The Intellectual and His People. Jacques Ranciere
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popular theatre had thus pronounced its own death certificate shortly before the government signed its act of birth. What was out of the running from now on, however, was the idea that a people could provide the principle of a new art. And equally finished was the attempt to create a dramatic literature inspired by the principle of this theatre. The Revue d’art dramatique had its own way of noting this death. A few years after having rewarded the project of Eugène Morel – which remained in the files – it had the idea of holding a new competition, designed this time to select the best plays that could constitute the repertoire of a popular theatre. The result plunged the Revue into an abyss of meditation. The concern to judge their playscripts submitted in terms of literary quality led to three prizes being awarded: the first to Le Pain, a social tragedy in three acts by Henri Ghéon, the second to L’Asinaire, adapted from Plautus’ Asinaria in free verse by Henri Dargel, and the third to Pierre Clésio’s Electra, in imitation antique verse. ‘It is bitterly ironic’, concluded the Revue, ‘how in a competition whose proclaimed ambition was to stimulate or discover a new form of dramatic art, two of the three plays selected are adaptations from the antique’.68 The evidence however had to be accepted, that the most socially interesting plays were unworthy of an award.
The Revue d’art dramatique now decided to turn the page, and become the ‘openly practical’ organ of the Association des Auteurs Dramatiques. Devoted above all now to championing young writers, from 1908 it was addressed only to members of this Association on payment of their subscription.
Before embarking on its official existence, the popular theatre had thus completed a period of mourning over both its form and its content. The humble doctrine of the civil service was now imposed, which Firmin Gémier, finally charged with organizing the Théâtre National Populaire, would make his own: the function of popular theatre was to familiarize those who did not attend the Comédie-Française or the Opéra with the classical masterpieces, in good productions at a modest price. Even if its pedagogic doctrine still accepted on the horizon the prospect of great popular festivals:
Before leading the crowds at the great artistic festivals that we dream of, it is indispensable to pursue their education, to familiarize them with the works of the repertory. Let us start by imbuing them with the taste for beauty, followed by the need for it, by popularizing those works that form the summits of literature and music . . . This programme may risk seeming narrow in the eyes of people in a hurry. But one must learn to read before studying philosophy.69
We know now what art was suitable for the people. We also know what made up the people that was suitable for art. As witness the active correspondence of Firmin Gémier with schools, barracks, local authorities and firms that promised, in return for certain reductions, to send their populations to profit from this ‘work of decentralization (!) and moral education’ that would popularize classics that were ‘far too neglected’, combat ‘the pernicious influence of the cinema’ on children, and be extremely useful to the latter ‘with a view to their preparation for the school-leaving certificate’.70 After seventy years of prehistory, the adjective ‘popular’ had finally acquired a fixed meaning, i.e. ‘designed for schools’. But some people already said about the man and woman of the people in the nineteenth century, that they could be more or less equated with a school pupil of thirteen years old. It was under these auspices that in November 1920, the Théâtre National Populaire opened its doors at the Trocadéro, under the wing of a prestigious actor and enthusiast for itinerant theatre who had nothing to do there but welcome the stars – or the understudies – of four major theatres, for some sixty or so productions a year.
A posthumous birth, about which a number of warnings had certainly been raised. It is true that these came from a rather suspect quarter. Against this project, vigorously supported by the trade unions and left political parties, the ‘moderates’ claimed to have a better understanding of the people. The workers, they said, would never leave Belleville or the Gobelins on return from work for a ‘popular’ theatre located in the midst of the bourgeois districts. Popular theatre had to reach its public on their home ground. And such a theatre did indeed exist: the old local theatres where workers used to go to see the melodramas after their run on the boulevard, but where they could also be brought to appreciate works of a higher class. Evidence of this was the work accomplished by Edmond Feuillet, a former lead in the Opéra-Comique, who, to save the people from the café-concert, took over the ‘people’s theatre’ of Belleville and the little theatres of Montparnasse, Grenelle and the Gobelins. Here Feuillet produced comic opera, drama, opera, vaudeville and operetta. He himself worked at all the trades of the stage, including that of electrician. He recalled how, during the First World War, he played while the bombs were falling, helping to maintain the morale of working class populations, and confident enough, if the means were at hand, to stage at the same time Britannicus at Montparnasse, Le Prophète at the Gobelins, La Closerie des Genêts at Grenelle, and La Mascotte at Belleville. For fifty years, he said, ‘families have handed down their numbered seats at Belleville and the Gobelins; they’re not going to change this’.71 Unless these theatres fell victim to the monopolies and were forced to give way to the competition that slowly transformed the majority of them in the popular districts and provincial towns into music halls, cinemas or supermarkets. A campaign accordingly developed that depicted these little theatres, the last vestiges of a certain popular life in which ‘the operetta that diverts and the drama that improves’72 were still performed, as victims of a double offensive, wedged between the commercial invasion of the cinema and the managerial illusions of a centralized popular theatre. During the course of this campaign, a strange typo occurred in an article criticizing the still young Théâtre National Populaire. The Trocadéro, this argued, was suitable only for a company headquarters or a gala performance:
For regular performances, it is a distant mecropolis [sic!], inaccessible and devoid of attractions, in which echoes fall in silence and scatter in the void. The Théâtre Populaire can stop there on tour. But it should certainly not settle there. It would succumb to the place.73
But it did not actually succumb. It continued to live there the death of its idea, just as long as it could resurrect each new season its suicidal Werther. In order for it to rediscover more conquering ambitions, the Resistance had to revive, for a while, the people of Michelet.
2
The Cultural Historic Compromise
The platforms of the image
‘The platforms of the Common Programme are empty.’1 This phrase, readily repeated in certain circles, leaves more questions open than it intends. It is not so much astonishment at the self-assurance of those who believe that their absence is enough to create a desert. Rather the sentiment is that the demonstration has forgotten to ask what it is seeking to demonstrate – is this non-presence really a lack? Is it the rhetoric of intellectuals on the platform that makes programmes – common or otherwise – loved today? If certain places on the platform are no longer occupied, it is perhaps also that platforms themselves no longer occupy the same place. Alongside the effects of rhetorical control that play themselves out within the political class, are there not other paths by which programmes today get through to people – by a certain ability to manage and reactivate the images that walls, screens, newspapers and other surfaces of representation offer us each day, i.e. images of the world and of ourselves? Images of misery and well-being, of freedom and constraint, of rootedness in the past and dreams of the future. What may well be decisive today for programmes of the left to seduce people is less the presence on the platform of the great intellectual stars than the ability for reappropriation shown by all those images that were forged in the struggles and dreams opened by May ’68, and that have slowly invaded the whole fabric of the social imaginary which advertising manages, and which politicians are learning to manage, in proportion to these struggles and dreams losing their substance.
There are no great thinkers to praise the policies of the established left from the platform. But who was it who used to warn us that ‘there is more to life than politics’? The same Wolinski, formerly the great image-maker for May and gauchisme, who, now that the former theorist and strategist proclaims the emptiness of platforms of the left, we see daily illustrating the latest party line on the front page of L’Humanité? A counter-example, or a sign of