Theater, War, and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France and Its Empire

Charles Harny de Guerville’s La Liberté conquise, ou le despotisme renversé, a play almost entirely forgotten today, was a smash hit when performed in 1791. So popular was it with over one hundred thousand spectators that a critic from the Journal de Paris exclaimed,The link between theatre and war is as old as Western drama itself but, as this episode shows, something new was afoot in Revolutionary France: the size of the public, the quality and extent of spectators’ responses, the critics’ struggle to describe the phenomenon, the multimedia nature of performances, and the blurring of audience and performers. In this outstanding and innovative study, Logan J. Connors examines the dynamic relations between the French military, dramatic literature, and performance from the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) to 1794, a period that saw the development of what he terms “the military-theatrical complex.” This phenomenon connects texts, performers, theatre houses, and spectators to soldiers, garrisons, policies, and strategies, subsuming individuals into the collective nation, at least in theory. Running through this important book are thus perennial questions of inclusion: What purposes does inclusion serve? who is included? who is left out? by which means does inclusion succeed or fail?Chapter 1 focuses on Pierre-Laurent de Belloy’s successful Le Siège de Calais (1765), which was not only staged all over Europe but was also the first play to be printed in a French colony (Saint-Domingue, or modern-day Haiti). De Belloy’s manipulation of national rather than classical history in order to inspire French audiences became the model for many eighteenth-century military plays. Crucially, De Belloy differed from the contemporary philosophes in his bolstering of pro-military patriotism, and he led the way for later dramatists to create “patriotic plays as affective experiences and effective tools to promote military and political goals such as recruitment, social cohesion, and antagonism toward the enemy” (46). Between the late 1760s and the Revolution, about a dozen theatrical works depicted military desertion, and chapter 2 offers a close reading of Louis Sébastien Mercier’s original Le Déserteur (premiered in Saint-Domigue in 1770) and its reworking by Joseph Patrat (first performed in Brest the following year). In Mercier’s critique of war, military bonds are not innate but earned, and with class differences stubbornly persisting across the ranks, experiences may only be shared so far; in Patrat’s version, however, diverse members of society come to embrace the same military identity. By comparing these two works, Connors reflects on how the philosophes’hopes that egalitarianism would serve humanitarian ends were transformed into a key tenet of the military killing machine.He shifts his attention from texts to places in chapter 3, in which he charts army and navy administrators’ attempts “to build community through shared experiences of militarized patriotism” (92). While much scholarship of eighteenth-century French theatre remains Paris focused, Connors extends his purview to provincial and colonial towns where a significant military presence was often invoked as a reason to build a permanent or seasonal theatre. He offers an illuminating analysis of France’s chief naval port of Brest, whose nine-hundred-seat theatre was the only one in the country to receive significant financial support from the war department; the establishment, however, never managed to achieve its aim of promoting “goodwill, cohesion, and civility in an emphatically uncivil space” (117). A particular highlight of this book is its astute analysis of theatre in Saint-Domingue, a wealthy and unequal colony built on enslaved labor. In 1764, a permanent theatre opened in the main city of Cap-Français, which was soon inhabited by 10,000 enslaved laborers, 7,100 white residents, 1,400 free people of color, and between 1,000 and 3,400 soldiers (depending on whether France was at war or not). Connors brilliantly demonstrates how the militarized theatre necessarily failed to efface the fractures on which this slave economy was built. Chapter 4 moves forward to the French Revolution and examines a series of often spectacular military-event plays that restage recent episodes; Connors uses the theory of reenactment to suggest that these stories of patriotic heroism function less as completed actions to be commemorated than open-ended possibilities to inspire the Revolutionary audiences. He distinguishes such works from “simplistic propaganda,” yet that complex term (which recurs through the study) needs to be explained: How does one understand propaganda in the eighteenth century? is it simplistic for both its original audiences and modern critics?The final chapter makes an important contribution to debates about women and the French Revolution by considering how the period’s war plays presented appropriate female behavior and sentiments. In his persuasive account of Olympe de Gouges’s L’Entrée de Dumourier à Bruxelles (performed January 1783), Connors demonstrates how women might be imagined to play an active role in the violent Revolutionary cause, and he proposes that most war plays “recognized that war and domestic bloodshed were also opportunities to portray progressive ideals outside of a sexual register” (218). Connors’ ambitious, expansive, and richly detailed book will be of considerable interest to students and scholars of history, warfare, theatre, and colonialism. Importantly, this significant book offers compelling ways of approaching and understanding theatre and war well beyond the Francophone eighteenth century.