• IBSEN COURSE •
Course Syllabus
Required Reading
Week I Material
Week II Material
Week III Material
Week IV Material
Week V Material
Week VI Material
Week VII Material
Week VIII Material
Week IX Material
Week X Material
Week XI Material
Week XII Material
Week XIII Material

WEEK II: The French Revolution - 1789

            The French Revolution can be called the major political event of the modern world, the moment when the middle class decisively takes over power from the ancien regime of monarchy and the aristocracy in Europe.   The Revolution, marks a dividing line, also in the cultural world.  The world was about to be transformed from a basically agricultural society into an Industrial Capitalist one..  The middle class began by thinking of itself as a Victim.  It dramatized itself as heroically removing the injustices of the old aristocratic order.  This is the theme of Beaumarchais’ The Marriage of Figaro, and of Schiller’s early plays.    By the mid-nineteenth century this middle class had become, no longer the victim, but the oppressor: a colonialist culture, invading and occupying Africa, the Middle East and Asia.  It had settled in the United States and wiped out the native inhabitants..  It was responsible for the Slave Trade and of huge cities that came into being to serve a new industrial capitalism.. 

             At this time a new class emerged, globally: the ‘industrial proletariat’, whose leaders developed a radical agenda against the middle class.  This proletariat lived in hideous slums working for merely subsistence wages to create the prosperous capitalist class and its culture. As the intellectual and moral authority of the official Church diminished there arose a new kind of cultural leader - the Intellectual, the Radical and the Artist.    This period, the period of a class that now saw itself as guilty, is the period of Ibsen.  Figaro has become capitalist, colonialist, and smug.

            Pierre Augustin Caron - or Beaumarchais. (1732-1799) was a good representative of the early period of this middle-class.  He was one of ten children of a clockmaker.  He had little or no schooling but early on showed a gift for music, especially for the flute and harp.  He worked in his father’s shop and invented a system for regulating watches which earned him a patent from the French Academy of Sciences.  He married a widow and inherited a small fortune on her death soon after.  He gave music lessons to the royal children.  Like his comic hero, Figaro, he was a resourceful man who got to know the aristocracy by working for it.  He married another widow, who also died soon after.  Much of his time was spent in lawsuits against aristocrats he accused of swindling him.   In 1775, the year that The Barber of Seville  was produced, he persuaded the King to supply arms to the American rebels against Britain and sent his own merchant ships to do the gun-running.  (Congress refused to reimburse him after the war).  He survived the Revolution and continued to be active in the theatre until his death in 1799.

             The Marriage of Figaro  is a formally conventional comedy adapting many stock ingredients from the commedia. The hero of the play, the resourceful Figaro, derives from the cunning slave of Greek and Roman comedies.   In the plot of the play we have the od comic conflict between the demands of society and those of love.  (Cf. Comedic Codes paper) 

The Marriage of Figaro and the Revolution

            The plot of The Marriage of Figaro revolves round the attempt of the intelligent servants, Figaro and Susanne to get married and thwart the designs of Count Almaviva to seduce Susanne before the wedding.  The Count had gained himself a reputation for liberality by abolishing a dubious ‘right’ (the droit du seigneur ) to ‘enjoy’ a servant’s bride before the wedding;  he now wishes to restore that right by devious means.  The plot, therefore, sets up an old, oppressive social order against an emerging new order.  The subplots attracted to this main plot are:

   a.  the Count’s attempt, aided by Marceline and Dr. Bartolo, to postpone the wedding until he has enjoyed Susanne;   

   b. the Countess Rosina’s attempt to win back the love of her husband, while finding herself compromised with the   

        page, Cherubino; the duenna Marceline’s plot to trap and marry Figaro with the help of the Count and of Dr.   

   c.   Bartolo who carries over a grudge against Figaro from the The Barber of Seville; 

   d.  the plot of the page, Cherubino, in love with all women, to escape military service and win the Countess or marry the

        maid Fanchette

   e.  the discovery by Marceline that Figaro is her son by Dr. Bartolo. 

            The subtitle of the play, ‘A Day of Madness’, suggests how all these plots are made to whizz along in comic counterpoint until the hilariously complicated denouement in Act V.  There seems, on the surface, little that is revolutionary in all this, even though Beaumarchais inserted into the play long, polemical speeches by Figaro and by Marceline that usually are omitted from performances.  More devastating than the polemical speeches was the clever working into the comic plot of many of the social abuses and corrupt privileges employed by the aristocracy and its agents.  Instead of challenging head-on the unjust social situation, Beaumarchais’s wit worked more effectively as a subtle method of undermining the system through comedy.  There was enough in the play to alarm the authorities and to lead them to ban is performance.

           The Court’s plot to prevent the performance of the The Marriage of Figaro and the counterplot to achieve it was as complicated, comic and dramatic as that of the play itself.  What was seen as subversive was the depiction of the servants as consistently, intellectually and morally superior to the Count.  Figaro contrasts the ingenuity with which he constantly must cope with life with the idle stupidity of the Count who merely “took the trouble to be born, nothing more” to gain his superior social status.  At every stage the Count is made to look a fool and the play, throughout, calls into question the whole system of privilege upon which French society was based.

            The play was submitted to the Censor, the Lieutenant of Police, who refused to allow it to be performed.  Beaumarchais appealed to the King who read the play with mounting consternation declaring, “this comedy shall never be performed.”  (Another of that unfortunate monarch’s misjudgments!)    He refused permission to the Comédie Français to perform the play.   This, of course, only increased public interest, and also increased Beaumarchais’ resolve to get it performed.  The playwright’s many friends at court, as well as the public, were determined the play should be seen.  “I do hope the King will continue to dislike it, as in that case it will soon find its way to the Comédie Français,"” Beaumarchais commented.  The King’s opposition was the best publicity Beamarchais could wish for. Everyone was made aware of the work. 

            The aristocracy satirized in the play were the most eager to see and hear it and Beaumarchais was invited to give readings to aristocratic gatherings.  As the deisre to see the play performed naturally increased enormously, the Queen herself, Marie Antoinette, summoned the players of the Comédie Français to give a secret performance at Versailles for June 13 1783.  Five or six hundred coaches of eager aristocrats crowded the approaches to the theatre.  But the King belatedly learned of the project and issued a prohibition preventing the performance This caused great indignation among the aristocratic gathering who were heard to mutter words such as ‘oppression’ and ‘tyranny’. 

            The players were summoned before the Lieutenant of Police who repeated the prohibition.  Beaumarchais then gave a reading of the play before the Queen and her circle, ostensibly to submit to any censoring they might suggest, but actually to win them over more ardently to the cause of the performance of the play.  Ultimately the King was forced to lift the prohibition and the preparation for a performance by the Comédie Français went forward.  The result, on April 27th, 1784, was the most overwhelming opening night in the history of the Comédie Français, followed by an unparalleled run of seventy five nights.

            In the days following, Beaumarchais was subjected to scurrilous published attacks, some instigated by the King and, when he responded, he was thrown into prison, only to be released a few days later.  To complete the absurdity of the whole situation, the play was then performed at Court with the Queen playing the servant Susanne, the Comte d’Artois as the barber, and the Comte de Vaudreuil as Count Almaviva.  Beaumarchais remarked, “If there is anything odder than my piece itself, it is its success.”  The forces that found themselves opposing each other over the matter of the performance of a comedy, were to regroup in the world outside the theatre for a major national tragedy.

The Revolution and the theater in France
The moment when the theatrical and political revolutions converged.

          While the French Revolution was being acted out violently in the streets of Paris, it also was being acted out, violently, within the theatre company.  The Comédie Français, though a National Institution for the whole people, was closely connected to the Court who rewarded it richly.   The best actors gave private performances at court and in the houses of the aristocracy, often at the expense of their obligations to the public.  When the revolution broke out the company was split in two between the majority, who were opponents of the revolution and a younger, talented minority who supported it.  The first major challenge arose in 1790 over the performance of a play that was considered pro-revolutionary.  The performance was demanded by a committee organized to celebrate the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille the previous year (1789).  While the company hesitated, voices from the pit during the performance of a comedy, demanded the ‘radical’ play be put on and the young, pro-revolutionary actor, Talma, calmed the audience by promising a performance the following night.  He played the leading part to great acclaim but the conservative members of the company were outraged and issued a declaration expelling Talma from the company. 

            This action led to furious protests, night after night, from the audience in the pit demanding the return of Talma to the company.  This created a showdown between the Comédie Français which still behaved as if its privileges within the old order still held; and the new revolutionary authorities determined to assert the authority of the people and its wishes over what was a national, not just a royalist, institution.  Talma was reinstated with the Mayor of Paris and the municipal authorities sitting in the royal box to rub in the lesson.

            The feelings within the company were now so bad that Talma and a group of fellow pro-revolutionary actors left to start a new theatre, soon to become the Theatre de la Republique.  Before long, this became the premier theater in Paris.   Back at the Théâtre de la Nation, the old guard struggled to attract audiences to a repertory that belonged to the vanished aristocratic past.   The conflict within the Comédie Français offers the spectacle of the Revolution in the streets being continued as a clash of dramatic styles within the theatre.  The result was to be a total revolution in dramatic art.

            The fate of the two companies, the old conservatives and the new radicals led by Talma, depended on the struggle for power in the National Assembly between the moderate Girondins and the radical Jacobins. The crisis in the theatre broke out over the company’s courageous but ill-judged decision to perform an anti-revolutionary play.  The conservative audiences that attended and applauded the play were quite clearly making a political statement.  Despite the abolition of censorship earlier, the Revolutionary Commune issued an order forbidding further performances of the comedy.  The play now had become a cause in the deadly political struggle, and the moderate ‘Girondist’ Assembly members in the audiences at the theatre demanded the restoration of the play to the repertory. In the middle of its debate on the issue of the King’s guilt the National Assembly was petitioned to overturn the decision of the Commune, which it did, and the reactionary play was performed to general applause.  This was a direct and dangerous challenge to the leaders of the revolution. In the Assembly, the Comédie Français was denounced by a Jacobin member as an institution for royalists and reactionaries, and the company was sufficiently alarmed to take the play off.  This, of course, led to demands for its restoration and further riots in the theatre.  When a performance of the comedy was announced, the police sent for the members and warned them that the play was counter-revolutionary and certain to create disorder.  At no other time in history, perhaps, has an ideological struggle for control of a nation been conducted simultaneously within both the theatre and the national assembly.

           The trial and execution of Louis XIV and the victory of the Jacobins in the Assembly proved fatal to the conservative Comédie Français.  In 1793, the entire openly conservative cast of the Comédie Français was arrested; the actors being sent to one prison, the actresses to another.  In the worsening situation, during which time France was attacked by Britain and Austria and any royalist sentiments could be judged an act of treason, the players, who were detested by Robespierre, were in imminent danger of being executed on the guillotine.

Though the conservative theatre members detested him, Talma tried to save their lives.   They were saved, however, by the most implausibly melodramatic circumstance: a secret royalist sympathizer got himself appointed by the revolutionary government as clerk to the prisoners’ records and would systematically destroy as many as he could, saving numerous lives: including those of the actors.  The subsequent fall and execution of Robespierre allowed the players to be released; but the company was disbanded and, for a number of years its members scattered to find what work they could.  This was the finest theatre company in Europe: and after some years, it got itself together again and is once again the National Theatre of France.

              Paris, meanwhile, witnessed an explosion of new theatres opened under the law that allowed any citizen to start a theatre company.  The monopolies of the old royal theatres were over and some thirty six new theatres sprang into being, offering everything from the most basic acrobatic and circus fare to the performance of the now generally available classic repertory.  One new genre emerging, the melodrama, was to prove internationally successful).

            The melodrama at first came into being as a means of getting round the strictly enforced monopoly on the spoken drama by the Comédie Français.  Forbidden to speak dialogue, the actors performed dumb-shows with music added (hence melo-drama).  Various stratagems had been employed such as placing actors in the audience to read out or even sing the lines that could not be spoken on the stage. The actions frequently were broad and violent and, now with the revolution, were created to attract a huge new working class theatre public released by the revolution.

            Under playwrights like the great melodramatist, René-Charles Guilbert de Pixérécourt, (1773-1844) the melodrama in France became a spectacular genre which was exported to the rest of Europe and the United States..   Melodrama, like action movies and science fiction today, by means of spectacular natural effects created a universe that took part in the human and moral drama: earthquakes, storms, floods, fires, collapsing buildings were some of the stage effects by which Innocence was rescued and Villainy astonishingly foiled.   To get these effects, which were beyond the resources of the average theatre workshop, the first  Stage Design studios were created in Paris.  To co-ordinate the complicated stage action, directors were brought into being.  Convents and prisons were particularly popular as  theater scenes of rescue from these symbols of the old order.  Lurid 'Gothic' plots featured the abominations of evil priests and dungeon governors exposed and punished; and these metaphors (based on social realities) found their way into the 'high' art of the time, as in Schiullar's The Robbers or Beethoven's Fidelio.

            It is at this time, that the history of drama and the history of the theatre, separate to an extent.  Any course on important developments in theatre - architecture, staging, lighting and so on - would have to take the melodrama into its account but probably would  not need to mention one major dramatist.   Until Brecht, no major dramatist, not even such innovative writers as Strindberg, the Symbolists and the Expressionists, required any major change in the technology of the theatre.

            Apart from the melodrama written for the masses, the other new form, for the prosperous bourgeoisie, was the “well-made-play.” Its major practitioner, Eugene Scribe, wrote hundreds of such plays: and the form was developed as sophisticated bourgeois entertainment.   The method behind the well-made-play was to create the maximum of theatrical excitement with the minimum of intellectual or conceptual risk - an ideal form for the public of Paris under the Bourbon rulers and their Censorship.  The plot would consist of a materially intricate situation subjected to the pressure of urgent theatrical timing.  Each act of the play would contain a roller-coaster series of reversals and counter-reversals, as the party in whom the audience invested sympathy, now was foiled, now was triumphant, only to be foiled again.  The curtain would fall on each act with the situation excruciatingly unresolved.   It was, in fact, similar to the interest of the stock exchange or gambling table.

            The well-made-play was continued by a number of playwrights, including Dumas fils, Emile Augier, and Victorien Sardou, and, like the melodrama, was widely exported in the nineteenth century, becoming the predominant form of the fashionable theatre.  Its practitioners in England and the United States mostly plagiarized and bowdlerized the French originals but original attempts at the genre were made by, for example, Oscar Wilde who infiltrated into the well-worn structure his own subversively witty dialogue. For serious drama in the period following the French Revolution we have to go to a country that had no theater tradition at all – Germany.

            While the Revolution created the social conditions for a new theater public to emerge that was to become the theatre public Ibsen confronted, it was in Germany that the ‘supertext’ of his drama was being fashioned, ready for him to take over and transform.