Rather than the activist writer, it was now the poet, as herald of the free man, who thus addressed himself to the people. And he did so first of all in order to have them attend him in his priestly role. If the theatre was once more the site of this encounter, this was not by virtue of its powers of communion. On the contrary, it was because the theatre, invaded by bourgeois digestions and distractions, was the profaned temple of the beautiful, and its ceremonial vocation had to be restored. The people would serve there in the first instance as vestal guardians of the cult. And the model for this role was supplied precisely not by the public’s participation in the theatre, but rather by their silence in the concert hall. In one of his Offices, Mallarmé summed up all the components of this Wagnerism without mythology:
Where sounds are concerned, the crowd, which begins to surprise us so greatly as a virgin element, or as ourselves, fulfils its pre-eminent function as the guardian of the mystery! Its own mystery! It offers its rich silence to the orchestra, in which lies its collective grandeur.33
Here the concept of music concealed that of drama, furnishing the principle of a communion that was neither the divinization of the people nor the popularization of art, but rather a participation that arose from a double displacement:
The miracle of music is this reciprocal penetration of the myth and the hall . . . The orchestra floats, fills the space; and the happening does not set itself apart, we do not remain just witnessing . . . Mystery – something other than representational – I compare to something Greek.34
Here vibration is opposed to representation in defining the new relationship of the poet to the crowd. The new principle of the popular theatre would be a coincidence between the poetic vibration of spiritualized materiality and the exaltation of the unified power of the crowd. A key concept in the late nineteenth century underlay this combination: that of energy, the force of matter en route to spiritual individualization. In this way, it was possible to unite the symbolist legend with the legend of Michelet, to make the Wagnerian poet the officiate of a new popular theatre. That is what was proposed by the young and ardent inspirer of the ‘Théâtre civique’, Louis Lumet:
A theatrical performance is a religious festival in which the people, celebrating their passions and their deeds, divinize their glorified life, the adventures of their ancestors, the existence of their city.
It is a solemn communion.
The poet shivers, intoxicated by all the forces of the world, and his word reveals and fixes these in phrases whose rhythm is that of the universal. He sums up the potential of fates, and the drama bursts forth in the midst of landscapes that see both love and death. In himself, he accumulates energy and has to spread it as the sun spreads its light . . . And now the crowd arrives, contemplative, ready to receive the thrill, blending this with the story of the race, with nature and passions. One and the same flame burns the poet, one flame for those who speak and those who listen. Theirs is a genuine communion.35
But this universal vibration of energy soon rediscovered themes already known: those of the spirit of place and the harmonics of work. Any place, says Lumet, is suitable for the ceremony: ‘The stadium of a tumultuous town, the barn of a peaceful hamlet, the tiled parlour of a farm, even a field or a country lane.’36 The visible inconvenience of ‘civic theatre’ in a country lane is sufficient sign that this indifference was in fact the consecration of a new idea of place, in which Taine’s theory of milieux supported a symbolist dramatic doctrine: place is the territory in which mystery is rooted, where the race shares a common energy and thrill. This latter notion conjures up here calm dreams of evenings in which women crack nuts and spin hemp, while listening to the storyteller mingle tales of distant adventures with evocations of the ploughs and marriages of yesteryear; in which, once the harvest is over, processions are organized where each person carries the instruments of their labour – the sickle, the rake or the seed drill – to pay homage to the nourishing earth, accompanied by blonde or red-headed girls adorned with flowers and sheaves. But Lumet soon returns to the urban vicissitudes of evenings organized in outlying districts to reveal to the ‘poor extinguished eyes’ of the people the light that should shine for the free man, the great words of beauty and freedom.
The theatre on the mountain
A dream of combining Michelet with Champfleury, and Mallarmé with Proudhon, even prepared to entrust the Wagnerian high mass to Jules Simon’s town band – the paradigm of civic theatre was evidently rustic. It has to be said that the people’s theatre, after half a century, had just taken its first practical steps, and in a very determined place – even overdetermined, one might say. In 1895, Maurice Pottecher opened Le Théâtre du Peuple in Bussang, at the foot of the Vosges, which offered the scenery of rural Greece as well as bordering on the territory seized by the enemy. On a summer’s day, in front of two thousand spectators – workers from his family’s textile mill, peasants, holiday-makers and drama-lovers from Paris – the curtain was raised to the natural backdrop of pine-covered hills and fields, in which real straw fell under real scythes wielded by real reapers. This was the stage on which Maurice Pottecher directed his tale of Le Diable marchand de goutte, and where the miracle was produced:
For three whole hours the hills heard below them the murmur of this crowd, by turn amused, saddened, amazed, irate and relaxed, expressing in a dozen different attitudes – some still completely spontaneous, others already measured and contained – the various emotions that stirred it; a living, vibrating people, who laughed and cried as the people of Athens laughed and cried when the great heroic Muse covered the distant beating of the Aegean Sea with the sound of her verses.37
Life, emotion and expression were the three key words of this Vosgian Greece. The basis of this fraternity lay less in the play performed than in ‘the commonality of sad or joyous emotions that the magic of the theatre arouses’. Popularity was a function of the expressive essence of art, ‘the means for man to express and share with his fellows the emotion excited in him by life’.38 And the power of theatre was fundamentally the expansion of this life itself: ‘Art, the most intimate means of expression and the most direct communication of life, expands and grows all the more as it contains more life and conquers more lives.’39 Understood in this way, art did not need to concern itself with popular morality. Even if Pottecher’s play dealt with alcoholism, it did not set out to cure a single drunkard. It did not make ‘so great or so little a claim’.40 All it had to do was set the propagation of life against solitary amusement, energy that falls back into matter – that of the child toying with sand, the idle worker shifting his materials, or the aesthete turning his verses and polishing his prose. The true artist, for his part, in the metaphysical paradigm of the time, spiritualized his material into luminous energy. His freedom was thus synonymous with his capacity to offer himself equally to all. This conquering communication of life was the means of uniting the two elements that constituted the new notion of the people in the late nineteenth century: the group of ‘already independent individualities that compose the elite’ and ‘the still confused and formless masses that constitute the crowd’.41 The collective joy that united the philosopher with the porter, by their more or less fine perception of the spectacle, was that of their common aspiration in a process which, out of the pleasure of each different person, created the principle of their ascent into the spiral of individualization. What unified the public was precisely the diversity of emotions among which this joy could be distributed.
The key question, therefore, was to maximize this intensification of vital energy that the magic of the theatre produced. One word summed it up, that of emancipation. It was in one and the same movement that dramatic art emancipated itself, emancipated its traditional public from its closed walls and cobwebs, and emancipated the people who had formerly been left in the darkness outside. The question of place was thus central. This place had