The Intellectual and His People. Jacques Ranciere
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the project of a group of Positivist workers, who met for the first time in 1886, in the back room of a wine shop. Its organizer, Georges Deherme, gave it the title of Coopération des Idées. In 1889 it was able to set up its theatre in the premises of a former café-concert, and inaugurate it with Liberté, the only play of Maurice Pottecher that glorified the Michelet style of legend. Its producer believed this theatre could only come alive by creating its own dramatic literature. Creation was ‘the only sign of life. Anything that simply reproduces and copies, without generating, is simply a more or less skilful machine, a soulless automaton.’58
In actual fact, the few creations of this theatre – for example L’École des juges, a ‘rural comedy’, or Dis-donc Ugène, did not seem to lead the public very far along the path of the Idea. They were also drowned in an eclectic choice that largely reproduced all the theatrical tendencies played on other stages, from Courteline to Porto-Riche, or Labiche to Breix and Mirbeau, with Molière and more rarely Corneille in the form of extracts. This theatre was caught up in the decline that rapidly affected the popular universities, in which, according to Rolland, the public came to look, politely applauded the lecturers, but felt a boredom that was very soon fatal to the project.
The other attempts to found popular theatres experienced a success inversely proportional to the social radicalism of their project. At the Théâtre Moncey, Robert Beaulieu, a former student of Antoine, posted his colours to the mast with his first creation: L’Affaire Grisel by Lucien Besnard tells how a rich industrialist forces his mistress, who works for the post office, to have an abortion. The foetus, hidden in a wood, is discovered, and a teaching assistant who has recently arrived in the town and is cohabiting outside of marriage is accused. The condemned teacher is saved in extremis by the remorse of the industrialist, who kills himself after confessing his crime. This dark register seems to have had only limited success with the public of the Batignolles – petty-bourgeois, according to Rolland. The theatre closed its doors after just six months.
The Belleville theatre, founded by Ernest Berny, another student of Antoine, also proclaimed Romain Rolland’s three principles. But it knew how to dispense with them when circumstances dictated, which brought it a greater prosperity, based on a more eclectic repertoire, before it was itself taken over by a regular impresario.
For Rolland, however, these attempts at popular theatre all suffered from a still more worrying prejudice than the mistakes or half-measures of their promoters: the suspicion of the working-class population towards spectacles described as ‘for the people’. For the working people of Paris, this was synonymous with a poor-quality entertainment for the poor:
The worst enemy was the people. They didn’t want to be a people. They said to M. Beaulieu: ‘People yourself! We’re just as good bourgeois as you . . .’ To bring them in, the theatre should have been called ‘Théâtre de la Bourgeoisie’.59
This was, in Rolland’s view, the evil that struck the project of popular theatre at its root – the disappearance of its people:
The demoralizing atmosphere of the city of luxury, pleasures and scandals has sapped its strength. To be more exact, there are two peoples in Paris: one that, once it has emerged from its misery, is immediately attracted and absorbed by the bourgeoisie; the other that is defeated and abandoned by its more fortunate brothers, and dwells in its wretched condition. The former no longer wants a popular theatre; the latter is unable to attend it, being harassed by work and overcome by fatigue.60
If the policy of the bourgeoisie was to absorb one of these peoples with a view to destroying the other, that of the promoters of popular theatre had to be to weld together again the two divided pieces of the popular body. The socio-cultural barrier now lay within the people themselves. By the same token, however, the powers of the theatre were now annulled. As Jaurès saw it, it was politics that would have to give the theatre a people worthy of the name. ‘Only a new society will be able to raise the new theatre.’61
The end of Bastille Day
But this limited effectiveness of the theatre was perhaps a limit of the theatre itself. The people’s theatre once more found itself being no more than the substitute for a life whose image could only be provided by the great civic festivals of the united and victorious nation:
The theatre presupposes a poor and disturbed life, which seeks in dreams a refuge against its cares. If we were happier and more free, we would no longer hunger for it. Life would then be our most glorious spectacle. Without claiming ever to attain an ideal of happiness, which recedes in proportion as one advances, let us dare to say that humanity’s effort seemingly tends to restrain the field of art and expand that of life – or rather to make art an adornment of life, rather than a closed world and an imaginary life. A happy and free people need festivals more than theatre; they will be always their own finest spectacle.62
This helps us to understand the double tension that had marked the ‘theatre of the Revolution’ that Rolland sought to develop, from the last years of the nineteenth century through to the eve of the Second World War. We could say that this whole construction was inspired by a single thought: that of the cunning of reason, its triumph passing by way of the blind forces of the people and the caricatures of goddesses and festivals of Reason. But this tirelessly repeated theme, particularly in Le Triomphe de la raison devoted to the fall of the Girondins, or Le Jeu de l’amour et de la mort, on the fate of Condorcet, led towards two distinct forms of theatre.
The first of these was represented by Le 14 juillet, for which Rolland wrote two different endings, one designed for regular production and the other for a popular festival complete with orchestra and choirs. The object of this expanded stage was ‘to realize the union of the public and the work, to lay down a bridge between the hall and the stage, to make the action of a drama a real action’.63 The main difference, as far as the text itself was concerned, would consist in the audience being directly addressed by Camille Desmoulins, Marat or Hoche, who summoned them to continue what they had begun. This could not proceed for long without the entrance of a new power onto the stage: ‘Music, the tyrannical power of sound that stirs the passive crowds; this magical illusion that suppresses time and gives what it touches an absolute character.’
If music took back its prior position, this was at the price of a reversal of roles. Music was now to substitute its illusion for the insufficient ‘sincerity’ of the theatre. Its role here was one of saturation. It had to be continuous, in order to ‘fill all the silences that a theatre crowd could never succeed in filling completely, that occur despite everything between its cries and destroy the illusion of continuous life’.64
But the power of a musical theme filling the gaps in both performance and life would not suffice by itself to realize the new principle of popular art – ‘the people itself becoming actor in the popular festival’.65 A new disposition was needed for the orchestra and choirs: the hymns sung by the characters on stage would be taken up by one or several groups of voices in the audience. And, after Hoche’s speech to the people, the same hymn would be ‘taken up at every level of the hall, on all sides, by groups of voices, small choirs, even little bands surrounding the public and morally forcing them to sing along’.66 At the climax, the choirs were joined by the sound of trumpets, by dances and rounds, ‘the tumult of a people and an army’.67
A great national festival . . . Romain Rolland and the champions of a popular theatre sought in vain in 1907 to have Le 14 juillet staged on the square in front of the Hôtel de Ville. Seven years later, other fanfares of unity would resound, those of the union sacrée. The energy of Louis Lumet and several other activists for popular theatre would finally find its culmination there. Rolland, for his part, decided to remain ‘above the battle’. And after the Great War was over, he drew the same lessons from it as did many others. In a theatre that no longer claimed to be popular, he pursued, from one play to the next, his demonstration of the fellow-travelling philosophy: reason on the march through the folly and crimes of revolutionary dictatorship; the necessity of individuals such as Condorcet perishing so that the peoples, instructed by their educational plans, would allow them to triumph over their executioners and would thus become worthy of having their theatre.
If the theatre dreamed of in the nineteenth century was never realized, it at least developed the philosophy