Historians often read dramatic works and novels for their content. But I wish to focus on the form of public performances in the same way that a literary critic would analyze a literary text in terms of its structure and genre. Genre can be seen as a set of rules about how a literary text should be structured in order to create meaning. As such, it has often been prescriptive, providing the basis for literary criticism that measures the extent to which a poem, or novel, or play conforms to the rules that supposedly define Aristotle’s genres of lyric, epic, and drama, or other subgenres discerned by later critics. Because of this prescriptive character, it has fallen into disfavor in recent decades. But the important point here is not the prescriptive ways in which genre has been used in literary criticism, but rather the insight that, by acting as a set of expectations, genre helps the reader to understand the work, “relating it to the world as this is defined and ordered by the prevailing culture.”53 Discerning the form of a public performance allows us to understand how a particular discourse—in this case, the French discourse about politics and especially democracy—operates to create, for French men and women over the last two centuries, an understanding of the uses of power in their political, social, and cultural institutions.
The form of performance, then, will help us to understand French political culture by giving us insight into the discourses that make up that culture. But in contrast to Habermas’s assumption of an external “rationality” to bourgeois discourse, or Debord’s positing of an equally external “reality” that spectacle distorts, I will emphasize the discursive constitution of both the objects available for study and the conditions under which statements about these objects may be considered “true” or “false.” This process is intimately connected with power and the institutions that exercise power. Discursive power is “an opening up of fields in which certain kinds of action and production are brought about. As power disperses itself, it opens up specific fields of possibility; it constitutes entire domains of action, knowledge, and social being by shaping the institutions and disciplines in which, for the most part, we largely make ourselves.”54 Discourses about democratic politics, therefore, create the terrain within which political action takes place as well as the actors-the state, political elites and leaders, citizens—who perform. This means not only the institutional setting, such as parliaments, bureaucracies, civil society, and elections, but also the possibilities for different kinds of political action, such as revolution, compromise, political maneuvering, and even corruption. The emphasis on discourse also suggests the importance of similarities, “family resemblances” throughout a culture of the practices and sciences of that culture, as similar forms of knowledge appear in seemingly distinct forms of cultural activity.55
The following pages explore the extent to which the dramatic forms of nineteenth- and twentieth-century theater and film were present as well in the public performance of political power and constituted a particular version of politics. To see how this approach can help us understand French political culture, let us return to the French stage for a moment. Ten years after the premiere of Monvel’s Les Victimes cloîtrées, a similar plot was used by another French playwright, Charles Guilbert de Pixerécourt, in a play entitled Coelina, performed for the first time on September 2, 1800, in the Théâtre de l’Ambigu-Comique on the Boulevard du Temple. The title character is an orphan who has inherited the wealth of her father, the Baron des Echelettes, and has been raised by her paternal uncle, Dufour. Coelina’s virtue is demonstrated by her kindness to a mute, Francisque, whose tongue had been cut out several years earlier. But while she is in love with her cousin Stephany, Dufour’s son, their happiness—and Coelina’s virtue—are threatened by the designs of Coelina’s maternal uncle, Truguelin, who proposes a marriage between Coelina and his own son.
Dufour, however, rejects the proposed marriage and instead announces that Coelina and Stephany will be engaged the next day. The celebration of this engagement opens the second act, but is interrupted by Truguelin’s servant with a letter informing Dufour that Coelina is not his niece, but rather the illegitimate child of another man, none other than Francisque Humbert, the mute. Dufour orders Francisque and Coelina to leave his house, and when Stephany protests, he is also sent away. The mysteries of the plot begin to be cleared up when Dufour’s doctor, Andrevon, informs Dufour that he recognized Truguelin as someone who, eight years earlier, had beaten and mutilated Francisque. He had alerted the authorities that Truguelin and Germain, his servant and confidant, were in the area, and he hoped that “at this moment they were taking them to Chambéry to deliver them to justice.” The play ends with Francisque explaining that he had been secretly married to Coelina’s mother when Dufour’s brother met her. Truguelin, wishing to obtain the property of this new suitor, forced his sister to marry the baron. Hoping eventually to gain control of Coelina’s fortune through her marriage to his own son, Truguelin pursued Francisque for years, literally silencing him to prevent obstruction of his plans.56
Pixerécourt’s Coelina was the harbinger of a new dramatic form on the Parisian stage, melodrama, in which suffering heroes or heroines, villains, and well-meaning comics play a moral, humanitarian, and sentimental plot in a world divided into good and evil, where virtue is protected and vice punished.57 Pixerécourt had been writing plays since 1793, but with Coelina he found his true métier. For the next thirty years, he reigned supreme on Parisian stages, turning out hit after hit, milking for all it was worth the conflict between good and evil characters and plots that brought the characters to the brink of disaster. From its slow beginnings during the Revolutionary decade, melodrama blossomed in the first part of the nineteenth century. Even after other forms of drama replaced it in the elite theaters, melodrama remained the preeminent form of theatrical entertainment in boulevard and other popular theaters into the twentieth century. Adopted in the twentieth century by the new media of film and television, it became a staple form of modern mass culture.
If we seek to understand better the role of public ceremony and performance in French political culture, the rise and pervasiveness of the specific form of melodrama needs to be taken into account. This is especially true if we consider the argument by Peter Brooks that melodrama “is vital to the modern imagination” and that “the origins of melodrama can be accurately located within the context of the French Revolution and its aftermath.” By destroying a series of certainties—Church and monarch, Christendom, organic and hierarchical society, as well as literary forms dependent on that society—the Revolution provided, in his view, the starting point for an unsuccessful response to those losses. Brooks directly connects a reading of the politics of the Revolution with the melodrama that marked the French stage in the aftermath of the events of the 1790s. “The Revolution attempts to sacralize law itself, the Republic as the institution of morality. Yet it necessarily produces melodrama instead, incessant struggle against enemies, without and within, branded as villains, suborners of morality, who must be confronted and expunged, over and over, to assure the triumph of virtue.” And he goes further, to argue fundamental similarities between the melodramatic form and the ways in which the Revolution described itself. Saint-Just claimed that “Republican government has, as its principle, virtue; or if not, terror,” similar to melodrama’s strategy of division into good and evil and its intention to impose a new society. Robespierre, Saint-Just, and the Committee of Public Safety are final references for melodrama, personifying virtue in themselves and projecting evil onto the enemies of the Republic. Both the orators of the Revolution and melodrama are concerned, Brooks claims, with the “expression and imposition of basic ethical and psychic truths.”58
Melodrama and the Revolution are both therefore about virtue, performing a Manichean conflict between good and evil and the reassertion of virtue. But the form was faced with an impossible task, describing not a final meaning or vision of life, but the search for that meaning. Melodrama is thus not life, but a “complete convention in the interpretation of life,” a form that searches for ethical certainty even as it operates solely in the realm of representation.59 Similarly, as Paul Friedland has noted, the political actors of the postrevolutionary era “were always a moment away from implausibility—if they forgot their lines, if they were heckled by the parterre, or even if the audience lost interest.”60 The constant threat of rivals denouncing the entire basis of the new society—whether