The Intellectual and His People. Jacques Ranciere
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under her weakened fingers rendered only soulless melodies and chords lacking strength and warmth . . . The divine and chaste Muse has been stripped of her azure tunic, and in greedy and profane hands has donned the spangled garb of the acrobat and juggler.19
This diagnostic was not haphazard. It implied a different idea of Greece, harmonic rather than dramatic in essence. It was not Plautus and Terence who made the literary grandeur of the cities of antiquity, nor even Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, but rather Horace, Cicero, Plato, Virgil or Pindar: the heaven of philosophical harmonies and the earth of bucolic poetry united against the theatrical stage. It was the symphony and the oratorio that were in harmony with a people unified less by its heroic history than by its everyday work and life. Music would create the true legend of the people, by accompanying them everywhere they worked and prayed, to the glory of life, ‘whether in the solitude of the field, the noisome activity of the workshop, the public place, the church or the home’.20
Here again, alliances crossed the division between ideological and political camps: the spokesman of the well-behaved local bands was not far in his opinions from red Proudhon. Immorality and barbarism lay in separating the performances of the theatre from the labours and seasons of life. The symbol of this, for Simon, was the theatre; for Proudhon it was salon or concert music, to which he opposed ‘music in situation’, whether fanfares in processions, hunting songs in the woods, or oratorios in cathedrals. Such was the music of the future that would one day be sung everywhere: ‘during the harvest, haymaking and the vendange, at seed-time and in school’.21 Popular art was the art of the harmonics of work. Once again, therefore, the end of art was this limit at which it was abolished in what it had to celebrate. In this case, it would cease when the cultivated earth became an immense garden, and organized labour a vast concert.22
The idea of a popular theatre was thus established in the long duration of its contradiction. It had its theoretical rise at the moment when new urban spaces and new scales of artistic values set in motion a long process: that of the artistic devalorization of the theatre and its desertion by the people.23 But this idea now went hand in glove with the great project of national education, and all the high tides of this idea and of progressive struggle brought it to the front of the stage: the liberal Empire of Émile Ollivier and Victor Duruy; the secular Republic of the 1880s; the Republic of the 1900s; and, after the world wars, the breath of reconstruction and of the Resistance. Each time round, the clear need arose for a supplementary means of national education and unity, for rooting the lettered classes in the people, and for having the people participate in the riches of culture. And on each occasion, too, the growing decline in the spectacles of high art, the advance of the café-concert, followed by cinema, sport, radio and television, only added practical urgency to theoretical necessity.
In the logic of administration and budgets, the question was quickly pinned down: the people’s theatre was simply one more subsidized theatre to add to the two major dramatic stages and the two great opera companies. The Beaux-Arts budget was meagre under any political regime, and even the least socialistic state was always inclined to the radical solution of making the rich pay. The 1870 project already defined the doctrine that would reign until 1951: the popular theatre would be a hall in which the four subsidized theatres of the rich would take turns to enrich the poorer classes with the treasures of their repertoire. (Students at the Conservatoire would find an ideal initiation to their trade in filling the remaining evenings.) From 1870, too, the artists and managers of these theatres would adduce evidence that such performances, on top of the increased costs they incurred, would always present too ‘precarious’ conditions ever to bring the people displays of art that were worthy of them.24
But the simple thinking of the Beaux-Arts civil servants would nonetheless continue its path. In 1902 it again lay at the centre of the project for a popular theatre, initiated this time round by the city of Paris. Certainly, other demands were also periodically heard. The project of Viollet-le-Duc, in 1882, insisted on a genre designed to make the people’s theatre ‘both a stimulant and an education’ for popular manners:25 the historical and social drama, whose development would indeed require the contribution of new dramatic writers. The director would be held to produce each year a minimum of ten new works, including at least five three-act ones, one of which had to be from a French writer who had never had a play of more than two acts performed at a Paris theatre. It goes without saying that dramatic authors warmly supported this vocation of the popular theatre for historical and social creation. In 1902, they sought in vain to press their opinion against that of the leading light of the conservative faction, Adrien Bernheim, administrator of the Théâtre Français and of ‘Trente ans de théâtre’, an organization that assisted retired members of the company. For Bernheim, the popular theatre’s task was to undertake periodic tours to perform selected pieces of French literature in local or suburban theatres, introduced by lecturers primed to show the popular public that the subject of Andromaque was no different from any crime story in the newspapers. His doctrine was simple: ‘The theatre is only a means of instruction and popular education if the people are offered masterpieces and nothing but masterpieces.’26 And if death was not a sufficient condition for recognizing the author of a masterpiece, it was certainly a necessary one.
It was naturally a civil service logic that settled these factional quarrels. The thinking of the late Empire’s superintendent of theatres still prevailed in 1920 when the organization of the Théâtre National Populaire was entrusted to Firmin Gémier: travelling productions of Werther, Faust and Manon were its staple in its heyday, before economic crisis and an ageing population brought the whole business into decline.27
Poetic communion
This logic was certainly too petty to express the militant enthusiasm that sought to raise the people to the luminous temple of art, or refill art from the treasury of popular energies. This enthusiasm found expression, in the final years of the nineteenth century, in the Revue d’art dramatique – though with an interesting shift of priorities. Activism was now the cause of aesthetes rather than politicians. The scepticism of the latter was clearly expressed in the way that Jaurès reversed the order of reasons given by Michelet:
Theatre is not, and by its nature cannot be, an avant-garde force. It only proclaims ideas long after these have been proclaimed elsewhere, in books . . . A new idea has to have matured forcefully before it starts to take theatrical form.28
Conversely, the pioneers of art for the people often shared the contempt of the new literary generation for the parliamentary republic. They rejected en bloc ‘titbits of socialist preaching’,29 and even those comedies of manners in which social criticism and ‘literary’ theatre often excelled, dissecting the corruption of institutions and bourgeois manners or depicting popular misery and suffering. Whatever its literary value or social significance might have been, popular theatre would rediscover here the moral atmosphere of melodrama: ‘sad visions of cruel humanity, ignorant and painful’.30 It would draw the same moral: the fatality of a world condemned to violence and hatred, in which ‘unbridgeable barriers divide the humble from the powerful’.31 In short, despite the activist sympathy of certain authors, such as Lucien Descaves, popular theatre could not be identified with social theatre. The latter was always a representation of social classes that gave one or the other a moral lesson. And the very distinction was a demoralizing one.
The principle of aesthetic action, therefore, was no longer to be found either in the needs of the people, nor even in the need to unite the different classes. It lay rather in the cult of the beautiful and the celebration of the poetic office. The key word was not ‘theatre’ or ‘culture’, but ‘beauty’. And if much was said – as with Michelet – about ritual and ceremony, what was involved here was not so much a national festival, but far more a Wagnerian mass or Mallarméan rite. The young defenders of the popular theatre did not belong to the symbolist sect. But they had learned the lessons of the Revue Wagnérienne that were much in the air. The communion they spoke of was less the warmth of a group vibrating to the spectacle of its unity, than the participation of the crowd in the high mystery of art.
That was the first lesson learned from Wagner: the people whose melodies Auber and Rossini had hunted out – from Alpine passes to the markets of Naples – before handing these back to them as choruses for barrel-organs, had become denatured. The aristocratic stage had confiscated