest,” many works depicted nothing short of a complete mobilization of the country for the total annihilation of its domestic and foreign enemies. Plays from 1794 detail this switch from defense to attack, even within the “volunteer” subgenre of war theater. For example, J. S. Raffard’s 1794 Les Volontaires en route, ou l’Enlèvement des cloches ends with this patriotic song by a “Volontaire”: À la voix de notre patrie, Nous quittons tout pour son salut Toi, restant avec ton amie, Paye au moins un autre tribute. Nous songerons, nous, aux conquêtes 99

Forrest, “The Lived Experience,” 87.

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Vous! À la population, Par ce calcul tous deux vous êtes Comme nous de réquisition.100 To the voice of our country, We leave everything for her salvation You, staying with your friend, Pay at least one more tribute. We will think, us, of the conquests You! To the population, By this calculation both of you are Like us, on requisition.

What was two years earlier a shared learning experience between men and women, urban citizens and provincial paysans, about republicanism, duty, and war changes by 1794 to an aggressive call for total service to the nation, including the replenishment of its citizens. There is no longer any need to explain terms such as conquête, réquisition, or patrie; these are now ingrained into the revolutionary psyche as core concepts of an increasingly aggressive state. The national–military theatrical phenomenon – a multi-generic constellation of plays, practices, and experiences – rendered war accessible to all, intimate to many, and exciting to some. As France moved into its most vigorous months of Revolution in late 1793 and early 1794, theater sought to bind armed conflict to the country’s future success. Plays from this period depict a fully mobilized, desperate State with specific tasks for each “type” of revolutionary citizen. This, of course, is not to say that performed theater correlated with larger armies and better troop morale. The famous 1793 levées, as several historians have demonstrated, were not as successful as the political speeches and military reports claimed at the time.101 Many regions, and precisely the far-flung provincial outposts and border villages that were so often depicted as bastions of revolutionary spirit in theatrical works, remained reluctant to hand over young men to the war effort. For example, “parts of the Midi, the West, Flanders, and the southern Massif had persistently high rates of resistance [to military service], while the 100

101

J. S. Raffard (or Raffard-Brienne), Les Volontaires en route, ou l’Enlèvement des cloches, comédie en 1 acte, mêlée de vaudevilles, par J.-S. Raffard . . . Théâtre du Vaudeville, le 3 pluviôse an II (January 22, 1794) (Paris: Théâtre du Vaudeville, Messidor, an III [1794–1795]), scene 12. Forrest writes that the term “volontaire” was still used “long after inscription into the armies had ceased to be in any sense voluntary,” a transition which occurred at different times in different regions during the Revolution. Forrest, Conscripts and Deserters, 25. For more information, see Forrest, Conscripts and Deserters, 20–22.

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presence of borders or provincial frontiers provided welcome opportunities for escape.”102 Total theater for total war was a political and artistic mission, not necessarily an example of successful military policy or clear proof that the political ideals that administrators so wanted to impart had seeped into the entire nation. Military and political leaders wanted citizens to mirror the eager soldiers and proud mothers on stage, but plays are plays and war is war. Nevertheless, the European battles that had begun in 1792 “were the first national wars [wars between modern nation-states] in which the combatants were drawn directly from civilian society.”103 War during the 1790s, more than in previous decades, produced a cultural context in which new French citizens witnessed the “tightening of the bond between the civilian and military worlds, between war and nation.”104 War, more than any other process or institution, became “a patriotic duty of all citizens or aspiring citizens. By extension, the army was to be transformed into a mirror of society itself: purged of non-citizens and filled by men who represented all geographic and economic sectors of French society.”105 The national–military phenomenon in French theaters – a phenomenon that bled into streets and celebrations from Paris to Perpignan, nourished a “tightening” process between civil and martial societies. For if it holds true that “the ideological transaction of performance must deal with the fundamental constitution of the audience’s community identity in order to approach efficacy,”106 then it is hard to imagine a more efficacious community-based artistic intervention than the Revolution’s military drama. The circular approach to military festivals, plays, and other social or political performances presented a harmony of voices singing different pitches of what was ultimately the same ideological tune. The next chapter will provide analysis of several exemplary plays about war, soldiering, and the domestic front from the period’s most ideologically intense months. These works reveal complex representations of wartime gender difference, political violence, and community building. I return to a few examples of the national–military phenomenon in theater – event plays and more subtle sentimental tales of wartime sacrifice – to measure the Revolution’s additions to a critical discussion of eighteenth-century gender 102 103 104 106

Forrest, “The Lived Experience,” 88. Marie-Cécile Thoral, From Valmy to Waterloo: France at War, 1792–1815, trans. Godfrey Rodgers (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011), 2. Ibid., 2. 105 Tozzi, “Home Fronts and Battlefields,” 109–10. Baz Kershaw, The Politics of Performance: Radical Theatre as Cultural Intervention (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 1992), 32.

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representation, theater, and war. The next chapter should emerge as a “revolutionary counterpoint” to previous chapters’ discussions of masculinity and soldiering in the Old Regime’s military–theatrical complex. This time, however, women and, more specifically, violent commitments of women to war will come into focus. Although they were perhaps not part of a clear military strategy or even a concrete and efficient means to raise troops, military plays provided unique spaces for imagining new gender roles, particularly for women. War plays, including works penned by women, sometimes mirror, but often repel, critical narratives of the French Revolution’s gender politics. The universal claims of French revolutionaries were never truly universal in practice, and war plays often represented different avenues and imaginaries for the country’s new citoyennes.

chapter 5

Femmes soldats and Militarized Domesticity: Women at War in French Revolutionary Theater

Military dramas of the French Revolution were nationalizing in their mission. War-themed theater insists on the cohesion of Republican values and depicts distant towns across the land in an effort to integrate peripheral spaces into a national, patriotic core.1 When political leaders and theater directors pushed for free performances and pumped money into traveling military festivals, they focused on many cities and towns that the Old Regime’s cultural politics had traditionally ignored. The inclusive calls for violence in war plays are unsettling to today’s readers and theater enthusiasts. But, in the 1790s, these experiences were attractive to many new citizens of the Republic. War theater was a community-building endeavor that enabled French citizens to come to terms with the country’s urgent national crises, evolving political rhetoric, and international battle strategies. Political operatives believed that ideological consensus would promote the notion that “individual, nation, and humanity” were “concentric spheres that develop into universal values.”2 This political commitment would then boost the war cause and help calm the Revolution’s unstable political regimes. Drama added depth and texture to print war reporting that might have been “flattened out through hype and spin” of newspapers and political tracts.3 Many military plays were bold in their departure from

1

2 3

The Journal des spectacles noted in 1794 that military plays set in border towns (the play in question is Au plus brave, la plus belle by the citizen Philipon) had become a vogue: “La scène se passe dans une ville frontière; nos auteurs paraissent beaucoup aimer cette position, car pour la plupart ils n’en choisissent plus d’autres” (The scene takes place in a border town; our authors seem to like this location very much, because for the most part they no longer choose any other). Journal des spectacles (October 10, 1794), 83. Robert Morrissey, The Economy of Glory: From Ancien Régime France to the Fall of Napoleon (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 91. Jeanne Colleran, Theatre and War: Theatrical Responses since 1991 (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 5.

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dramaturgical norms, innovative in their aesthetic diversity, and inclusive of new voices, characters, and dramatic situations that the previous regime had ignored, mocked, or relegated to the background. Plays about soldiers and war praised the new nation’s brand of fighting and pushed the idea that military service had evolved, after the storming of the Bastille, from a dour system of forced labor to a voluntary commitment by eager “brothers-inarms.” The emotional change from theatricalized feelings of subjugation to enthusiastic participation was a recurrent theme in war drama. The Revolutionary war play oscillated between state propaganda and grass-roots patriotic outpouring. The genres and subgenres that treated themes of war, sacrifice, and military zeal were legion, and the tones of war plays were diverse, ranging from large-scale celebratory pomp with dozens of on-stage soldiers to short, intimate pantomimes between two citoyennes affected by war. A goal in most war plays, and especially after France declared war on Austria and other continental forces in the spring of 1792, was to describe and prescribe the roles of men and women in the military mobilization of the country. The period’s theater was clear about the merits of militarization and about the bravery of French citizens versus the depravity of the Revolution’s enemies. As Jacobin principles intensified and hardliners gained institutional control in 1793 and 1794, playwrights incorporated more aspects of quotidian life into their dramas, bending or breaking the lines between fictional characters and actual French citizens in a “regenerated” society at war. The plays of the Revolution’s most volatile months sought to bring the separate circles that had previously constituted French society into concert with each other, and even join them in a unitary whole of service, war, political zeal, and patriotism. The previous chapter detailed the proliferation, amalgamation, and totalization of military war drama. In this chapter, my goal is to return to a selection of revolutionary plays to describe representations, debates, and transformations of gendered wartime roles, both on the front and at home, that France’s new citoyens and, especially, citoyennes were supposed to occupy during some of the most ambitious mobilizations, national requisitions, and battle campaigns that Europe had ever witnessed. This chapter complements previous chapters on gender (and particularly masculinity) in Old-Regime military drama; also, it will demonstrate the pervasiveness of war and national urgency in the period’s theater and in France’s rural and urban social peripheries. This is the story of war drama’s spread from battles, military camps, and other contexts of overt conflict into France’s home fronts, village squares, and other locales with women and children of the Revolution.

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Women are often left out of discussions about the Revolution’s military history. This omission is not surprising, given the male demographics of soldiering and the masculinizing rhetoric of combat and military service. Many historical studies of war and its cultural representations, including this one so far, concentrate more on artistic depictions of male soldiers, their relations to each other, and their involvement with civilians (including women), as well as on the social contexts that changed and were changed by the military man. The Revolution, with its calls for fraternité and its proliferating military endeavors of (usually) exclusively male fighting units, was rife with dramatic representations of men and manly norms at a time of social upheaval, international conflict, and domestic political uncertainty. Theatricalized men of the period were endowed with a novel vocabulary of Republican and military zeal, and new types of men, including the rural poor, urban artisans, and ambitious teenagers filled the Revolution’s war dramas as well as theater parterres and balconies. Most war plays from the period focus on men, yet the ubiquity of men on the stage did not necessarily produce a rich diversity of representations of their personalities, anxieties, and goals. Part of this flattening of representational complexity during the Revolution was deliberate. War is a supposedly equalizing force that renders other concerns less important, or even antagonistic, to the mission of uniting men of different social and cultural horizons in a common cause. Unless they were treated as deviants or traitors, the Revolution’s men, if of age (or even, as we shall see, not quite of age), were supposed to join the war by enlisting in one of an increasing number of voluntary regiments. Older men, if not serving in the army, appear in military plays as foils to the Revolutionary war cause. They lament their service in Old-Regime brigades led by aristocratic officers, who are described as cruel, inept, and vain. Older men serve as watchmen of the cause on the home front. They are despondent that they are too old to serve, point out differences between the glory of the current moment and their reluctant servitude to the defunct regime, and ensure that their wives and daughters follow new revolutionary principles, which are, for younger women, often reduced to marrying a zealous French soldier before he leaves for the front or upon his triumphant return. Studies by Robert Nye, Judith Bennett, Karen Harvey. and others, who were themselves influenced by groundbreaking feminist historians, turned their critical gazes to masculinity in order to “study the mechanisms of patriarchy in specific contexts” and detail a “series of anxieties” that men faced in different historical epochs – anxieties “about women’s sexuality”

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and “about men’s inability to fulfill patriarchal models.”4 The largest group of men in the same place, at the same time, and with the same set of goals – soldiers – has attracted the attention of gender historians writing on the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods. From Brian Joseph Martin’s study of friendship in Napoleon’s Grande Armée to Michael J. Hughes take on military masculinity across the Revolution and First Empire to important articles on the armies of An II by Alan Forrest, scholarship on military men, as I hope to have demonstrated in Chapter 2 of this study, is now an important part of cultural military history, a growing and vibrant subfield.5 This chapter brings to light a performance environment where wartime behaviors and activities unfolded in front of the community whose members were asked to go to battle and support the war cause on the home front. War plays detail the gendered roles that the Revolution’s men and women should occupy in order to increase military efficiency, boost patriotic zeal, and stabilize the domestic social and political context. Men’s roles were relatively straightforward. The emergence of the “brothers-inarms” image in Old-Regime military plays expands and adapts to the Revolutionary moment, but the diverse behaviors, personalities, and experiences shared among men are channeled into sacrifice and war. Vocabularies and characters change, but military men share the common purpose of fighting valiantly and obtaining glory (however glory may be defined in the moment) in the military pursuit.6 The same cannot be said, however, for women, who occupied a more ambiguous, and sometimes more dynamic, place in the period’s war plays. Women’s roles in the Revolutionary war effort, both on stage and in society, included more than tending to the home while the men were at the front. Women took up arms against foreign and French aristocratic soldiers as femmes-soldats and filles-soldats, embedded themselves in military 4 5

6

Karen Harvey, “The History of Masculinity, circa 1650–1800,” Journal of British Studies 44 (2005), 299. See Brian Joseph Martin, Napoleonic Friendship: Military Fraternity, Intimacy, and Sexuality in Nineteenth Century France (Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2011); Michael Hughes, Forging Napoleon’s Grande Armée: Motivation, Military Culture, and Masculinity (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2012); and Alan Forrest, “Citizenship, Honour, and Masculinity: Military Qualities under the French Revolution and Empire,” in Gender, War and Politics: Transatlantic Perspectives, 1775–1830, ed. Karen Hagemann, Gisela Mettele, and Jane Rendell (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010), 93–109. Morrissey describes changes to the notion of glory in pre-Revolutionary and Revolutionary France, writing that “the ideology of glory acquired a discursive force that offered a way out of the impasse of contractualism and past the problem raised by the abstraction of the general will. The emotion and enthusiasm kindled by glory were seen as generators of social bonds, even of fraternity.” Robert Morrissey, The Economy of Glory: From Ancien Régime France to the Fall of Napoleon (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 89.

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units as sutlers and supply operatives (vivandières), spied on and denounced unpatriotic neighbors to national and municipal political operatives, and taught martial skills, including how to use weapons, to the children of their towns and villages. This diversity aside, most women in the period’s war plays are indeed represented on the home front as concerned mothers, wives, and daughters – an undeniable feature in Revolutionary drama that has led scholars to reinforce narratives of exclusion, separation, and domesticity concerning women and war. Domesticity, however, is not a universal phenomenon but a historically grounded, cultural construct with evolving characteristics, discourses, and goals.7 The Revolution’s dramatic hearth spaces were forged from ideologically charged war causes as well as by the evolving social and political discourses of the 1790s. Revolutionary domesticity engages new forms of radical politics and mission-focused violence that were absent in the previous regime’s domestic drames, opéras-comiques, and comédies sérieuses.8 The discussion below thus provides a view from another angle of the Revolutionary period’s innovative and engaging dramatic culture. This chapter is organized into three parts. First, I frame my analysis of drama within an ongoing critical debate on women’s visibility, participation, and domesticity in the Revolution, and especially in the context of its war effort. Next, I describe one of the period’s most controversial theatricalizations of women at war through a close reading of Olympe de Gouges’ final dramatic work, L’Entrée de Dumourier [sic] à Bruxelles, ou Les Vivandiers (1792–1793). De Gouges was a prolific writer and a strident advocate for the rights of women until she was guillotined in November 1793. Her play about General Charles François Dumouriez and his conquest of Belgium was a theatrical intervention into war activism, women’s roles, and rights feminism, including the right to bear arms against the Revolution’s enemies. In the last part of this chapter, I provide a provocative (re)reading of the theater’s engagement with radical “republican domesticity” – a characteristic of revolutionary women at war that has not received enough critical attention among theater scholars. I describe how domesticity was both reinforced and problematized by total war by 7

8

Suzanne Desan stresses this point in her work on women and the family in Revolutionary France. See Suzanne Desan, The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004). For a comprehensive account of domesticity across large swaths of time and media, see Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). Old-Regime theater staged numerous violent women. The point here is that the Revolution’s drama depicted violent women serving the military goals of the French nation, at times fighting alongside male soldiers in battle, and at other times, on a dangerous and violent home front.

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analyzing a corpus of plays about women which appeared on stage in “Year II” (October 6, 1793 to September 21, 1794) of the Revolution, often considered the most repressive period of Jacobin gender politics. Through the close readings and contextual information presented in this chapter, I analyze critically the ambiguous place that women occupied in the theatricalized war cause and propose alternatives to two chief explanations of women’s wartime experiences during the Revolutionary decade: (failed) rights feminism and (forced) private domesticity.

War, Women, and the French Revolution War and civil conflict put intense pressure on social structures and norms, including gender roles. In no way was this process unique to the French Revolution. As Neil Ramsey and Gillian Russel argue, War both reinforces the cultural pressures surrounding existing identities of nation or gender even as it forces individuals to adopt new identities, to become a soldier, patriot, coward, traitor, or casualty. It rigidifies differences, between male and female, post-war and pre-war, friend and enemy, the living and the dead, at the same time that it dismantles borders, mixing peoples, cultural forms and identities, producing monsters, exiles, wanderers, spectres, and rebels who inhabit the painfully liminal zones of war’s disquieting geographies and temporalities.9

War solidifies some norms and disintegrates others, and often concurrently or through stunted phases, moments, and processes. During the Revolution, the effects of war on “existing identities of nation or gender” were exacerbated by the domestic political situation. The nation’s political culture was rife with factions and changes in persuasion within factions. The period’s war plays impart a dual anxiety about external war and internal political division. The works describe a dangerous and volatile environment that required vigilance, knowledge, and skills. Many war plays avoided a straightforward picture of gender relations during conflict whereby men departed to a dangerous front while women waited in the safety of their homes. Women had to occupy support roles in the war cause – a role ascribed to many women and a common theme of “women’s war work” in artistic representations of nearly any conflict. During the Revolution, however, women also had to articulate the ideological battles of the cause, take up arms (to a degree not seen in France for generations) 9

Neil Ramsey and Gillian Russell, “Introduction,” in Tracing War in British Enlightenment and Romantic Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015), 8.

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against invaders, and root out the new Republic’s enemies, both foreign and domestic. Ramsey and Russell’s description of war’s effects on gender relations, identities, and population flows calls into question several traditional, even seemingly intuitive, conceptions of war and gender. Conflict, so one story goes, creates separate spheres. Men occupy a public, martial space on the war front and, with the Revolution, in the halls of the National Convention. Women, especially before the advent of heavy manufacturing and its requisite of mass employment during war, recede into a domestic, intimate, and auxiliary space at home. War separates and rigidifies the gender differences for which French philosophes such as Rousseau and others began to conceptualize biological underpinnings.10 Men and women take on different yet complementary roles during battle, which supposedly increases wartime efficiency, speeds up military mobilization, and secures domestic spaces for potentially long periods of sacrifice and resource management. With the emergence of an increasingly meritocratic but clearly masculine military culture during the Old Regime, it was a goal of military administrators and some playwrights to differentiate between the manly spaces and discourses of soldiers and the effeminate and effeminizing world of polite society. As we saw in Chapter 2, Mercier’s Le Déserteur was unique precisely because it challenged masculine models of soldiering and questioned the consequences of feminine exclusion for military behaviors and values. The “separation thesis” describing men and women at war latches on to a larger scholarly discourse on gender relations in eighteenth-century France. Historians and literature specialists have long focused on the disparate roles of men and women in early modern Europe, often in studies showing the subjugated position of women relative to men. For example, separation and subjugation were the narrative linchpins of groundbreaking studies about women and the French Revolution penned in the 1980s and 1990s by Joan B. Landes, Joan Wallach Scott, Madelyn Gutwirth, Dominique Godineau, and others.11 Feminist scholars around the time of the Revolution’s bicentennial questioned its universalist claims by 10

11

For a concise account of this “biological” narrative, see Anne C. Vila, “‘Ambiguous Beings’: Marginality, Melanchology, and the Femme Savante,” in Women, Gender and Enlightenment, ed. Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), 53–69. See, for example, Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1988); Joan Wallach Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); Dominique Godineau, The Women of Paris and Their French Revolution, trans. Katherine Streip (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998).

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exposing the period’s patriarchy and lack of women’s participation in domains as diverse as historical painting, business ownership, and public ceremonies. Feminist scholars took particular aim at the early gains, yet subsequent suppression, of Revolutionary era “rights feminism” – a movement that sought to integrate women, quite understandably, in the supposed universal rights that the period’s white male leaders professed. In one of several important essays on the origins and limits of Revolutionary rights feminism, Joan Wallach Scott describes the chief obstacle that women faced when they attempted to assert themselves as active citizens in the new political order: On the one hand, the unit of national sovereignty was declared to be a universal, abstract, rights-bearing individual; on the other, this human subject was almost immediately given particularized embodiment as a man. [. . .] The abstract gesture of embodiment – the attribution of citizenship to (white) male subjects – complicated enormously the project of claiming equal rights, for it suggested [. . .] that rights themselves, or at least how and where they were exercised, depended on the physical characteristics of human bodies.12

Efforts by women to claim citizenship, sometimes through non-violent campaigns, sometimes through more militant actions, were ultimately outstripped.13 Misogynistic legislation and social discourses reified classical republican values but prescribed gendered roles for the revolutionary moment when “women, the wives, sisters, mothers of citizens were depicted as enclosed in domestic spheres and at best confined to roles as educators of future citizens.”14 Historians mapped the ultimate failure of rights feminism on to the broader chronology of the 1790s, when early flashes of women’s agency and representation, such as the October Revolt in 1789, the participation of women in armed marches celebrating the spring 1792 declarations of war, and the creation of the Revolutionary Republican Women club in May 1793 ended in October of that year, when Jacobin legislators denied women the right to bear arms and banned them from participating in political clubs and organizations. 12

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Joan Wallach Scott, “‘A Woman Who Has Only Paradoxes to Offer’: Olympe de Gouges Claims Rights for Women,” in Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution, ed. Sara E. Melzer and Leslie W. Rabine (Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1992), 102. For more information on non-violent social movements, including non-violent women’s rights movements during the Revolution, see Micah Alpaugh, Non-violence and the French Revolution: Political Demonstrations in Paris, 1787–1795 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Darline Gay Levy and Harriet B. Applewhite, “Women and Militant Citizenship in Revolutionary Paris,” in Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution, ed. Sara E. Melzer and Leslie W. Rabine (Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1992), 80.

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After October 1793 France entered a more volatile period of domestic and international conflict. Gender relations, according to this narrative, were less ambiguous and less dynamic than during the early Revolutionary years. Jacobin leaders proposed a gendered model where “strength, reason, endurance, and an aptitude for civic virtue – the qualities of man’s nature, prepared him for citizenship [whereas] timidity, modesty, weakness, susceptibility to over-excitation, ineptitude for elevated thoughts and serious meditations, determined women’s natural incapacity for political life.”15 As France ramped up for international war, its political establishment worked to enlist women into ensuring the future health of the Republic through mothering and tending to the country’s food supply. Feminist historians and literary scholars of the 1980s and 1990s highlighted the meager political rights granted to women in what was supposed to be an era of progressive action and universal gains. During this initial period of reflection about French women in the 1790s, according to Suzanne Desan, “various scholars built a powerful paradigm: they argued that the Revolution excluded women from politics and created a private sphere of female domesticity. Public politics became a male domain. This interpretation of the Revolution gained conceptual backing from scholarship in political theory, which stressed the exclusionary aspects of liberalism more broadly.”16 The burgeoning of scholarship that had created and professed the separation thesis was evidence that studies on women and gender had a critical role to play in a broader transformation of French Revolutionary historiography, catalyzed by dozens of conferences, special editions of journals, journées d’étude, festivals, and other events linked to the bicentennial. Feminist historians and scholars such as Landes, Godineau, Wallach Scott, Lynn Hunt, Marie-Hélène Huet, Desan, Carla Hesse, Anne Verjus, Sara Melzer, and many others chipped away at the unequal foundation of a period and a scholarly body of work that for too long had overplayed a supposed commitment to liberty and equality for all by a relatively small group of male revolutionaries. But, at the turn of the millennium, a new wave of gender historians modified the “separation” thesis by turning their lenses from the Revolution’s leading women and activists (Olympe de Gouges, Marie Antoinette, Madame de Roland, Pauline Léon, Claire Lacombe, etc.) to 15 16

Ibid., 96. Suzanne Desan, “Recent Historiography on the French Revolution and Gender,” Journal of Social History 52, no. 3 (2019), 567.

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subgroups of women, including actresses, widows, sex workers, urban artisans, and female soldiers. While in no way disputing the basic premise that women had a more difficult path than men to participation and agency and that some domains remained totally off limits to women, the new wave of gender historians of the Revolution avoided a pure separation framework to instead propose a model for understanding gender and gender relations based on contingency, nuance, and specificity as markers of subversion, participation, and even power.17 Recent studies have gestured to what Sarah Knott calls the “situational narrative” – a description of a particular group, agent, or action that “privileges historical contingency” without recourse to the traditional grand narratives (Marxism, liberalism, universalism, etc.) that have dominated the Revolution’s historiography.18 This empirical approach, in addition to allowing space for diverse places and contexts of revolution (such as the Atlantic and the Caribbean), seeks to build an argument about gender and agency from small to large and from one example to several. In her own work, Knott has taken on the binary of rights feminism versus revolutionary domesticity by describing narratives of what she calls “sentimental gallantry” – scandal memoirs that were penned across revolutionary Atlantic spaces and which “exposed the workings of male tyranny in an era of interconnected elites and international celebrity, when personal relationships still structured politics.”19 In addition to denationalizing revolutionary narratives and showing the interconnectivity of people, places, and things during a wider Age of Revolutions, scholars such as Knott have broken down larger narratives into a series of moments, impasses, and junctures, where particular performances of courage, subjugation, or revolt influenced the trajectories of women (and men) of the period. Insofar as the period’s drama and theatrical performances are concerned, a contingent, constructivist, and even performative explanation of gender may be 17

18 19

On sex workers and political participation, see Clyde Marlo Plumauzille, Prostitution et Révolution: Les femmes publiques dans la cité républicaine (1789–1804) (Ceyzérieu: Champ Vallon, 2016); on married nuns and other new subgroups created by Revolutionary politics, see Kathryn Marsden, Married Nuns in the French Revolution: The Sexual Revolution of the 1790s (PhD diss., University of California-Irvine, 2014); on female soldiers, see David Hopkin, “The World Turned Upside Down: Female Soldiers in the French Armies of the Revolution and Napoleonic Wars,” in Soldiers, Citizens and Civilians: Experiences and Perceptions of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 1790–1820, ed. Alan Forrest, Karen Hagemann, and Jane Rendall. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009, 77–95; see also Thomas Cardoza, Intrepid Women: Cantinières and Vivandières of the French Army (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010). Sarah Knott, “Narrating the Age of Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 73, no. 1 (2016), 24–25. Sarah Knott, “Female Liberty? Sentimental Gallantry, Republican Womanhood, and Rights Feminism in the Age of Revolutions,” The William and Mary Quarterly 71, no. 3 (2014), 428.

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useful for explaining the diversity of representations of women and their struggles in the Revolutionary military endeavors depicted on stage. Now, almost forty years have passed since the first wave of feminist studies of French Revolutionary women and gender. It would be difficult to imagine any account of the period without a significant interrogation not only of famous Revolutionary women but also of this contested historiography – the limits and specific pressures endured by women – urban and rural, rich and poor. As Jeremy Popkin reminds us, quoting Abigail Adams, “A history of the French Revolution that does not ‘remember the ladies’ is incomplete,”20 and this commitment to the history of gender and women is shared by scholars of the period’s theater. From sections of Lenard R. Berlanstein’s groundbreaking book Daughters of Eve: A Cultural History of French Theater from the Old Regime to the Fin de Siècle (2001) to more recent works, such as Cecilia Feilla’s Sentimental Theater of the French Revolution (2013) and Annelle Curulla’s Gender and Religious Life in French Revolutionary Drama (2018), feminist scholars have sought to discover and recover the contours and tensions of female characters, actresses, and audience members during what many have long thought to be a virile moment in French history “in which masculine identities in particular were fused to the project of the nation.”21 Grounded in this evolving debate on access, gender performance, and social limitations, I return in the following pages to the Revolution’s military drama and theatrical performances to highlight gendered roles in moments of extreme military and political action. Armed with the previous chapter’s “reenactment lens” and with the pedagogical and identity-building bonds that drama of the Revolution sought to create, I will describe gender norms, and subversions of those norms, through targeted close readings of several dramatic works and experiences. This short study of women in military drama and performance will bring militarized women both at war and on the home front into dialogue with their male counterparts. The totalizing features of revolutionary theater – the “concentric circles” of military achievements and theatricalized celebrations of those feats – integrate both sexes into the period’s all-encompassing 20 21

Jeremy D. Popkin, A New World Begins: The History of the French Revolution (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2019), 3. Annelle Curulla, Gender and Religious Life in French Revolutionary Drama (Liverpool: Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment and Liverpool University Press, 2018), 127. See Cecilia Feilla, The Sentimental Theater of the French Revolution (London: Ashgate, 2013) and Lenard R. Berlanstein, Daughters of Eve: A Cultural History of French Theater Women from the Old Regime to the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).

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mobilization efforts. This feature of Revolutionary drama troubles the masculine “brothers-in-arms” notion of military service to the country as well as the “separation thesis” whereby the role of women became increasingly detached from the more militant and politically engaged moments of the Revolutionary period. The rest of this chapter will unfold in two parts. First, I revisit representations of rights feminism and women soldiers through a critical analysis of Olympe de Gouge’s L’Entrée de Dumourier à Bruxelles, ou Les Vivandiers, a play that was authored by one of the period’s leading feminists. Next, I return to the idea of female domesticity and the Revolutionary war effort to show violent, political home lives in war plays from Year II, the most ideologically charged period of revolutionary activity. This discussion cannot and should not overlook the exclusion of women from the Revolution’s tangible projects of representative politics, but must rather recover the specificity of domestic life at the time, contrast it with other types of home life from before and after the Revolution, and detail some of the radical imaginaries attributed to and created by the period’s most engaged citoyennes.

Rights Feminism and Gender Exceptionality in Olympe de Gouges’ L’Entrée de Dumourier à Bruxelles Marie Antoinette aside, no French woman of the Revolutionary era has attracted more attention from scholars than Olympe de Gouges. Born in 1748 to a modest family in Montauban, near Toulouse, Marie Gouzes (as she was known at the time) was forced into marriage at age sixteen. Her husband died soon after, and around the same time that she gave birth to her only son. Around 1770, Gouzes changed her name and moved to Paris, where she would go on to write dozens of plays, political tracts, and essays, including her most famous work today, the Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne (1791). As an early supporter of the queen and, later, of the moderate Girondist group in the National Convention, de Gouges was found guilty of fomenting division against the Revolutionary state and, like the former queen and de Gouges’ fellow Girondist, Madame Roland, she was sent to the guillotine in the autumn of 1793.22 The bibliography on de Gouges is voluminous. She has been championed as a leading light of French Revolutionary rights feminism by 22

Olympe de Gouges was executed on November 3, 1793, shortly before Manon Roland (November 8) and several weeks after Marie Antoinette (October 16).

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historians since the 1980s. More recently, several scholars have tempered their language on de Gouges’ radical progressivism, especially regarding her positions on the role of armed insurrection as a means to end slavery. My goal here is not to measure de Gouges’ feminism or progressivism against the discourses and actions of her contemporaries, but to investigate her theatrical efforts in the context of the Revolution’s evolving strategies of building community through armed conflict and artistic representations of those wars. Here, I focus on de Gouges’ five-act heroic comedy dedicated to the French “liberation” of Belgium, L’Entrée de Dumourier à Bruxelles, ou Les Vivandiers, which was penned in late 1792 and performed, after much lobbying and protesting by de Gouges, at the Théâtre de la République in January 1793. De Gouges’ play focuses on the trials and tribulations of a vivandier (sutler) family with Republican sympathies which finds itself embedded with Austrian troops in their fight against the French General Dumouriez and his Armée du nord. Charlot, the family patriarch, is a French national in Belgium and his wife is German; their daughter, Charlotte, is a teenager who has attracted the eye of the Chevalier Clairfayt, an Austrian officer and the son of a commander. Charlotte and the Chevalier eventually fall in love, much to the dismay of her parents, especially of her father, who desires a French victory and worries about his daughter because of the military life she has thus far led and will continue to endure if she were to marry the Austrian soldier. De Gouges employs an impressive number of characters (twenty-seven named in addition to dozens of extras) in her play about Republican virtue, the role of women in battle, and the expansion of French Revolutionary zeal and aggression into neighboring territories. Of particular interest are the play’s female characters – a diverse group of Walloons, Germanspeaking women, and French women. De Gouges refuses the idea that French military success depends solely on women protecting the household and serving auxiliary roles away from the battlefield. For de Gouges, the only path to victory is the persistent and total mobilization of both sexes. Women in L’Entrée de Dumourier blend domestic and “active” roles because their home front is a military camp, where domesticity can quickly transform into political action and violent conflict. The play’s women are asked to serve multiple roles, often at the same time, and in extreme environments. Madame Charlot, for example, is at the heart of the family’s domestic spaces and decisions. She is concerned about her daughter’s matrimonial goals and worries about the effect of her husband’s rising patriotism on the family’s livelihood, given their

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proximity to and economic dependence on the Austrian army. No one would accuse Madame Charlot of disinterest in family affairs which would have been “typical” of any eighteenth-century household: she is anxious about her daughter’s reputation and vertu, and troubled about the family’s finances. However, this is war, not peace; she and her family are in constant contact with military officers and foot soldiers. She sells them goods, engages soldiers in conversation, and stays up to date on the war effort and the evolving battle for control of the Low Countries. Even Madame Charlot, perhaps the most “domestic” character in the play, still finds herself drawn into the “active” world of military strategies, political disagreement, and international war, especially with the arrival of French forces in the final act of the play. All in all, the Charlot family’s hearth space is indiscernible from Europe’s most ravaged war fronts. Charlot’s daughter, Charlotte, has grown up in the military camp, which de Gouges attempts to recreate on stage with precision. For example, to set up Act two, de Gouges writes: Le théâtre représente le camp des ennemis, hors des portes de Bruxelles. On voit ça et là un grand nombre de tentes, de soldats et d’officiers; celle du général est sur un des côtés du théâtre; en face est une tente de cantinier, où l’on découvre une espèce d’amphithéâtre, où l’on voit toutes sortes de comestibles. Madame Charlot est assise derrière une espèce de comptoir. Sa fille tire des fruits d’un panier, et s’occupe à les ranger sur l’amphithéâtre. Le cantinier Charlot entre avec une brouette chargée d’un baril de vin. Dans le fond du théâtre, des soldats s’occupent à faire bouillir la marmite; l’un épluche des légumes, l’autre taille du pain dans la gamelle; tous les soldats sont costumés avec leurs vestes et bonnets du matin.23 The theater represents the enemy camp, outside the gates of Brussels. Seen here and there are a great number of tents, soldiers, and officers; that of the general is on one side of the theater; opposite is a sutler’s tent, where one discovers a kind of amphitheater, where one can see all kinds of alimentary goods. Madame Charlot is seated behind a sort of counter. Her daughter pulls fruit from a basket, and is busy arranging it on the amphitheater. The sutler Charlot enters with a wheelbarrow loaded with a barrel of wine. At the back of the theatre, soldiers are busy with a boiling pot; one is peeling vegetables, the other is cutting bread into the bowl; all the soldiers are dressed with their jackets and morning caps.

23

Olympe de Gouges, L’Entrée de Dumourier à Bruxelles, ou Les Vivandiers, pièce en cinq actes et en prose. Représentée sur la Théâtre de la République, l’an deuxième de la République (Paris: Le Jay, 1793), 2.1, 35.

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Charlotte has only known the militarized, transient space of the camp, where soldiers depend on families like hers to sell them everything from dry goods to bedding materials to wine and spirits. As with other family members, she is expected to work in the mobile store and tend to the material well-being of the Austrian soldiers, but with the added challenge of navigating her adolescence and falling in love in this violent, masculine zone. According to Thomas Cardoza, Jennifer Heuer, and other scholars who have worked on the historical scope of vivandières and cantinières in the Revolutionary wars, camp children (enfants du camp) were more abundant in the 1790s because the laws forbidding French soldiers to marry were relaxed, pushing many families to join the front. Heuer writes that military commissioners routinely complained that “in an army of 30,000 men, there could be up to 8,000 women,” whose presence, leaders argued, “led to great losses, as women rode in wagons that would have otherwise carried baggage and fodder.”24 One issue of concern was what to do with children, especially the daughters of soldiers or vivandiers, as most boys were assumed to go on into armed service. In her play, de Gouges challenges this pessimistic take on camp families, refuting the argument that they added confusion to the cause by distracting soldiers from their missions. Instead, she provides a more optimistic image of a reconstituted wartime society, grounded in the Revolutionary family. Camp women and their children, including daughters, are vital to provisioning soldiers and maintaining morale. They emerge as agents of the Revolution, even when embedded with the enemy and despite their material interests in serving anti-Republican armies. When Charlotte meets the Austrian Chevalier, it is love at first sight. Unlike other enemy soldiers, he is sympathetic to the Republican cause and fatigued from what he views as a never-ending war desired by hardline Coalition officers like his father. He and Charlotte eventually decide to defect from the Austrian camp to join Dumouriez’s Republican forces, which have surrounded Brussels after striking victories along the border. At first glance, the young couple’s defection appears as nothing new in the world of French Revolutionary theatrical propaganda. Their change of sides looks like another example of Republican zeal creeping into the hearts and minds of foreigners as “the cause” spreads north and east with France’s approaching army. 24

Jennifer Ngaire Heuer, “Celibacy, Courage, and Hungry Wives: Debating Military Marriage and Citizenship in Pre-Revolutionary France,” European History Quarterly 46, no. 4 (2016), 661.

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However, the reasons for Charlotte’s military engagement are sincere and complex. Her trajectory is not from her father’s militarized domestic space (the Austrian camp) to another militarized domestic space (the French camp with her defecting lover) merely because she is in love with the Chevalier. She is not following a deserting man across to the other side to support his future commitments. Charlotte wants to fight for the French, and she is a vocal partner in her lover’s decisions and actions. As a goods and newspaper seller, she is knowledgeable about military news and strategies and, like other characters in the play, she has heard rumors of the “Freling sisters” – two female soldiers serving as Dumouriez’s aides-decamp in the play. As Dominique Godineau points out in her analysis of the Revolution’s armed women, de Gouges’ “Freling” sisters were based on the real femmes-soldats, Félicité and Théophile Ferlig, who fought alongside Dumouriez on his northern campaigns in 1792.25 De Gouges’ depictions of female soldiers are grounded in her persistent off-stage efforts to assert active female citizenship through political action, military participation, public ceremonial representation, and leadership. As Nielsen points out, de Gouges petitioned the National Assembly to create a “Women’s National Guard,” helped stage a militarized Festival of Law in June 1792, and, later that year, “carried weapons at the head of a woman’s group,” which included the women’s rights activists Etta Palm and Théroigne de Méricourt.26 The female soldiers in L’Entrée de Dumourier serve as theatrical avatars of feminist efforts of the early Revolution. In the play, de Gouges treats the Ferlig story not as a fascinating anecdote but as a tangible path to women’s armed participation in the military endeavor and, with that, active citizenship in the new Republic. The women’s battle readiness is on display when the two sisters kill a group of enemy soldiers at the beginning of Act three, scene thirteen. This prompts Dumouriez to give a rousing description of his use of femmes soldats, which he admits is a rare practice in the army. The General argues that men are wrong to think that women cannot face the rigors of battle. He urges France’s “hommes injustes” (unjust men) to “rendre justice à ce sexe aimable et aussi valeureux que le nôtre”27 (give justice to a sex which is 25 26 27

Dominique Godineau, “De la guerrière à la citoyenne. Porter les armes pendant l’Ancien Régime et la Révolution française,” Clio 20 (2004), 57. Wendy Nielsen, Women Warriors in Romantic Drama (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2013), 47–8. De Gouges, L’Entrée de Dumourier, 3.13, 97.

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as likeable and courageous as ours). The Frelings impress the characters of the play, especially with their riding techniques and superior marksmanship. Moreover, the soldier-sisters are emulative revolutionary models for the other women on stage. To escape the Austrian camp and flee to the French side, Charlotte dresses as a German officer by hiding her hair under a military cap, which she had seen the Frelings do earlier in the play. Electrified by the sisters’ courage, Charlotte steps into the part when she and the Chevalier are ambushed. By Act four, scene four, Charlotte has fully integrated her new martial identity into her Republicanism; she exclaims, almost without emotion, “J’ai tué deux autrichiens pour ma part”28 (I killed two Austrians for my part). Even for women who are no longer of military service age, the Frelings are a source of admiration and patriotic zeal. On seeing the militarized sisters, Madame La Feuillette, the wine merchant’s wife, wonders: Si je me battrais? Et les Françaises ne se battent-elles pas comme des hommes? Voyez ces deux sœurs Freling, ce sont des guerrières intrépides. On les voit à la tête de l’armée Française, chacune aux côtés du Général Dumourier, le fusil sur l’épaule, des pistolets à la ceinture, le sabre au côté, l’havre-sac sur le dos, le chapeau sur le coin de l’oreille.29 If I were to fight? And French women, don’t they fight like men? Look at these two Freling sisters, they are fearless warriors. We see them at the head of the French army, each at the side of General Dumouriez, with rifle on the shoulder, pistols on the belt, saber at the side, the haversack on the back, the hat on the corner of the ear.

La Feuillette, who is still at this point embedded in the Austrian camp, then leads the crowd of characters on stage in a rousing chant. This scene (5.9) dovetails into the most important collective political action in the play when, in Act five, scene ten, the people of Brussels confront their municipal officials and persuade them to give the city over to Dumouriez’s Republican forces. This supposed act of “courage” on the part of the Bruxellois is ultimately accomplished after an emotional plea by Balza, who, at the beginning of the play, had been the only city councilman with revolutionary sympathies. Many war dramas from the period portray a murky process whereby the Revolution’s ideals are transferred from the male voices of French soldiers into the hearts and minds of “newly liberated” populations, both inside and outside of France, and particularly in border towns and villages. De Gouges, however, binds newly acquired 28

Ibid., 4.4, 105.

29

Ibid., 5.9, 128.

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Republican commitments and successful military results to the actions and discourses of female citizens who influence the direction of the battles depicted in the play and serve as models for others – both women and men – to follow. By the end of L’Entrée de Dumourier, Charlotte’s motivations for leaving her family’s vivandier business at the Austrian camp appear to have shifted. When she escaped the camp with the Chevalier, her intention was to marry the Austrian officer, to leave the Coalition army, and to perhaps assist the Chevalier while he served the Republican cause. It is not implausible to think that she could draw from her skills as a vivandière under the Austrians to aid the French forces in like manner. As the play unfolds, however, Charlotte’s own revolutionary zeal supersedes her feelings for her lover, and by the final scene, the Chevalier is at least symbolically removed from the equation when Dumouriez remarks, “je n’avais que deux jeunes guerrières; j’en ai trois actuellement à presenter à nos frères les Belges”30 (I had only two young women fighters; now I have three to present to our Belgian brothers). Charlotte and the Freling sisters march triumphantly into Brussels, placed by one of Dumouriez’s officers “à la tête de l’armée, qui défile sur le théâtre” (at the head of the division, which marches across the stage). Residents of the city remark “qu’elles sont bien sous cet habit” (how great they are in that uniform), “qu’elles sont jeunes” (how young they are), and that the female soldiers inspire the people to “aller à la guerre”31 (go to war). The militarized women are at least partly responsible for the cheerful welcome of the Revolutionary army by Brussels’ now “liberated” people. Dumouriez ends the victory parade in town with a short speech on the value of women to the war cause: LE GÉNÉRAL DUMOURIER, les montrant: Femmes, vous venez de l’entendre. Les sages d’Athènes et de Rome eussent reconnu dans ces deux jeunes personnes deux vaillants guerriers; les hommes de la république française ne seront pas moins équitables envers votre sexe dans une révolution naturelle qui doit s’étendre sur tous indistinctement. Allons, Égalité, jeune Achiles, aussi aimable qu’intrépide, conduisez à la tête 32 de l’armée ces trois héroïnes, et qu’on s’empare de tous les postes de la ville. Women, you just heard it. The sages of Athens and Rome would have recognized in these two young people two valiant warriors; the men of the French republic will not be less equitable towards your sex in a natural revolution which must extend to all without distinction. Come, Égalité, 30

Ibid., 5.19, 144.

31

Ibid., 5.19, 144–45.

32

Ibid., 5.19, 145.

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The Revolutionary moment, Dumouriez contends, surpasses institutions, discourses, and structures of human creation to fulfill a sort of prophecy. Familial, sexual, and political circles converge because France’s newly regenerated nation is morally and sexually different from the Old Regime. The Revolution’s daughters and sons are connected through shared characteristics and commitments, not through separate spheres.33 Charlotte has deserted her father’s and, now, her husband’s domestic spaces to join the exact type of female fighting units that de Gouges and other women had been calling for throughout the first years of the Revolution. In addition to portraying an admirable feat of courage and commitment, Charlotte offers a new vision of the relationship between women and war. The character Dumouriez argues that a society based on sexual equality and shared martial responsibilities will lead to a stronger nation with a more powerful military. Now that he has “liberated” women from a purely auxiliary role, Dumouriez will extend Revolutionary rights and privileges to new members of an international “French” force. The General explains to Balza, the Brussels councilman, that the civil, religious, and linguistic differences that characterize the Low Countries will all be conflated into one Belgian nation: DUMOURIER, à Balza: Et toi, citoyen Balza, reçois le baiser de paix au nom de la république française, qui te promet, par mon entremise, de défendre de toutes ses forces et de tous ses trésors les représentants librement élus de la société des amis de la liberté. Frères et concitoyens, ne soyez plus flamands, hennuyers, tournaisiens, namurois, ni brabançons; que tous ces noms disparaissent à jamais; que celui de belge soit désormais le seul connu dans ces provinces, et ne 34 forme plus qu’un peuple de frères sous une même dénomination. And you, Citizen Balza, receive the kiss of peace in the name of the French Republic, which promises you, through me, to defend with all its strength and all its treasures the freely elected representatives of the Society of Friends of Liberty. Brothers and fellow citizens, stop being Flemish, Hainaut, Tournai, Namurian, or Brabant; so that all these names disappear forever;

33

34

It is important to note, however, that equality in the play applies only to a citizen’s right to serve in the military, not in the leadership ranks. Dumouriez, who assumes the role of a political figurehead, father, and military leader, remains a decidedly masculine image in the play, and the female soldiers are subsumed into his martial family. Ibid., 5.19, 146.

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so that that of Belgian is henceforth the only one known in these provinces, and forms no more than a people of brothers under the same denomination.

Dumouriez’s sourcing of Belgium’s collective origins in the Revolution is typical of French theater and political discourses in late 1792. That autumn, as de Gouges was writing her play, Dumouriez was one of France’s most beloved military leaders. Like de Gouges, he was a member of the Girondist party and an eager partisan of France’s declaration of war against Austria on April 20. When General Lafayette was declared an enemy of the state after the fall of the constitutional monarchy in August, the more révolutionnaire Dumouriez stepped in to lead the army to decisive victories at Valmy (September 20) and Jemappes (November 6), which by the end of 1792 sealed his reputation as France’s greatest military commander. When de Gouges sent her play to the Théâtre de la République in November 1792, she was attempting to celebrate (and perhaps capitalize on the popularity of) a war hero of the Revolution. However, de Gouges’ play was shelved for several weeks by the comédiens, who had been antagonistic toward her going all the way back to Gouges’ battles with the Comédie-Française in the 1780s.35 Dumouriez returned to Paris in early January 1793, and, much to the dismay of Jacobin leaders, expressed compassion and support for the king during his trial. De Gouges’ play did not debut until January, and it was performed at the Théâtre de la République only three times – on January 10, 23, and 25 – and never with much acclaim. According to Nielsen, “the public appeared unready to accept Dumouriez. Contemporary reviews dismiss the work as strange, peculiar, and confusing.”36 Nielsen is quick to point out, however, that some critics appreciated certain parts of play and that it is difficult to read criticism of the work as detached from the political situation in France (the rise of the Jacobins), the broader gendered attacks on de Gouges and on female playwrights, and a general animosity toward actors, and particularly, actresses, at the relatively modéré Théâtre de la République.37 What is certain is that the first performance of Dumourier was poorly timed. Shortly after the play debuted, the real-life General Dumouriez was castigated for his efforts to save the king, who lost his trial and was guillotined on January 21, 1793. Several weeks later, Dumouriez’s army was smashed by Coalition forces in the Battle of Neerwinden, which 35

36

For more on de Gouges’ battle with the Comédie-Française in the 1780s, see Gregory S. Brown, “The Self-Fashionings of Olympe de Gouges, 1784–1789,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 34, no. 3 (2001), 385–90. Nielsen, Women Warriors, 52. 37 Ibid., 51–5; see also Berlanstein, Daughters of Eve, 33–83.

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stunned the nation’s military and political leaders. When the National Convention sent four Jacobin deputies to investigate why the General had been beaten so badly, Dumouriez had them arrested and sent across to the enemy camp. He then attempted to persuade his own soldiers to stop fighting for the National Convention and to turn on Paris. When most of his forces chose to remain loyal to the Republic, Dumouriez fled across to the Austrian lines along with his friend, the duc de Chartres (the future King Louis-Philippe) and a handful of other officers. Dumouriez deserted on April 4; the next day, the National Convention created the Committee of Public Safety (Comité de salut public), which, under the leadership of Georges Danton, purged Girondists and their sympathizers from France’s political institutions and organizations. De Gouges, now associated with Dumouriez and herself a long-standing Girondist and supporter of constitutional monarchy, was arrested on June 2. She was imprisoned, tried, and then guillotined later that autumn. L’Entrée de Dumourier would be her final work of public theater. The reimagining of the gendered battlefield that de Gouges proposes in her play was radical, even if the author’s politics were deemed too moderate by the new Comité de salut public. L’Entrée de Dumourier, perhaps because of its tepid public reception, the real-life General’s tarnished reputation, or the play’s eclipse today behind de Gouges’ more prominent prose works, has received little critical attention. Beyond its novel approach to women and war, the play exhibits interesting parallels to the theatrical and gender politics in French society at the time. In fact, de Gouges’ tragic move from the theatrical stage to the real-life scaffold was concurrent with the end of the Revolution’s most progressive period of women’s political mobilization and calls to participate in military endeavors. In an essay on women and militant citizenship, Darline Gay Levy and Harriet B. Applewhite write that historians have interpreted the Jacobins’ “repressive linguistic–political–military hegemony” of late 1793 and 1794 as too indicative of the entire Revolutionary period, especially in regard to “women’s practice of militant citizenship,” which was actually a dynamic force up until late 1793.38 Levy and Applewhite then go on to detail several militant and even violent acts involving women, from the famous October revolt, which brought the king from Versailles to Paris in 1789, to militaryinfused festivals involving both men and women in 1791 and 1792, to a massive demonstration on April 9, 1792, when “women, children, and men [. . .] accompanied by battalions of National Guardsmen, participated 38

Levy and Applewhite, “Women and Militant Citizenship,” 86.

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in an armed march through the national legislature to escort and honor” a group of soldiers who had rebelled against their aristocratic officers.39 Women played a central role in “reclaiming the National Guard for the people” and in boosting the domestic opinion of France’s armed forces, which had been viewed with suspicion by many revolutionaries after the exodus of aristocratic officers.40 By the summer of 1792, France was at war against a coalition of European monarchies and ousted French royalists. The mobilization of France was bolstered by a groundswell of support for the country’s new militarized family in art and festivals, which Levy and Applewhite argue gave new symbolic and political significance and legitimacy to women as political actors, family members in arms, emblems of civic virtue, national unity, and sovereign power [. . .] women and men empowered a “powerless” and “passive” citizenry, publicly dramatized their militant citizenship – their sovereignty. These acts were symbolically charged. No matter how the organizers might struggle to control and direct them, they retained their subversive potential to blur or invert gender roles and beyond that, to link women’s political identities as militant citizens to the life and fate of the sovereign nation.41

Calls to fully integrate women into the most visible forms of militant citizenship, namely, service to the new nation’s army, culminated in 1793, when most male citizens were called upon to serve in the famous levées en masse. Many citoyennes wanted to join their brothers, husbands, and fathers on the front. On March 6, 1792, the activist Pauline Léon presented to the Legislative Assembly a petition signed by 300 women (including de Gouges), demanding the right to bear arms. In the spring of 1793, Léon and Claire Lacombe started the Société des citoyennes républicaines révolutionnaires – a hardline Jacobin group which pushed for the surveillance of political activities and supported mandatory military service for men and women alike. In May of that year, the Société des citoyennes went so far as to propose an “armed body of women to combat internal enemies,” which incarnated “a determination to expand the scope of their [women’s] activities beyond the domestic sphere of their homes to embrace the interior of the nation, its welfare and its safety.”42 Radical women’s groups such as the Société des citoyennes were perhaps part of what Timothy Tackett has called the “darker side of the Revolution,” which by summer 1793 pressed for “an increasingly dictatorial 39

Ibid., 87.

40

Ibid., 88.

41

Ibid., 88.

42

Ibid., 93.

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government” where “surveillance committees were everywhere rooting out ‘suspects’ and purported traitors.”43 This, in other words, was the Terror and, at least during its first few months, many women had found active roles to play in its discourses, programs, and institutions. The overt participation of women in politics, however, was restricted in both scope and duration. Women never occupied any important political positions in the Revolutionary period, and, even before the summer of 1793, they had already been banned from formal military service and deemed “unnecessary” on the battle front through a government edict on April 30.44 Later that year, in a series of reforms that limited women’s rights, the Société des citoyennes was disbanded in October and all women, Jacobin or not, were denied the right to join political clubs and committees. According to Levy and Applewhite, the period of “real, if short-lived and incomplete” expansion of women into the political sphere had been brought to an end, even if that repression, they add, was not as total as many historians have claimed.45 The intertwined stories of de Gouges’ life and the political livelihood of new French citoyennes in 1793 fit squarely with one of the Revolution’s most popular historiographical narratives. Just three to four years after the exciting events at the Bastille, so this story goes, the country moved from a period of optimism, connectivity, and political ouverture to one of anxiety, surveillance, and repression. Historians as ideologically opposed as Albert Soboul and François Furet would agree that the fall of the Girondist group in spring 1793 and the purge of moderate voices from the Convention coincided with a more violent Revolutionary moment, even if disagreement continues among historians on the legacy of and motivations behind that violence. As a political group, French citoyennes were in a different place at the end of 1793 than they had been at the beginning of the year. The next section takes a closer look at the evolution of plays depicting women and war during the first few months of 1794, arguably the most active period of state-sponsored cultural programs that were designed to foment “Revolutionary spirit.” What emerges in war plays across several genres is indeed a representative loss of public, active 43 44

45

Timothy Tackett, The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2015), 1. As Jennifer Heuer writes, “on April 30, 1793, the government banned women soldiers and other ‘unnecessary’ women from the troops, including the wives or girlfriends of soldiers. It specified that a limited number of women be allowed to remain as laundresses and vivandières [. . .] It was a strong reaction against claims that women could act militarily and politically, and particularly affected women who had taken up arms.” Heuer, “Celibacy, Courage, and Hungry Wives,” 661. Levy and Applewhite, “Women and Militant Citizenship,” 98.

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military options to female characters. This loss, however, is replaced not by a “quiet” life on the home front, but rather by a particular brand of violent domesticity and engaged revolutionary politics.

Violent Domesticity: The mère révolutionnaire at War By the end of 1793, France was at war on several international and domestic fronts. The young Republic was in danger, and all were called upon to serve its military and political goals. In a speech to the National Convention on 8 nivôse Year II (December 28, 1793), Maximilien Robespierre called for the ashes of Joseph Bara, a teenager who had died three weeks earlier while fighting rebels in the Vendée uprisings, to be interred at the Pantheon. Robespierre also announced that Bara’s efforts and death would be forever remembered as examples of adolescent bravery and martial sacrifice to the nation through a commissioned engraving. The image, which was created following Jacques-Louis David’s famous painting of Bara, was then to be sent “par la Convention nationale dans toutes les écoles primaires”46 (by the National Convention to all the primary schools). A military festival celebrating Bara, as well as the life of Agricole Viala, another teenager who had recently died fighting domestic insurgents, was planned for the spring. In another speech to the National Convention about Bara, this time on 18 floréal Year II (May 7, 1794), Robespierre explained to his compatriots that the nation had now decided to memorialize the young man’s zeal and reward his family’s sacrifice by “adopting” his mother and providing her with a state pension.47 In a stirring application of Bara’s story to the larger national narrative of sacrifice in Revolutionary childhood and womanhood, Robespierre exclaims: Barra, enfant héroïque, tu nourrissais ta mère et tu mourus pour ta Patrie! Barra, tu as déjà reçu le prix de ton héroïsme; la patrie a adopté ta mère; la Patrie, étouffant les factions criminelles, va s’élever triomphante sur les ruines des vices et des trônes. Ô Barra, tu n’as pas trouvé de modèle dans l’antiquité, mais tu as trouvé parmi nous des émules de ta vertu [. . .] Pourquoi ne rendrions-nous pas le même honneur au pudique et généreux amour, à l’amour conjugal, à la tendresse paternelle, à la piété filiale? Nos 46

47

Histoire parlementaire de la Révolution française, ou Journal des assemblées nationales depuis 1789 jusqu’en 1815, vol. xxxi, ed. Philippe Buchez and Pierre Célestin Roux-Lavergne (Paris: Pauli, 1834– 1838), 25–6. For more information on the engravings and their intended purpose for schoolchildren at the time, see the report in the Moniteur 100 (10 nivôse an II) (December 30, 1793), 403. For more on the life and legacy of Joseph Bara (Barra), see Jean-Clément Martin, Violence et Révolution: Essai sur la naissance d’un mythe national (Paris: Seuil, 2006), 175–85.

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Femmes soldats and Militarized Domesticity fêtes, sans doute, ne seront ni sans intérêt, ni sans éclat. Vous y serez, braves défenseurs de la Patrie, que décorent de glorieuses cicatrices; vous y serez, vénérables vieillards, que le bonheur préparé à votre postérité doit consoler d’une longue vie passée sous le despotisme; vous y serez, tendres élèves de la Patrie, qui croissez pour étendre sa gloire et pour recueillir le fruit de nos travaux. Vous y serez, jeunes citoyennes, à qui la victoire doit ramener bientôt des frères et des amants dignes de vous; vous y serez, mères de famille, dont les époux et les fils élèvent des trophées à la République avec les débris des trônes. (On applaudit) Ô Femmes françaises, chérissez la liberté achetée au prix de leur sang; servez-vous de votre empire pour étendre celui de la vertu républicaine! Ô Femmes françaises, vous êtes dignes de l’amour et du respect de la Terre! Qu’avez-vous à envier aux femmes de Sparte? Comme elles, vous avez donné le jour à des héros; comme elles, vous les avez dévoués, avec un abandon sublime, à la Patrie (On applaudit).48 Barra, heroic child, you nourished your mother and died for your country! Barra, you have already received the prize for your heroism; the country has adopted your mother; the Fatherland, stifling the criminal factions, will rise triumphant over the ruins of vices and thrones. O Barra, you did not find a model in antiquity, but you found among us emulators of your virtue [. . .] Why should we not pay the same honor to modest and generous love, to conjugal love, to paternal tenderness, to filial piety? Our celebrations, no doubt, will be neither without interest nor without brilliance. You will be there, brave defenders of the Fatherland, decorated with glorious scars; you will be there, venerable old men, whom the happiness prepared for your posterity must console for a long life passed under despotism; you will be there, tender pupils of the Fatherland, who grow to extend its glory and to reap the fruit of our labors. You will be there, young citizens, to whom victory must soon bring back brothers and lovers worthy of you; you will be there, mothers of families, whose husbands and sons raise trophies to the Republic with the remains of the thrones. (Applause) O French women, cherish freedom purchased at the price of their blood; make use of your empire to extend that of republican virtue! O French Women, you are worthy of the world’s love and respect! What have you to envy the women of Sparta? Like them, you have given birth to heroes; like them, you have devoted them, with sublime abandon, to the Fatherland (Applause).

What was once a story about adolescent bravery and a call for young men to follow Bara’s example had now become a decidedly family affair.

48

Maximilien Robespierre, Discours de Robespierre à la Convention nationale, séance du 18 floréal an II (7 mai 1794), in Moniteur universel (19 floréal an II) (May 8, 1794), 451. Reprinted in Jennifer Heuer and Anne Verjus, “Les mères de la patrie révolutionnaire: Entre représentation et incarnation du politique (1792–1801),” in Les Mères de la Patrie: Représentations et constructions d’une figure nationale, ed. Laura Fournier-Finocchiaro (Caen: Cahiers de la MRSH, 2006), 7.

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Robespierre praises the teenager’s intrepidness but turns his attention to the boy’s mother and to other women of the Revolution, who, he argues, are “worthy of the world’s love and respect” and whose “freedom” has now been “purchased” by the violent efforts of their sons, husbands, and brothers. Robespierre’s opinion of men’s virtue and women’s dependence on that male virtue is one example among many of what Sarah Knott has called the “sober brew” of Revolutionary “idealistic moralism,” which “fashioned an explicitly domestic role for white women as rational wives and mothers.”49 After Jacobins stripped women of their rights to join political organizations, according to William Sewell, women were constrained “more insistently than ever to a narrow domestic sphere.”50 If women after October 1793 were indeed stripped of their political rights, denied access to military and institutional roles, and forced back into rural and urban hearth spaces, how did this eclipse “play out” in the period’s theater? Several recent studies encourage a more nuanced view of the move from early revolutionary feminine visibility and participation to the strictly surveilled domesticity of Year II. Annie Smart, for example, urges scholars to look toward the home front to understand the diversity of women’s political engagements as well as the difficulties women faced during the upheavals of political disaccord and civil war. She writes that women had, among other charges, constitutive and pedagogical functions for citizenship making at the time – a role that goes beyond procreation and maternity – and that the home front “might play an important role in generating citizenship in the domestic space.”51 As Jennifer Heuer and Anne Verjus have demonstrated, the mère révolutionnaire, one of these so-called domesticated feminine types, was categorically different from Old-Regime representations of domesticity as well as from later versions of motherhood and home life in the arts and in literature, especially after Napoleon’s more gender prescriptive Code civil was enacted in 1804.52 The women of an II were called upon for mothering, care, and domestic tasks, yet added to these essential roles were new political norms, discourses, and practices that women were supposed to profess as well as instill in their children, friends, and communities. 49 50

51 52

Knott, “Female Liberty?,” 428, 426. William H. Sewell, “Le citoyen/la citoyenne: Activity, Passivity, and the Revolutionary Concept of Citizenship,” The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, vol. ii: The Political Culture of the French Revolution, ed. Colin Lucas (Oxford: Pergamon, 1987), 121. Annie K. Smart, Citoyennes: Women and the Ideal of Citizenship in Eighteenth-Century France (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2011), 10. See Heuer and Verjus, “Les mères de la patrie révolutionnaire.”

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Theatrical representations of the mother and of women in general shifted during the Revolution. In a subset of war plays from the period’s most fervent months, women’s roles, including domesticity, engaged discourses and strategies that were grounded in anxious domestic and international contexts. By early 1793, an important semiotic shift had already occurred with the execution of Louis XVI, when revolutionaries severed ties, literally and symbolically, to paternalistic sovereign power. This act provided a representational space for the Revolution’s citoyennes to emerge as political signifiers. The “mère patrie” image was deployed in diverse media at the time in order to “promouvoir l’égalité parmi les citoyens” (promulgate equality among citizens) and “encourager le sacrifice patriotique” (encourage patriotic sacrifice) which had now been subsumed into a singular process of devotion to one’s (mother) country.53 Through this image of Revolutionary women, mothers and daughters were politicized as local representatives of state interests, and the family was transformed into “la société politique dans laquelle s’enseignent et se pratiquent les valeurs et principes de la nouvelle République”54 (a political society in which the values and principles of the new Republic are taught and practiced). Marie-Anne Bara, placed on a pedestal at the Convention during a public adoption ceremony in 1794, was the quintessential representation of la mère révolutionnaire. The lesson for other French families was clear: Bara mère had taught her son the values of the Republic, and with such success and efficacy, that Joseph defied her (as it is portrayed “feminine”) drive to keep him safe when he joined a regiment of volunteers at the age of thirteen. In newspaper reports and, as we shall see next, in theatrical representations, Bara mère, however, is no weeping, despondent mother. She is steeped in revolutionary ideology, apt at continuing her pedagogical effectiveness by teaching others about the values of the newly regenerated France, and ultimately proud of and compensated for her son’s sacrifice to the nation. In spring 1794 a series of plays were performed throughout France about Joseph Bara’s life and death. These works were part of a multimedia campaign to show the teenager’s sacrifices and provide lessons to others on bravery and service to the nation.55 The plays – mostly one-act vaudevilles, drames, and traits historiques – show that an untimely death can ignite 53 55

Ibid., 2. 54 Ibid., 4. For example, Le Manuel des jeunes républicains, published by Patris in 1794, opened with a series of stories about Bara. The young revolutionary also appeared in a Recueil des actions héroïques et civiques des républicains français, which included twenty stories about recent French bravery and sacrifice. For more information, see James A. Leith, “French Republican Pedagogy in the Year II,” Canadian Journal of History/Annales canadiennes d’histoire 3, no. 1 (1968), 60–62.

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a fighting spirit against foreign and domestic enemies. A more calculated glimpse of how women are depicted in several of these plays reveals the militarized domestic sphere of Year II – a form of domesticity invigorated by war, internal rebellion, and political anxiety from late 1793 through the first half of 1794. As we shall see, even if Robespierre and other leaders at the National Convention reified what were believed to be biologically grounded notions of feminine virtue and weakness – conceptions of women anchored to the ideas of Rousseau and other philosophes – many plays portray the revolutionary woman as a capable fighter and ideological beacon in times of war, and especially in internal conflicts such as the Vendée Rebellion and the Federalist Revolts.56

Domestic Roles and Revolutionary Commitments in citizen Briois’ La Mort du jeune Barra The citoyen Briois’ La Mort du jeune Barra, ou Une Journée de la Vendée was performed shortly before Robespierre’s second Bara speech on 15 floréal, Year II (May 4, 1794).57 Briois’ drame historique, one of at least a half dozen sentimental drames dedicated to Bara, recounts the young soldier’s final days, a story that multiple newspapers had picked up in late 1793 and early 1794. It was not performed until May, so spectators would have been primed for this type of sentimental military play after witnessing dozens of theatrical works dedicated to the Toulon siege, the Vendée Rebellion, the Federalist Revolts, and other contemporary conflicts that were performed across France from January to April of that year. The first printed edition includes a preface in which Briois states his objectives: Je veux regarder autour de moi et rendre hommage au patriotisme, au zèle que vous avez montré tous, mes amis, dans l’exécution de ce petit ouvrage. Je veux qu’on sache qu’il est un théâtre exempt des tracasseries des coulisses, où les Acteurs ne cherchent ni à éloigner ni à corriger les Auteurs; mais au contraire où ils se surpassent, si j’ose le dire, pour donner la vie aux productions qu’on leur confie: qu’à ce théâtre encore, dont je laisse au Public à distribuer la part de louanges que méritent tous ceux qui ont joué 56

57

The Federalist Revolts were a series of rebellions against the National Convention in 1793. The rebellions, which were particularly violent in Brittany, Marseille, Bordeaux, and the Rhône valley, were ultimately suppressed by the Jacobins in late 1793. Citoyen Briois, La Mort du jeune Barra, ou Une Journée de La Vendée, drame historique en un acte, représenté, pour la première fois, à Paris, sur le Théâtre Républicain, le 15 Floréal, l’an second de la République (Paris: Barba, an II [1794]).

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Femmes soldats and Militarized Domesticity dans Barra, il existe un Homme de Lettre qui, loin de montrer de l’insouciance ou un esprit de critique sur les ouvrages qu’il n’a point faits, a donné les soins les plus actifs pour présenter celui-ci au Public.58 I want to look around me and pay homage to the patriotism, to the zeal that you have all shown, my friends, in the execution of this little work. I want people to know that there is a theater free from behind-the-scenes annoyances, where the Actors seek neither to distance nor to correct the Authors; but on the contrary where they surpass themselves, if I dare say it, to give life to the productions entrusted to them: only to this theater again, of which I leave to the Public to distribute the share of praise which all those who have played in Barra, there is a Man of Letters who, far from showing carelessness or a spirit of criticism on the works he has not written, has taken the most active care to present it to the Public.

To appreciate the contemporary military feats and “examples” of national sacrifice that he has staged rapidly after the events, Briois asks participants in his play – actors and spectators alike – to treat his theatrical work as a different type of cultural artifact and experience. He implores the public to “celebrate a foundational event, a fabled instance of harmony at the start of a society” rather than judge the artistic execution of the event.59 Bara’s actions, according to Briois, surpass the collective talents of an author or actor. The author in this case, Briois himself, is no typical writer. He has not created the “ouvrages” which constitute his play, but assembled them, he hopes, in an accurate and pleasing way. The actors should do the same, and the implicit argument is that any spectators who find the work lacking are, in turn, not fully appreciating the real Bara’s heroic exploits – an act of civil negligence which would be comparable to treason in the spring of 1794. It is important to state that this avertissement – a warning not to criticize the author, the actors, or the work – frames any interpretation of Briois’ La Mort du jeune Barra at the time. The play begins with a conversation among Gilbert, Clotilde, and Aimée, members of a modest family, who live in a small village in the Vendée. Gilbert, the family patriarch and a former soldier, reads the newspaper and opines on current events, including the local rebellion and the eastern war front. Clotilde, Gilbert’s wife, and Aimée, their daughter, sit dutifully next to the veteran, sewing uniforms. Gilbert sees the women of his household working for the nation and comments that “bien des gens font tous ces dons 58 59

Briois, “Préface,” in La Mort du jeune Barra, 2. Yann Robert, Dramatic Justice: Trial by Theater in the Age of the French Revolution (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 34.

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là pour se faire remarquer; mais s’ils lisaient ce journal-ci; s’ils recueillaient, comme je l’ai fait, tous les traits d’héroïsme de nos braves soldats, ils voudraient donner tout leur bien pour l’armée, ou leur âme serait morte à tout sentiment”60 (many people give all these gifts to get noticed; but if they read this paper here; if they registered, as I have done, all the heroic traits of our brave soldiers, they would give all their property to the army, or their souls would be dead to all feeling). The household is doing its part to further the interests of a completely (and supposedly “happily”) militarized state. In addition to providing labor through the efforts of his wife and daughter, Gilbert has sent his two sons to fight – a decision that worries his wife, Clotilde. Gilbert attributes her “weakness” to her being a woman and a mother, and argues that now is no time to doubt the nation’s war plans: GILBERT: Clotilde! tu es mère, je le sais; mais point de faiblesse: oui, nos deux enfants exposent leur vie, nous ne devons peut-être jamais les revoir . . . Mais ils vengent leurs frères, ils font triompher la Liberté méconnue, ils punissent des traitres; et s’ils périssent dans les combats, c’est l’Éternel qui les recevra dans ses bras, c’est lui qui les récompensera d’avoir rendu leurs concitoyens à cet état de liberté pour lequel il nous fit. Oui, notre premier crime envers l’Être suprême, est d’avoir vendu à un maitre nos volontés. C’est lui seul qu’il fallait reconnaître, lui qui, dans la dispensation de ses dons, fit tous les hommes égaux.61 Clotilde! You are a mother, I know; but no weakness: yes, our two children are risking their lives, we may never see them again . . . But they avenge their brothers, they make a little-known Freedom triumph, they punish traitors; and if they perish in battle, it is the Eternal who will receive them in his arms, it is he who will reward them for having restored their fellow citizens to that state of freedom for which he made us. Yes, our first crime against the Supreme Being is to have sold our wills to a master. He alone should be recognized, he who, in the dispensation of his gifts, made all men equal.

Gilbert and Clotilde’s sons are not defending the patrie against Austrian attackers, nor are they expanding the Revolution across the border. They are waging war against internal “traitors” – domestic enemies and supporters of the now defunct monarchy. In the play, Joseph Bara (or Barra), a local boy, has defied his own family’s objections to fight for the Republic as it attempts to quell the rebellion. Gilbert notices that his daughter, Aimée, has taken a liking to 60

Briois, La Mort du jeune Barra, scene 1, 4.

61

Ibid., scene 1, 7.

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Bara, even if just one month prior she had been betrothed to a young soldier from their village. The family discusses her change of heart: GILBERT: Barra ne te déplait pas. Qu’en dis-tu? Tu l’aimes mieux que le fils d’Urbin, dont tu appris si tranquillement la mort le mois passé, quoiqu’il fût ton prétendu? AIMÉE: S’il n’avait pas fui, il ne serait pas mort comme cela. CLOTILDE: Ma fille a raison: on ne reçoit pas de coups dans le dos, quand on est brave. Et un lâche déshonore tout ce qu’il approche; il aurait vécu cent ans après cela, qu’il n’aurait jamais été mon gendre.62 GILBERT: Barra doesn’t displease you. What do you say? Do you like him better than the son of Urbin, of whose death you learned last month with tranquility, even though he was your intended? AIMÉE: If he hadn’t run away, he wouldn’t have died like that. CLOTILDE: My daughter is right: one does not receive shots to the back when one is brave. And a coward dishonors all he approaches; if he had lived for a hundred years, he would never have been my son-in-law.

Aimée’s former fiancé, “le fils d’Urbin,” was a deserter, the ultimate embarrassment and crime to a young patriot; he is thus unworthy of Aimée’s love and the family’s sentimental attachment. He earns no compassion from Aimée or her mother and father, even in death. On the contrary, the young Bara is full of “gloire” and ardent dedication to the revolutionary cause. “Tant qu’un seul brigand respirera” (As long as a single brigand breathes), he claims, Bara will fight to his last breath.63 Gilbert is impressed by the teenager’s patriotism and zeal, so much so that he decides that Bara should marry Aimée. In this type of patriotic play, a father who is committed to the Revolution acts as the state’s agent in the household, and the other characters quickly adhere (or are supposed to adhere) to the father-state’s ideology. Aimée responds, “J’obéirai à mon père” (I will obey my father), and her mother then chimes in with a quick affirmation, “Ta volonté soit faite, not’ homme”64 (your wish is granted, our man). There 62

Ibid., scene 1, 8.

63

Ibid., scene 2, 10.

64

Ibid., scene 2, 13.

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is nothing innovative in this depiction of the revolutionary family’s gender dynamics, where men are catapulted outwards to the political and military cause (to sometimes never return) and women are grounded in procreative concerns, maintaining the home, and supporting the Revolution through ideological adherence, domestic tasks, and emotional labor. What is perhaps more innovative in Briois’ play is the value placed on a particular strand of revolutionary soldiering and the portrayal of a completely militarized society. Military masculinity, once a trait shared among soldiers, is now transferred to the bodies and psyches of all the Republic’s men, no matter their age, occupation, or social status. Gilbert details the differences between this type of military man and the soldiers he served with under the Old Regime: GILBERT: Allez, allez, mes enfants; encore un jour heureux pour moi! Marier ma fille à un héros! . . . un héros soldat! O Liberté, Égalité, voilà tes bienfaits! Les héros d’autrefois étaient tous des altesses, qui, jouissant en paix du courage de ceux qu’ils plaçaient au-dessous d’eux, avaient toute la gloire, quand les malheureux soldats n’avaient que les sueurs et les dangers. Aujourd’hui chaque action est pour celui qui la fait; et l’on pense vaincre les troupes républicaines! Ah! ne l’espérez pas, vils despotes. La gloire, un regard, un souvenir de son pays, voilà de quoi mener le Français à mille morts. Je n’ai jamais reculé, moi; oh, non, jamais: mon cœur ne me reproche rien; mais si j’avais eu une pareille récompense, deux cents anglais de plus auraient péri de ma main. La République entière me regarde, honore mon courage! cette réflexion doit faire autant de héros que de soldats.65 Go, go, my children; another happy day for me! Marry my daughter to a hero! . . . a soldier hero! O Liberty, Equality, these are your blessings! The heroes of old were all highnesses, who, enjoying in peace the courage of those they placed below them, had all the glory, when the unfortunate soldiers had only the labors and the dangers. Today every action is for the one who does it; and we think of defeating the Republican troops! Ah! hope not, vile despots. Glory, a glance, a memory of one’s country, that’s enough to lead the Frenchman to a thousand deaths. I never backed down; oh, no, never: my heart does not reproach me for anything; but if I had had such a reward, two hundred more Englishmen would have perished at my hand. The whole Republic looks at me, honors my courage! this reflection must make as many heroes as soldiers.

Bara is a new type of hero, a “héros soldat.” He is committed to his “country” and differs starkly from the “héros d’autrefois” who fought 65

Ibid., scene 4, 14.

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only for personal glory and rank above others. This breed of soldier, Gilbert claims, is both more glorious and more efficacious to the war cause, and if Gilbert had fought for the Revolution instead of in the Seven Years’ War, he would have killed “deux cents anglais de plus.” Commenting on the welcomed reach of military values into civil life, the father remarks that “hero” and “soldier” are synonymous – where there is one, there is, by definition, the other. Women also have a “heroic” duty, defined by Aimée as domestic service to the cause: “Mon père, tout ce qui peut faire votre bonheur me plaît: vous me donnez un brave homme; j’espère que je serai aussi bonne mère de famille qu’il est bon guerrier, et que nos destinées et l’estime que nous obtiendrons tous deux de nos concitoyens, feront long-temps la consolation de vos jours”66 (My father, everything that can make you happy pleases me: you give me a great man; I hope that I will be as good a mother as he is a warrior, and that our destinies and the esteem that we will both obtain from our fellow citizens will console you for a long time). Heroines of the Revolution complete on the home front the military tasks of their husbands, brothers, and fathers. Their happiness, portrayed here as the execution of domestic tasks and servitude toward male family members, is anchored to their bodies and their relationship to their father, who teaches women from a young age the lessons of sacrifice and subjugation to the patrie’s local substitutes of the father and, then, husband. Sometimes, however, women err because, according to Gilbert, the Old Regime provided them with a poor education: GILBERT, se levant, et gaiment. (à part): Ô femme! femme! pourquoi cet instant où ton être s’ennoblit, où tu cesses d’être l’objet des désirs errants de notre sexe, pour devenir l’espoir de la République, pour être mère, coûte-t-il toujours à ton cœur! Pourquoi ce passage est-il pénible? C’est que l’éducation de ton sexe est mal organisée; c’est que des êtres perdus de mœurs ont placé la fin de ton existence où commence ta gloire.67 O woman! Woman! Why does this moment when your being is ennobled, when you cease to be the object of the wandering desires of our sex, to become the hope of the Republic, to be a mother, always tax your heart! Why is this passage painful? It is because the education of your sex is badly organized; it is that immoral beings have placed the end of your existence where your glory begins.

66

Ibid., scene 7, 16.

67

Ibid., scene 8, 18.

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Women of the Old Regime were taught a social economy of sexual commerce and persuasion. Women lost value, according to this narrative, once they were married off, out of the courtly limelight, and no longer bargaining chips for their fathers and brothers. Gilbert turns this logic on its head, for now, a woman’s true glory, he argues, begins once she marries a soldier of the Revolution and bears him children. This procreative logic is rooted in the Revolution’s optimistic drive to create a “regenerated” society led by “a new breed of men [. . .] and thus the focal point of political activity in the new France.”68 This new man required a separate and unequal space to be occupied by a new Revolutionary woman with far fewer political aspirations than her male counterpart. Women in Briois’ La Mort du jeune Barra often reify the gender separation thesis, where women were characterized in art and media by “simplification, reiteration, and redundancy,” leaving “little space for the emergence of a female individuality that could lead to women’s equality or parity with men.”69 Briois’ La Mort du jeune Barra theatricalizes martial and masculine discourses of the National Convention and larger French society in early 1794. Women play an essential role in the household; their participation in and opinions about international affairs and politics are eclipsed behind support of the male characters’ causes, struggles, and voices. It is important to note, however, that the domestic lives depicted in the theatrical works of Year II are by no means safe from violence, nor are women in plays such as La Mort du jeune Barra devoid of skills and attributes that were often projected onto the period’s militarized men. In addition to consecrating themselves to military tasks by making meals for soldiers, stitching uniforms, and passing along news, women fight the enemy. Clotilde and Aimée, for example, are no slouches when it comes to the assault of invading brigands: LE CAPUCIN: Ministres des vengeances du Ciel, vrais Catholiques, vengez votre chef qu’on veut assassiner. Saisissez ces femmes, et liez-les; elles paieront bientôt leur sacrilège. CLOTILDE: N’approchez pas, ou vous êtes morts. (Les brigands s’avancent; Aimée tire son fusil, Clotilde ses pistolets; deux tombent morts; un troisième et le Capucin se sauvent. Gilbert entre.)70 68 69

70

Forrest, “Citizenship, Honour and Masculinity,” 94. Madelyn Gutwirth, “The Rights and Wrongs of Woman: The Defeat of Feminist Rhetoric by Revolutionary Allegory,” in Representing the French Revolution: Literature, Historiography, and Art, ed. James A. W. Heffernan (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1991), 165. Briois, La Mort du jeune Barra, scene 15, 32.

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Femmes soldats and Militarized Domesticity THE FRIAR: Ministers of revenge from Heaven, true Catholics, avenge your leader whom they want to assassinate. Seize these women and bind them; they will soon pay for their sacrilege. CLOTILDE: Do not approach, or you are dead. (The brigands advance; Aimée fires her rifle, Clotilde her pistols; two brigands fall dead; a third and the Friar escape. Gilbert enters.)

Briois treats armed defense by women (Figure 5.1) only briefly in his play, but the inescapability of the war cause is omnipresent. Flashpoints of violence and conflict reveal cracks in revolutionary discourses of feminine weakness, douceur, and incapability. Enemies were everywhere and women were required both to sew and to shoot. Other authors of Bara-inspired plays, and particularly women playwriters, pushed against the restrictive sexual politics presented in the dramatic works of Year II. As we will see

Figure 5.1 Cazenave, J.-F. (artist) after Thouvenin, J. (engraver), Trait de courage héroïque: des brigands de la Vendée, s’étant rendus maîtres de Saint-Mithier (Paris: Pezard, 1793 or 1794). Bibliothèque nationale de France Département Estampes et photographie, RESERVE FOL-QB-201 (134).

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next, some writers expanded on the new martial behaviors that the Revolution asked of its women, even downplaying the male roles and patriarchal relationships that otherwise dominated many of the period’s cultural programs and artistic representations.

Weaponizing Domesticity in Nicole-Mathieu Villiers’ Barra, ou La Mère républicaine Nicole-Mathieu Villiers’ Barra, ou La Mère républicaine is a drame historique about women, domesticity, and revolution written by one of France’s own citoyennes. One of the first plays about Joseph Bara to appear in press, Villiers’ drame features few male characters and, contrary to the norm, it debuted not in Paris but in provincial Dijon on 5 germinal, Year II (March 25, 1794).71 Barra, ou La Mère républicaine starts at the height of the Vendée rebellion, depicts a war-torn nation, and stages the most pressing political concerns of the day. Dorothée Bara, a poor widow with five children, has been forced out of her house and village because of the uprisings.72 She has taken her family into pension at the home of Brigitte, also a widow, who lives with her daughter, Pauline. Villiers’ play is complex, with varying intensities and emotional registers. She mixes intimate, domestic scenes (for example, the first act depicts “une chambre ménagère”) with exciting outdoor battles.73 In contrast to other Bara-inspired plays, the action in Villiers’ play focuses on the widow Bara, rather than on her heroic son, and shows how armed conflict affects the home front and France’s citoyennes – the daughters, mothers, and wives in the Revolution’s violent domestic sphere. The domestic features of the play are indisputable, with no shortage of scenes in which female characters sew clothes, tend to small children, and lament the difficulties of war. But politics and overt political debate are also a part of this world – a characteristic of the 71

72

73

Nicole-Mathieu Villiers, Barra, ou La Mère républicaine, drame historique en trois actes et en prose, représenté pour la première fois sur le théâtre de Dijon, le 5 germinal, l’an second (Dijon: Causse, an 2e [1794]). It is possible that Villiers changed Bara mère’s first name from Marie-Anne to Dorothée because of the fictional plot in her play. Villiers sticks to the basic facts of Joseph Bara’s death but invents a series of dialogues and characters to render Barra mère a veritable actor in Revolutionary activities and discourses. Villiers, Barra, 1.1, 2. The second act, however, depicts “la campagne. Dans l’enfoncement, d’un côté, est une coline, de l’autre, un bois; une vaste perspective entre les deux. À gauche des spectateurs, est la maison de Brigitte; à droite un rang d’arbres, sous lesquels se trouvent quelques bancs. Au fond du théâtre sont quelques buissons épars” (the countryside. In the recess, on one side is a hill, on the other, the woods; a wide space between the two. To the left of the spectators is Brigitte’s house; on the right a row of trees, under which there are a few benches. At the back of the theater are a few scattered bushes). Ibid., 2.1, 24.

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play that emerges in the first act in discussions between Dorothée, the ardent Jacobin, and Brigitte, who is assumed to be a former aristocrat who now leans towards moderate political opinions and more traditional visions of women’s roles. In Act one, scene three, for example, Brigitte describes how she believes women should behave: “J’ai toujours remarqué que les personnes aimantes étaient en même temps bonnes et généreuses. Et la bonté! La douceur! Comme cela nous est nécessaire à nous autres femmes!” (I have always noticed that loving people are kind and generous at the same time. And kindness! Gentleness! It is so necessary for us women). Dorothée, however, is unconvinced that douceur is always a positive feminine trait, and responds, “Oui, pourvu que cela ne dégénère point en faiblesse; car enfin la femme n’est point un être nul dans la création” (Yes, provided it does not degenerate into weakness, because, ultimately, woman is not a useless being in creation), adding that “où règnent la confiance et la raison, les droits sont égaux”74 (equal rights exist wherever trust and reason reign). For Dorothée, women and men are equal if both sexes share common behaviors. Essentialized differences, however, can cause the revolutionary project to run asunder, ultimately leading to the type of “enslavement” that women and men endured under the former regime. Dorothée views martial knowledge and skills as necessary features of France’s newly regenerated society. She has trained her sons to use swords and rifles, which the audience witnesses in Act one, scene four, when Félix and Jules present their arms for their mother to inspect. Gender difference, however, is not completely absent in Dorothée’s pedagogy. Blanche and Claire, her daughters, receive no military training, and even though Blanche, at age twelve, is the oldest sibling after Joseph (who is off at war), she and her sister are relegated to the household, where they tend to their brothers. The daughters’ purview is domestic: when the family needs to send someone into town to get the latest news about the military campaign, Dorothée and Brigitte send the (younger) boys, while “Blanche, Pauline et Claire” stay “sur la porte, et questionnent tous les passants”75 (at the door, and question all the passers-by). Men fight and women perform auxiliary tasks – a lesson that spectators grasp in the first scene of the play, which depicts Brigitte and her daughter sewing clothes and making embroideries. The citoyenne Villiers’ play differs from other depictions of revolutionary domesticity, however, because, as the intrigue unfolds, gender differences scale down and a series of duties shared by both 74

Ibid., 1.3, 9.

75

Ibid., 3.2, 46.

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men and women emerges – roles that are coordinated not by a father but by a family matriarch. Both sexes are responsible for weeding out traitors and moderates, detailing the horrors of the previous regime, and praising the military exploits of the new nation. Dorothée is responsible for the civic education of the children. Her pedagogy is grounded in several principles, starting with the idea that the current political moment differs in every way from the previous one. This difference has almost biological underpinnings because aristocrats, she argues, are of a contrasting nature. She explains to her son Jules that les aristocrates ne sont point nos semblables. Ces lâches, pour qui la liberté n’a point d’attraits, qui se complaisent dans leur bassesse et leur abjection; ces tigres, qui n’ont pas craint de déchirer le sein de leur patrie pour défendre d’odieuses prérogatives; ces perfides enfin, qui revêtent le masque du patriotisme pour mieux tromper, pour mieux trahir . . . Non, grâce au ciel, tous ces êtres vils, opprobre et fléau de l’humanité, ne sont point nos semblables, et nous ne leur devons que mépris, que haine et que rigueur.76 aristocrats are not like us. These cowards, for whom freedom has no attraction, who thrive in their lowliness and their abjection; those tigers, who were not afraid to tear the bosom of their homeland to defend odious prerogatives; finally, these perfidious people, who put on the mask of patriotism the better to deceive, the better to betray . . . No, thank heaven, all these vile beings, opprobrium and scourge of humanity, are in no way like us, and we owe them nothing but contempt, hatred, and rigor.

Enemies of the Revolution differ in essence from Dorothée and her Jacobin family. Brigitte, the moderate, finds this hardline take on domestic politics difficult to rectify with her more cosmopolitan and pacifist worldview. She complains that, while the Revolution might have been “inévitable,” it has spiraled out of control and into “une foule d’abus qui font gémir tous les cœurs sensibles” (a host of abuses that make all sensitive hearts tremble). The Revolution’s wars, she argues, have produced a “nombre” of “malheureuses victimes” both inside and outside of France.77 She yearns for a more peaceful time, even if that means a return to former hierarchies. Dorothée refuses to back down. Not even loss of life, including innocent lives, negates the value of the new nation’s transformation. Most of those 76

Ibid., 1.5, 16.

77

Ibid., 2.1, 24.

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who have perished by the hands of the new government, she argues, deserved their sentence: DOROTHÉE: D’abord, la très-grande majorité de ces personnes s’est elle-même attiré ses malheurs, non par imprudence, mais par une méchanceté réfléchie, par une avidité insatiable, par l’orgueil le plus odieux, ou la plus révoltante bassesse. Ce sont elles, d’ailleurs, ce sont tous les traitres, tous les égoïstes, qui entravent la révolution dans sa marche, et en retardent les bienfaits; et les maux dont ils sont les auteurs, ils s’en servent ensuite pour dénigrer le nouvel ordre de choses, égarer les faibles, et perpétuer ainsi les troubles et la confusion. Ah! Ma chère, j’avoue que j’ai peine à concevoir comment on peut s’apitoyer sur le sort de pareils monstres.78 First of all, the vast majority of these people have brought their misfortunes upon themselves, not through imprudence, but through deliberate wickedness, through insatiable greed, through the most odious pride, or the most revolting baseness. It is they, moreover, it is all the traitors, all the egoists, who hinder the revolution in its progress, and delay its benefits; and the evils of which they are the authors, they then use to denigrate the new order of things, to mislead the weak, and thus to perpetuate trouble and confusion. Ah! My dear, I confess that I find it difficult to conceive how one can feel sorry for the fate of such monsters.

The mère Bara does not pull any punches. The Revolution’s enemies warrant neither mercy nor pity; their insolence and malevolence bleed into the hearts and minds of potentially weak citizens (such as Brigitte), and the only correctives are eradication and death. Spectators at the Dijon theater in March 1794 would have been knowledgeable about Joseph Bara’s story. As mentioned above, newspaper articles and public speeches with details of his bravery and death had circulated throughout France since late December 1793. His portrait appeared in urban and rural classrooms, and his story was integrated into pedagogical efforts targeted at the Revolution’s new citizens, both young and old. The teenage soldier-hero moves in and out of Villiers’ play, laments the evils of Vendean brigands, and speaks exuberantly about the values of the Republic. Bara fils, however, is a minor character. The crux of the action is not focused on Joseph’s death or on his military skill and bravery, but rather on the effect of a tragic loss on a family and, by extrapolation, on an entire family-nation. The death of a thirteen-year-old boy is indisputably heartbreaking, and 78

Ibid., 2.2, 26.

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when Dorothée receives the news, the audience wonders whether she will slip into Brigitte’s moderate pacifism or whether her Republican resolve will withstand the blow. But Joseph’s death, Villiers shows, is not a mere family affair, and the possibility of an intimate scene of domestic sorrow is complicated by the state’s intervention into the grieving process. Rather than hearing of the death in town or “domestically” – through rumors passed from home to home – it is none other than the leader of the Bara’s Bressuire division, General Jean-Baptiste Desmarres, who arrives with the news. General Desmarres’ presence serves several purposes in the play. First, he institutionalizes Joseph’s military achievements and sacrifice. Joseph had been too young to officially enlist in the French military, and his status as a soldier and war casualty remained unclear until Desmarres’ arrival. The General’s intervention models the actual historical narrative, when Desmarres wrote to the Convention in December 1793 with testimony of the young man’s bravery and sacrifice. This report helped inform Robespierre’s December 28 speech to the Convention calling for Bara’s panthéonisation. Second, the General’s presence interrupts the domestic scene by presenting the women of the household with an account of how citizens should view the deaths of soldiers who have sacrificed their lives to the cause. The occasion should not be marked by despair and retreat into the silence of the home, but by a more public-facing mission to share exemplary stories of heroic deeds and to inspire more young women and men to commit acts of virtue and bravery for the nation. Revolutionary deaths are forward-focused, optimistic reflections on a new society built on sacrifice and patriotism. Villiers’ play ensures that citoyennes are not left out of this political charge. Third, Desmarres uses Bara’s case to adumbrate a revolutionary brand of domesticity by grounding the young hero’s deeds in the education that he had received from his mother – a testimony to her patriotism and “usefulness” that even Dorothée is surprised to hear: DOROTHÉE: Il t’a donc parlé de sa mère? DESMARRES: Il m’en a parlé avec tout l’amour, toute la vénération que tes leçons et tes soins avaient dû lui inspirer. Citoyenne, c’est à sa prière que je suis venu près de toi.79 79

Ibid., 3.9, 52.

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Femmes soldats and Militarized Domesticity DOROTHÉE: So, he told you about his mother? DESMARRES: He spoke to me about her with all the love, all the veneration that your lessons and your care must have inspired in him. Citizen, it was to fulfill his dying wish that I have come to see you.

Joseph’s patriotic courage was not, according to Desmarres, an innate, biological quality or a lesson he had gleaned from the military men in his unit. Joseph was a brave and able soldier because of the engaged lessons and care (“soins”) of the woman who raised him. The mother’s pedagogy has prepared Joseph ideologically for the revolutionary moment and armed him with the martial skills necessary to succeed on the battlefield. Villiers’ play could have ended with this Republican sublimation of wartime grief into praise of one family’s contribution to a regenerated, virtuous society. But an important lesson to learn (and relearn) during the Revolution’s most extreme months was that moderation and indecision lurked behind every corner, and that surveillance and vigilance were necessary to combat internal enemies and weakness. The play ends not with the sentimental reconstitution of two widows’ families (Brigitte, Dorothée, and their children) but with a startling disagreement between the two women. BRIGITTE: Pauvre amie! Citoyen, si tu savais comme elle aimait son fils! Tu vois sa douleur; il n’en peut exister de plus grand amère: entend les sanglots de sa malheureuse famille. Quel spectacle déchirant! Et voilà donc les suites des troubles civils et de la guerre! (à Félix et à Jules) O mes enfants, gardez-vous d’y aller jamais. Souvenez-vous sans cesse du désespoir où vous voyez votre mère, et ce que ce jour affreux ne se renouvelle jamais pour elle! DOROTHÉE, se levant avec vivacité: Que dis-tu, Brigitte? Quel faux zèle, quelle indiscrète amitié t’égare? Et pourquoi donc seraient-ils nés? La patrie n’a-t-elle pas sur eux des droits plus sacrés que les miens? (à ses enfants avec beaucoup de véhémence) Mes enfants, vous, moi, nous sommes tous à elle; nos veilles, nos sueurs, notre sang; tout lui appartient. La plus grande gloire d’un Français est d’être appelé à l’honneur de la servir. Ô patrie! Malheur à l’égoïste, dont l’insensible cœur n’est point embrasé de ton amour! Mes enfants l’ont puisé dans mon sein; ils seront dignes de toi. Ô patrie! Je te les dévoue. Leur frère n’est plus, il t’a payé sa dette. Et moi qui te le cédai, et moi qui lui survis . . . Ah! Que puis-je faire davantage? (La toile se baisse).80 80

Ibid., 3.9, 65.

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BRIGITTE: Poor friend! Citizen, if you only knew how much she loved her son! You see her pain; there can be no greater bitterness: hear the sobs of his unhappy family. What a heartbreaking sight! And these are the consequences of civil unrest and war! (to Félix and Jules) O my children, beware of ever going there. Always remember the despair in which you see your mother, and how this dreadful day should never be repeated for her! DOROTHÉE, rising quickly: What are you saying, Brigitte? What false zeal, what indiscreet friendship leads you astray? And where are they coming from? Does not the country have more sacred rights over them than mine? (to her children very vehemently) My children, you, me, we are all hers; our vigils, our labors, our blood; everything belongs to her [la patrie]. The greatest glory of a Frenchman is to be called to the honor of serving her. O fatherland! Woe to the egoist, whose insensitive heart is not on fire with your love! My children drew it from my bosom; they will be worthy of you. O fatherland! I dedicate them to you. Their brother is no more, he has paid his debt to you. And I who yielded it to you, and I who survived him . . . Ah! What more can I do? (The curtain drops).

Dorothée has accepted her son’s death as a necessary sacrifice to the cause; now, it is her entire family who will give itself to the new nation. Bara mère chooses devotion to the Revolution over the hospitality of a moderate because revolutionary society will be forged not from compromises and concessions but from unflinching commitment to the Jacobin state. Revolutionary domesticity is not a passive state of safety, family intimacy, and care, but an even more challenging role requiring active vigilance, political commitment, and militant pedagogical strategies. Sarah Knott writes that “Republican womanhood” was an international ideology “that invited women to embrace a renewed domesticity and influence as wives and mothers in a separate sphere.” Grounded in the “figure of the worthy Roman matron,” the Republican woman was supposedly “well educated, extolling reason over passion, and raising her sons to be good countrymen.”81 Knott goes on to argue that, at its core, “‘Republican womanhood’ may have been anti-authoritarian in its rejection of untrammeled male authority and embrace of female reason, but the accompanying delimitation of a female sphere of good daughters and wives was thoroughly conservative.”82 Conservatism cut different ways during the Revolution. Barra mère and her family were certainly no political reactionaries. Her faith in the state 81

Knott, “Female Liberty?,” 452.

82

Ibid., 452.

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rather than in benevolent but uncommitted individuals like Brigitte was a radical take on the nation’s role in the private lives of its most desperate citizens. War and terror transformed the nature of the domestic sphere as plays dedicated to Joseph Bara or soldiers in Toulon latched on to the specificity of France’s national context and, especially, on to pressing issues of political and military concern. Many war plays in revolutionary France subscribed to the sexual conservatism discussed by Knott; most plays, however, recognized that war and domestic bloodshed were also opportunities to portray progressive ideals outside of a sexual register, which, for women, had not always been a source of progress and self-fulfillment, even during the supposedly more sexually liberated Old Regime. The goal of this chapter was not to uncritically rehabilitate revolutionary domesticity. The “Republican womanhood” in French Revolutionary war dramas represented and often perpetuated the limits placed on citoyennes after the suppression of militant women’s rights campaigns in 1792 and 1793. The domesticity reflected in these plays shows a litany of responsibilities, even impossible burdens placed on women in a moment of national crisis. The domestic front of the Terror included knitting, cooking, and childcare; also, it demanded exemplary expressions of patriotic zeal and commitments to the Revolutionary war cause. The militarized domestic sphere of Year II required women to learn martial skills and kill enemies, domestic or foreign. The totalizing force of French Revolutionary war drama was not limited to the aesthetic strategies and performance techniques of authors and actors. The Revolution sought to create a total woman for total war. Her livelihood, however, depended on a militant commitment to the institutions and values of a system under which she was excluded from real participation and agency. The analysis above should render more complex the notion of domesticity during the French Revolution by illustrating the intelligence, political aptitude, and, at times, mission-driven violence that were required of women. In addition, Villiers’ drama proves that some playwrights were able to offer a revolutionary imaginary with very few male attachments or dependences. But, as many women and caretakers throughout the world and across time have learned in moments of crisis – the recently acute yet still active global COVID-19 pandemic is a searing reminder – new tasks and responsibilities do not always produce more egalitarian and progressive outcomes. Quite the contrary, and, in many ways, the total woman for France’s total war was merely asked to do more with less, even if she learned new skills and discovered new horizons along the way.

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In the conclusion to this book, I take stock of some of its main arguments and summarize a few key evolutions both in military drama and in military-infused performance spaces from the last few decades of the Old Regime through the most turbulent moments of the French Revolution. I conclude with a close reading of the military–theatrical complex’s unravelling in Saint-Domingue, which I hope will inspire more discussion and inquiry into the nexus of coloniality, military intervention, and performance in the revolutionary Atlantic.

conclusion

The Military–Theatrical Complex of Revolutionary Saint-Domingue

The arc of military–theatrical relations presented in the preceding chapters unfolds like this: the Seven Years’ War inspired a series of increasingly potent interactions between theater (both dramatic literature and performance) and the French military. Some of these interactions were implicit, circumstantial, and unplanned, but many were nurtured by a deliberate military–theatrical complex, which was pitched as a means to make soldiers and sailors “better” through drama and performance. A proliferation of military–theatrical interactions culminated during the French Revolution when government sponsorship and coercion merged with locally driven theater projects to create bellicose, communal experiences. In the very revolutionary Year II, differences between martial and civil society were obliterated by the militarized and theatricalized mobilization of the country to fight, inspire, denounce, and regenerate. During the 1790s, traditionally underrepresented citizens such as the urban poor, rural women, and teenagers participated in the nation’s war cause as well as in theatrical representations of war; this was total theater for total war. After the Revolution, theater obviously did not disappear, nor did France’s military endeavors subside. The early nineteenth century, ravaged by the Napoleonic Wars, was witness to some of the most horrific and massive battles until the First World War. European colonialism in the nineteenth century reached a destructive zenith. These events, conflicts, and geopolitical movements influenced the culture of theater, and certainly in variegated and intriguing ways.1 But nineteenth-century 1

The bibliography on nineteenth-century military–theatrical experiences is vast and varied. See, for example, Jean-Paul Bertaud, “Le théâtre et la guerre à l’époque de Napoléon,” in Armée, guerre et société à l’époque napoléonienne, ed. Jacques-Olivier Boudon (Paris: SPM, 2004), 177–88; Philippe Bourdin, “Divertissement et acculturation en temps de campagne. Le théâtre français en Égypte (1798–1801),” Dix-huitième siècle 49, no. 1 (2017): 159–80; Christine Carrère-Saucède, “Les militaires et le théâtre dans le sud-ouest au XIXe siècle: De la salle à la scène,” Annales du Midi 115, no. 244 (2003): 563–74; Rahul Markovits, Civiliser l’Europe: Politiques du théâtre français au XVIIIe siècle

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military–theatrical experiences, however interesting and unique, are not the subject of this book. Rather than follow military–theatrical interactions into the rise of Napoleon and the first French Empire, I conclude this study by returning to Saint-Domingue, where military–theatrical overlaps thrived as whitecentric experiences of the colonial project. The trajectory of military–theatrical interactions in France described above was not identical to that in France’s largest Caribbean slave colony. A core mission of military–theatrical projects in metropolitan France was inclusion – a point that was criticized by the country’s literary elite, aristocratic army officers, and the Old-Regime establishment. As the country moved into the throes of the Revolution, a greater diversity of characters, situations, emotions, classes, and conditions was incorporated into the nation’s theatrical and military cultures. The binding agent of this process was distilled from a brew of community building and access to theater, as well as from warmongering, xenophobia, patriotism, and fear – notions that render the national–military theatrical phenomenon problematic to today’s readers. During the Revolution, however, theater and public performances by, for, and about the military were attractive to new citizens, urban and rural, men and (to some degree) women, young and old. This drive toward inclusion, however, was mostly limited to white metropolitan citizens – an infamous blind spot in what many French revolutionaries believed to be a “universal” vision. With several notable exceptions, people of color were excluded from many projects, theatrical or political, of the French Revolutionary era.2 The binding agent never “stuck” in Saint-Domingue because of slavery, inequality, racism, demographics, and coloniality, or, “an ideology according to which race and geography subtend understandings of humanness, cultural intelligibility, and political belonging.”3 From complaints against allowing free people of color to attend public theaters, to racist critiques of mixed-race actors, to prejudice against militia units composed of men of color, to the white-dominated performances and seating arrangements in the island’s auditoriums, a core mission of Saint-Domingue’s military– theatrical phenomenon was to segregate and exclude, not bind and

2

3

(Paris: Fayard, 2014), 266–306; see also Clare Siviter, Tragedy and Nation in the Age of Napoleon (Liverpool: Oxford Studies in the Enlightenment and Liverpool University Press, 2020), esp. 111–32. This is why books such as Julia Prest’s monograph on the relations between slavery and theater in Saint-Domingue are so important. See Julia Prest, Public Theatre and the Enslaved People of SaintDomingue (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2023), esp. “Introduction,” 1–16. Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649–1849 (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2014), 16.

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commune.4 Destruction of segregation, difference, and inequality in metropolitan France was the rationale of many French revolutionaries. The militarized egalitarianism in Revolutionary plays created new spectatorial experiences and powerful moments of community building. This social aesthetic was weaker in colonial Caribbean spaces because upholding segregation and exclusion was precisely what would allow the plantation complex to thrive, even in a Republic. A socio-theatrical process that had found success in metropolitan France could not succeed in a colony where, even after the National Convention abolished slavery on February 4, 1794, inequality continued to reign. Most people in Saint-Domingue had been left out of the Revolution’s purview, and it should be no surprise that the disintegration of French military–theatrical interactions was almost as spectacular as the dismantling of French occupation, which culminated in the first successful rebellion of enslaved people of color against a European oppressor. This conclusion moves from theater to public performances of the military in Saint-Domingue to illustrate how colonial ceremonies and events foreshadowed and “played out” an unstable political situation which would set the stage for the Haitian Revolution. First, I show how the marginalization of enslaved black women and men, mixed-race soldiers, and free people of color was inherent to the colony’s strategies of selfrepresentation in public ceremonies. Then, I depict an event from “the beginning of the end” of French Saint-Domingue: the arrival of French revolutionaries and Jacobin sentiment in 1791. Although the relationship between the French and Haitian Revolutions is complex and contested, a theatricalized account of the murder of an aristocratic French colonel reveals a performance ecosystem of imminent political and social crisis on the island. In addition, the events occurred shortly before theaters in both Cap-Français and Port-au-Prince were burned to the ground.5 4

5

David P. Geggus describes a litany of rules, regulations, and laws that were designed to control and police people of color in Saint-Domingue with increased intensity starting in the 1760s. See David Patrick Geggus, “The Slaves and Free People of Color of Cap Français,” in The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade, ed. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Matt D. Childs, and James Sidbury (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 101–21. The crux of the debate lies in attributing or not influence to the French Revolution in laying the groundwork for the Haitian Revolution. I tend to agree with how Geggus characterizes the relationship between the two as “more political than ideological; the [French] revolution promoted resistance probably less through the propagation of libertarian ideas than by affecting, or appearing to affect, the distribution of power. In the French colonies as of September 1789 the revolution in Europe split the white population into hostile factions, causing conflict between colonists and metropolis, military mutinies, and struggle between whites and free coloreds.” David Patrick Geggus, “Slavery, War, and Revolution in the Greater Caribbean, 1789–1815,” in Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the

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Public processions in Saint-Domingue were performances of military control and reminders to local colons and international travelers that the island was indeed part of the French kingdom. Ceremonies testify to the military’s prime political position in the colony and its reach into judicial, legislative, and religious processes. For example, in a document reprinted in Moreau de Saint-Méry’s Loix et constitutions, a court clerk describes the military’s control of public religious celebrations and national events, such as a Corpus Christi procession in the spring of 1769: La Procession s’est mise en marche; la Cour suivant immédiatement le S. Sacrement porté par le R. F. Comban, Préfet Apostolique et Curé; assisté de deux Vicaires; et était le Dais porté le côté gauche par deux Grenadiers de la Légion de Saint-Domingue, et le côté droit par deux Grenadiers des Milices de cette Ville, les cordons d’icelui tenus par les deux Marguilliers en exercice, et les deux qui sont sortis de charge l’année dernière; la Compagnie de Grenadiers de ladite Légion, les Officiers à la tête, formant une haie à la droite, et la Compagnie des Grenadiers des Milices une haie à gauche du Dais, en dedans de laquelle étaient les Huissiers du Conseil marchant sur deux files en avant de la Cour, et au milieu d’eux le premier Huissier sa baguette à la main; à la suite du Conseil marchait en même ordre le Siège Royal du Cap, pareillement entre deux haies de Soldats, prolongées en arrière par la Compagnie de Maréchaussée du Cap, et fermée par la Troupe de Police; marchaient en avant du S. Sacrement toutes les Troupes et Milices de la Ville sur deux haies, dans l’ordre suivant, La Légion de Saint-Domingue, les Gendarmes, les Carabiniers, les Dragons à pied, et les Compagnes des sieurs Papillon, Crebassa, Charpentier, Blancan, Collot, Rimbert, Cochon, Basseville, du Petit-Houars, Mesnier, Gallibert, Frère, et la Compagnie de Dragons à cheval, celle des Canonniers s’étant trouvée aux batteries; la Procession rentrées à l’Église, a été chantée la Grand’Messe, et MM. ont été à l’Offertoire immédiatement après le Clergé, et après eux les Officiers du Siège Royal du Cap, et après ces Officiers les Marguilliers de la Paroisse; la Messe finie, a cessé le Cérémonial du jour.6 The Procession has started; the Court immediately following the Blessed Sacrament carried by R. F. Comban, Apostolic Prefect and Pastor; assisted by two Vicars; and the Dais was carried on the left side by two Grenadiers of the Legion of Saint-Domingue and on the right side by two Grenadiers of the militias of that city, the cords of it held by the two current Wardens and the two who had been entrusted with this role the previous year; the

6

Greater Caribbean, ed. David Barry Gaspar and David Patrick Geggus (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997), 11. Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry, Loix et constitutions des colonies françoises de l’Amérique sous le vent, suivies d’un tableau . . ., vol. v (Paris: Moreau de Saint-Méry, 1779), 245–6.

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Conclusion Company of Grenadiers of the said Legion, the Officers at the head, forming a line on the right, and the Company of Grenadiers of the Militia a line on the left of the Dais, within which were the Council Clerks marching in two files in front of the Court, and in the midst of them the first Clerk, his staff in his hand; following the Council marched in the same order the Royal Representative of Cap-Français, likewise between two rows of soldiers, extended in the rear by the Constabulary of Le Cap, and closed by the Police Troop; there marched in front of the Holy Sacrament all the Troops and Militias of the City in two rows, in the following order, The Legion of Saint-Domingue, the Gendarmes, the Rifle division, the Dragoons, and the Companies of the Sirs Papillon, Crebassa, Charpentier, Blancan, Collot, Rimbert, Cochon, Basseville, du Petit-Houars, Mesnier, Gallibert, Frère, and the Company of Dragoons on horseback, that of the Gunners who had served in the batteries; the Procession returned to the Church, High Mass was sung, and the Sirs were at the Offertory immediately after the Clergy, and after them the Officers of the Royal Council of Le Cap, and after these Officers the Wardens of the Parish; when the Mass ended, the Ceremonial of the day ceased.

In this performance of power and intradepartmental cooperation, specific military units and grades are paired with representatives of the colony’s government and religious institutions. The military initiates and sanctions the celebration, controlling the speed and the flow of people in a performance that symbolically sanctions the island’s civil and spiritual cultures. Harmony, synchrony, and order are supposed to characterize the festival, which combined the most important institutions of colonial life from the perspective of colonials: the Church, the military, the courts, legislators, policemen, finance ministers, and municipal operatives. As Gene Ogle has demonstrated, the relationship between the military and the judiciary in Saint-Domingue was fraught, which makes this performance illustrative not only of a projected harmony but also of the colony’s institutional anxieties and power strategies.7 It is difficult to speculate on how this performance was received by residents. The procession’s choreography evinces the military’s role in spiritual life as well as in performances of the relationships and hierarchies among colonial institutions. Glaringly absent, however, are several of the 7

See Gene E. Ogle, “Natural Movements and Dangerous Spectacles: Beatings, Duels, and ‘Play’ in Saint-Domingue,” in New World Orders: Violence, Sanction, and Authority in the Colonial Americas, ed. John Smolenski and Thomas J. Humphrey (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania, 2007), esp. 235–40.

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island’s largest demographic groups: women (of any race, free or enslaved), enslaved black male laborers, and free people of color.8 The account of the Fête Dieu celebration confirms the exclusion of women, black, and mixedrace people from public celebrations and reifies male whiteness as the quality which determined participation in official collective experiences in the French colony.9 The colonial context is unambiguous about the race and gender required for inclusion into le public – a characteristic that is implicit in the metropole, yet explicit and increasingly codified on the island. Fast forward two decades to when a young lieutenant, Clément Delafosse de Rouville, was sent to Port-au-Prince. In the 1780s, the city was the administrative capital of Saint-Domingue and an important hub of military and commercial activity. Years later, after the fall of Napoleon and riding the Bourbon Restoration’s wave of aristocratic energy, the antirepublican de Rouville published his memoirs in the form of an Éloge to his former commander in Saint-Domingue, Colonel Thomas-Antoine de Mauduit du Plessis (or Mauduit-Duplessis), followed by an Essai sur La Situation de Saint-Domingue à cette époque.10 The Éloge centers on the death of Mauduit-Duplessis, who in 1791 was dragged through the streets, mutilated, and killed by French soldiers under his command because he had refused to recognize the new government in Paris. De Rouville, who avoided his own death by means of deception and disguise, recalls Mauduit-Duplessis’ murder as a procession of violence and brutality that ultimately turned theatrical when men from the Artois division stripped the colonel of his service medals and uniform, which were then “portés en triomphe dans les bals et les comédies” (worn triumphantly to balls and the theater) by his military assassins.11 De Rouville’s depiction of French soldiers murdering their commander, severing his head, and wearing his uniform to the theater differs from his take on the purpose and importance of theatrical performance and theatergoing 8

James McClellan writes that enslaved people constituted nearly 90 percent of the population, with the rest split almost evenly between white residents and free people of color. See James E. McClellan III, Colonialism and Science: Saint Domingue in the Old Regime (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 48. 9 This is not to say that enslaved and free people of color did not participate in the event but that their presence was dismissed, downplayed, and largely unrecorded in official documentation at the time. 10 Clément Delafosse de Rouville, Éloge historique du Chevalier Mauduit-Duplessis, suivi d’un Essai sur La Situation de Saint-Domingue à cette époque (Senlis: Tremblay, 1817). 11 Ibid., 46. The account of Mauduit-Duplessis’ death became fully theatricalized in 1800 when it was staged by Marsollier de Vivetières in La mort du Colonel Mauduit ou Les Anarchistes au Port-auPrince, fait historique en un acte et en prose (Paris: Cailleau, an VIII [1800]). In Marsollier de Vivetières’ play, Mauduit-Duplessis is presented as a martyr and his death is far less gruesome.

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elsewhere in his memoirs. In his Essai sur la Situation de Saint-Domingue à cette époque, de Rouville details the urban planning of Port-au-Prince, where he spent most of his time, and of Cap-Français, where he was often sent on mission. He describes the architecture of different theaters on the island, contrasting the stage in Port-au-Prince, which he insists is “fort simple” (quite modest) and embedded into local white Creole culture and customs, to the Comédie in Le Cap, which he associates with that city’s metropolitan French political, economic, and military institutions.12 By 1791, the colony was rife with political uncertainty, rebellions of enslaved people, and threats of English attack. That year, residents of Portau-Prince were witness to the procession of enlisted soldiers dragging the body of the aristocratic Mauduit-Duplessis down the street, the colonel’s head leading the way on a pike that the soldiers used to menace any sympathizers of the nobility left in the ranks. The cortege then arrived at the bottom of a hill near the harbor, and Mauduit-Duplessis’ corpse was turned over to a crowd of local women. One of the women, an “épouse d’un pêcheur” (fisherman’s wife), sat on the headless Colonel’s chest, took out a fishing knife, cut off his “marques de la virilité” (marks of virility), and triumphantly marched away with them in her hand.13 French soldiers inflicting tremendous harm and fear on other French soldiers and class war carried out inside the military: this is a very different military procession, performance, and representation from what is recounted in institutional military archives. Mauduit-Duplessis’ gruesome death did not make it into official obituaries, which concentrate mostly on his valor during the American Revolution when, as a young engineer and friend of George Washington, he instigated the strategic reconfiguration of Fort Mercer (New Jersey) and helped defeat the Hessian forces at Red Bank.14 De Rouville’s narration of violent intra-military performances of disaccord provides an alternative reading to the ordered performances of civil–martial solidarity and spectacle in eyewitness reports from earlier decades. SaintDomingue in 1791 was a different place than it had been several years prior. This type of politically motivated violence was widespread in the Caribbean during the 1790s when the French Revolution added ideological complexity and new affinities to an already volatile region of dissent, inequality, and rebellion. But the startling differences between these two “parades” mask an important similarity. As in the case of the Corpus Christi procession, De 12 14

De Rouville, Éloge historique, 105. 13 Ibid., 41–2. See the “Map and Description of Fort Mercer, Red Bank, Gloucester County, New Jersey,” Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia Library of Congress. https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/wpcontent/uploads/2015/03/Map.png. Accessed July 29, 2023.

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Rouville grounds colonial experiences in events occurring to and perpetuated by exclusively white participants, even if the orderly lines, collaboration, and orchestrated turn-taking of different units, grades, and squadrons devolve into the violent chaos of a revolutionary moment. The performance ecosystem in 1791 Saint-Domingue was more politically turbulent than that of the 1760s, but it was unlike the situation in metropolitan France. Or, if this violence did mirror what was happening in Europe, it was perpetuated in front of a radically different public. The colony’s largest and most subjugated group – people of color –were never incorporated with vigor into the colony’s cultural and political institutions. The national–military phenomenon failed in Saint-Domingue because most of the population was simply left out. At the end of the eighteenth century, the French military–theatrical complex in Saint-Domingue was a memory, even as France started pouring thousands of troops onto the island in a desperate attempt to hold on to its so-called perle des Antilles. Gone were the double-feature days at the theater in Port-au-Prince or the anticipated arrival of metropolitan starlets at the Comédie du Cap-Français. The auditoriums in both cities were memories, having been burned to the ground along with countless other colonial buildings and aspirations. And even the Revolution’s military and theatrical stars failed to shine in the Caribbean. Joseph Arné, the young soldierhero who introduced this book, and perhaps the personification of France’s national–military phenomenon in theater, had a rather unspectacular demise in Saint-Domingue. The Bastille-storming grenadier and protagonist of early Revolutionary plays was, along with most young French men, sent to the front in 1792. After successful campaigns across the Rhine, against Vendée rebels, and then in Italy, he was captured while serving in Napoleon’s short-lived occupation of Egypt. After his release, he joined General Charles Victoire Emmanuel Leclerc’s expeditionary force to reinstate slavery and quell what military leaders viewed as an inferior army of insubordinate former slaves and subjects of color. Like Leclerc and thousands of other French men, Arné failed to find glory on the battlefield, but died in a sick tent, riddled with yellow fever.15 By 1802, Saint-Domingue was no longer a challenging but potentially lucrative and exciting endeavor for French soldiers, but an impossible war zone where the values of equality, liberty, and freedom characterized not the formerly revolutionary French but their soon-to-be Haitian adversaries. The French 15

Arné’s story appears in several sources, notably in G. Lenotre’s (Théodore Gosselin’s) collection of essays from the early twentieth century. See G. Lenotre, La Révolution française (Paris: Grasset, 2010), 440. A more recent article confirms this trajectory; see Daniel Bienmiller, “Arné, le dolois de la Bastille,” Cahiers dolois 8 (1989), 11–12.

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national–military theatrical phenomenon was part of the colonial project. It was tested, and it failed, in Saint-Domingue, owing to the deep-seated inequality in colonial life and France’s inability to recognize and correct the glaring paradoxes of its supposedly universal Revolution.

Archiving the Repertoire Not all theatrical performances in the colonies, provincial France, or Paris were influenced by military culture. It is crucial not to overstate the magnitude of military–theatrical interactions merely because it was the goal of this book to find them. There are realities that call into question the potency and pervasiveness of the military–theatrical complex such as the cost of boxes at the theater, which were prohibitively expensive for many officers serving in the Caribbean and in provincial France.16 Other mitigating factors include the facts that the majority of (but not all) theater directors and theater journalists were civilians, not soldiers; that monied civilian urban populations, not the military, were at the origin of many theatrical projects in metropolitan France and its colonies; and that there were numerically more civilians than soldiers at the theater, given that women attended plays but, aside from the cases discussed in Chapter 5, they did not serve in the military. The military’s actual role in theatrical life is difficult to quantify and easy to exaggerate because the French armed forces have always been particularly adept at writing things down. Those caveats aside, I hope this book has proven that the relations between the French military and public theater and performance changed and proliferated during the second half of the eighteenth century and as the French national project crystallized in the Revolution. Dramatic authors incorporated, often deliberately and tactfully, military themes, strategies, and personnel into the crux of their plays and performance events. These were social interventions into questions of political representation, gender dynamics, and geopolitics. Members of the military constituted a significant public in colonial and metropolitan theaters and, as such, soldiers influenced how theater was experienced in those locales. Soldiers and sailors in Saint-Domingue, Brest, Metz, Arras, and elsewhere on the militarized French periphery were often far from the places they considered home, and thus attended performances and events as military men. Military cultures shaped everything from 16

Boris Lesueur, Les Troupes coloniales d’Ancien Régime: Fidetilate per Mare et Terras (Paris: SPM Kronos, 2014), 255.

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dramatic repertoires to theater finances to the performance environments of colonial and provincial cities. All in all, the “military element” created flashpoints of innovative artistic creation and it increased accessibility to theaters throughout the French-speaking world. From an empirical position, this military approach to the stage provides more data on eighteenth-century theatrical cultures. For example, it helps describe how some theaters across the empire were funded, complicating purely market-driven rationales of provincial and colonial theater management. This approach also helps reveal the local, regional, and international power networks (and their associated tensions) and encourages the development of new comparative frameworks for studying theatrical life. Rather than viewing theaters in Port-au-Prince, Brest, Metz, or Cap-Français as inferior emulative models of Parisian tastes and practices, military–theatrical interactions can speak to the specificity of performance in these places or connect certain traits of military performance environments to related spaces of military–theatrical interaction. This study has highlighted flows of theater professionals and dramatic texts, and not necessarily with all roads leading to and from the French capital. Brest–Le Cap was one of the comparisons studied at length in this book, but potentially, with further inquiry, scholars could follow soldiers, actors, and cultural intermediaries from and to other sites: Rochefort to Port-au Prince, Besançon to Strasbourg, Kingston to Le Cap, or Saint-Pierre to Havana, to name a few.17 From a critical perspective, military–theatrical interactions generate information about the colonial theatrical archive – the “supposedly enduring materials” that build knowledge of theatrical practices, institutions, and relations in what are still understudied geographical areas.18 In the colonial context, military–theatrical engagements show efforts to uphold, foster, and police predominantly white-centric practices and experiences such as public theater, as well as the associated assumptions, tensions, and impossibilities inherent to those efforts. In France and its empire, the overlaps between military and theatrical cultures provide glimpses of “embodied memory” – a “repertoire” of performances, gestures, orality, movement, and practices that often elude the institutional archives and 17

18

A drive to connect Caribbean spaces with different cultural, colonial, and linguistic histories is the driving force behind Julia Prest’s newly formed research group, the Colonial-Era Caribbean Theatre and Opera Network (CECTON). For more information, see https://cecton.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk. Accessed March 30, 2023. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 20.

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traditional historiographies both of dramatic literature and of the military.19 Accounts of social performances and embodied acts at the time can be entered into dialogue with institutional archives and other sources to reveal a more holistic vision of theater and performance, and of their articulations with power, coloniality, repression, revolution, and violence across the eighteenth-century Francosphere.20 More analysis of military–theatrical overlaps will dislodge eighteenthcentury French theater studies from normative models of theatrical experience, which, through an implied ideal spectatorial experience and a persistent emphasis on dramatic textuality, continue to this day. Cities with powerful military apparatuses boasted rich theatrical cultures that were both reinforced and complicated by high concentrations of theaterphilic soldiers and sailors. This book has revealed eager soldier-spectators and grandiose displays of military might, but also deeply aggressive performance environments, violent examples of military brutality and disaccord, and, in the case of Saint-Domingue, an exclusionary space with racism and inequality embedded into every social performance. These tensions combined with

Figure C.1 Image of Sarah Bernhardt’s visit to Boucq, near Verdun, where she gave six performances for troops during the First World War. Agié, Jacques. Le théâtre dans le parc du château. Boucq (Meurthe-et-Moselle, 1916). ©Jacques Agié/ECPAD/ Public Domain/Images de la Défense/SPA 21X775. 19 20

Ibid., 20. Combining archival information with testimony on the performances of soldiers can help enable us to construct something like a colonial military–theatrical séance – a sort of dispositive that binds certain groups and identities to the same physical space and at least some of the same experiences and stimuli while also highlighting their differences, tensions, and anxieties. See Christian Biet, “Séance, Performance, Assemblée et Représentation: Les jeux de regards au théâtre (XVIIe–XXIe siècle).” Littératures classiques 82, no. 3 (2013), 79–81.

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other features of eighteenth-century urban life to constitute a series of unique military performance ecosystems. This type of site-specific analysis decenters French theater studies from Paris’ state-sponsored venues and exposes several of the most important power relations and social anxieties that informed and complicated any sort of collective performance experience in the militarized French periphery. The military–theatrical complex in France and its Caribbean empire was grounded in the political turbulence of the late eighteenth century. Soldiers, of course, continued to enjoy theater in the nineteenth century and beyond. The army, especially under Napoleon, employed actors and other theater professionals for purposes of diplomacy, cultural transfer, and (forced) nation-building.21 In the twentieth century, the military was a source of income for traveling actors and musical shows – a practice made famous during the First World War by Sarah Bernhardt’s performances at a makeshift theater next to the Verdun trenches (see Figure C.1), and then, in the Second World War, by groups such as the United Service Organization (USO). Military bases continue to sponsor dramatic troupes and host theater festivals, despite the decline of theatrical performance visà-vis other forms of entertainment.22 Simulation training exercises are standard components of a military education, historical battle reenactment societies thrive all over the world, and theater practitioners devise new pieces about contemporary conflicts as well as stage more “standard” plays from the repertoire in today’s war zones.23 Contemporary military– theatrical overlaps are remnants of a dynamic military–theatrical complex in eighteenth-century France, where the army and navy created unique theater experiences, enabled impressive urban planning projects, helped devise new dramatic genres and performance techniques, and marshalled the power of theatrical performance to build community around war. 21

22

23

For an example of how Napoleon sought to employ theater for political goals in occupied territories (but without much success), see Rahul Markovits, “Sociopolitique des genres: La ComédieFrançaise à Erfurt, ou du mauvais usage de la tragédie (1808),” Revue d’histoire politique 8, no. 3 (2012): 67–80. For example, the TOPPERs (Tournament of Plays for US Army and Air Force Theater Programs across Europe) awards are held every April at a US base in Germany. The awards are designed “to recognize outstanding achievement in the entertainment field programs [. . .] and thank the thousands of soldiers, civilians, and family members who provide hundreds of thousands of volunteer hours putting on live theater events in their overseas military communities.” See www .armymwr.com/ArmyEuropeEntertainment/toppers-awards. Accessed July 25, 2022. A recent example is the Garmyder theater in Lutsk, Ukraine. The troupe uses theater and staged dialogue to understand and heal victims of the Russian invasion. See Blair Ruble’s blog post, “The Healing Potential of Community Theater as Seen in Ukraine’s Lutsk,” which is part of the Wilson Center’s The Arts of War: Ukrainian Artists Confront Russia series. www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post /healing-potential-community-theater-seen-ukraines-lutsk. Accessed August 8, 2022.

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Index

affective bonds among spectators, 46–7 Agamben, Georgio, 11 Anglais à Bordeaux, L’ (Favart), 27 Arné, Joseph, 1–2, 140, 227 Arnould, Jean-François, 58 Asselin, Simon, 58 Bara, Joseph, 199–201, 202, 214, See also Barra, ou La Mère républicaine (Villiers); La Mort du jeune Barra (Briois) Bara, Marie-Anne, 202, See also Barra, ou La Mère républicaine (Villiers) Barra, ou La Mère républicaine (Villiers), 211–18 Bastille, storming of, 1, 139, 140 Belloy, Pierre-Laurent de, 5–6, See also Le Siège de Calais (de Belloy) médaille royale for dramatists awarded to, 20 Œuvres complètes, 48 popularity of, 31 Bernhardt, Sarah, 231 Bertin d’Antilly, August-Louis, 153 Biet, Christian, 10–12 Blaise et Babet ou la suite des trois fermiers (Dezède), 132 Boismartin, Antoine Vieillard, 156 Bonnet, Jean-Claude, 47 Brest. See also Théâtre de la Marine (Brest) as naval port, 103–4 theatrical history of, 104–7 Bret-Vitoz, Renaud, 47 Brigands de La Vendée, Les (Boullaut), 153–4 Briois (citoyen), 203–4 Campbell, Peter, 39 Cap-Français (Le Cap), history of, 127–9 capital punishment for desertion, 61 censorship, 29 Chénier, Marie-Joseph, 161–2 Choiseul, Étienne-François de (duc de Choiseul), 4, 27–9, 106 Choquet de Lindu, Antoine, 109–11

Chroniques (de Froissart), 32 citizen armies in Revolutionary France, 142–5 citoyennes, 17, 144–5, 197–8 civilian–soldier interactions. See military–theatrical experiences; military–theatrical interactions Clément, 132 Coat, Jacques-Yves Le, 103 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, 127 colonial Caribbean theaters. See also Comédie du Cap (Cap-Français) end of, 227–8 recent scholarship on, 99–102, 129 segregation in, 125–7, 134–5, 221–2 colonial context military reform in, 127–8 military–theatrical experiences in, 12–13, 16–17, 101–2 public processions in Saint-Domingue, 223–5 theater and society in Saint-Domingue, 118–22 colonial paradox, 122 comedic portrayal of soldiers, 60 Comédie du Cap (Cap-Français), 16, 93, 129–35 history of, 122–7 performances, list of, 130–2 segregation in, 125–7, 134–5 Committee of Public Safety, 196 community building via reenactment, 163–5 conservatism in Revolutionary France, 217–18 cosmopolitanism in patriotism, 42–4 Cosmopolite, Le (Monbron), 45 Counter-Enlightenment thought, patriotism in, 44–6 critical reviews of French Revolution theater, 158–60 of Le Siège de Calais (de Belloy), 29–31 Danton, Georges, 196 Dauberval, Jean, 58 David, Jacques-Louis, 161–2 death penalty for desertion, 61

250

Index Décius français (de Rosoi), 27–8 democratization of theater, 60 Demonville, ou les Vendéens soumis (Privat), 156 Départ des volontaires villageois pour les frontières, Le (Lavallée), 167–71 Déserteur, Le (Dauberval), 58 Déserteur, Le (Gardel), 58 Déserteur, Le (Mercier), 16, 56–7, 65–6, 148–9 conclusion of, 88–90 critique of war, 80–3 Déserteur, Le(Patrat), comparison, 78–90 emotional bonds in, 72–3 masculinity in, 71–2, 83–8 moral lessons of, 73–4 premiere of, 93, 100–1 social classes in, 83–8 soldier’s humanity in, 71 synopsis of, 70–1 versions of Déserteur, Le (Patrat), 9, 65–6 conclusion of, 88–90 critique of war, 80–3 Déserteur, Le (Mercier), comparison, 78–90 Enlightenment and military reform, 90 masculinity in, 74–9, 83–8 premiere of, 103, 116–17 purpose of, 74 religion in, 79–80 social classes in, 76–8, 83–8 Déserteur, Le (Sedaine, Monsigny), 56, 68–70 “Déserteur effect,” 58–9, 92 Déserteur, ou le contentement passe richesse (Robineau “Beaunoir”), 57 Déserteurs du Parnasse, Les (1771), 57 desertion, 16 debate on causes of, 9 military reform and, 60–4 punishments for, 61 desertion plays, 56–9, See also Déserteur, Le comparative analysis, 78–90 military culture and, 65–8 Desmarres, Jean-Baptiste, 215 Dezède, Nicolas, 132 Dictionnaire of the Académie française (1762), 41–2 Diderot, Denis, 30–1 Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC), 100 Discipline républicaine, La (Valcourt, Foignet), 154 domesticity in Revolutionary France, 180, 218 in Barra, ou La Mère républicaine (Villiers), 211–18 mère révolutionnaire, 199–203 in La Mort du jeune Barra (Briois), 203–11 Dragons français et les Hussards prussiens, Les (Villiers), 156

251

drame, 9, 36, See also Déserteur, Le (Mercier) Dumouriez, General, 195–6 de Durfort, Emmanuel-Félicité (duc de Duras), 21 École du soldat, ou Les remords du déserteur français, L’ (1768), 56 education programs in Revolutionary France, 165–7 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 7–9 émigré army in Revolutionary France, 144 emotional bonds in Le Déserteur (Mercier), 72–3 émulation pedagogy, 166 English army, comparison with French army, 62 Enlightenment masculinity and, 75–6 military reform and, 63–4, 90 patriotism in, 42–4 Entrée de Dumourier à Bruxelles, ou Les Vivandiers, L’ (de Gouges), 180, 188–96 Essai sur la situation de Saint-Domingue à cette époque (de Rouville), 226 Estaing, Charles Henri Hector d’, 49–50 event plays. See military-event plays events, performances as, 10–12, 17, 160–3 experiences. See military–theatrical experiences family in Le Siège de Calais, Le (de Belloy), 35–7 Favart, Charles-Simon, 27 Federalist Revolts, 203 Femme déserteur, La (Asselin), 58 Ferlig, Félicité and Théophile, 191 Ferron de La Ferronnays, Étienne-Louis, 119 festivals, military-event plays as part of, 160–3 La Fête du Grenadier, 1, 140 Foucault, Michel, 10 Fouchard, Jean, 99, 129, 132–3 free performances of Le Siège de Calais (de Belloy), 46–7 French Revolution citizen armies in, 142–5 Haitian Revolution and, 222 mère révolutionnaire in, 199–203 militant citizenship of women, 196–8 recent scholarship on women and gender, 185–6 rights feminism, 183, 188–96 separation thesis on gender, 182–3, 184–5, 209 French Revolution theater, 139 Barra, ou La Mère républicaine (Villiers), 211–18 context of, 18 critical reviews of, 158–60 education programs resulting from, 165–7 Entrée du Dumourier à Bruxelles, ou Les Vivandiers, L’(de Gouges), 188–96

252

Index

French Revolution theater (cont.) gender and, 181–2 masculinity in, 178–9 military-event plays, 150–6 military volunteerism and recruitment in, 167–74 Mort du jeune Barra, La (Briois), 203–11 national–military phenomenon, 140–2 Old-Regime theater comparisons, 13–15, 17, 148–50 performances as events, 160–3 political goals of, 176–7 proliferation of, 146–8 reenactment as community building, 163–5 “total theater for total war,”, 172–4 women’s role in, 17, 179–80, 218 Fréron, Elie-Catherine, 19, 56 de Froissart, Jean, 32 Gardel, Maximilien, 58 gender. See also masculinity; women recent scholarship on French Revolution, 185–6 research questions regarding, 6 separation thesis, 182–3, 184–5, 209 war and, 181–2 glory, ideology of, 179 de Gouges, Olympe, 180, 187–8, 191, 196 Grimm, Melchior, 19 Guerre de Vendée, La (Thiébaut), 156 Haitian Revolution, 222 Harny de Guerville, Charles, 1, 151–2 d’Héméry, Joseph, 27–8 heroism in Le Siège de Calais, Le (de Belloy), 47–8 Hilliard d’Auberteuil, Michel René, 134–5 honor codes, 77 humanity (of soldiers) in Le Déserteur (Mercier), 71 Hundred Years’ War, 22, 27, 32, 45 inclusion in military–theatrical experiences, 221 intellectual agency in Le Siège de Calais (de Belloy), 35 Jaucourt, Louis de, 42 Julien et Susette, traduction nègre de Blaise et Babet (Clément), 132 Kershaw, Baz, 2 Knowles, Charles, 127 Lavallée, Joseph, 167–71 Leclerc, Charles Victoire Emmanuel, 227 Léon, Pauline, 197

levées en masse, 144 Liberté conquise, La (Harny de Guerville), 1, 140, 151–2, 155, 159 Louis XVI, execution of, 202 Marin, François-Louis, 27–8 masculinity in Le Déserteur (Mercier), 71–2, 74–9, 83–8 in Le Déserteur (Patrat), 83–8 in French Revolution theater, 178–9 in La Mort du jeune Barra (Briois), 207–8 politeness and, 75–6 Mauduit-Duplessis, Thomas-Antoine de, 225–7 médaille royale for dramatists, 20 Mehegan, Colonel, 49 Mercier, Louis-Sébastien, 9, See also Déserteur, Le (Mercier) inspiration for writing Le Déserteur, 56–7 on patriotism, 41 mère révolutionnaire, 199–203 metadiscourse on war in military reform, 63 metropolitan France city populations, 123 military–theatrical experiences in, 12–13 militant citizenship, 196–8 military culture binding elements in, 66–7 in Le Déserteur (Sedaine, Monsigny), 68–70 desertion plays and, 65–8 difficulties in forging, 66 in Old Regime, 59–68 Military Enlightenment, 62 military-event plays critical reviews of, 158–60 examples of, 150–6 performances as events, 160–3 reenactment as community building, 163–5 military reform in colonial areas, 127–8 Enlightenment and, 63–4, 90 nobility and, 64–5 in Old Regime, 60–4 principles of, 63 in Revolutionary France, 142–5 theater, effect on, 4–5 military–industrial complex, 7–9 military–theatrical complex comedic portrayal of soldiers, 60 democratization in, 60 end in Saint-Domingue, 227–8 goals of, 9–10, 92–3 military–industrial complex, coined from, 7–9 in nineteenth and twentieth centuries, 231 Old-Regime and French Revolution theater comparisons, 13–15, 17

Index terminology usage, 9 women’s role in, 17 military-theatrical experiences. See also French Revolution theater; performance environments in colonial context, 12–13, 16–17, 101–2 Comédie du Cap (Cap-Français), 129–35 defined, 9 discord in, 10 event plays, 150–6 fragmentation in Old Regime, 135–9 inclusion in, 221 in metropolitan France, 12–13 national–military phenomenon, 140–2 in nineteenth century, 220–1 patriotism and, 55 performances as events, 10–12, 17 public processions in Saint-Domingue, 223–5 in Revolutionary France, 18, 146–8 in Saint-Domingue, 120–1, 221–2 Théâtre de la Marine (Brest), 103–18 military–theatrical interactions defined, 9 “Déserteur effect,”, 58–9, 92 parodies of Le Siège de Calais (de Belloy), 50–5 provincial theaters, military support for, 94–7 purpose of studying, 229–31 support for Le Siège de Calais (de Belloy), 48–50 synopsis of, 220, 228–9 Monsigny, Pierre-Alexandre, 56 Montesquieu on patriotism, 40 Moreau de Saint-Méry, Médéric Louis Élie, 125–7, 133, 135 Mort du jeune Barra, La (Briois), 203–11 national sentiment, comparison with nationalism, 38 nationalism, comparison with patriotism, 38 national–military phenomenon, 140–2, 150–6, 173–4 Nicolson (Jesuit priest), 135 nobility in Le Déserteur (Mercier), 76–8 military reform and, 64–5 in Le Siège de Calais (de Belloy), 33–5 Œuvres complètes (de Belloy), 48 Old Regime military culture in, 59–68 military reform in, 60–4, 144–5 patriotism in, 37–46 Old-Regime theater. See also Déserteur, Le; Siège de Calais (de Belloy) “Déserteur effect,” 58–9, 92

253

fragmented séances, 135–9 French Revolution theater comparisons, 13–15, 17, 148–50 Orateur du peuple (newspaper), 1 Palissot, Charles, 44–5 parodies of Le Siège de Calais (de Belloy), 50–5 Patrat, Joseph, 9, 16, 116–17 patrie, la. See patriotism Patrie (de Jaucourt), 42 patriotism cosmopolitanism in, 42–4 in Counter-Enlightenment thought, 44–6 definitions of, 41–3 in Enlightenment, 42–4 language of, 39 Mercier on, 41 military–theatrical experiences and, 55 Montesquieu on, 40 nationalism, compared, 38 in Old Regime, 37–46 in parodies of Le Siège de Calais (de Belloy), 50–5 in Le Siège de Calais (de Belloy), 22, 37–46 virtue and, 40 Voltaire on, 40–1 Patriotisme, ou Les Volontaires aux frontières, Le (Macors, Walter), 154 pedagogy in Revolutionary France, 165–7 performance environments, 90–1, See also colonial theaters; provincial theaters Comédie du Cap (Cap-Français), 122–7, 129–35 fragmentation in Old Regime, 135–9 Théâtre de la Marine (Brest), 103–18 performances as events, 10–12, 17, 160–3 Les Philosophes (Palissot), 44–5 physical training in military reform, 62 Picard, Louis-Benoît, 159–60 Pichichero, Christy, 62, 63 politeness, masculinity and, 75–6 political goals of French Revolution theater, 176–7 population of French cities, 123 premiere of Le Déserteur (Mercier), 93, 100–1 of Le Déserteur (Patrat), 103 of Le Siège de Calais (de Belloy), 27–32, 124 Prest, Julia, 99, 129 Primtemps, Corporal, 48–9 Prise de Toulon, La (Picard), 159–60 Prise de Toulon par les Français, La (Bertin d’Antilly), 153 propaganda, 29 Protestantism in Le Déserteur (Patrat), 79–80

254

Index

Raffard, J. S., 172–3 Rancière, Jacques, 1, 18 recruitment and volunteerism in French Revolution theater, 167–74 reenactment as community building, 163–5 religion in Le Déserteur (Patrat), 79–80 Republican womanhood, 217–18 Retour et kes effets du Siège de Calais, Le (“Monsieur M.”), 50–5 Revolutionary France theater. See French Revolution theater Revolutionary rights feminism, 183, 188–96 Robespierre, Maximilien, 155, 199–201, 215 Robineau, Antoine-Louis-Bertrand (“Beaunoir”), 57 de Roquefeuil, Aymar Joseph, 106–9 de Rosoi, Firmin (or Farmian), 27–8 de Rouville, Delafosse, 225–7

heroism in, 47–8 inspiration for, 21–2 military support for, 48–50 national themes in, 32–7 parodies of, 50–5 patriotism in, 22, 37–46 popularity of, 19–21 premiere of, 27–32, 124 public engagement with, 33 social classes in, 33–5 synopsis of, 22–6 Siège de Rouen, Le (Boismartin), 156 slavery in Saint-Domingue, 119–20, See also colonial context social classes democratization of theater, 60 in Le Déserteur (Mercier), 76–8, 83–8 in Le Déserteur (Patrat), 83–8 in Le Retour et les effets du Siège de Calais (“Monsieur M.”), 53–5 in Le Siège de Calais (de Belloy), 33–5 Société des citoyennes républicaines révolutionnaires, 197–8 soldier–civilian interactions. See military–theatrical experiences; military–theatrical interactions

Saint-Domingue, 18 demographics of, 119 history of Cap-Français, 127–9 Mauduit-Duplessis’ murder, 225–7 military–theatrical complex, end of, 227–8 military–theatrical experiences, context of, 12–13, 16–17, 101–2 public processions in, 223–5 segregation in theaters, 125–7, 134–5, 221–2 Siège de Calais, Le (de Belloy), publication in, 49–50 slavery in, 119–20 theater and society in, 118–22 Salic Law, 22, 24 séance (theatrical), 10, 135–9 Sedaine, Michel-Jean, 56 segregation in Saint-Domingue theater experiences, 125–7, 134–5, 221–2 separation thesis, 182–3, 184–5, 209 Seven Years’ War, 16, 45, 62, 128, 145 Siège de Calais, Le (de Belloy), 5–6, 16, 19–55, 148–9 critical reviews of, 29–31 family in, 35–7 free performances, 46–7 French setting of, 32–3 government intervention in production of, 27–9

Talleyrand, Charles-Maurice, 117 theater and war. See also military–theatrical complex military reform, effect on, 4–5 overlap between, 2–3 relationship between, 157–8 in Revolutionary France, 142–8 Theater of War Productions, 2 theaters. See performance environments théâtre de l’actualité, 152 Théâtre de la Marine (Brest), 16, 93, 103–18 Choquet de Lindu as architect, 109–11 Comédie du Cap (Cap-Français), comparison, 102–3 conflict concerning, 116 demise of, 117–18 military support for, 110–13 premiere of Le Déserteur (Patrat), 103, 116–17 de Roquefeuil’s support for, 106–9 selection of shows, 115–16 Thérepsicore project, 98 TOPPERs (Tournament of Plays for US Army and Air Force Theater Programs across Europe), 231 “total theater for total war,” 172–4, 220 “total war,” defined, 143 Treaty of Paris (1763), 128

provincial theaters difficulty of studying, 98 military support for, 94–7 Théâtre de la Marine (Brest), 103–18 Thérepsicore project, 98 Prussian army, comparison with French army, 62 public processions in Saint-Domingue, 223–5 punishments for desertion, 61

Index Vauxhalls, 109–11 Vétéran, ou Le Bucheron Déserteur, Le (Arnould), 58 Viala, Agricole, 199 Victoire de Pont de Lodi, La (1797), 154 Vie du soldat français (1805), 156 Villiers, Nicole-Mathieu, 211 virtue, patriotism and, 40 Volontaires en route, ou l’Enlèvement des cloches, Les (Raffard), 172–3 Voltaire on patriotism, 40–1 volunteerism and recruitment in French Revolution theater, 167–74 war and gender, 181–2 war and theater. See also military-theatrical complex

255

military reform, effect on, 4–5 overlap between, 2–3 relationship between, 157–8 in Revolutionary France, 142–8 Washington, George, 226 women. See also domesticity in Revolutionary France in L’Entrée de Dumourier à Bruxelles, ou Les Vivandiers (de Gouges), 188–96 mère révolutionnaire, 199–203 militant citizenship, 196–8 recent scholarship on French Revolution, 185–6 Republican womanhood, 217–18 Revolutionary rights feminism, 183, 188–96 role in military theater, 17, 179–80, 218 separation thesis, 182–3, 184–5, 209