Tea at Trianon: Popular Theater and Political Utopia

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, January 31, 2013

Popular Theater and Political Utopia

An article from the Warwick Knowledge Centre about how theater was used as a political tool in fin de siècle France.

The relationship between art, theatre, politics and community wasn’t particularly a French phenomenon. Popular theatre was in favour in Russia both before and after 1917. German Volkstheater flourished in the late 19th century. Cities had boomed following the industrial revolution and with a sense of idealism, political groups vied to create communities out of the proletariat. What were the problems, however, of using art to create a narrow political community, and could art really be moulded to a narrow political and didactic purpose?

France’s republican governments’ attempts to create a republican community through theatre were, by and large, a failure, says Dr Wardhaugh. They founded a national popular theatre in 1920 but their subsidised ticket policy didn’t have the desired effect. Those who already attended the theatre took advantage of cheaper tickets whereas new attendees were persistently thin on the ground.

It wasn’t for lack of ambition on the governments’ part. The Trocadero Palace (pictured, right) in which the new National Popular Theatre was housed had been built in the 1870s for an international exhibition and could hold four to five thousand people. To its detriment it was unheated and located in an elite part of Paris far away from the working-class suburbs. The government hadn’t thought through who the ‘people’ were and what they actually wanted from their entertainment. (Read entire article.)