art and the ‘strong poetry of the ancients’,11 between these two manifestations of the spirit of nature, the distance travelled by the sap in the social body had to be respected. The principle of corruption lay in compositions that fell between the two.12
From Salamis to Domrémy: the theatre of the nation
Two paradigms thus separated out. On the one hand, the education of the public by artistic impregnation; on the other, the poetics of the spirit of place – the light shining down from top to bottom, and the sap rising from bottom to top. The people’s theatre was summoned to define its identity between these two paradigms, prepared to cross their effects and divert their trajectories in order to assure its own circuit, that of a great art that was the education of the people by way of their own legend. It was Michelet who laid down the principle of this in his lectures of 1847–8, in which he taught the students of the Collège de France their duty to ‘feed the people from the people’.13 But this relationship of people to people, in which the student takes the place of the travelling salesman, no longer had anything in common with the tepid regime of regulating village passions. The people’s theatre that would carry out this programme would be one in which the people would perform their own grandeur for themselves. And this they could only do if they were a true people, abolishing a class division whose principle did not lie in the distribution of property but precisely in the separation of languages.
Such was the theme of these lectures, which a clairvoyant government suspended after three sessions: the evil that our society suffered lay in the divorce between the educated classes and the people. This divorce went back five centuries, when the clergy opposed their Latin, and the nobles their French, to the diction of the people. Caught between the old and the new, the people no longer had a tongue of their own. Or, what amounted to the same thing, they had a hundred tongues. But not one, at all events, in which to speak to the men of culture. It was this absence of common language that deserved the name of barbarism. It was opposed to the very principle of civic life: the constant movement from ‘instinctive wisdom’ to ‘reflective wisdom’, ‘the mutual initiation of the instinctive and the educated classes’.14 The revolutionary ‘miracle’ that had given the coming unity its legend had not managed to abolish the separation between the two virtues that were supposed to mutually irrigate one another: the culture of the lettered class that summed up the experience of the men of the people, and the energy of the men of the people in which the lettered had to immerse themselves. It was up to the young, who were not yet ‘classified’, to reunify these two halves of the national body. What they needed to give the people was not ‘popular’ books. The people would create these for themselves, if they could only speak. In order for them to speak, they had to be given ‘the sovereign teaching that was the whole education of the glorious cities of antiquity: a theatre that is truly that of the people’.15 Here Michelet takes up Plato’s analysis, while reversing its meaning: it was the manners of the theatre that made the laws of democracy. Democracy was essentially theatrocracy:
Athens deserved the name that the sophists gave it without grasping its significance: a theatrocracy . . . The sovereign People at the theatre, by turn actor and critic, constantly rediscovered the unity undermined by disputes in the public space; they created for themselves this community of thought and feeling, this common soul that was the genius of Athens and still remains in history the flaming torch of the world.16
For Plato, theatrocracy meant the noise of the mass, applauding themselves by applauding the actors. For Michelet, it meant community of thought based on a spectacle that was fundamentally self-representation: the theatre as mirror in which the people could view their own actions, the scene of reciprocity in which each could be at once the judging critic, the playing actor and the chorus in dialogue. A representation without separation in which the warrior-citizen himself wrote and played his victory, which was the victory of the community. A single image summed everything up: that of Aeschylus, the soldier of Salamis who on return from the battlefield acted before the people the victory over the Persians, and by this very act communicated its secret.
This emblematic image is also a screen-image: the victor playing victory, this summary of citizen theatre, masks the question as to how the relationship of the stage and the public tiers actually achieved the essence of a theatre in which each half of the people was alternately the representation of the other. Michelet’s popular religion comes up against the same problem as Feuerbach’s humanist religion: how can representation be at the same time the immediately experienced essence of the community? Michelet avoids this difficulty in two ways. On the one hand, he endows this representation with a moral surplus: the essence of the theatre is not the glamour of illusion but rather the accomplishment of sacrifice. ‘What is theatre? The abdication of the actual, self-interested individual in favour of a better role.’17 On the other hand, this moral form of the theatrical act serves to express a content that is the legend of national unity formed from the sacrifice of each.
The solution of popular communion is thus shifted to the side of the represented. No one clearly sees how the people will play for themselves. But it is clear how the people can be fed from themselves: by the representation of their legend which is their anticipated unity. In a certain sense, what would be played in the theatre of our New Athens would simply be episodes in the equivalent of The Persians: the sacrifices and victories of the nation. But also, since France was not a city that could contemplate itself in a single theatre, being rather an organism enlivened by constant circulation from the centre to the periphery, it would make this pulsation its essential theme.
Exemplary in this respect were the two first characters that Michelet proposed for a people’s theatre. Joan of Arc, first of all, indicated its style: her youthful charm and the earthly vigour of her answers to the tribunal did away with any artifice of representation or distinction of language. After her, La Tour d’Auvergne was the prototype of Michelet’s positive heroes. This first grenadier of Republican France was also an erudite Breton and panegyrist of the Celtic tradition. His comings and goings between his study and the battlefield combined not only the man of letters and the soldier, but also the spirit of place with that of the Republic. The opposition between rootedness in the soil and antique grandeur was thereby resolved. This people’s theatre, intended for production in every village, would represent the union between the national virtues of the Convention and the earthly virtues of the Vendée.
The theatre thus had its unifying effect by virtue of this power of an ‘embodied legend’ in which the representation that abolished the division of the audience also abolished its distance in the national history that a united public inherited. By the same token, the Rousseauean opposition between the corruption of the theatre and the health of the militant festival was likewise suppressed. At the limit, the people’s theatre was simply a Fête de la Fédération ceaselessly replayed.
Between field and office
One might imagine that the citizen spectators would tire of an unending festival, at least if they were given the opportunity. But what began with these words of Michelet was just the prehistory of this festival, the interminable gestation, theoretical and administrative, of the popular theatre. The project, called for in 1848 but submerged by the vicissitudes of the Republic, would reappear in 1856 in a more modest form – that of a theatre offering the working classes the comfort of an elevated bourgeois leisure activity with a moral suited to their condition. The character of the putative director, D’Ennery, a leading impresario, suggested a morality that had little in common with the Athenian, though the ruin of a certain financier put an end to this fine idea. Solicited anew in 1867, the superintendent of theatres settled the question as follows: ‘The theatre will never be a school of morality for anyone . . . It is already hard enough to prevent those existing now from doing more harm than they do.’18
This spontaneous Rousseaueanism, buttressed by both administrative inertia and budgetary restriction, found an echo in several of those who sought to raise up the people by art. For them, the world of the theatre confessed its true nature in the age of the great corrupter Offenbach, that of an art demoralized by the spatial barrier that separated it from the great sighs of the soul. It was in this sense that the new champion of local bands, the flautist Jules Simon, attacked the corruption of musical religion by theatrical speculation:
Saddened by this confined horizon that surrounded