Children of the Revolution

by Robert Gildea

  A THEATRE FOR ALL SEASONS

  In the theatre, as in the publishing market, there was a hierarchy of genres, and this was formalized by Napoleon for political reasons. The function of the theatre was to entertain, but it was also a vehicle for political comment and criticism. During the Revolution the politics of the theatre had often run out of control and Napoleon reasserted order with a decree of 1807 which arranged the theatre according to type of production and placed it under close supervision.38 At the top of the pile was the state-subsidized theatre, the Théâtre Français, otherwise known as the Comédie Française, where classical tragedy and the great comedies of Molière were played, the stage of tragic actors such as Talma and Mlle Mars.39 The Odéon performed Molière’s prose plays, such as Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, and added Shakespeare in 1827. Below these were the tolerated popular houses, each allotted its own genre. The Porte Saint-Martin Theatre was allowed to perform melodramas, the Théâtre de la Gaïté pantomimes, watched by ‘fat, good-humoured market women, laughing fit to burst and fanning themselves with six-sous fans they had bought at the theatre itself’,40 while the Variétés and the Vaudeville were given over to farces. At the very working-class Funambules mime king Jean-Gaspard Bureau played Pierrot in harlequinades six times a day and nine times on Sundays, for 4 sous a throw.41 The flea-pits of the popular quarters of Paris were at the bottom of the heap, strung out along the boulevard du Temple, commonly known as the boulevard du Crime on account of the dark gallows humour of its repertoire and the amount of blood shed on stage.

  The strict hierarchy devised by Napoleon was gradually subverted by the evolution of genres and the changing tastes of the public. The mannered, declamatory style of the Comédie Française was not adapted to the passion of the new Romantic plays and fell out of favour with writers and the public. Juste Olivier, a budding Swiss man of letters visiting Paris in 1830, saw Hernani there, and found Mlle Mars ‘a little too old, at fifty-one’ to play the leading lady.42 Alexandre Dumas, frustrated with the failure of Mlle Mars to give him the expression he wanted for the adulterous wife in Antony, moved his play to the Porte Saint-Martin and hired the thirty-three-year-old and more passionate Marie Dorval.43 The Porte Saint-Martin, whose public of shop-assistants had hounded out the English touring company performing Othello in English in 1822, throwing apples and coins, now became the preferred venue for Dumas and Hugo. It steadily became more bourgeois, attracting a mixed audience from the beautiful ladies of the Chaussée d’Antin, hiding behind their fans, via the middle classes to a section of the literate working classes.44

  There was much circulation of material and actors between the different theatres and there was a downgrading or trickle-down effect whereby material from the elite theatres was reworked for the more popular ones. Pastiches of Hugo’s Hernani were being performed at the Vaudeville and Variétés in 1830, poking fun at the Romantics, within a very short time of the first performances for which the Romantic army was mobilized.45 Similarly an actor such as Frédéric Lemaître went from the Porte Saint-Martin to the Folies Dramatiques on the boulevard du Crime in 1834 to star as gentleman crook and popular hero Robert Macaire. ‘He parodied himself,’ wrote the theatre critic Jules Janin, ‘and the public applauded the wit of this man who now repudiated his glorious past.’46 There was also, however, a capillary action by which material and actors moved up to more respectable theatres. Marie Dorval, who had played opposite Lemaître at the Porte Saint-Martin, went on to play Phèdre at the Opéra-Comique in 1842, a tragic role for which she was however ill suited. Henri Monnier, a pupil of Gros who had excelled in artists’ studio productions, invented and played the character of Monsieur Prudhomme, the quintessential bourgeois, for the Vaudeville in 1831, and took it revamped as the Grandeur and Decadence of Monsieur Prudhomme to the Odéon in 1853. It was a caricature of the bourgeoisie for the bourgeoisie itself. Prudhomme, for Gautier, was ‘the synthesis of bourgeois stupidity. How his fat lips drop leaden aphorisms which make one terrified of common sense.’47

  The embourgeoisement of the theatre reached its climax in the middle of the century. The theatres of the boulevard du Crime were demolished in 1862 during the Haussmannization of Paris, an attack on a genre which was always feared for its ability to nurture violent emotions. The Comédie Française struck back after 1838 with the discovery of a brilliant tragic actress, Élisa-Rachel Félix, known simply as Rachel, the daughter of a Jewish pedlar from Switzerland who made her debut playing Hermione in Racine’s Andromaque and pursued a vertiginous but brief career.48 ‘Racine and Corneille were revived among us as during the great century of Louis XIV,’ recalled Dr Véron, director of the Comédie Française, ‘a feverish popularity surrounded the young tragedian and old tragedy.’49 Rachel’s greatest role was Racine’s Phèdre, ‘the mere announcement of this tragedy,’ noted one critic, ‘no matter how frequently repeated, sufficing to attract half the playgoers of Paris to the doors of the Théâtre Français’.50 Exhausted by tours of the United States and Egypt, she died in 1858 aged only thirty-seven.

  Much of the other half of the Paris public, meanwhile, would be at the Gymnase Theatre, where Rachel had begun her theatrical career in 1837. This had been founded in 1820 and was known as the Theatre of Madame because it received the patronage of the Duchesse de Berry, whose husband was assassinated that year. The theatre was dominated by the talent of Eugène Scribe, a silk-merchant’s son who wrote 182 plays for the Gymnase Theatre, 107 in the 1820s and 68 between 1830 and 1848, accounting for 40 per cent of its productions. Like Dumas, he employed a number of collaborators to achieve this vast output, characterized by a tight plot, witty interaction and a fast pace. There was no political content but only gentle social satire, portraying the ambitions, rivalries and foibles of different elements of contemporary society.51 ‘The whole middle class and the distinguished part of society does not dream of anything better,’ wrote Sainte-Beuve in 1840. ‘One emerges neither too moved, nor too disoriented, as befits our contemporary passions and our affairs.’52 Scribe represented what was best about bourgeois theatre, offering a mirror for bourgeois society but offering no criticism, providing entertainment rather than literature.

  FROM POPULAR MUSIC TO

  GRAND OPERA

  The musical world also had its own hierarchy. At the popular end, in the first half of the nineteenth century, were the working-class singing clubs or goguettes, of which there were 300 in Paris in 1818 and 500 in 1836. A few, like the Lice, were closed to women, others were more familial, places where the populace went to drink, laugh and sing. Often the songs were political – republican, Bonapartist or socialist in sympathy – those of Béranger being particular favourites. His popular song, ‘Le Drapeau’, for example, celebrated the tricolour flag of the Revolution and Empire that was banned after the Restoration. Goguettes flourished in the revolutionary ferment of 1848 but after that the authorities clamped down, authorizing only sixty of them in 1849.53

  More salubrious, but equally successful, were the popular concerts that took off in Paris under the baton of French rivals of Johann Strauss. While high society danced at the Opéra or in the gardens of the Tuileries palace, Philippe Musard presented winter waltz nights at the Salle Valentino in the rue Saint-Honoré from 1833 and promenade concerts in a marquee on the Champs-Élysées from 1837, with an entry fee of 1 franc to keep out the rabble. Facing competition from Strauss in Paris he plied most of his trade in London after 1838. Meanwhile the director of concerts at the Turkish Garden was Louis-Antoine Jullien, whose father had been music director of the Papal Guards and who had been both a sailor and a soldier before undergoing a brief training at the Paris Conservatory and launching his concerts with the quadrille from The Huguenots. Where Musard was buttoned up, Julien was a showman, with seductive moustache and yellow gloves, an inveterate duellist and always in debt. Like Musard, he pursued his career in London after 1840, opening a space for Jacques Offenbach, who had written walzes for Jullien and made his reputation with operetta in
the Second Empire.54

  Until then, French comic opera was dominated by Eugène Scribe, who was not only a playwright but also a librettist, writing for the composers Daniel Auber and Adolphe Adam. Auber synthesized the Italian and French traditions and had a particular success in 1830 with Fra Diavolo, about the Neapolitan friar–bandit who had given Bonaparte’s forces such a hard time. ‘M. Scribe has created a kind of comic opera that is his alone,’ wrote Gérard de Nerval in 1844. ‘M. Auber sets this kind of literature to a fitting music which everyone is sure to like, and this witty and harmonious partnership brings forth a host of pleasant successes which will cease only when one of them dies.’55 In fact Scribe’s collaboration with Adam was equally successful, with such hits as the 1836 Postillon de Longjumeau, for which Jacques Offenbach played in the orchestra as a cellist. A third composer with whom Scribe worked was Giacomo Meyerbeer, of German-Jewish origin, who came from the Milan opera to stage Margaret of Anjou at the Opéra-Comique in 1826. Together Scribe and Meyerbeer developed a French grand opera, characterized by rich historical settings, lavish production and massive orchestration, produced not at the Opéra-Comique but at the more prestigious Opéra. Robert the Devil, staged in 1831, took a traditional folk story and made it into a vast medieval pageant, complete with dancing nuns, while The Huguenots, a Protestant–Catholic Romeo and Juliet set at the time of the St Bartholomew massacre, was put on in 1836. Combining material and musical extravagance, grand opera appealed to a broad bourgeois public. Robert the Devil completed 500 performances in 1868, and The Huguenots reached the same landmark in 1872.56

  PAINTING AND POLITICS

  Fine art, like the theatre, had a political dimension. The state was the most powerful patron of architecture, sculpture and painting, using them to dramatize its legitimacy. It was not a free medium, but was constrained by the artistic conventions laid down by the Academy of Fine Arts. In general this body required high-quality drawing, heightened colour and impeccable finish. It subscribed to an eternal and universal concept of beauty which could best be explored by taking models from the Ancient world or Ancient mythology. The artistic equivalent of the Opéra or Comédie Française was the Salon or exhibition held annually in the Louvre, an arena in which the great battles of artistic schools and individual reputations were fought out. The selection of works of art for the Salon was made by a jury, the composition of which was also a battlefield. During the Revolution access to the Salon was supposed to be equal, but even the artists demanded some kind of selection. Under the Empire the government took a leading role, then selection was devolved on to the Academy of Fine Arts, chaired until 1830 by the director of the Musée du Louvre. The public flocked to the Salon, especially for the opening. In 1830 Balzac described the ‘immense crowd’ around two paintings exhibited by an artist fresh from studying in Italy. ‘People were almost killing each other to get to the front. Speculators and great lords offered piles of gold coins, but the artist obstinately refused to sell, or to permit copies.’ Daumier caricatured the throng of the bourgeoisie in a number of lithographs. The critics also had their say, publishing their verdicts on the winners and losers in a wide range of reviews and newspapers.57

  Under Napoleon the Salon was almost eclipsed by the permanent exhibitions in the Louvre, which displayed for his own glory and the edification of the public the artistic treasures that he had sent back to Paris in baggage trains during his various conquests, from Italy to Germany and Spain. In order to legitimate his new Empire he secured the support of Jacques-Louis David, who had signed Louis XVI’s death-warrant and choreographed the festivals of Robespierre’s Republic, and commissioned him to execute a series of huge paintings for his palaces, depicting his coronation in Notre-Dame and the distribution of eagles of victory to his troops. The first was exhibited in the Salon of 1808, the second in that of 1810, and David was paid a fee of 77,000 francs. After Austerlitz Napoleon marked his victories by having a triumphal arch built at the Carrousel, at the entrance to the Tuileries, starting the Arc de Triomphe at the Étoile, which remained unfinished at his fall, and erecting a column on the model of Trajan’s column in the place Vendôme, in honour of the Grande Armée, unveiled on his birthday, 15 August 1810.58 To define his leadership and represent his military prowess and domination of Europe Napoleon harnessed the talent not only of David but of his pupils. David had painted Napoleon Crossing the Great Saint-Bernard in 1801, but his pupil Antoine-Jean Gros followed Bonaparte’s Army of Italy in 1796 and submitted the portrait of Bonaparte at Arcola to the Salon of 1799. Gros portrayed Napoleon as a king with a healing touch in Napoleon in the Pest-house of Jaffa, exhibited in 1804, and as a great military leader in his 1808 Battle of Eylau, foregrounded by the frozen bodies of men and horses. François Gérard provided the first portrait of Napoleon in imperial robes in 1805, and he triumphed with his Battle of Austerlitz, exhibited in the Salon of 1810. In the same Salon, from which Napoleon bought twenty paintings for 47,000 francs, Girodet exhibited the ferocious Revolt of Cairo, showing French soldiers putting down Mameluke rebels. Ten years younger than this cohort of David’s pupils, Ingres nevertheless worked alongside them, producing his own portrait of the emperor in imperial garb in 1806, before winning the Prix de Rome and going to work in Italy.59

  Under the Treaty of Vienna the art treasures plundered by Napoleon had to be returned to their place of origin. The Prussian army occupying Paris in July 1815 organized the return of art works to the German states, Metternich took care of Italy and the Duke of Wellington acted on behalf of the new Kingdom of the Netherlands. Even the restored King of Spain wanted his Murillos back. So upset was the director of the Louvre that he resigned in October 1815.60 The Louvre had to fall back on French painting, and in any case for political reasons the restored monarchy was keen to demonstrate the continuity of national art since 1789 and powers of royal patronage equal to those of Napoleon. Military painting was frowned upon as too gruesome, recalling the generation of war that was now over. David was exiled as a regicide to Brussels in 1816 and died in 1825, but his pupils Girodet, Gérard and Gros reinvented themselves as painters of the glories and sufferings of the monarchy and for the time being dominated the jury of the Salon. For the Salon of 1817, for example, Gérard exhibited The Entry of Henri IV into Paris, foreshadowing the restoration of the statue of Henri IV to its plinth on the Pont-Neuf in 1818, while Gros submitted his Departure of Louis XVIII for Ghent, marking the moment when the king learned of Napoleon’s return from Elba. Gros was made a baron not by Napoleon but by Charles X.

  This continuity and national perspective did not go unchallenged. Artists committed to Bonapartism celebrated the heroism of the National Guard who had defended Paris against the advancing Allies in 1814 and that of the soldiers of Waterloo. Nicolas-Toussaint Charlet, who had been one of those national guardsmen, depicted a Grenadier of Waterloo. Horace Vernet organized a private exhibition after his Barrier of Clichy, showing the same defence of Paris by the National Guard, and his Soldier of Waterloo were rejected by the Salon of 1822. The use of lithography meant that these iconic pictures could be reproduced on a mass basis and sold to veterans of Napoleon’s armies. Closely associated with these Bonapartist circles was Théodore Géricault, who returned from two years in Italy to produce a powerful lithograph of The Retreat from Russia in 1818. The following year, moved by the scandal of a shipwreck caused by a reckless noble captain bound for Senegal and the cutting adrift of survivors on a raft, Géricault submitted his dramatic Raft of the Medusa to the Salon. Representing a few desperate survivors among a pile of corpses on the raft waving at a passing sail, echoing the Last Judgements of Michelangelo and Rubens, it was variously heralded as a work of genius and a gratuitous descent into horror.61 The Salon of 1819 indeed marked a turning point. There was a breakthrough of ‘young artists who wanted to dethrone David and overthrow his school’, said the art critic Delécluze, himself a former pupil of David, ‘the nude was proscribed, the beautiful rejected, and the choice of subject
s from Antiquity absolutely condemned.’62 Prompted by Romantic poets and writers such as Lord Byron and Walter Scott, artists turned to the Middle Ages for an inspiration that was chivalric and religious. The so-called Troubadour school was in vogue, epitomized by the acclaim received by Louis Hersent for his Abdication of Gustave Vasa, a poignant rendering of a good Swedish king enjoining his people to preserve the unity he has built up. Even Ingres broke with the Antique in the period 1812–26, inspired by Raphael and enjoying success with his Vow of Louis XIII, exhibited in the Salon of 1824, recalling the moment in 1637 when the king committed France to the protection of the Virgin Mary in the hope of being granted an heir.

  The Romantic offensive continued through the 1820s. An artistic revolution was under way, as Romantic painters preferred life and movement to precise drawing, individual character and local colour to eternal beauty, and real historical context to the world of An tiquity and mythology. The movement was spearheaded by Eugène Delacroix. Delacroix, who was inspired by Géricault and mortified by his early death in 1824, painted not to display beauty but to express physical and mental anguish, his paintings full of movement, sensuality, exotic colour, executed with bold brushstrokes rather than the conventional fine finish. He owed much to Byron, and to contemporary events such as the Greek struggle for independence against the Turks with which Byron was involved. His Scenes from Massacres at Chios, exhibited in the Salon of 1824, portrayed the death and enslavement of Christian Greeks. The Salon of 1827 saw a head-on clash of Romantic painters and the classical school, the flame of which was now taken up by Ingres. Ingres exalted the Ancient world in his Apotheosis of Homer, in which his beloved Raphael and classical writers Corneille, Racine, Molière and La Fontaine paid homage to the great storyteller. Delacroix on the other hand exhibited a powerful painting drawn from Byron of the Assyrian king Sardanapalus waiting for death, surrounded by his harem, slaves and horses who are about to be engulfed in a funeral pyre.63