Even if it was not ideologically committed to democratization, melodrama was democratic in its attempt to make clear its message to everyone. A representation of virtue with widespread popularity, melodrama allowed French culture to act as if it had a basis for a new morality even if the form underlined that, in the aftermath of the Revolution, it was impossible to find such a foundation. It distanced postrevolutionary French society from the violence and bloodshed of the revolutionary era by describing a world in which the virtue of the heroine was threatened only by the actions of an evil traitor, figuring the virtue of the French nation threatened by revolutionary or counterrevolutionary extremists. It is therefore a cultural accommodation to the disruptions of the 1790s. But while it represents the divisions in French culture, melodrama is inherently unable to resolve those disruptions. Virtue may triumph over vice by the end of the play, but melodrama does not perform this accommodation to the challenges faced by postrevolutionary France by describing a new society, as would comedy, or even through the communal sacrifice and transformation of tragedy.61 Rather, it speaks only in terms of the religious, familial, and social hierarchies of the old society, purportedly absolute values that no longer existed in the postrevolutionary world. Amidst all of its shifting styles and popularity—a high point between 1800 and 1830, a decline through the rest of the nineteenth century (when it became less concerned about public virtue, more domestic, primarily “plot, suspense, excitement, the search for new categories of thrills”), and a drift in the twentieth century to film as popular theater declined—melodrama nonetheless has been a fundamental form with which modern culture can describe and understand change.62
Were melodrama limited to theater history, it would be of little interest for French political culture. But as Brooks suggests, it is a powerful insight into a fundamental problem faced by postrevolutionary culture in all of its manifestations, on stage and in the spaces in which political power was represented and exercised. Brooks’s description of melodrama as a form seeking to create its own version of reality, operating solely in the realm of representation, bears striking similarities to the spectacles described by Clark, Debord, Samuels, and Schwartz. Its fundamental themes of threatened virtue, good versus evil, and an attempt to restore the assumed wholeness of a lost past reverberate through French political ceremonies as well.63 The Festival of the Supreme Being, with its portrayal of virtue and vice, the triumph of the virtuous Republic opening the way to the happiness of the French people, and the tenuousness of that reassembly of the French nation in the dramatized unity of the festival, bears similarity to the travails of Coelina and Francisque at the hands of Truguelin, and the eventual capture of the villain and restoration of the happy household of Dufour.
These links between theater and public ceremony are underscored by the frequency with which theatrical performances were often a part of public festivals and performers were contributors to the festivals themselves. As recently as the events of May–June 1968, both politics and theater aimed at creating a transparent identity between the spectacle, whether of a public ceremony or a stage performance, and the viewer.64 As the theater scholar Christophe Campos noted then, as in 1789 and 1871 “there was no need to go to the theater to commune with the gods of imagination, because they were everywhere. For several weeks [in 1968] Paris was a producer’s dream, an enormous street happening; everything was theatrical, and there was no need for theaters.”65
If we discard the prescriptive idea of melodrama as a set of rules to be followed by an author, and rather understand it as a form that creates a particular understanding of the world, we can see how speaking of both public ceremonies and theatrical performances in terms of melodrama allows us to see the similarities in these different practices of representation. It suggests not only that there was a significant theatrical dimension to modern French political culture, but that this theatricality took a particular form, a melodramatic sensibility, in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We can also see how the French experience with democracy was informed by these ways of representing the transformation of the Old Regime into the New. As Brooks emphasized, the rhetoric of the Revolution and of later Republican leaders was melodramatic in its construction of a world of good and evil, of virtuous revolutionaries and evil counterrevolutionaries, and of the ultimate inability to eliminate the Old Regime and create the dreamt-for new society here on earth. The opponents of the Revolution similarly viewed the world as sharply divided. The interaction of theatrical form and political culture—the melodramatic thread this book describes—helped to shape nineteenth- and twentieth-century France, portraying and performing the relationship between the state and that civil society as it developed through the public debates and political upheavals that are such an important part of French history in those centuries.
This theatricality was intimately linked with the development of a mass political system as French political culture struggled to become more democratic in the two centuries after the Revolution. As French men and women came to participate actively in the exercise of power, the assumptions they learned about that process were presented in a particular form that drew on the rupture created by the revolutionary decade. It was not only that republicans such as Léon Gambetta, Georges Clemenceau, and Jean Jaurès saw themselves as virtuous workers for human progress and their opponents as corrupt reactionaries, or that monarchists (or Vichyites) saw themselves as the representatives of virtue, and republicans as the opposite. These divisions, arising from the Revolutionary crisis, we know provided the basis for many of the controversies of modern French political history. But the process went even further. My contention here is not the unoriginal point that after the Revolution France was often divided into two political camps, one supporting the Revolution of 1789, the other opposed to it and wishing to restore some version of the Old Regime. My point, rather, is that these representations employed melodramatic forms when they were performed in the public spaces of Paris. The parallels we will see between the performances in French theaters and those on the Champs de Mars and Place de la Nation are important aspects of the French experience with mass democracy. The popularity of the genre of melodrama lent itself to solving one of the fundamental problems of mass democracy, that of attaching citizens to the institutions, processes, and decisions of the Republic. But in so doing, melodrama shaped the political culture by forcing the very complicated events and questions of French public life into the plots, characters, strengths, and weaknesses of the theatrical form. The construction through melodrama of events like the June Days in 1848, the Commune in 1871, the trial of Dreyfus, the defeat of 1940 and subsequent occupation and resistance, and the loss of empire made individuals such as Louis-Eugène Cavaignac, the Petroleuses, Alfred Dreyfus and the general staff, Philippe Pétain and Pierre Laval, and Charles de Gaulle specific kinds of characters, capable of some actions but incapable of others. They could be heroes or villains, but it was difficult to see them as compromisers. The plot line of melodrama, emphasizing a conflict between virtue and vice, right and wrong, weakened the attempts of figures such as Louis-Philippe, Adolphe Thiers, or Paul Reynaud to find a middle ground in the political disputes of the country. And the inability of melodrama to resolve its Manichean vision of the world damaged efforts to find reconciliation between the proponents and opponents of the Revolution. François Furet’s essay arguing that “the Revolution is over” may be read as a hope that French political culture might find a different way of organizing its representations of the players, plots, and outcomes of French politics than through political divisions based on the disputes of the 1790s. As with Debord’s spectacles, these representations drawn from the “revolutionary catechism” had seemingly cut loose from any connection with what they purported to represent.66 The problem, it seemed, was to find a representation of French political life more in tune with the post-colonial, democratic France of the late twentieth century.
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At the conclusion of this introduction, it is worth making clear what the following pages attempt to do, and what they do not. My primary goal is to describe the ways in which public spectacles in two different locations in French culture—public ceremonies on the one hand, theatrical and film performances on the other—contributed to the public life of France between the Revolution and the Fifth Republic. While we will not see rigid adherence to any supposed “rules” of melodrama in French theatrical