The Melodramatic Thread. James R. Lehning

to the development of commodified spectacle in modern French culture. In order to make this argument, I will focus primarily, although not exclusively, on ceremonial and theatrical representations of the Republic and the Revolution of 1789.

      It might be suggested, especially by historians familiar with the works of Agulhon, Ozouf, Ben-Amos, Ihl, and others, that this approach has already been made a part of our version of the French past. Certainly these studies have unearthed much about the ceremonial life of French politics, and a strong cultural tinge has pervaded our version of events such as the Revolution itself.⁶⁷ But these public ceremonies have not led to a rethinking of the story of modern France. Surveys of French history written in the late 1980s and early 1990s by François Furet and Maurice Agulhon make mention of well-known public ceremonies such as the Festival of Federation, the Festival of the Supreme Being, the funeral ceremonies for Victor Hugo, the quatorze juillet, the Centennial, the Bicentennial in 1989, and others.⁶⁸ But in both cases the narrative is constructed around the central theme of the actions of political leaders—the thumbnail sketches of Robespierre, Napoleon, Gambetta, Jules Ferry, Laval, and De Gaulle are brilliant pieces of character construction—and the ceremonial aspects of French political culture serve only to illustrate themes such as the contested nature of French politics.

      If we were to take these accounts as typical of the way modern French history is narrated today—and there seems little reason not to do so⁶⁹—we would have to say that the results of monographic research by historians such as Agulhon, Ozouf, Truesdell, Ory, Ben-Amos, and Ihl on the ceremonial aspects of French public life have not been integrated in any significant way into that narrative. The prevailing narrative of French history tells a story about rulers, elections, and social developments, and overwhelmingly about actions and what people have said in words. These actions and words are taken usually at face value, not analyzed as performance. Performance and ceremony are relegated to the margins, useful illustrations but not a part of the story.

      The following chapters suggest that Clifford Geertz’s insight about the importance of public ceremony in the theater state in Bali and Laurence Whitehead’s perception of the dramatic aspects of democratic transitions may find applicability in one of the most important states in modern Europe. They sketch an outline of the interactions between French political culture and a melodramatic sensibility by examining key elements of these developments over the last two centuries. Chapter 2 discusses several significant events of the nineteenth century. In spite of such massive spectacles as the return of Napoleon’s remains in 1840, this was a period in which civic performances were severely limited by the restrictions placed on French civil society by the governments of postrevolutionary France. Nonetheless, debates in the Restoration assembly, trials of republicans during the July Monarchy, and the public spectacles of Napoleon III’s Second Empire allow us to trace the growing theatricality of French political culture and assess the significance of melodramatic conventions in those performances. Chapter 3 views the full-blown theatrical culture of the triumphant Third Republic after 1870 through the work of one of the most important playwrights of Belle Epoque culture, Victorien Sardou. In the series of plays that Sardou wrote using the Revolution as material, and in ceremonies such as the Centennial in 1889, we can see the specific ways in which melodrama served to define important aspects of the politics constituted by his work, especially the way in which Sardou utilized gender conventions to dramatize his version of the place of virtue and vice in France’s culture.

      Chapter 4 moves into the period between the two world wars, an era marked not only by the popularity of the new medium of film, but also by attempts to channel the crises and conflicts of republican politics into ceremonial forms. Both film representations of revolutionary events and the civic ceremonies of the early 1920s and the Popular Front of the 1930s reflected the deep melodramatic sensibility of French culture, especially the desire to create a post-revolutionary culture that would unify the nation. In the struggle to maintain a functioning democracy that marked the interwar period, we can see the ability of melodrama to link citizens and the republican state, as well as the limits such a sensibility placed on the viability of that state. The inconsistencies of the republican promise, however, became apparent not only, as at the turn of the century, in questions about gender, but also through the ways in which previously marginalized groups such as workers, women, and colonial subjects appeared in these performances. Chapter 5, finally, concludes our journey by examining a significant experimental theater company of postwar France, Ariane Mnouchkine’s Théâtre du Soleil. In the various representations of French republican culture by the Théâtre du Soleil in the 1970s and 1980s, we will see the pervasiveness of melodramatic conventions as they interacted with post-1968 attempts to revitalize the radical message of French republicanism.

      This brief overview should make clear that this book is neither an exhaustive catalogue of melodramatic forms in modern French culture nor a synthesis of the role of the memory of the Revolution in France over the last two centuries. The first is a task better suited to the theater and film historians on whose work I will draw in the following pages. My focus on performance also skews my sampling of the memory of the Revolution. The political volatility of the message of the Revolution over the last two centuries often forced it underground, leaving other topics more easily performed. It also leaves aside the most important location in French culture in which that memory was reproduced and represented, the school system. Beginning during the Revolution itself, and flourishing after the foundation of the Third Republic and the Ferry Laws of the late 1870s and early 1880s, this system has inculcated versions of the Constituent Assembly, the Convention, Louis XVI, Robespierre, and Danton in the minds and hearts of French students. So instead of a definitive narrative of theater history or memory, my concern in concentrating on the Republic and the Revolution and on theatrical performances is to provide a focus for my selection of materials related to the larger purpose of examining the performative aspects of French political culture.

      In spite of these limitations, however, the following pages make an argument that moves toward a more cultural understanding of the political differences that have marked France in many of the years since 1789 and that have seemed so important, to both contemporaries and later historians, as explanations of the twists and turns of the country’s political history. Like bits of glass in a child’s kaleidoscope, the elements of French political culture reassembled in different ways and at different times over the last two centuries. The discourses of French culture that divided the world into a conflict of good and evil, that sought to rescue threatened virtue, and that continually hovered on the edge of exposure helped assemble the elements of French political culture into images of the world and, through them, create the processes of social, economic, and political life for French men and women.