Patronage, Profits, and Public Theaters: Rethinking Cultural Unification in Ancien Régime France

Patronage, Profits, and Public Theaters: Rethinking Cultural Unification in Ancien RégimeFranceAuthor(s): Lauren ClaySource: The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 79, No. 4 (December 2007), pp. 729-771Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/521064 .

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The Journal of Modern History 79 (December 2007): 729–771� 2007 by The University of Chicago. 0022-2801/2007/7904-0001$10.00All rights reserved.

Patronage, Profits, and Public Theaters: RethinkingCultural Unification in Ancien Regime France*

Lauren ClayTexas A&M University

In late 1774, residents of Le Mans, a city of about fifteen thousand located tothe southwest of Paris, complained in the local newspaper that their city wasnow “the only [one] in all of the [region] that is deprived of the pleasure of aplayhouse.”1 Many other French cities had recently dedicated public theaters,but those acting companies willing to travel to Le Mans rented space in aprivate house to stage their performances.2 Although a group of citizens hadpetitioned the city government in 1768 to build a municipal theater, they hadbeen refused, with the explanation that Le Mans simply did not have the funds.3

Having exhausted all other avenues to get the theater they wanted, MathieuChesneau-Desportes and several other prominent residents decided upon a newplan—they would construct the theater through private investment. They or-ganized the Society for the Playhouse of the City of Le Mans, a joint-stockcompany that proposed to sell 120 shares in order to raise the eighteen thou-sand livres needed to build a public theater.4 The city donated the land. Thesociety would operate the theater, with members receiving a share of the pro-ceeds made from renting the stage to traveling acting and opera troupes, aswell as to popular performers. Over the next few months, more than a hundredinvestors came forward to purchase shares in the enterprise. The city celebratedthe theater’s inauguration in 1776. Local residents began enjoying theatrical

* I would like to thank the following individuals for their helpful comments andsuggestions on various incarnations of this article: Cynthia Bouton, Chester Dunning,Leor Halevi, Lynn Hunt, Alan Kors, Sheryl Kroen, Lynn Lees, Bill Weber, the juniorfaculty reading group at Texas A&M University, and the anonymous readers for theJMH. Research for this project was supported by a Fulbright Fellowship and by theNational Endowment for the Humanities.

1 Affiches du Mans, December 12, 1774, 199. Unless otherwise noted, all translationsfrom the French are my own.

2 On the history of theater in Le Mans before the new theater was inaugurated, seeRobert Deschamps La Riviere, Le theatre au Mans au XVIIIe siecle (Mamers, 1900),esp. 134–39; and L. H.[ublin] Notice sur le theatre et sur les anciennes salles despectacle du Mans (Le Mans, 1885). In this essay, by “public theaters” I mean dedicatedbuildings in which performances were accessible to any individual who could affordto purchase a ticket. Public theaters featured performances by professional actors, sing-ers, dancers, and others who, unlike amateurs, made their livelihood on the stage.

3 Archives departementales [AD] de la Sarthe, 111 AC 611, “Extrait des registres duBureau de l’hotel de ville du Mans.”

4 Affiches du Mans, December 12, 1774, 199.



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entertainment on a regular basis, and the society-operated theater remained thecity’s primary performance venue, to the benefit of its shareholders, into themiddle of the nineteenth century.5

The desire of Chesneau-Desportes and others in Le Mans to enjoy localpublic theater was shared widely throughout urban France in the eighteenthcentury. As late as 1680, the year when the Comedie-Francaise was establishedin Paris, only a single provincial city featured a dedicated playhouse: Tou-louse.6 During the course of the “long” eighteenth century, however, literallydozens of French cities inaugurated their first public playhouses. These build-ings were designed to provide a paying public with a space in which spectatorscould socialize and enjoy plays, operas, or more popular entertainments. Asthese theaters began hosting traveling acting companies and, in a number ofcases, permanent municipal troupes, they became prominent and celebratedinstitutions in urban public life. Theaters provided an important means bywhich men and women living in France’s cities came to participate in sharedcultural practices and a common literary culture. In the past decade, a growingnumber of historians have rediscovered the French theater, and their effortshave produced a rich and varied scholarship demonstrating the importance ofParisian institutions such as the Comedie-Francaise and the Paris Opera inFrance’s cultural, literary, and political life.7 The rapid development of thisextensive network of provincial theaters, by contrast, has received little atten-tion.8 This essay will focus on a single aspect of the development of a thriving

5 After a new and larger municipal playhouse was inaugurated in 1842, the theaterserved at times as a hall for dances, concerts, and conferences. It was finally demolishedin 1986 (Sylvie Granger, “Il etait une fois une salle de spectacle,” La Vie Mancelle etSarthoise 42 [April 2001]: (6–7, 7).

6 Georges Mongredien and Jean Robert, Les comediens francais du XVIIe siecle:Dictionnaire biographique suivi d’un inventaire des troupes (1590–1710) d’apres desdocuments inedits, 3rd, rev. ed. (Paris, 1981), 309–26, esp. 313–14.

7 Among recent work focusing on theater in eighteenth-century France, see esp.William Weber, “L’institution et son public: L’opera a Paris et a Londres au XVIIIesiecle,” Annales: Economies, Societes, Civilisations 48, no. 6 (1993): 1519–39; JamesJohnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley, 1995); Jeffrey Ravel, TheContested Parterre: Public Theater and French Political Culture, 1680–1791 (Ithaca,NY, 1999); Gregory S. Brown, A Field of Honor: Writers, Court Culture, and PublicTheater in French Literary Life from Racine to the Revolution (New York, 2002); andPaul Friedland, Political Actors: Representative Bodies and Theatricality in the Age ofthe French Revolution (Ithaca, NY, 2002).

8 Max Fuchs’s valuable but now dated La vie theatrale en province au XVIIIe siecle(Paris, 1933) remains the only synthetic study of eighteenth-century provincial theaterand continues to influence more recent treatments of French theater, such as Martinede Rougemont’s La vie theatrale en France au XVIIIe siecle (Paris, 1988), 279–96;and F. W. J. Hemmings’s Theatre and State in France, 1760–1905 (Cambridge, 1994),3, 137–43. Provincial public theaters have been examined from the perspective of



Cultural Unification in Ancien Regime France 731

provincial theater industry: who constructed provincial public theaters, how,and why. By asking these questions, I hope to use the establishment of theseplayhouses to reexamine the process of cultural unification in France.9

Ancien regime France was made up of a “crazy-quilt of overlapping units. . . many with their own laws, weights, measurements, and dialects.”10 Yet,by the eve of the Revolution, Alexis de Tocqueville writes, “France had be-come the country in which men were most like each other,” where elites “hadthe same ideas, the same habits, the same tastes, the same kinds of amusements;read the same books and spoke the same way.”11 The eighteenth century rep-resented a critical period in which growing numbers of individuals, but espe-cially urban elites, adopted more cosmopolitan ways and began participatingmore actively in cultural networks that extended throughout France.12 Scholarsexamining the factors that promoted this integration of urban France havefocused primarily on two different, yet overlapping, areas: increasing inter-vention of the royal government in local affairs and the establishment of newcultural and social institutions in France’s eighteenth-century cities.13

Scholarship on cultural unification in France has long privileged the first ofthese—a vision of acculturation in which the state played a leading role, amodel that has been applied as comfortably to the age of absolutism as to theThird Republic.14 Pierre Nora has argued for the distinctiveness of France’s

architecture and urban planning in the exhibition catalog by Pierre Frantz and MicheleSajous d’Oria, with the help of Giuseppe Radicchio, Le siecle des theatres: Salles etscenes en France 1748–1807 (Paris, 1999); as well as in Daniel Rabreau’s unpublisheddissertation, “Le theatre et l’‘embellissement’ des villes de France au XVIIIe siecle”(these de doctorat d’etat, Universite de Paris IV, 1977).

9 Here, I use the term “cultural unification” to distinguish the processes of culturalchange taking place during the ancien regime from the explicitly nationalist culturalagenda introduced in France during the Revolution. It is meant to suggest an increaseduse of the French language; greater participation in a shared literary and musical heri-tage, as well as in various fashionable trends; and the adoption of similar social prac-tices and manners beyond a narrow elite and in regions throughout France.

10 Robert Darnton and Daniel Roche, eds., Revolution in Print: The Press in France,1775–1800 (Berkeley, 1989), xiv.

11 Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, trans. StuartGilbert (New York, 1983), 77, 81.

12 See, e.g., Robert Schneider’s Public Life in Toulouse, 1463–1789: From MunicipalRepublic to Cosmopolitan City (Ithaca, NY, 1989), 10, 253–357.

13 In this essay, I focus on developments in material and institutional organization inFrance, rather than on those taking place in the realm of intellectual life, which havereceived substantial attention in recent years. On this historiographical distinction, seeDavid Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800 (Cam-bridge, MA, 2001), 32–35.

14 The idea that the state was the primary engine transforming France during theancien regime was advanced as early as Alexis de Tocqueville’s The Old Regime and



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path toward building national community: “Other countries may owe the sin-ews of their cohesion and the secret of their togetherness to economics, reli-gion, language, social or ethnic community, or to culture itself; France hasowed them to the voluntary and continuous action of the State.”15 Scholars ofabsolutism point to new forms of royal engagement in French cultural lifeunder Louis XIV, who cultivated the arts and sciences as part of a coordinatedpolicy of royal patronage while also dictating France’s fashion trends.16 High-lighting an ever-greater state intervention in municipal affairs, historians arguethat many French cities were subjected to the “near dictatorial power” of rep-resentatives of royal authority. This interpretation is often reinforced in schol-arship on eighteenth-century urbanization, in which intendants typically appearas the primary forces behind urban building.17 More recently, the nature and

the French Revolution, where he asserted that “it is only government by a single manthat in the long run irons out diversities” (see esp. 32–51, 72–81, quote from 81).Eugen Weber argues for an aggressive acculturation of rural France led by the nine-teenth-century state in his influential Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization ofRural France, 1870–1914 (Palo Alto, CA, 1976). The role of the state has been high-lighted in studies of cultural institutions such as Philippe Poirrier’s Histoire des poli-tiques culturelles de la France contemporaine (Dijon, 1996); and Dominique Leroy’sHistoire des arts du spectacle en France: Aspects economiques, politiques et esthetiquesde la Renaissance a la Premiere Guerre mondiale (Paris, 1990). See also Daniel Sher-man’s work on art museums, where he argues that “if . . . the state did not have the lastword on what museums would become in France, it clearly had the first” (WorthyMonuments: Art Museums and the Politics of Culture in Nineteenth-Century France[Cambridge, MA, 1989], 15).

15 Pierre Nora in Les lieux de memoire, quoted in Bell, The Cult of the Nation, 18.This idea is echoed by Andre Burguiere in Histoire de la France, vol. 4, Les formesde la culture, ed. Burguiere (Paris, 1993), 21.

16 On the sun king’s remarkable cultural endeavors, see esp. Robert Isherwood, Musicin the Service of the King: France in the Seventeenth Century (Ithaca, NY, 1973); PeterBurke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven, CT, 1992); and the essays in DavidLee Rubin’s edited volume Sun King: The Ascendancy of French Culture during theReign of Louis XIV (Washington, DC, 1992). Joan DeJean highlights Louis XIV’s rolein directing French style as well as the production of luxury goods in The Essence ofStyle: How the French Invented High Fashion, Fine Food, Chic Cafes, Style, Sophis-tication, and Glamour (New York, 2005). Roger Chartier suggests that royal patronageand state efforts to control cultural production, by their very success, contributed to thedevelopment of the institutions of the “public sphere” discussed below. In “Trajectoireset tensions culturelles de l’Ancien Regime” in Burguiere, ed., Les formes de la culture,307–85.

17 Robert Schneider, “Crown and Capitoulat: Municipal Government in Toulouse,1500–1789,” in Cities and Social Change in Early Modern France, ed. Philip Benedict(London, 1989), 195–220, 212. On increasing royal intervention in municipal mattersunder Louis XIV, see also Nora Temple, “The Control and Exploitation of FrenchTowns during the Ancien Regime,” in State and Society in Seventeenth-Century France,ed. Raymond Kierstead (New York, 1975), 67–87. On the centrality of intendants in




extent of royal intervention in local cultural affairs have come under closerscrutiny. Robert Schneider, for example, has suggested that Toulouse’s rein-vention as a cosmopolitan city and its cultural integration into France duringthe eighteenth century owed as much to the interests of the urban elite as tothe power wielded by royal representatives. Even to Schneider, however, the“intrusive” monarchy constituted one of the most important forces for changein provincial urban life.18

A second approach credits the establishment beginning in the late seven-teenth century of provincial academies of arts and science, Masonic lodges,and other institutions that constituted what Jurgen Habermas has famouslynamed the “bourgeois public sphere.” Institutions such as these opened up newarenas for critical debate independent of the state, and they fostered the de-velopment of public opinion as a political force. They also helped to consol-idate new communications networks and created both social and cultural tieswithin the Republic of Letters.19 Daniel Roche, perhaps the most influential

eighteenth-century urbanization, see Pierre Lavedan’s classic Les villes francaises(Paris, 1960), 146–74; and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie with the collaboration of Ber-nard Quilliet, “Baroque et Lumieres,” in La ville classique de la Renaissance auxRevolutions, ed. Le Roy Ladurie (Paris, 1981), 288–535, 439–81. Jean-Louis Harouelpresents a more nuanced assessment of the various agents involved in urban buildingprojects in L’embellissement des villes: L’urbanisme francais au XVIIIe siecle (Paris,1993).

18 Schneider, Public Life in Toulouse, 9–11, 255–99, 324–57, quote from 11. Oncultural change in ancien regime France from a provincial perspective, see also SaraBeam, Laughing Matters: Farce and the Making of Absolutism in France (Ithaca, NY,2007); Katherine Brennan, “Culture in the Cities: Provincial Academies during theEarly Years of Louis XIV’s Reign,” Canadian Journal of History 38 (2003): 19–42;and Paul Cohen, “Courtly French, Learned Latin, and Peasant Patois: The Making ofa National Language in Early Modern France” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2001).Schneider’s assessment of state intervention is in accordance with shifts in the histo-riography of absolutism. The traditional model of absolutism, which focused on a“centralizing, modernizing monarch” who promoted a process of national unification,has in recent decades been replaced by a new model, in which the state and its agentsworked in collaboration with powerful local elites for mutual benefit. For a brief over-view of this extensive literature, see William Beik’s review article, “The Absolutismof Louis XIV as Social Collaboration,” Past and Present 188 (2005): 195–224, 195.

19 Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiryinto a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger, with the assistance ofFrederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA, 1989). On the spread of new institutions inprovincial France, see such works as Daniel Roche, Le siecle des lumieres en province:Academies et academiciens provinciaux 1680–1789, 2 vols. (Paris, 1978); Ran Halevi,Les loges maconniques dans la France d’ancien regime: Aux origines de la sociabilitedemocratique (Paris, 1984); Roger Chartier, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Mod-ern France, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Princeton, NJ, 1987), 183–239; Daniel Mornet,Les origines intellectuelles de la Revolution Francaise 1715–1787, 6th ed. (Paris,



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scholar of provincial institutions, has argued that learned societies and Masoniclodges were “the two principal means that permit[ted] the diffusion of theEnlightenment [des lumieres] and the integration of provincial amateurs in acommon universe of sociability and of culture.” Both academies and lodges,it is worth noting, were noncommercial and selective, with membership criteriafavoring those who were prosperous, educated, and, in the case of academies,often wellborn. In addition, these institutions shared similar organizationalmodels at the local level throughout France, a “uniformity of practice” thatRoche suggests created cultural bonds between Paris and the provinces.20

In contrast to these two approaches, the impact of cultural commodities inFrench and especially provincial life—with the notable exception of the pub-lishing industry—has only recently begun to attract significant scholarly in-terest. Unlike historians of Britain, who have produced an extensive scholar-ship investigating and debating the implications of Britain’s “consumerrevolution,” historians of France have devoted relatively little attention to therole that the rising availability and consumption of cultural goods and expe-riences played in fostering change on the local and national level.21 This dis-

1967), esp. 145–52, 159–70, 298–318, 349–56; and Gilles Feyel, “La presse prov-inciale francaise dans la seconde moitie du 18e siecle: Geographie d’une nouvellefonction urbaine,” in La ville et l’innovation: Relais et reseaux de diffusion en Europe,14e–19e siecles, ed. B. Lepetit and J. Hoock (Paris, 1987), 89–111.

20 Roche, Le siecle des lumieres, 1:280, and France in the Enlightenment, trans.Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA, 1998), 241–44, 436–43, quote from 242. Onthe organization of Masonic lodges, see Margaret Jacob, Living the Enlightenment:Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Oxford, 1991), esp. 96–119.

21 Schneider, e.g., does not point to entrepreneurship or commercialization as im-portant factors influencing shifts in cultural life in Toulouse in Public Life in Toulouse,while Chartier gives them only minor mention in “Trajectoires et tensions culturelles.”The debate about a British “consumer revolution” was initiated by Neil McKendrick,John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb in The Birth of Consumer Society: The Commerciali-zation of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington, IN, 1982) and flourishes in workssuch as John Brewer and Roy Porter, ed., Consumption and the World of Goods (Lon-don, 1993); and Ann Bermingham and John Brewer, ed., The Consumption of Culture:Image, Object, Text (London, 1995). Among the many works that have investigated themeaning and impact of rising consumption in Britain, see esp. John Brewer, The Plea-sures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1997);Helen Berry and Jeremy Gregory, eds., Creating and Consuming Culture in North-EastEngland, 1660–1830 (Aldershot, 2004); and Maxine Berg, Luxury and Pleasure inEighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford, 2005). More recently, scholars of France, workingmainly on Paris, have also found significant increases in the circulation and consump-tion of a wide range of commodities in the eighteenth century. See especially thepioneering work by Daniel Roche, The Culture of Clothing: Dress and Fashion in the“Ancien Regime,” trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge, 1996), and A History of EverydayThings: The Birth of Consumption in France, 1600–1800, trans. Brian Pearce (Cam-bridge, 2000); Cissie Fairchilds, “The Production and Marketing of Populuxe Goods




parity may result from the long-standing prejudice that France’s economy waswoefully traditional in comparison to that of England or perhaps from a ten-dency among many scholars of France to “de-economize” Habermas and thepublic sphere.22 Yet, as Robert Darnton’s work has shown, expanding networksof trade often operated hand in hand with the communication of new ideasand the cultivation of new attitudes and practices.23 This neglect of local en-trepreneurship is all the more apparent given that Habermas himself arguedthat the emergence of a public sphere was in fact dependent upon the “com-mercialization of cultural production.”24

France’s provincial public theaters—new institutions that were politicallycharged and were typically commercially operated—stood at the intersectionof these three domains, with the individuals establishing these playhouses act-ing as “cultural intermediaries.”25 For these reasons, theaters can provide auseful case for reconsidering the question of how cultural change was pro-moted and enabled on the local level and, just as important, by whom. Whetheremphasizing the centralizing policies of the state or the preeminence of Pari-sian cultural institutions and intellectual life, studies of eighteenth-century cul-tural life often relegate the inhabitants of province (as the rest of France is

in Eighteenth-Century Paris,” in Brewer and Porter, Consumption and the World ofGoods, 228–49; Annik Pardailhe-Galabrun, The Birth of Intimacy: Privacy and Do-mestic Life in Early Modern Paris, trans. Jocelyn Phelps (Philadelphia, 1991); andCarolyn Sargentson, Merchants and Luxury Markets: The Marchands Merciers of Eigh-teenth-Century Paris (London, 1996). Recent explorations of the meaning and conse-quences of rising consumption and growing commercialization in France include ColinJones, “The Great Chain of Buying: Medical Advertisement, the Bourgeois PublicSphere, and the Origins of the French Revolution,” American Historical Review 101,no. 1 (1996): 13–40; Jennifer M. Jones, Sexing “La Mode”: Gender, Fashion, andCommercial Culture in Old Regime France (Oxford, 2004); and Michael Kwass, “BigHair: A Wig History of Consumption in Eighteenth-Century France,” American His-torical Review 111, no. 3 (2006): 630–59.

22 On both of these points, see Jones, “Great Chain,” 16, 39.23 Robert Darnton’s extensive and pathbreaking work on the publishing industry and

the book trade in the French Enlightenment includes The Business of Enlightenment:A Publishing History of the “Encyclopedie,” 1775–1800 (Cambridge, 1979), and TheForbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-revolutionary France (New York, 1995). In the latterwork, although Darnton suggests that markets, public gardens, salons, and bookstoresall played roles in the eighteenth-century “communication circuit,” theaters remaincuriously absent (see 181–97 and diagram on 189).

24 Habermas defines this as a process that made cultural goods and experiences avail-able much more widely and to a broader spectrum of the population over the courseof the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Structural Transformation, 38, and21, 35, 164).

25 On the importance of cultural intermediaries, see Robert Darnton, “Sounding theLiterary Market in Prerevolutionary France,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 17, no. 4(1984): 477–92, 492.



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known) to a passive or at least a submissive role. The deeply ingrained Paris-province divide has framed the scholarship to such a degree that—despitestrong population and economic growth, extensive urbanization, and the foun-dation of numerous new cultural institutions during this period—urban lifeoutside of the capital is regularly cast in negative terms. Leading scholarssuggest that eighteenth-century provincial cities faced a cultural “crisis” anddeveloped a “provincial cultural inferiority complex.”26 To account for thedramatic expansion of France’s theater industry during this period, theaterscholars have endorsed this vision of provincial acculturation, arguing thattheater was forced upon provincial cities, often against their will, by represen-tatives of the royal government or suggesting that Paris imposed theater onprovince.27

The initiative demonstrated by the civic leaders and investors of Le Manscalls into question such interpretations. To what extent should the establish-ment of France’s theaters be seen through the lens of royal and municipalpatronage, with the implications of change from “above”? Or to what extentshould these new cultural institutions be seen as commercial operations thatsold access to a cultural commodity in new and growing markets? This essaysets out to investigate these questions by evaluating the roles played by royalagents, municipal authorities, and private individuals in establishing France’spublic theaters. In the process, it provides a new perspective from which wecan see how the foundations of these new cultural enterprises were in fact builtup in the cities of France’s “periphery.”

To the members of the Society for the Playhouse of the City of Le Mans,like many of their contemporaries, the construction of a dedicated playhousewas a necessary first step toward the establishment of a thriving performingarts culture in their city. Therefore, before we can address the broader questions

26 The power of this mythic Paris-province divide in the French imagination and inthe scholarship is explored in Alain Corbin’s “Paris-Province,” in Realms of Memory:Rethinking the French Past, ed. Pierre Nora and Lawrence Kritzman, and trans. ArthurGoldhammer, 3 vols. (New York, 1996–98), 1:427–64. Le Roy Ladurie describes “la‘crise’ et la mutation culturelle de nos villes d’Ancien Regime” and an eighteenth-century “deculturation provinciale,” in Histoire de la France urbaine, 3:488, 485. EvenRoche has suggested that the establishment of academies and learned societies inFrance’s cities during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries may indicate,somewhat paradoxically, “the slowing of a provincial dynamism.” Cited in Corbin,“Paris-Province,” 431; quotes are from Le Roy Ladurie, above, and from Hemmings,Theatre and State, 143.

27 Hemmings, following Fuchs, gives credit for the spread of provincial theater topressure from “representatives of royal authority.” Rougemont, on the other hand, ar-gues that theater was imposed on the provinces by Paris (Fuchs, La vie theatrale enprovince, 44, 53; Rougemont, La vie theatrale en France, 17; Hemmings, Theatre andState, 3, 137–42).




of the influence of theaters in French society and culture, we must first learnmore about the circumstances of their establishment. This essay considers theconstruction of public theaters built in sixty-three French cities between 1680and 1790. It begins with a brief overview of the introduction of theaters intoprovincial urban life. In the next two sections, the essay turns to the engage-ment of the state and municipality and of private individuals in the buildingprocess. Royal agents, this research suggests, worked primarily on their owninitiative to promote or control local cultural institutions. Their interest in thestage emerged out of local circumstances and personal political concerns,rather than from royal mandate. Royal agents and municipal governments didprovide important support for the emerging theater industry and in some caseswere instrumental in founding theaters. Nevertheless, they were not the pri-mary force behind the rapid expansion of public theater in eighteenth-centuryFrance. Rather than a directed and centralized process of expansion, mostprovincial theater building, we will see, was locally motivated and privatelyfunded.

NEW PLAYHOUSES AND URBAN PUBLIC LIFE

Between 1680 and 1790, playhouses spread widely throughout urban France.In the seventeenth century, traveling acting and opera troupes had typicallyrented a jeu de paume (indoor tennis court) or another building that they con-verted into a theater for the days, weeks, or months that they were in resi-dence.28 Dedicated theaters began appearing in major provincial cities such asToulouse, Marseille, Lille, Lyon, and Strasbourg in the late seventeenth andearly eighteenth centuries. By the middle of the eighteenth century residentsof about twenty cities enjoyed performances in an established public theater.29

Although France had been a relative latecomer to professional theater whencompared with England and Spain, French interest in the stage soon began tooutstrip that of its European neighbors.30 By 1790 no fewer than seventy-one

28 Mongredien and Robert, Les comediens francais du XVIIe siecle, 309–26.29 By 1750, in addition to Paris the following cities (at least) enjoyed dedicated public

theaters: Toulouse, Lyon, Marseille, Montpellier, Lille, Strasbourg, Dijon, Metz, Avig-non, Rennes, Rouen, Bordeaux, Nımes, La Rochelle, Nantes, Nancy, Amiens, andAngouleme. See Frantz and Sajous d’Oria, Le siecle des theatres, 101, 117, 125, 128,138–39, 140, 142, 157; Fuchs, La vie theatrale en province, 21–27, 39, 105; Mongre-dien and Robert, Les comediens francais du XVIIe siecle, 313–14; Pierre Jourda, Letheatre a Montpellier (Oxford, 2001), 12; Henri Tribout de Morembert, Le theatre aMetz (Paris, 1952), 42, 47; Jean Nattiez, “Les salles et le materiel dans les theatres dePicardie 1780–1860,” Revue d’histoire du theatre [RHT] 13 (1961): 246–49.

30 On the origins of professional public theater in sixteenth-century Spain and En-gland, see N. D. Shergold, A History of the Spanish Stage: From Medieval Times until



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French cities had inaugurated at least one new public playhouse.31 This com-pares favorably to the situation in England, where by 1778 only about thirtyprovincial cities enjoyed purpose-built playhouses.32 In fact, by the eve of theRevolution, more French cities boasted theaters than universities, chambers ofcommerce, royal academies, or local newspapers.33

The rapid evolution in architectural design after midcentury highlights thegrowing importance of theaters in the urban landscape.34 From the convertedtennis courts of the early eighteenth century—merely functional spaces in

the End of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1967), 177–97; Walter Cohen, Drama ofa Nation: Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain (Ithaca, NY, 1985); Wil-liam Ingram, The Business of Playing: The Beginnings of the Adult Professional The-ater in Elizabethan London (Ithaca, NY, 1992). Regular public theater was availablein Paris beginning only around the 1630s (see W. L. Wiley, The Early Public Theatrein France [Cambridge, MA, 1960]; and Georges Mongredien, La vie quotidienne descomediens au temps de Moliere [Paris, 1966]).

31 Emile Biais, “Le theatre a Angouleme (XVe siecle–1904),” Reunion des societesdes beaux-arts des departments [RSBAD] 28 (1904): 279–333, 290; Robert Caillet andRene Duplan, Spectacles a Carpentras (Valence, 1942), 35–37; E. G. de Clerambault,“Le theatre a Tours a l’epoque de la Revolution,” Bulletin de la Societe archeologiquede Touraine 20 (1916): 81–91, 83; Frantz and Sajous d’Oria, Le siecle des theatres,93–193; Gustave Lhotte, Le theatre a Lille avant la Revolution (Lille, 1881), 33; Mo-nique Moulin, L’architecture civile et militaire au XVIIIe siecle en Aunis et Saintonge(La Rochelle, 1972), 73; E. Queruau-Lamerie, “Notes sur le theatre a Laval au XVIIIes.,” Bulletin de la Commission historique et archeologique de la Mayenne 39 (1923):66–79, 89–108, 78; Danielle Teil and Roger Heyraud, Saint-Etienne et le theatre: Duvaudeville a la comedie 1650–1990 (Lyon, 1990), 10–12.

32 C. W. Chalklin suggests that English theater building took off several decades laterthan in France, with many playhouses built between the 1780s and 1820 (Chalklin,“Capital Expenditure on Building for Cultural Purposes in Provincial England, 1730–1830,” Business History 22 [1980]: 51–70, 53–54). On theater in eighteenth-centuryBritian, focusing on London stages, see John Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination,325–423. On provincial theater, see Peter Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance:Culture and Society in the Provincial Town, 1660–1770 (Oxford, 1989), 117–22, 329–31; and Sybil Rosenfeld, Strolling Players and Drama in the Provinces, 1660–1765(New York, 1970).

33 Feyel, “La presse provinciale francaise,” 93; Roche, Le siecle des lumieres, 1:15–74; Roger Chartier, Dominique Julia, and Marie-Madeleine Compere, L’education enFrance du XVI au XVIIIe siecle (Paris, 1976), 249–50; “Chambre de Commerce,” inJacques Savary des Brulons and Philemon-Louis Savary, Dictionnaire universel decommerce, 6th ed., 4 vols. (Paris, 1750), 1:797–809. Masonic lodges, which prolifer-ated rapidly after their introduction in France around 1725 to number at least 650 bythe Revolution, did significantly outnumber theaters (Halevi, Les loges maconniques,19, 43).

34 On French theater architecture in the eighteenth century, see Frantz and Sajousd’Oria, Le siecle des theatres; and Wend von Kalnein, Architecture in France in theEighteenth Century (New Haven, CT, 1995), esp. 85, 166–67, 184–87, 228–29,235–36.




FIG. 1.—The opulent Grand Theatre of Bordeaux, designed by the prominent ar-chitect Victor Louis, was inaugurated by the city in 1780: Vue perspective de l’entreeprincipale is from Victor Louis, Salle de spectacle de Bordeaux (Paris, 1782). Bypermission of the Billy Rose Theatre Division, the New York Public Library for thePerforming Arts, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

which to gather a crowd—public theaters soon became a source of civicpride and a means to display affluence and cultural status. In his Coursd’architecture, published in 1771, royal architect Jacques-Francois Blondelargued that “nothing so contributes to the magnificence of cities as publictheaters; these edifices must, by their grandeur and their exterior disposition,announce the importance of the cities where they find themselves erected.”35

Lyon, Nantes, and Bordeaux raised elegant monuments to the performing arts,with construction costs rising into the hundreds of thousands of livres andeven, in the case of Bordeaux, as high as several million livres (fig. 1).36 Evenin a small city like Chalons-en-Champagne, population about thirteen thou-

35 J. F. Blondel, Cours d’architecture; ou, Traite de la decoration, distribution &construction des batiments: Contenant les lecons donnees en 1750, & les annees sui-vantes, 6 vols. (Paris, 1771–77), 2:263–64.

36 Gerard Corneloup, Trois siecles d’opera a Lyon: De l’Academie de musique al’Opera-nouveau (Lyon, 1982), 52; Henri Lagrave, “Le dix-huitieme siecle (1715–1789),” in La vie theatrale a Bordeaux des origines a nos jours, vol. 1, Des originesa 1799, ed. Henri Lagrave and Philippe Rouyer (Paris, 1985), 127–352, 180; EtienneDestranges, Le theatre a Nantes depuis ses origines jusqu’a nos jours 1430–1901, newed. (Paris, 1902), 32–37; Frantz and Sajous d’Oria, Le siecle de theatres, 162.



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FIG. 2.—In Chalons-en-Champagne, a group of local citizens built this small yettasteful public theater, which was inaugurated in 1771: Facade de la salle de spectaclede Chaalons, engraving by Varin. Bibliotheque municipale Georges-Pompidou de Chal-ons-en-Champagne, no. 1238. Reproduced by permission.

sand, the modest new theater, with its balcony, large central window, anddecorative carvings, projected an air of refinement (fig. 2). For these and manyother French cities, the municipal theater became the most visible and cele-brated new cultural institution of the eighteenth century.

These new theaters’ success relied upon attracting the support of a nascentprovincial public. Even before a playhouse was completed, this building prom-ised change for the social and cultural life of a city. In Le Mans, their modesttheater project drew crowds of excited residents who milled around the con-struction site, getting in the way of the workers until the builder finally agreedto give tours on Sundays and holidays.37 Once open to the public, theatersbecame gathering places for audiences that included nobles, lawyers, mer-

37 See Affiches du Mans, March 25, 1776, 50, and May 13, 1776, 78.




chants, artisans, students, servants, “respectable” wives, shopgirls, and pros-titutes.38 In these new public spaces, any individual who could afford the costof entry, which usually began at twelve or fifteen sous, less than a day’s wagesfor a male worker, could socialize, have refreshments, conduct business, and,most important, enjoy live entertainment.39 Most provincial theaters were de-signed to accommodate large audiences—from about seven hundred spectatorsin a small city like Lorient to as many as two thousand in Lyon and Marseille.Together, they could play host to tens of thousands of theatergoers on a nightlybasis.40 Their stages featured professional acting and opera companies thatmight perform comedy and tragedy, operas, and fairground farces. By the1760s and 1770s, a growing number of cities began engaging resident actingcompanies to perform for much or all of the year, while smaller cities mightenjoy several months of performances in the course of a year.41

A systematic examination of who paid to construct France’s theaters castsnew light on the widespread adoption of this institution. For this project I wasable to identify the individuals or groups that paid to build eighty-one play-houses constructed in sixty-three provincial cities between 1685 and 1790.42

38 On the constitution of the publics in cities such as Bordeaux and Besancon, seeLagrave, La vie theatrale a Bordeaux, 265–96; Corbun, Le voeu de l’humanite; ou,Lettres sur le spectacle de Bordeaux (Bordeaux, 1778), 44; and Jacques Rittaud-Hu-tinet, La vision d’un futur: Ledoux et ses theatres (Lyon, 1982), 54–56, 135–36. Thiscan be compared with Jeffrey Ravel’s analysis of masculine Parisian parterre audiencesin The Contested Parterre, 13–19, 229–37.

39 For the cost of entry to provincial theaters, see Lauren Clay, “Theater and theCommercialization of Culture in Eighteenth-Century France” (PhD diss., University ofPennsylvania, 2003), 336–38. On provincial wages, see Roche, A History of EverydayThings, 62–67.

40 Andre Segond, L’opera de Marseille: 1787–1987 (Marseille, ca. 1987), 10; Frantzand Sajous d’Oria, Le siecle des theatres, 94; J. L. Debauve, “Theatre et spectacles aLorient au XVIIIe siecle,” Revue de la Societe d’histoire du theatre [RSHT] 18 (1966):7–153, 32.

41 For example, see performance schedules and repertory lists for Bordeaux and LeMans, in Lagrave, La vie theatrale a Bordeaux, 141, 190, 241–52; and AD de la Sarthe,111 AC 611.

42 A complete list of these theaters may be found in the appendix to this article. Dataon theater construction were drawn from Frantz and Sajous d’Oria, Le siecle des thea-tres, 110, 115, 121, 127–29, 134–37, 142–43, 147–53, 157–67, 175–79, 182–85,191–93; Corneloup, Trois siecles d’opera a Lyon, 31, 50–53; Segond, L’opera deMarseille, 9, 63; Jean Queniart, Culture et societe urbaines dans la France de l’ouestau XVIIIe siecle (Paris, 1978), 488; Jourda, Le theatre a Montpellier, 12, 15; Lagrave,La vie theatrale a Bordeaux, 177–80; Destranges, Le theatre a Nantes, 40; PantaleonDeck, Histoire du theatre francais a Strasbourg (1681–1830) (Strasbourg, 1948), 20–21; Nattiez, “Les salles et le materiel,” 246; Lucien Decombe, Recherches d’histoirelocale, notes et souvenirs: Le theatre a Rennes (Rennes, 1899), 44; Jacques Villard, LeTheatre Montansier a Versailles: De la Montansier a Francis Perrin (Marly-le-Roi,



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Only two of these theaters, the Spectacle de la Marine in Brest, discussedbelow, and the theater in Besancon, another midsize city with a sizable gar-rison, received significant direct financial assistance from the Crown. In threecities noble-sponsored theaters were opened to the public: Nancy, Luneville,and Macon. Municipal backing proved more common, with city governmentspaying for the construction of twenty-three of these new theaters. Municipallyowned theaters were among the most impressive theaters in eighteenth-centuryFrance, and a number of these enjoyed a resident theater and opera company.Perhaps for these reasons, many contemporaries shared the belief that “in effectthe playhouses in France are furnished either by His Majesty or built on themunicipality’s dime.”43 Yet this was not, in fact, the case. Of these eighty-onetheaters, fifty-four were constructed using private funds. To understand why,we now turn our attention to royal and municipal involvement in provincialtheater building.

1998), 15–16; Tribout de Morembert, Le theatre a Metz, 47–65; Henry Rousset, Letheatre a Grenoble: Histoire et physionomie 1500–1890 (Grenoble, 1891), 7–9; P.Achard, “Theatre,” Bulletin historique et archeologique de Vaucluse et des departe-ments limitrophes 3 (1881): 133–46, 142; Jacques Maillard, “Le theatre a Angers auXVIIIe siecle,” RHT 43 (1991): 107–18, 110–13; Louis de Gouvenain, Le theatre aDijon 1422–1790 (Dijon, 1888), 77–78; Paul Armand Vogt, Le theatre a Nancy depuisses origines jusqu’en 1919 (Nancy, 1921), 5–7; Ulysse Robert, Les origines du theatrea Besancon (Nogent-le-Retrou, 1900), 74; Adolphe de Cardevacque, Le theatre a Arrasavant et apres la Revolution (Arras, 1884), 40–45, 96–99, 113; Gustave Lhotte, Letheatre a Douai avant la Revolution (Douai, 1881), 50–51; Edouard-Hippolyte Gos-selin, Recherches sur les anciens theatres du Havre et d’Yvetot (Rouen, 1875), 16–33;Teil and Heyraud, Saint-Etienne et le theatre, 101–2; Francisque Habasque, Documentssur le theatre a Agen (1585–1788) (Agen, 1893), 15–16; Rene Ancely, Histoire dutheatre et du spectacle a Pau sous l’ancien regime (Pau, 1955), 26–28; E. Ducere, “Letheatre bayonnais sous l’ancien regime,” Revue de Bearn, Navarre et Lannes, Partiehistorique de la Revue des Basses-Pyrenees et des Landes 1 (1883): 116–29, 159–62,186–91, 226–30, 272–80, 320–30, 366–74, 414–23, 229–30; Biais, “Le theatre aAngouleme,” 290–320; E. Charvet, Recherches sur les anciens theatres de Beauvais(Beauvais, 1881), 45-51; Georges Lecocq, Histoire du theatre de St.-Quentin (Paris,1878), 37; G. Musset, “Le theatre a La Rochelle avant la Revolution de 1789,” RSBAD23 (1889): 649–58, 657; Louis Gueneau, L’organisation du travail a Nevers aux XVIIeet XVIIIe siecles (1660–1790) (Paris, 1919), 441; G.-A.-J. H[ecart], Recherches his-toriques, bibliographiques, critiques et litteraires sur le theatre de Valenciennes (Paris,1816), 25–26, 49–53; Henry de France, “Les divertissements de nos peres (suite),”Recueil de l’Academie des sciences, belles-lettres et arts de Tarn-et-Garonne 11, no. 2(1895): 51–77, 53–55; P. Benetrix, Le theatre a Auch sous la Terreur (Auch, 1890),1–3.

43 Quoted from a petition from 1774 by the shareholders of the theater in Cap-Francois, Saint-Domingue, Archives Nationales [AN], T 2103, papers of M. le baronde la Ferronnays. Similar sentiments were expressed by the intendant in Colmar, whourged the municipal government to contribute significantly to the building of a newtheater “as this is done in all other cities” (Frantz and Sajous d’Oria, Le siecle destheatres, 179).




PROVINCIAL NOBLES, ROYAL AGENTS, AND MUNICIPAL

GOVERNMENTS: THE LIMITS OF STATE PATRONAGE

The challenge facing all those who wanted to erect a new public theater intheir city, from France’s provincial governors and royal intendants to militarycommanders to municipal officers, was money. Building a public theater, es-pecially one that might bring honor to a city, was expensive. Although aris-tocratic patronage had provided a vital support to the traveling acting troupesof the mid-seventeenth century, this traditional patronage was not in most casesa viable means to supply a city with a public theater. The settling of the courtat Versailles and the establishment of the royal theater companies in Paris seemto have discouraged nobles from supporting their own theater troupes. Thenumber of companies bearing the names of royal family members and otherhigh-ranking nobles had declined precipitously by the early eighteenth cen-tury.44 (In fact, theater companies would become so independent from thistraditional source of patronage that by the middle of the eighteenth century,when provincial governors began to assert their authority to select the actingcompany or companies that would perform in their province, the troupe’s di-rector was often required to pay the governor for this privilege.)45 The fewprominent nobles who had the means and desire to build a stage usually in-tended these venues for private, rather than public, use. For example, in Nancy,Duke Leopold erected an opera house in the gardens behind the ducal palacein 1708–9 for the use of his court. Only decades later, in 1755, after the courtand its theater had been removed to Luneville, did his heir Stanislas supportthe construction of a new public theater in Nancy.46

For most royal representatives, their relationship with Versailles did notprovide a direct solution to the money problem. Louis XIV and his successorsfocused their attention on the Paris stages, taking surprisingly little initiativeregarding theatrical life in provincial cities. For example, the French monarchy,unlike the British state, authorized no royal dramatic theaters beyond the cap-

44 See the list of acting companies “protected” by members of the royal family aswell as other eminent noble families in Georges Mongredien, Dictionnaire biogra-phique des comediens francais du XVIIe siecle (Paris, 1972), 173–97. Among thosetroupes that continued to bear the name of the provincial governor or another pow-erful patron into the eighteenth century, such as those of Marseille and Lyon, thisdistinction did not necessarily imply any financial support. See detailed financialdiscussions between these directors in Archives Municipales [AM] de Lyon 0003,GG 098 and 099.

45 On the development of the provincial privilege, see Max Fuchs, “Recherches surles origines au privilege provincial des theaters,” Revue d’histoire moderne 26 (1930):81–100. As an example, in 1777 a group of actors paid four thousand livres to the ducde Penthievre for the rights to the exclusive theatrical privilege for Nantes for a year(AM de Nantes, GG 676, n. 10).

46 Vogt, Le theatre a Nancy, 4–6.



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ital.47 Although the approval of the King’s Council was necessary for the con-struction of new provincial playhouses, the monarchy provided significantfunds for such projects only in the rare instances mentioned above.48 In fact,the state even made it a general rule to deny tax relief to cities building orrebuilding a theater.49 It is nonetheless worthwhile exploring one of these ex-ceptional cases, the Spectacle de la Marine in Brest, which provides insightinto the relationship between the Crown, royal officers, and local communitiesconcerning the promotion of cultural change.

Even before the wooden hall that acting companies used as a theater in Brestburned down in 1764, the duc de Roquefeuil, the commander of a significantnaval garrison situated in this Breton port city, had begun advocating for anew playhouse.50 During the previous two years, Roquefeuil had praised thelocal acting troupes to his superiors, noting the benefits of theatrical entertain-ment for the thousands of sailors and soldiers under his command. In 1762,he had proposed that the officers stationed in Brest purchase a group subscrip-tion to these performances, a practice that was becoming common for armyofficers in garrison cities but was new for the navy.51 Now, Roquefeuil wroterepeatedly to persuade Versailles that the Marine itself should build a newplayhouse for Brest.52 Theater, he explained, helped maintain order and im-prove morale among the sailors, soldiers, and officers in port: “In such a sizablecity where so many different groups find themselves gathered together, a the-ater is of no small use in steering clear of gambling and quarrels; besidesfurnishing some education to young provincials who enter in the navy, it also

47 On the “theatres royal” established by the British Parliament, see Rosenfeld, Stroll-ing Players and Drama, 2; and Allardyce Nicoll, The Garrick Stage: Theatres andAudience in the Eighteenth Century (Athens, GA, 1980), 64–66. The closest Frenchcase was the establishment of the naval theater in Brest, where the performers wereknown, at least briefly, as the “Comediens du roi au port de Brest” (P. Levot, Histoirede la ville et du port de Brest, 3 vols. [Brest, 1864–66], 2:273–86).

48 On the involvement of intendants with urban building projects, see Harouel,L’embellissement des villes; and Richard Cleary, The Place Royale and Urban Designin the Ancien Regime (Cambridge, 1999), 13.

49 Such requests were formally denied to both Grenoble and Arras, but some reliefon the amortissement was granted to Arras and Montpellier for extraordinary circum-stances (AN H 39 IV, n. 52, “Ville d’Arras, 1783: Amortissement d’une salle de spec-tacle”).

50 A. Kerneis, “Contribution a l’histoire de la ville et du port de Brest: L’hotel Saint-Pierre actuellement la prefecture de la Maritime, deuxieme partie, le spectacle de laMarine,” Bulletin de la Societe academique de Brest 36 (1911–12): 97–258, 109, 112,123–24; and Levot, Histoire de la ville et du port de Brest, 2:274.

51 Kerneis, “Contribution,” 108: letter from Roquefeuil, naval commander, toEtienne-Francois de Choiseul, duc de Stainville, December 3, 1762.

52 See letters dated June 13, June 20, and September 24, 1764, in Kerneis, “Contri-bution,” 109–12.




inspires less distaste among the officers to reside in the department.”53 Roque-feuil’s arguments must have resonated within a French military commandstruggling with declining public prestige following the disastrous Seven Years’War (1756–63) and encountering discipline problems now that thousands ofmen had returned to garrison life. The monarchy consented to experiment witha new level of engagement in provincial cultural affairs. The navy providedthe land, and Roquefeuil received royal financing to construct the Spectaclede la Marine in Brest. The loan was to be repaid over time through subscrip-tions by several hundred officers and six battalions.54 The new theater, finishedin late 1766, was owned and operated by the French military, under the per-sonal direction of Roquefeuil.

Roquefeuil was hardly alone in recognizing social and practical advantagesthat France’s military might draw from theater. In fact, the relationship betweenprofessional theater and the military had its roots in the late seventeenth cen-tury. During the War of the League of Augsburg (1689–97), several of France’sarmies embraced theatrical entertainment for the men on campaign. They in-troduced a new policy of subscribing officers and regiments to the theatercompanies that followed the troops.55 The use of performers to entertain sol-diers and raise morale during war was employed even more actively duringthe War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48). Military commanders like themarechal de Saxe invited acting troupes to accompany their men, an oppor-tunity that was seized by Charles-Simon Favart, the composer and future di-rector of the Opera-Comique in Paris, among others. One officer from thenorthern campaign described posters from no fewer than three different theatercompanies that brightened the roads to Antwerp. Soldiers even constructed aportable stage, carried on twenty-five wagons, to follow the army when itdecamped.56

Although these relationships typically ended when the war was over, themilitary’s concerns about its officers soon extended into the peacetime garri-son. This was especially true in the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War, whenarmy and naval commanders found themselves struggling with new challenges.In the 1760s, the military’s reputation reached its peacetime nadir. With

53 Kerneis, “Contribution,” 123, letter from Roquefeuil to Cesar-Gabriel de Choiseul,duc de Praslin, May 16, 1766.

54 AN, Marine B2 381, f. 18 and 20.55 Service historique de l’armee de terre [SHAT] A1 1391, f. 77–80, signed by comte

d’Artignans on September 13, 1697.56 Charles-Simon Favart, Memoires et correspondance litteraires, dramatiques et

anecdotiques, de C. S. Favart, publies par A. P. C. Favart, son petit-fils; Et precedesd’une notice historique, redigee sur pieces authentiques et originales, par H. F. Du-molard, 3 vols. (Paris, 1808), 1:xxii–xxiv. SHAT A1 3147, f. 85. On military engage-ment of acting troupes during this war, see also SHAT A2 20, f. 95, 98, 99, 100.



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France’s large standing army confined to garrison duty, the thousands of youngofficers earned a reputation for debauchery and womanizing.57 Venereal diseaseand illegal gambling became central concerns for the police and local govern-ments of cities from Lille to Bayonne, and military commanders in a numberof cities looked to the stage for help. The commander at Toulon wrote to theminister of war about the problems he faced “given the large number of youngofficers of the navy and army who by their estate are required to reside hereand who are usually very unoccupied [desoeuvres] in the evening.” Toulon,he argued, absolutely needed a theater, to “occupy them enough for them toavoid the bad company of the evenings that they spend in gambling dens orwith the girls.”58 Military commanders thus embraced theater not only as anenjoyable pastime but also as a means to discipline soldiers. Since the audi-torium was illuminated as well as the stage, theaters were spaces where soldiersand sailors spent evenings under the watchful eye of their commanding officersand even under armed guard.59 It was in this context that Roquefeuil convincedthe court to support his Brest theater-building experiment.

Both Roquefeuil’s close engagement with Brest’s theater company and hisletters about the project demonstrate his personal passion for theater. In ad-dition, he undoubtedly anticipated benefiting from the prestige of having en-dowed Brest with a playhouse in which he would enjoy performances from aseat of honor. Nonetheless, when he presented his support for theater, he, likemany of his colleagues, did so in terms of its necessity for his officers, sailors,and soldiers. Echoing Enlightenment arguments promoting the didactic poten-tial of theater, he argued that the subscription cost for the young guards wasless than “the cost of an instructor of dance or of music, and would be forthem a better education.”60 Language skills were another area of particular

57 Jean Chagniot, “Les rapports entre l’armee et la societe a la fin de l’ancien regime,”in Histoire militaire de la France, vol. 2, De 1715 a 1871, ed. Jean Delmas (Paris,1992), 103–28, 107, 110.

58 Bibliotheque nationale de France [BN], MS Fonds Francais n.a. 9411, f. 284. Thecommander at Toulon to the duc de Choiseul, January 25, 1767. For similar argumentsregarding Bayonne, see E. Ducere, “Le theatre bayonnais sous l’ancien regime,” 161.On prostitution and concerns regarding venereal disease, see Erica-Marie Benabou, Laprostitution et la police des moeurs au XVIIIe siecle (Paris, 1987), 26, 407–30.

59 Roquefeuil explicitly raised the importance of a “place for entertainment and as-sembly, where one can be on watch [ou l’on puisse veiller]” (BN, MS Fonds Francaisn.a. 9411, f. 316, April 6, 1772). On policing of French theater audiences, see Ravel,The Contested Parterre, 133–90.

60 Kerneis, “Contribution,” 118, Roquefeuil to Choiseul, August 2, 1765. DespiteRousseau’s attacks on the morality of the stage, many philosophes, including Diderot,Voltaire, and others, promoted theater as an educational force (Marie-Claude Canova-Green, “Le XVIIIe siecle: Un siecle du theatre,” in Le theatre en France des originesa nos jours, ed. Alain Viala [Paris, 1997], 233–301, 239).




concern for Roquefeuil, especially given that his officers, often from the poorerranks of the nobility, were recruited from across a polylingual France. The “48livres that a family will pay . . . for a year of theater for a child in the navalguard,” he wrote, “are not what they would pay a teacher of the French lan-guage, which this child often needs when sent to port.”61 The theater, Roque-feuil repeatedly stressed, served as an educational supplement important forthe formation of a military elite. Moreover, his letters seem to suggest that, forboth senior officers and for those young recruits who had rarely left theirprovince before coming to the navy, theater could help promote a shared cul-tural identification that might encourage camaraderie.62

Roquefeuil’s support of the Brest theater suggests the kinds of motivationsthat inspired many royal agents—but especially the military—to support pro-fessional theater in France and its colonies. On the other hand, the trials thatthe Brest theater soon encountered also reveal the limitations that faced thosewho tried to impose new cultural priorities on a city. Could “absolutist” ap-proaches to theater be transferred from the court or capital to a provincial city?The answer, it seems, was no. Just six years after it opened to the public, theSpectacle de la Marine was foundering. The theater and its management underRoquefeuil managed to alienate local residents, actually disrupt military dis-cipline, and, perhaps most important, cost the royal treasury some eighty thou-sand livres in additional debts. Without the support of a local elite and a sub-stantial public, which Roquefeuil never seriously courted, a year-round theatertroupe with a sizable cast was simply too expensive to maintain. With thetheater’s financial crisis growing too large to hide or justify, royal funding wasfinally cut off, forcing the theater’s resident company into bankruptcy. Whenthe theater finally reopened, it did so under private management.63 Ultimately,the Spectacle de la Marine would be the only provincial playhouse in which themonarchy would play such a direct role.

61 BN, MS Fonds Francais n.a. 9411, f. 292–93, Roquefeuil to Praslin, August 10,1768.

62 See esp. Roquefeuil’s letter from May 16, 1766, cited above in n. 53.63 Although Roquefeuil claimed that the theater company’s debt amounted to only

fifty-three thousand livres, Clugny de Ruis calculated that between 1767 and 1772, thesum advanced by the treasurer to support the Brest theater amounted to 79,788 livres,13 sous, 9 deniers (AN Marine B3 598, f. 16 and 169–78). On discipline problemsrelated to this theater, see Memoires secrets pour servir a l’histoire de la Republiquedes lettres en France depuis 1762 jusqu’a nos jours, 36 vols. (London, 1780–89),5:46–47. On tensions with the local community, see Levot, Histoire de la ville et duport de Brest, 2:280–81. The military subscription, which totaled 76,000 livres eachyear, was intended to support fully the theater company, suggesting the lack of anyambition to cultivate a diverse audience that would include nonmilitary residents ofBrest (AN Marine B3 577, f. 269, B3 577, f. 270; Kerneis, “Contribution,” 132–37,196–98, and BN, MS Fonds Francais n.a. 9411, f. 289).



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With the exception of the Brest case, military commanders elsewhere hadto content themselves with pressing theater subscriptions on their officers andsoldiers to support local professional theater, a practice that Louis XV author-ized for all garrisons in 1768.64 These subscriptions granted, at a much dis-counted cost, entry to all regular performances taking place during the theateryear. The cost was deducted from the men’s pay, and participation was notvoluntary. A British officer traveling in France was astonished to learn that“the officers are ordered to attend [the theater] merely (like children) to keepthem out of mischief.”65 Members of France’s military elite also promoted thespread of commercial theater in more informal ways. Within five years ofCorsica’s annexation to France in 1768, a theater was built and an actingcompany recruited to Bastia at “the solicitation of many distinguished peopleof this city and of many officers of the garrison.”66 After a new cavalry schoolwas established at Saumur, a group of officers provided much of the impetusfor building a new public theater there.67 All in all, by 1789 officers and soldiersin at least eighteen of the most significant French garrisons could attend adedicated playhouse.68 The military not only provided a source of stable fund-ing for acting companies through garrison subscriptions: by exposing thou-sands of officers, soldiers, and sailors to the experience of the playhouse,France’s army and navy also participated in the making of a provincial publicthat could sustain commercial theater.

On the whole, provincial governors and especially royal intendants weremore likely than military commanders to wield the kind of local influence thatproved instrumental in resolving the financial challenges of theater building.During the reign of Louis XIV, the king had granted intendants extensivecontrol over the finances of most municipalities, making these administratorsresponsible for overseeing all major capital projects.69 It is no surprise, there-fore, to find intendants and other royal agents closely involved in promotingtheaters in cities such as Montpellier, Clermont-Ferrand, and Bayonne, all

64 Art. 23 of Titre XX(1) in Ordonnance du roi pour regler le service dans les placeset dans les quartiers du 1er mars 1768; suivi du Decret imperial du 24 decembre 1811(Paris, 1855), 178.

65 Quoted in John Lough, France on the Eve of the Revolution: British Travellers’Observations, 1763–1788 (Chicago, 1987), 211.

66 Bibliotheque-Musee de la Comedie-Francaise, Comediens divers, hors Comedie-Francaise: “Saint-Pierri,” July 20, 1774, and 2 ATO Dossier Province 1774, “Memoire,”February 12, 1774.

67 AM de Saumur 4M 92, Tableau general de messieurs les actionnaires de halleset salle de spectacle, construites a Saumur par forme de tontine (Saumur, 1789).

68 For a list of the primary garrisons in France in 1789, see Rafe Blaufarb, “Aristo-cratic Professionalism in the Age of Democratic Revolution: The French Officer Corps,1750–1815” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1996), 115–17.

69 Cleary, The Place Royale and Urban Design, 13.




cases in which the municipality paid for the building.70 If they could win theapproval of the King’s Council, these individuals could use their authority todemand, more or less, that city governments pay for projects ranging from aplace royale to a new hotel de l’intendance to a new theater.71 Provincialgovernors, too, might exert a great deal of influence. Because of the pressureplaced on the Bordeaux city government by the governor of Guyenne, the ducde Richelieu, the construction of the Grand Theatre de Bordeaux (1773–80)has been characterized as an act of “blind despotism.”72 When the city beganmaking arrangements to replace the “temporary” theater that Bordeaux spec-tators had used for over fifteen years, Richelieu pushed for the commission togo to his chosen architect, Victor Louis. Richelieu seems to have coerced thecity officers into accepting Louis’s ambitious vision for the project, while leav-ing the city struggling to pay the mounting construction costs for its monu-mental theater.73 Bordeaux certainly paid dearly, yet the city also benefited intangible ways as it became home to the most architecturally celebrated theaterin France.74

More commonly, royal representatives worked with municipal governmentsor private individuals to realize projects that can be seen as mutually benefi-cial.75 For intendants, theater projects certainly offered political advantages.Like their king, intendants sought to benefit from the display of status andauthority that was staged during a performance.76 Eighteenth-century Frenchtheaters featured hierarchical seating. Intendants maneuvered, along with mili-tary commanders, municipal officers, and others, to claim one of the most

70 Franz and Sajous d’Oria, Le siecle des theatres, 122, 136, 177, 179, 181, 188;Jourda, Le theatre a Montpellier, 13.

71 Cleary, The Place Royale and Urban Design, 12–14. One such example can befound in the new residence built for the intendant in Lille in 1786, which cost thestrapped city two hundred thousand livres. See Gail Bossenga, The Politics of Privilege:Old Regime and Revolution in Lille (Cambridge, 1991), 39.

72 Daniel Rabreau quoted in Lagrave, La vie theatrale a Bordeaux, 196.73 Ibid., 174–80.74 See, e.g., Pierre Patte’s praise for the Bordeaux theater in Essai sur l’architecture

theatrale; ou, De l’ordonnance la plus avantageuse a une salle de spectacles, rela-tivement aux principes de l’optique & de l’acoustique: Avec un examen des principauxtheatres de l’Europe, & une analyse des ecrits les plus importans sur cette matiere(Paris, 1782), 115.

75 See Richard Cleary on the involvement of the intendant and the municipality inthe building of places royales, in The Place Royale and Urban Design, 14, 47.

76 On the relationship between ritualized display, social status, and political powerin absolutist France, see Norbert Elias, The Court Society, trans. Edmund Jephcott (NewYork, 1983), esp. 41–65, 78–116. On the uses of theater, music, and spectacle to assertauthority, see Isherwood, Music in the Service of the King. Johnson discusses the hi-erarchical relationship between seating and social status in the Paris Opera in Listeningin Paris, 16–19.



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prominent boxes from which to enjoy performances. Unless outranked by aroyal governor or military commander, the intendant was usually entitled toeither the “king’s box” or the “queen’s box,” located above the stage to theright and left. These seats often gave a poor view of the performance, sincethe sight lines were awkward and the stage lamps could be blinding. They hadthe advantage, however, that the spectators seated there were the most visibleto the audience. From this prestigious position, an intendant could demonstratehis authority as the king’s representative. Some intendants explicitly used the-ater seating to assert their rank over local dignitaries, such as members of thecity council or the president of the provincial parlement.77 Beyond these aims,however, many intendants, like city governments, also saw in a public theaterthe opportunity to provide a new center for elite sociability, to promote urbanrenewal and civic pride, and to integrate the city into developing cultural net-works. By 1789, the seats of thirty of France’s thirty-four intendancies enjoyeda public theater.78

Municipally owned playhouses expressed an intensification of the city gov-ernment’s traditional oversight of local public entertainment. In the seven-teenth and early eighteenth centuries, the municipality exercised the right toapprove or deny performances by traveling troupes, and it also took respon-sibility for maintaining public order at performances.79 Over time, and as the-ater companies began to spend longer seasons in residence, a number of mu-nicipalities began providing and maintaining a performance space. Initially,these theaters might be located inside the hotel de ville, as in Toulouse, orconverted from a warehouse or jeu de paume, as in Strasbourg and Lyon.80 Bythe mid-eighteenth century, however, several municipalities began formingmore ambitious plans. With the inauguration of a new Lyon theater, designedby architect Jacques-Germain Soufflot, in 1756, a theater quickly became asource of cultural prestige for a city—a marker that architects as well as trav-elers used as a point of comparison between one city and another.81 Cities

77 On the political uses of theater boxes by provincial intendants and other politicalfigures, see Clay, “Theater and the Commercialization of Culture,” 71–110.

78 France’s intendancies are listed in Leon Mirot, Manuel de geographie historiquede la France. 1. L’unite francaise 2. Les divisions religieuses et administratives (Paris,1979), 315–24, 349–95. These were compared with those cities that enjoyed theatersby 1789.

79 On municipal authority, see Fuchs, La vie theatrale en province, 115–26. As Ravelhas shown, in the later eighteenth century a number of municipalities, confrontingviolence in the parterre, lost the right to oversee theater policing to royal soldiers (TheContested Parterre, 170–84).

80 Robert Mesuret, Le theatre a Toulouse de 1561 a 1914 (Toulouse, 1972), 16–18;Emmanuel Vingtrinier, Le theatre a Lyon au XVIIIe siecle (Lyon, 1879), 11; Deck,Histoire du theatre francais a Strasbourg, 20–21.

81 On the building of Lyon’s new theater, see Leon Vallas, Un siecle de musique et




including Metz, Montpellier, Bordeaux, and Nantes also undertook impressivetheater-building projects, producing imposing edifices that these cities used tonegotiate their place in France’s urban hierarchy. A number of smaller citiesfollowed their lead, likely hoping, as suggested by a citizen of Saint-Quentin,that with a theater “we will place ourselves on the level of the great cities ofthe kingdom, almost all of which enjoy this advantage.”82 The construction ofliterally dozens of new playhouses in France sparked a kind of intercity com-petition in which Paris, interestingly, was not often evoked.83

Proposals for these projects reveal a variety of motivations that inspiredmunicipalities to invest in new theaters, from beautifying the city and provid-ing citizens with a much-desired cultural amenity to helping the city managegambling and other social ills. Contemporaries, citing the dilapidated condi-tions under which performances were taking place, emphasized that to promoteattendance a new playhouse was needed that would provide for the comfortas well as the safety of the audience.84 To make sense of such seemingly all-inclusive agendas, we need to read petitions promoting theater as part of theeighteenth-century discourse of embellissement. To contemporaries, NicholasPapayanis explains, embellissement encompassed not only beautification butalso improvements to urban infrastructure and concerns for public health,maintaining order, and promoting commerce.85

Finally, local demand may have influenced the decisions of city govern-ments to invest in theaters. By the 1760s and 1770s, a public theater was nolonger considered a luxury—it was rapidly becoming a necessity. This wastrue for the rising commercial classes no less than for traditional elites. A writer

de theatre a Lyon (1688–1789) (Geneva, 1971), 290–93. For one set of comparisonsand descriptions of city theaters, see the account by British traveler Arthur Young,Travels in France during the Years 1787, 1788 & 1789, ed. Constantia Maxwell (Cam-bridge, 1950), 58–59, 86, 115–16, 124–25, 190, 229, 242. For architectural compar-isons, see Gabriel Pierre Martin Dumont, Parallele de plans des plus belles salles despectacles d’Italie et de France, avec des details de machines theatrales (Paris, 1774).

82 Lettre d’un citoyen de la ville de Saint-Quentin, a M. **, sur l’etablissement d’unesalle de spectacles dans la meme ville (Saint-Quentin, 1774), 2.

83 For example, in a 1783 memoir promoting a new theater in Marseille, the authorcompares the city and its amenities to Bordeaux and Lyon, but not to the capital (ANH 1359, n. 133). For regional awareness, see the case of Le Mans, n. 1.

84 On municipal motivations for building a theater, see esp. the “Declaration del’assemblee des notables autorisant les consuls a transferer la salle de spectacle dansl’ancien local de l’election,” December 9, 1767, reprinted in Habasque, Documents surle theatre a Agen, 14–15; the Deliberation du conseil de ville tenu pour la constructionde la salle de spectacle issued in 1759, in Andre Bossuat, “Le theatre a Clermont-Ferrand aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siecles,” RSHT 13 (1961): 105–71, 146; and Jules-Edouard Bouteiller, Histoire complete et methodique des theatres de Rouen: Depuisleur origine jusqu’a nos jours, 4 vols. (Rouen, 1860–80), 1:24.

85 Nicholas Papayanis, Planning Paris before Haussmann (Baltimore, 2004), 17.



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chronicling Lyon in the late eighteenth century explained that “the theater hereis the principal and almost the only amusement; it is the daily rendezvous ofall busy people; it is there that they come to relax and entertain themselvesand arrange for the evening some enjoyable suppers.”86 Having studied thetheater in Marseille, the architect C.-N. Ledoux concluded that “negociants domore business at the theater than at the bourse.”87 Even in a small city likeLimoges, a resident maintained that “the theater has become, for most of us,a need; it is the rendezvous of the businessmen on one hand, of the leisuredclass on the other.”88 As was the case in Le Mans, in cities where there wasno public theater, citizens often turned first to the municipal government toprovide one.

Nonetheless, despite the influence exerted by governors, intendants, andeven their own populations, municipal governments could and did find waysto resist the pressure to take the theater in hand. In La Rochelle, for example,the city refused to purchase and renovate the city’s theater as the intendanthad hoped. The municipal government, likely worried about expense, justifiedits refusal by focusing on the administrative responsibilities this would havecreated: “These officers, occupied with serious affairs in the interests of theking’s service and the good of their city, are they obliged to leave their gravityand to interrupt their deliberations to descend into the base and minute detailsof the theater?”89 Theaters, they imply, should be left in the hands of profes-sional managers more familiar with these responsibilities and of a more ap-propriate social station to undertake them. The La Rochelle playhouse re-mained in private hands.

Nor should royal support for such municipal theater-building projects betaken for granted. In fact, as the expense and potential risks involved in theaterbuilding became clear, especially after the disaster of Brest, the royal govern-ment actively discouraged the plans of certain cities to build a theater withmunicipal funds. When the mayor of Lorient solicited royal approval in 1774to take out municipal loans necessary to build a new theater in this small portcity, the King’s Council responded that Lorient was neither “significant enoughnor peopled enough to possess an institution of this nature.” Versailles deniedLorient’s request.90

86 A.-B.-L. Grimod de La Reyniere, Tableau de Lyon en 1786: Addresse sous formede lettre a Mercier, auteur du Tableau de Paris (Lyon, 1843), 12.

87 AN H 1359, “Memoire de C.-N. Ledoux pour le theatre de Marseille,” February20, 1785.

88 Quoted in A. Fray-Fournier, Le theatre a Limoges avant, pendant & apres laRevolution (Limoges, 1900), 23.

89 Quoted in Musset, “Le theatre a La Rochelle,” 656.90 Cited in Debauve, “Theatre et spectacles a Lorient au XVIIIe siecle,” 28.




PRIVATE INITIATIVES: INVESTING IN THE ARTS

To understand the proliferation of French theaters, then, it becomes necessaryto look beyond the role of the state to consider private initiatives. Beginningas early as the late seventeenth century, new modes of private entrepreneurshiphad emerged to exploit the potential for monetary gain in professional enter-tainment. Local small businessmen and women, alone or in groups, were oftenamong those establishing France’s earliest public theaters. This was the casein a number of France’s largest cities as well as in smaller provincial outposts.In the early seventeenth century, when traveling acting companies rented spaceto perform, jeu de paume owners often refused to allow actors to have thesecourts during the daylight hours, when they might be filled with tennis players.Actors were forced to set up a rudimentary stage every evening. As the pop-ularity of the game declined and that of theater and other entertainments rose,however, acting and opera companies began renting these buildings for sus-tained periods.91 Beginning around the 1680s, some entrepreneurs began gam-bling that permanently converting a jeu de paume or another large buildinginto a theater could be lucrative. It is no surprise, therefore, to find a numberof jeu de paume operators among theater entrepreneurs, as well as wood mer-chants and those in the building trades.92 Another group included those wemight place in the service sector. For instance, in the 1740s a Nantes aubergistnamed Tarvouliet turned a concert space that he had initially constructed tohost party guests into a theater. In Abbeville a cafe owner and his wife boughtan adjacent lot in order to establish a theater that featured their cafe along thestreet front. A tiny 150-seat theater was set up by a hairdresser in Saint-Etienne.93 Finally, some theater entrepreneurs were professional performersthemselves. In 1685, a musician named Gautier opened Marseille’s first publictheater to provide a space in which his opera company could perform. Whenthe Troyes playhouse was destroyed in a fire, a new theater was built justoutside the city walls by the local theater director and several associates (fig.3). Later in the century, the successful directrice Mademoiselle Montansierconstructed new public theaters in the cities of Versailles and Le Havre.94

91 Mongredien and Robert, Les comediens francais du XVIIe siecle, 310–12.92 For example, jeu de paume operators were among those establishing theaters in

Metz, Rennes, Tours, and Douai. In Toulon and Quimper, theaters were built by woodmerchants, in Alencon by a masonry entrepreneur, and in Soissons by a master roofer.See n. 42.

93 This entrepreneur appears alternately as Tarvouillet (AD de la Loire-Atlantique, C392, n. 72–73; Destranges, Le theatre a Nantes, 20–21; Frantz and Sajous d’Oria, Lesiecle des theatres, 160; Teil and Heyraud, Saint-Etienne et le theatre, 10–12).

94 Segond, L’opera de Marseille, 9; Gosselin, Recherches sur les anciens theatres du



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FIG. 3.—This theater in Troyes, built by a group of entrepreneurs, was inauguratedin 1777: Vue de la salle de spectacle de Troyes, de la porte et de l’eglise de la Made-leine, drawing by Etienne Bouhot. Courtesy of the Musees de Troyes.

To understand how these individuals might benefit from building a theater,it is helpful to compare the operations of theatrical entertainment in provincialcities with that in Paris. Unlike theaters in Paris, where the system of royalmonopolies guaranteed that each theater or opera house featured only a singlegenre of entertainment, provincial playhouses were multifaceted.95 Entrepre-neurs negotiated monopolistic privileges with the city and sometimes the royalgovernment, and these privileges typically assured that their theater would bethe city’s only venue for paid entertainment. Sometimes this included all the-ater, opera, and ballet; in other contexts it was extended to popular perfor-mances by marionettists, acrobats, glass players, and the like. Most theatersalso hosted balls and dances.96 In smaller cities owners might charge for theuse of the building by the performance, while in larger cities contracts wereoften negotiated for several months or for the full theater year.

If these entrepreneurs could fill their theater with acting troupes and other

Havre et d’Yvetot, 16–33; Villard, Le Theatre Montansier a Versailles, 15–16; LouisMorin, Le theatre a Troyes au XVIIe et au XVIIIe siecle (Paris, 1900), 12–19.

95 For an overview of the Parisian theater system and its restrictive monopolies, seeRougemont, La vie theatrale en France, 235–78.

96 For an example of such a theater privilege, see AN H 1359, n. 74.




entertainers, they stood to make a relatively comfortable living off their in-vestment. Once the theater was built, they operated more like landlords, withthe troupes renting from them taking on much of the risk. Rental contractsbetween the Nantes theater owner Tarvouliet and various directors demonstratethat from the late 1740s through the 1770s, he charged three thousand livresa year to rent the theater and furnishings. As additional perks, he and his wifeand children were granted free entry to all performances, and he was giventhree additional free tickets for each performance and ball.97 In Marseille inthe late 1730s, the Gay family earned approximately five thousand livres ayear from the use of the theater they had built in 1733 as well as from therental of an apartment and cafe located within the building. Their incomeseems to have fluctuated depending upon how much of the year the theaterwas active and whether troupes in fact paid their rent.98 In the 1770s, this sametheater, now owned by a lawyer named Chomel, was rented to Marseille’sresident theater and opera company for a steady 7,200 livres a year. In theearly 1780s, when concerns arose about public safety in the now-outdatedstructure and plans began taking shape to build a new public theater, Chomelsought in vain to defend his privilege. This theater, he wrote, constituted “themain object of [my] fortune” and the means by which he supported his family.Could the city “refuse to an honest citizen, a father of a family, the upkeepfrom his profession?”99 In sum, theaters like that of Marseille provided a sub-stantial income for their entrepreneurs, enough that the Marseille city govern-ment even investigated purchasing the playhouse to operate itself, although itultimately decided not to do so.100

The buildings erected or converted by these entrepreneurs ranged from min-imally utilitarian to modestly elegant. All, however, operated as commercialenterprises. Their owners, like the acting companies they solicited to rent them,were committed to selling a cultural commodity—an evening of entertain-ment—in these emerging markets. Promoting local consumption of profes-sional entertainment, they helped to open up participation in French theaterboth geographically and socially. In his landmark studies of consumption inFrance, Daniel Roche has highlighted the role that merchants played in trans-

97 AD de la Loire-Atlantique, C 392, n. 73, 74, 78, and 46, contracts from April 4,1755, April 17, 1756, April 10, 1747, and statement from intendant from November10, 1771.

98 The family claimed that they rented the theater for seven hundred livres a monthand in total earned more than ten thousand livres a year in revenue. The city investi-gated, however, and determined that the income from the theater was closer to fivethousand livres a year, most likely because it was not rented every month of the year(AN H 1359, n. 92).

99 AN H 1359, n. 122, Chomel to Monseigneur de Calonne, February 13, 1784.100 Marseille conducted this investigation in 1739 (AN H 1359, n. 92, 95, 96).



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FIG. 4.—In Lille, shareholders inaugurated this freestanding “theater-temple,” de-signed by architect M.-J. Lequeux, in 1787: Theatre de Lille, drawing, artist unknown.Courtesy of the Bibliotheque nationale de France.

forming early modern buying practices.101 Similarly, theater entrepreneurs pro-vided an important impetus for the adoption of new leisure practices in urbanFrance.

Beginning in the 1760s, private engagement in theater building would takeon a second—and substantially different—form. Between 1767 and 1789,private individuals founded joint-stock companies to finance the building ofnew public playhouses in Rochefort (1767), Grenoble (1768), Le Mans (1775),Rouen (1776), Reims (1777), Lorient (1778), Lille (1784), Saumur (1785),and Marseille (1787). In some cities, as in Le Mans, the theater society raisedfunds to build a theater that the municipality could not afford to give them.Elsewhere, such as Lille, local elites used the joint-stock organization to gen-erate enough capital to replace an old, dilapidated playhouse with a moreelegant and modern theater (fig. 4). In still other cases, like Marseille, a pri-vately funded new theater served as the centerpiece of an extensive project inspeculative land development. Some, like the Lorient joint-stock company,involved fewer than twenty very wealthy investors. Others included more thana hundred investors whose participation required a much smaller contribu-

101 Roche, A History of Everyday Things, 42.




tion.102 Most adapted the investment formula known as a tontine, a variationon an annuity that offered lifetime revenue in exchange for an investment ofprincipal.103 Shareholders paid to construct, furnish, and maintain the building;in exchange, they and their designated heirs received the revenue generatedfrom renting the theater. As the number of living owners and heirs diminishedover time, fewer survivors shared the rental revenues. This system benefiteddisproportionately those who were long-lived.104 The city government typicallyprovided the land for the theater at no charge, with the agreement that at thedeath of the last designated heir the building would become the property ofthe city. These theater societies not only erected public theaters; they alsomanaged the operations of these cultural institutions, sometimes well into thenineteenth century. The recruitment processes, social makeup, and businesstactics of these little-studied arts organizations shed light on the processes ofcultural change in France’s cities.

Who invested money in public theaters? The theater societies of Le Mans,Lille, and Saumur maintained detailed records regarding their membership andoperations, enabling the reconstruction of the social background of more than85 percent of investors in each project.105 Of ninety-nine identifiable investors

102 The theater of Toulon was also built by a group of private individuals in the late1760s, but I have not been able to determine if a joint-stock organization was used.Moulin, L’architecture civile et militaire, 73–75; Rousset, Le theatre a Grenoble, 7–9; Bouteiller, Histoire . . . des theatres de Rouen, 1:24; Louis Paris, Le theatre a Reimsdepuis les Romains jusqu’a nos jours (Reims, 1885), app. 259–60, and 154; Debauve,“Theatre et spectacles a Lorient au XVIIIe siecle,” 29; Rene Maurice, Nouvelle con-tribution a l’histoire de Lorient: La creation du theatre a Lorient au XVIIIe siecle(Lorient, 1941), 7–8; Leon Lefebvre, Histoire du theatre de Lille de ses origines a nosjours, 5 vols. (Lille, 1901–7), 2:406–18, annexe 2; AM de Saumur 4M 92, Tableaugeneral de messieurs les actionnaires; AN H 1359; and A.- Jacques Pares, Apercu surles spectacles de Toulon avant la Revolution (Toulon, 1936), 15.

103 For a brief history of the tontine, which had been introduced in the seventeenthcentury as a means of raising revenue for the Crown, see Robert M. Jennings andAndrew P. Trout, The Tontine: From the Reign of Louis XIV to the French RevolutionaryEra (Philadelphia, 1982).

104 When the last shareholder in the Lille theater tontine died in 1864, this individualhad been for several years the sole recipient of all rental income from the Lille theater(Lefebvre, Histoire du theatre de Lille, 2:xxiv).

105 For Le Mans, information provided in the Tableau de la societe d’actionnaires,published in 1777, complemented by notes in the register maintained by the treasurerof the society, enabled the reconstruction of the social background of ninety-nine ofthe 108 shareholders. For Lille and Saumur, these numbers are similar: seventy-two ofseventy-six, and one hundred out of 116, respectively. For each of these societies, afemale investor who did not have a noble title or occupation listed was associated,when possible, with the social group of her husband or family. AD de la Sarthe, 111AC 611, Tableau de la societe d’actionnaires, autorisee par Monsieur, frere du roi,suivant ses lettres-patentes du mai 1775, pour la construction d’une sale [sic] despectacle dans la ville du Mans, conforme au registre journal de Mr. Rey, tresorier de



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at Le Mans (out of a total of 108), the nobility ranked most strongly, withthirty-six nobles purchasing shares. They were joined by thirty-one lawyersand royal or local officeholders.106 Yet the relatively modest cost of a share,just 150 livres, also placed this opportunity within reach of thirty-two others,including not only negociants and merchants but also an apothecary, an ar-chitect, two grocers, a watchmaker, a surgeon, and a printer.107 Such socialdiversity also characterized the joint-stock society in Lille and the one in Sau-mur, where the project combined a theater with a new covered market. In Lille,twenty-four of the seventy-six investors were noble, yet only seven office-holders or lawyers were involved. Perhaps due to the higher cost of a share,the commercial bourgeoisie was a much stronger presence here than in theother two societies—especially negociants, who alone made up about one-third of investors. Another twentysome came from more modest backgrounds,including a master locksmith, a printer, an apothecary, and a brewer. Of thehundred Saumur investors whose social or occupational status is known, onlytwenty-six investors came from military elite or noble backgrounds, whilethirty-one held offices or practiced law. The remaining forty-one shareholderscame from other professions and from the commercial and artisanal classes.In Saumur, a fourth category must be entered for two priests who, despite theGallican church’s hostility toward the stage, supported the project.108

Recruitment for theater projects took place through personal networks as

ladite societe (Le Mans, 1777), and “registre journal de recette et depense”; “Arrest duconseil d’etat du Roi, Qui approuve & autorise la construction d’une salle de spectaclesen la ville de Lille, Du 26 janvier 1785,” Recueil des edits, arrets, lettres-patentes,declarations, reglemens et ordonnances, Imprimes & mis a execution par ordre de M.l’intendant ou par les differens tribunaux de la ville de Lille (Lille, 1785); Lefebvre,Histoire du theatre de Lille, 2:406–18, annexe 2; AM de Saumur 4M 92, Tableaugeneral de messieurs les actionnaires.

106 According to William Doyle, of the more than fifty thousand venal offices inFrance, the vast majority were held by nonnobles, while about 3,700 offices conferrednobility on their owners (William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution[Oxford, 1989], 25–26). Because of local variation, it is difficult to know with certaintywhich of these offices might or might not have granted the owner or his heirs noblestatus. Unless an individual’s noble title was specifically indicated in the theater records,as one would expect in such a status-conscious society, individuals holding offices werenot included in this category.

107 AD de la Sarthe, 111 AC 611, Tableau de la societe d’actionnaires and “registrejournal de recette et depense.” Given the fact that the nine unidentified shareholderswere not distinguished by a title, it seems likely that they also belonged to the middlingsocial ranks.

108 “Arrest du conseil d’etat du roi”; and Lefebvre, Histoire du theatre de Lille,2:406–18, annexe 2; AM de Saumur 4M 92, Tableau general de messieurs les action-naires. Jean-Baptiste Cassin, “pretre,” purchased two shares in the project, as did Ho-nore Baune, “pretre, prieur.”




well as through more public means. In Le Mans, the theater project was ad-vertised repeatedly in the local newspaper, and public meetings were held topromote interest.109 In Saumur, a city without a local paper, recruitment in theproject began by mobilizing support within existing social networks. A formletter circulated in 1783:

Monsieur,The repeated cries of the public and the vows that you have certainly made to have

in Saumur a more proper theater than the current one, where one runs great risks tolife, make me believe that you will not hesitate to sign the enclosed form, which is apromise to buy one or several shares of three hundred livres each for the constructionof a new theater.110

If social connections were a primary means of finding investors, the Saumurorganizers nonetheless went out of their way to clarify that all investorswould be welcome: “Persons who desire to buy shares, and who will nothave received a copy of this letter, are asked to believe that this is an omis-sion.”111

The success of each of these three projects, it is evident, hinged upon thecreation of a heterogeneous coalition including the local nobility, rising com-mercial and administrative elites, professionals, and a healthy range of inves-tors of the “middling sort.” Contemporaries publicly acknowledged this di-versity. The police ordinance for the new Saumur theater was prefaced withthe announcement that “this edifice [is] uniquely destined for the public, ofwhich the different classes contributed to its construction.”112 Because anyonewith the funds could purchase a share, membership in theater societies provedsignificantly more socially inclusive than membership in academies, in whichpotential academicians needed to be elected by a membership drawn pre-dominantly from the nobility and the clergy. Furthermore, despite the fact thatMasonic lodges, often held to be the most egalitarian of provincial institutions,typically excluded women from membership, women constituted a small butsignificant number of shareholders in each of these theater societies.113

109 Affiches du Mans, December 12, 1774; January 2, 1775; January 23, 1775; andFebruary 13, 1775.

110 AM de Saumur 4M 92, “Extrait du registre des deliberations des actionnaires.”111 Ibid.112 Ibid., “Ordonnance de police, 29 avril 1788.”113 The majority of members of provincial academies (57 percent) were nobles or

clergy, and few negociants or merchants were elected to membership. The election ofwomen to academies was extremely rare (Roche, Le siecle des lumieres, 1:99–105,193, 197). Although women were usually excluded from Masonic lodges, MargaretJacob notes that some Continental lodges did in fact begin to admit women in the latereighteenth century, including several in France (Living the Enlightenment, 69, 120–42).



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By enabling a group of civic-minded individuals to pool their money inorder to build a public theater “necessary to the status of this city,” theatersocieties helped to give rise to a new form of local arts patronage.114 In at leastone case—Reims—patrons made a no-interest loan toward the building of thetheater. They would recoup their investment capital over time, but they agreedto make no profit from the theater, which was a gift to the community.115 Asprivate organizations established to contribute to the improvement of localurban life, theater societies have certain parallels to the musees, emulationsocieties, and secular philanthropic organizations also created in the last de-cades of the ancien regime.116

Why did these shareholders choose to invest in theaters? Beyond the de-sire—civic-minded or perhaps more personal—for a nicer venue in which toenjoy performances and socialize, the primary motivation for most investorscan likely be found in the cultural capital that could be gained from joining insuch an effort.117 Theater patrons can be seen as emulating the actions of theseventeenth-century high aristocracy, perhaps in hopes of receiving some ofthe same admiration and legitimation. In fact, these very traditional aristocraticpowers sometimes played a leading role in these projects. The first of the joint-stock theater-building companies, in Rochefort, was supported financially aswell as politically by the provincial governor, the marechal de Senecterre, who“wanted to place himself at the head of this establishment” by purchasing thefirst share.118 For the local nobility, participation in such a venture can be seenas a natural extension of leadership in other cultural institutions such as provin-cial academies. It may also have helped reinforce the status of nobles, who,according to Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret, were becoming increasingly concernedwith demonstrating their merit through acts of utility and benevolence.119

For those from professional and commercial backgrounds, the desire for

114 AM de Saumur 4M 92, “Extrait du registre des deliberations des actionnaires.”115 Cited in Paris, Theatre a Reims, 261, 269.116 Michel Taillefer, “L’echec d’une tentative de reforme academique: Le Musee de

Toulouse (1784–1788),” Annales du Midi 89, no. 134 (1977); 405–18; John Iverson,“Forum: Emulation in France, 1750–1800, Introduction,” Eighteenth-Century Studies36 (2003): 217–23; Catherine Duprat, “Pour l’amour de l’humanite”: Le temps desphilanthropes; La philanthropie parisienne des lumieres a la monarchie de Juillet, 2vols. (Paris, 1993), 1:59.

117 On the concept of “cultural capital,” see Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A SocialCritique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, 1984).

118 “Actionnaires du theatre de Rochefort, en 1766,” reprinted in Recueil des actesde la Commission des arts et monuments historiques de la Charente-Inferieure et So-ciete d’archeologie de Saintes 7 (1884): 326–29, 327–28.

119 Roche, Le siecle des lumieres, 1:211–33; Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret, The FrenchNobility in the Eighteenth Century: From Feudalism to Enlightenment, trans. WilliamDoyle (Cambridge, 1985), 33–35, 34.




entree into this world of cultural patronage seems to have been especiallystrong. Christine Adams has argued that for provincial professionals, mem-bership in cultural institutions, along with other cultural activities, “played animportant role in the construction of . . . masculine social identities and inrepresenting their status and rank.”120 For doctors and lawyers, but perhapsespecially for wealthy negociants, whose membership in other institutions suchas provincial academies remained restricted, theater societies presented a novelterrain in which to demonstrate cultural accomplishment and to exert civicleadership.121 Purchasing a share in one of these organizations may have servedas a means to achieve membership in the cultural elite to which these individ-uals very much wanted to belong.

Yet, for a significant number of those involved in such projects, financialopportunity was also likely a motivation. As Colin Jones has suggested forFrance’s professionals and businessmen, growing civic-mindedness posed lit-tle conflict with “a developing ‘market-consciousness.’”122 Recent scholarshipon eighteenth-century credit markets demonstrates that wealthy nobles andwell-off artisans alike kept their eyes open for potentially profitable places toinvest their money, with some preferring private annuities.123 France’s nobilityinvested alongside the commercial elite in joint-stock companies for industrialand manufacturing ventures and were certainly comfortable with this frame-work.124 Even the elite investors in Lorient’s theater, we know, anticipated a 5

120 Christine Adams, A Taste for Comfort and Status: A Bourgeois Family inEighteenth-Century France (University Park, PA, 2000), 189. See also 194.

121 Daniel Roche has argued that intellectual societies were largely closed to thecommercial bourgeoisie, noting that of the six thousand members of France’s academiesfewer than 160 were negociants and manufacturers. Roche suggests that in many cities,commercial elites found their own sites of sociability, which included the theater. Here,we can see them helping to establish these very sites. “Negoce et culture dans la Francedu XVIIIe siecle,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 25 (1978): 375–95,376–77, 381.

122 Colin Jones, “Bourgeois Revolution Revivified: 1789 and Social Change,” inRewriting the French Revolution, ed. Colin Lucas (Oxford, 1991), 69–118, esp. 104–10.

123 Investment in theater societies was somewhat more concentrated among the elitethan the social trends in lending in Paris identified by Philip R. Hoffman, Gilles Postel-Vinay, and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal. The participation of women in theater tontines,however, matches their data for women’s participation in private and state lending inParis between 1730 and 1788, where they constituted 11 percent of lenders. Moreover,women and elite men, they find, often preferred private annuities to government an-nuities (Priceless Markets: The Political Economy of Credit in Paris, 1660–1870 [Chi-cago, 2000], 62, 66–67, 160–61, 164–65).

124 On noble investment in joint-stock companies, see Guy Richard, “La noblesse deFrance et les societes par actions a la fin du XVIIIe siecle,” Revue d’histoire economiqueet sociale 40 (1962): 484–523.



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percent return on this investment, roughly equivalent to that earned on a renteor royal annuity.125 (On average, the theater society in Le Mans, we will see,exceeded this goal.) Among investors in the Saumur theater society, it is tellingthat, military officers aside, nearly one-fifth listed their residence not in thelocal area, but in cities as far away as Rouen, Lyon, and Bayonne. For theseshareholders, unlikely to attend the new theater and with less obvious personalmotivations, their investment decision may have hinged on economic consid-erations.126 Finally, the social diversity characterizing membership in theseorganizations suggests a diversity of motivations on the part of shareholders.Although an investment in a theater held none of the guarantees of a rente ora state-run tontine, the widow, apothecary, baker, and servant who boughtshares in these operations likely approached this as an investment in theirfuture and especially that of their children.

Ultimately, in order to succeed as patrons of the arts, those organizing andleading these societies had no choice but to learn to run these theaters asbusinesses. Constructing a theater held no guarantees that troupes would rentit or that the enterprise would operate in the black. Because their operationsdepended upon renting the theater at favorable rates, theater societies had goodreason to be invested in attracting acting companies and establishing a viablepublic. Mathieu Chesneau-Desportes, the primary force behind the Le Manstheater society, began seeking out directors in the months before the theaterwas completed to encourage them to perform in the city.127 He also undertookresearch on other regional theaters. In February 1776 he sent Pierre Pinchinat,one of the painters commissioned to decorate the theater, to visit the theaterof Rouen, still under construction, and the theater in Caen to gather ideas aboutinterior design. Pinchinat also investigated their business practices, writingback with advice about how to rent the theater: “I do not doubt that you, aswell as your other commissioners, are thinking hard so as not to make a badplan for renting the theater; don’t speak of twelve livres per performance, norof twenty, because they will take it for a gargote [literally, a cheap and vulgareating establishment]. [The theater] of Le Havre, where there aren’t half theresources of Le Mans, is rented for fifteen hundred livres for just six months.These entrepreneurs have more resources than you think.”128 Pinchinat’s letterdemonstrates how information concerning theaters, ranging from designs to

125 Maurice, Nouvelle contribution a l’histoire de Lorient, 7–8; Fernand Braudel andErnest Labrousse, eds., Histoire economique et sociale de la France, vol. 2, Des der-niers temps de l’age seigneurial aux preludes de l’age industriel (1660–1789) (Paris,1970), 616, 632–41.

126 AM de Saumur 4M 92, Tableau general de messieurs les actionnaires.127 See, e.g., AD de la Sarthe, 111 AC 611, Renault [to Chesneau Desportes], June

14, 1776, and Deliniere [to Chesneau Desportes], April 2, 1776.128 Ibid., Pinchinat to Chesneau Desportes, Caen, February 18, 1776. Pinchinat also

inquired about the rental of cafes located in the theater and auxiliary spaces.




business strategies, was shared laterally through France’s urban network. Withcareful management, theater-building societies’ investments in the local com-munity seem to have paid off in the long run. After the Le Mans theater wasinaugurated, the community enjoyed about seventy-five to eighty-five perfor-mance days each year. Shareholders began receiving a regular return, on av-erage around 6–7 percent on their investment. In Lille, those investors or heirswho were still alive in the 1840s and the early 1850s received dividends thatsteadily increased from two hundred to almost five hundred francs a year.129

Those participating in such ventures had the opportunity to take pride intheir contribution to urban life and to enjoy attending the new theater theyhelped to build. But theater societies also enabled investors to participate inmanaging the enterprise and in the process to take part in another new insti-tution of “civic sociability.”130 The society of Le Mans provides one exampleof how this could work. When it was first created in 1775, nearly sixty share-holders attended an organizational meeting to approve bylaws and to electrepresentatives for the society.131 While the building was under construction,the shareholders gathered regularly to discuss membership, finances, and pro-gress on the theater. After the theater was completed, shareholders continuedto meet every few months to deliberate on issues including rental arrange-ments, the acquisition of sets and props, and the upkeep of the building.132 Atthese meetings, each shareholder was given a vote on society affairs. The LeMans theater society was not alone in this democratic organization, which wasshared by those in Reims, Saumur, and elsewhere.133 In fact, in voting rights,theater societies were more inclusive than many other joint-stock companies,in which shareholders often needed to hold a significant financial stake in orderto receive a vote, and where many important decisions were made by theprofessional staff and merely endorsed by the shareholders.134 For members,

129 In Le Mans, the first year’s revenues were used to decorate and furnish the theater.A payment of twelve livres, or 8 percent of the initial investment, was made on eachshare in 1778. Thereafter, payments of between 2 livres 10 sous and 15 livres, averagingaround ten livres, were made to shareholders each year until at least 1793. Sourcesregarding payments are not available after this point, but the society did operate thetheater until at least 1842 (AD de la Sarthe, 111 AC 611; and Lefebvre, Histoire dutheatre de Lille, 2:xx–xxi).

130 I borrow this term from Jones, “Bourgeois Revolution Revivified,” 109.131 In Le Mans as in Lille, elected leadership positions were filled mainly by nobles,

tax farmers, and other elites (Affiches du Mans, February 13, 1775, 28; Lefebvre, His-toire du theatre de Lille, 2:419).

132 See Affiches du Mans, February 13, 1775, 28; July 17, 1775, 29; November 27,1775, 190; May 20, 1776, 83; March 3, 1777, 34; and November 24, 1777, 186.

133 Paris, Le theatre a Reims, 262; AM de Saumur 4M 92, “Extrait du registre desdeliberations des actionnaires”; “Actionnaires du theatre de Rochefort, en 1766,” 328.

134 Henri Levy-Bruhl, Histoire juridique des societes de commerce en France auxXVIIe et XVIIIe siecles (Paris, 1938), 192–99.



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the social implications of such an organizational framework are surprising.Shareholders in the Saumur theater and covered market such as Anne Poperin,a domestic servant, and Jacques Ainard de Moreton, the comte de Chabrillan,could both, at least in theory, attend meetings and cast their vote on theaterpolicy. At their meetings as well as in their new playhouses, theater societiesfacilitated social mixing among their members. At the same time, the demo-cratic aspects of their operations helped to erode the boundaries of estate andinvited participation in what can be seen as a political experience.135

In sum, provincial theater societies brought together a remarkably hetero-geneous group of private investors to collaborate on an enterprise that em-braced civic, cultural, and often financial goals. In doing so, they created newopportunities for civic leadership and for the status acquisition with which artspatronage was traditionally associated—opportunities that are more often as-sociated with the “bourgeois leisure” of the nineteenth century.136

The commercial orientation characterizing France’s privately run provincialtheaters may seem surprising to those more familiar with the cultural landscapeof Paris, where royal patronage continued as a defining force throughout theancien regime. There, the royal theater companies were actually administeredas part of the king’s household. The king provided each of the three royaltroupes with a Parisian monopoly over drama, opera, or commedia dell’arteand opera-comique and also with the tremendous prestige that came with thedesignation as a royal company. Royal protection enabled these troupes torecruit the best talent from all over France, to serve as the principal venue forthe debut of new stage works, and to suppress and exploit competition fromtheaters of the fairgrounds and on the Paris Boulevard. Even with such support,the Paris Opera remained chronically insolvent.137

135 In their operations, theater societies can be compared with institutions such as theMasonic lodges discussed by Jacobs in Living the Enlightenment, 96–119, 203–4; andby Jones in “Bourgeois Revolution Revivified,” 111.

136 Nineteenth-century private organizations of arts patronage include the art asso-ciations discussed in Sherman’s Worthy Monuments, 132–53; and the music patronsand concert societies discussed in William Weber, Music and the Middle Class: TheSocial Structure of Concert Life in London, Paris, and Vienna between 1830 and 1848,2nd ed. (Burlington, VT, 2004), 61–98.

137 Although the Comedie-Francaise and the Comedie-Italienne were administeredthrough the Maison du roi throughout the ancien regime, after 1749 responsibility forthe Academie Royale de Musique [or Paris Opera] was given over to the city of Paris.The royal government intervened in 1776–78, and in 1780 it once more took the Operaunder its control. As Rougemont and Weber attest, the Opera was in an almost constantstate of financial crisis. On the other hand, the Comedie-Francaise, after its reorgani-zation in 1757, was quite financially successful. Moreover, Claude Alasseur asserts thateven before that date, the various financial subsidies and gratuities given to the Co-medie-Francaise by the Crown were, relative to the company’s operating budget, of




Yet, these privately financed provincial playhouses were perhaps not so verydifferent from the royal theaters of Paris as one might think. The monarchy,too, faced financial constraints in its cultural patronage, and direct financialsupport from the Crown had its limits. In fact, in 1687 when Louis XIV forcedthe Comedie-Francaise to vacate its theater on the rue Guenegaud, the playersfound themselves collectively responsible for building their own new play-house, which they constructed on the rue des Fosses-Saint-Germain-des-Presat a cost of nearly two hundred thousand livres.138 Nearly a century later, whenthe Comedie-Francaise finally moved to an elegant new theater, the troupe’snew home—the present-day Odeon theater—had been constructed neither bythe king nor by the royal company. This time, the new Paris theater was fi-nanced by private investors.139

PROVINCIAL THEATERS AND THE MAKING OF A “NATIONAL”CULTURE

Describing France’s arts economy in the twentieth century, a leading scholarhas observed that “the French model of cultural life is inseparable from publicintervention in the domain of the arts.”140 The evidence presented in this essay,however, suggests that the “French model of cultural life” has a history andthat the arts economy of the ancien regime needs to be examined on its ownterms. Extensive public intervention in provincial cultural life presaging thatof today is to a great degree a nineteenth-century innovation. After seizingpower, Napoleon Bonaparte established a centralized, coordinated policy forentertainment that dictated how many provincial public theaters could beopened and where. During the Restoration, King Louis XVIII went a stepfurther when he ordered municipal governments to purchase or build their ownpublic theaters in an effort to bring the theater arts more definitively understate control. Even as such policies were being put into place, contemporariesremained skeptical about the benefits to be gained from intensive state over-sight when it came to the theater business. “The most beautiful regulations inthe world do not provide spectators,” one critic cautioned, “and without spec-

little importance (Rougemont, La vie theatrale en France, 235–60, esp. 254; Weber,“L’institution et son public,” 1528–33; Claude Alasseur, La Comedie-Francaise au 18esiecle: Etude economique [Paris, 1967], 45, 72).

138 Alasseur, La Comedie-Francaise, 9, 37–41.139 Charles de Wailly: Peintre architecte dans l’Europe des lumieres, ed. Monique

Mosser and Daniel Rabreau (Paris, 1979), 65–67.140 Pierre-Michel Menger, “L’hegemonie parisienne: Economie et politique de la

gravitation artistique,” Annales: Economies, societes, civilisations 6 (1993): 1565–1600, 1586.



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tators, no actors.”141 He need not have worried: when nineteenth-century pro-vincial theater companies faltered, municipal governments stepped in to sup-port their opera and theater troupes with ever-larger cash subsidies, a financialdependence that only intensified over time.142

In most eighteenth-century cities, however, public intervention in the artsremained much more limited. Versailles, we have seen, took little initiative toencourage provincial theater and provided minimal financial support for suchendeavors. Some royal agents aggressively promoted theater, and local citygovernments certainly encountered pressure to construct playhouses. Yet, evenas royal agents asserted greater influence over professional theater, their rela-tionship with the city often involved negotiation and even collaboration—forinstance, by facilitating the royal approval necessary to construct any localplayhouse. Further, while municipal governments established a number ofFrance’s most striking public theaters, many more cities chose to support theprojects of local entrepreneurs, investors, and patrons. Often, these new play-houses were strictly business. In other cases, as in Le Mans, Saumur, and Lille,cities endorsed the development of a more inclusive conception of arts pa-tronage. In these privately funded theaters the municipal government wouldtake on but a modest, supporting role. Ultimately, the widespread establishmentof theaters in French urban life and the development of a substantial provincialtheater public can be attributed less to the actions of the state than to thecommercialization of the performing arts.

What were the consequences of the introduction of public theaters in eigh-teenth-century France? The diversity of cities, audiences, and acting troupesmakes it difficult to generalize about urban public life. France’s new publictheaters, we know, served different purposes in different places. Briefly, inmore than a half-dozen of France’s largest and wealthiest provincial cities,these theaters became home to resident drama and opera troupes with perfor-mances taking place year-round, often on an almost nightly basis.143 (Inciden-

141 [Francois Joseph Grille], Les Theatres. Lois.—Reglemens.—Instructions.—Sallesde Spectacle.—Droits d’Auteur.—Correspondans.—Conges.—Debuts.—Acteurs deParis et des departements. Par un amateur (Paris, 1817), 12, 214–22, 261–65, quotefrom 53.

142 Hemmings writes that the Marseille city council authorized its first subsidy forthe theater in 1806 (Theatre and State, 149). On the expansion of subsidies for munic-ipal theater, which more than tripled in many cases over the course of the nineteenthcentury, see William Cohen, Urban Government and the Rise of the French City: FiveMunicipalities in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1998), 138–40. On state fundingfor France’s arts economy in the late twentieth century, see Menger, “L’hegemonieparisienne,” esp. 1567–70, 1586–89.

143 Between the 1750s and the 1770s, year-round local theater and opera companies




tally, not a single English city outside of London supported a full-time residenttroupe. Claims of English commercial supremacy aside, if we use professionalentertainment as our measure, France’s provincial cities more than rival theircounterparts across the Channel.)144 The stages of small cities, in contrast,catered to a variety of touring entertainments that might range from travelingopera troupes to acrobats to marionettes. The Abbeville entrepreneurs, forexample, proposed that their playhouse be used “to perform comedies, to holdpublic balls, to play goblets, to rope dance, and [to] give all other entertain-ments.” Finally, at least some of these theaters failed to draw many troupes atall.145

Despite this diversity in theatrical experiences, the centralization of the de-veloping theater industry encouraged similar repertory trends in professionalacting troupes performing throughout France, with the monarchy helping toestablish a national market for publication and performance. By the mid-eighteenth century, almost all works performed on provincial stages had pre-viously been performed in Paris. Even in the provinces, actors and actressesperformed almost exclusively in French. Only rarely might a company stagea special performance using one of the local languages and dialects still spokenwidely in many regions of France. Troupes typically featured favorite playsby Moliere, Voltaire, and others, but also novelties that were staged withinmonths of their Paris debut. The cultural connections between France’s theatersbecame even more immediate beginning in the 1750s, when icons of the Parisstage like actor Henri Lekain began touring to these new provincial playhousesto perform their most famous roles.146

were established in cities such as Lyon, Bordeaux, Marseille, Lille, Nantes, and Tou-louse (Vallas, Un siecle de musique, 285–321, 383–448; Lagrave, La vie theatrale aBordeaux, 265; AN H 1359; Lefebvre, Histoire du theatre de Lille, 1:258, 386–88,annexe vbis; AD de la Loire-Atlantique, C 321, n. 36–37; AM de Toulouse GG 943).

144 Even the town companies in large cities such as Norwich performed on a circuitin surrounding towns (Borsay, English Urban Renaissance, 120). Discussions of Britishcommercial supremacy began more than twenty-five years ago in McKendrick et al.,The Birth of a Consumer Society, and continue today in works such as Maxine Berg’sLuxury and Pleasure. British leadership in commercialization has been asserted in bothleisure and the performing arts. See J. H. Plumb’s “The Commercialization of Leisurein Eighteenth-Century England,” in McKendrick et al., The Birth of a Consumer So-ciety, 265–85; and Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, xvii–xxx.

145 Quote cited in Franz and Sajous d’Oria, Le siecle des theatres, 160. The magis-trates of Agen complained in 1788 that directors were not honoring their contracts tospend several months a year in Agen and were almost totally ignoring the city (Hab-asque, Documents sur le theatre a Agen, 29).

146 In 1772–73, of the 202 works performed in Bordeaux that could be identified bytheir titles, 194 were taken from the Parisian theaters, and only eight were created



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Interest in theater was, to be sure, a European phenomenon, and theaterrepresented a certain cosmopolitan worldliness that many enlightened individ-uals undoubtedly found desirable. Still, theater, perhaps even more than otherartistic enterprises, was actively celebrated as a triumph of French culturalgreatness. Dramatic literature became more self-consciously French and pa-triotic around the 1760s, a trend that was embraced and encouraged by theCrown. A growing number of plays such as The Siege of Calais began cele-brating the exploits of France’s “great men,” and playwrights like Moliere,Racine, and Corneille were honored in this category.147 Cultural critics pro-moted the sentiment that France’s esteemed theatrical tradition demonstratedthe nation’s “superiority over all people ancient and modern.” As this reviewerexplained, “Our dramatic chef-d’oeuvres are applauded on the banks of theDanube & the Vistula, as on the banks of the Seine. . . . All the conquests ofthe Roman Empire spread its language only with difficulty among its con-quered peoples. Five to six peaceful writers have extended ours in climateswhere our armies will never penetrate.”148 During an era when France foundits military and economic prowess challenged by Britain, France’s successfultheater became a potent symbol of French cultural identity both for the Frenchand for foreigners.149 Not long after the outbreak of the Revolution, the theaterwould be explicitly embraced as a tool to educate the nation’s citizens. Yet

locally. Henri Lagrave, “La saison 1772–1773 au theatre de Bordeaux: Etude de re-pertoire,” in La vie theatrale dans les provinces du Midi: Actes du IIe colloque deGrasse, 1976, ed. Yves Giraud (Paris, 1980), 209–21, 213; and Lagrave, La vie thea-trale a Bordeaux, 281–309. This can be compared with repertory information providedfor troupes performing in cities in Picardie in P. Leroy, Les comediens de province enPicardie au XVIIIe siecle (Amiens, 1997), 115–61. On the forces encouraging commonrepertories in acting troupes, see also Lauren Clay, “Provincial Actors, the Comedie-Francaise, and the Business of Performing in Eighteenth-Century France,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 38 (2005): 651–79.

147 Bell, The Cult of the Nation, 63–65, 111. On the rise of “national” and patrioticsubjects for the French theater, see also Anne Boes, La lanterne magique de l’histoire:Essai sur le theatre historique en France de 1750 a 1789 (Oxford, 1982); and EdmondDziembowski, Un nouveau patriotisme francais, 1750–1770: La France face a lapuissance anglaise a l’epoque de la guerre de Sept Ans (Oxford, 1998), 181–91, 392–496.

148 Lettres sur l’etat present de nos spectacles, Avec des vues nouvelles sur chacund’eux; particulierement sur la Comedie Francoise & l’Opera (Amsterdam, 1765),6–7.

149 France’s dominance in the areas of dramatic literature, performance, and dance,although widely acknowledged on the Continent, came to generate resentment in placessuch as Vienna, where the French troupe was eventually expelled, and London, whereFrench performers encountered hostility and even violence. See Julia Witzenetz, Letheatre francais de Vienne (1752–1772) (Szeged, 1932); and P. and M. Fuchs, “Co-mediens francais a Londres (1735–55),” Revue de litterature comparee 13 (1933): 43–72.




even before the advent of nationalism, as explicitly patriotic works like TheSiege of Calais and cultural phenomena like The Marriage of Figaro wererapidly staged in cities throughout France, provincial audiences, too, couldimagine that they were part of a national cultural community.150

The establishment of provincial playhouses, I suggest, raises questions aboutwho participated in the making of a shared “national” culture and with whatconsequences. In David Bell’s influential study on the emergence of nationalsentiment in France, those defining the meaning of nation and patrie—and atsome level what it meant to be French—were France’s intellectual elites, oftenthrough the leading royal and Parisian cultural institutions in which they par-ticipated. The cultural shifts that Bell has identified in elite discourse are criti-cal for our understanding of the emergence of a widely shared national sen-timent in eighteenth-century France.151 New ideas, however, depend uponnetworks in order to reach audiences, and they take on meaning as they areadopted and adapted in specific contexts.152 The study of cultural intermedi-aries and the institutions they founded can help us to understand better howideas and practices spread in new ways in the eighteenth century and why.Focusing attention beyond the capital reveals the importance of less familiaractors in this process. If local notables played a prominent role in establishingtheaters, so too did the professionals and “middling” men (and women) whoseentrepreneurial drive and civic values motivated them to become importantplayers in urban society.153 Moreover, the playhouses built and managed bythese individuals demonstrate an often unacknowledged diversity among

150 Ravel has explored connections between the theater and France’s national char-acter and identity in The Contested Parterre, esp. 191–209. Benedict Anderson raisesthe relationship between an imagined sentiment of community, which he attributesprimarily to the rise of print capitalism, and the development of national consciousnessin Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev.ed. (London, 1991), 37–65. On the political uses of theater during the Revolution inParis, see Michele Root-Bernstein, Boulevard Theater and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Ann Arbor, MI, 1984), 215–33; from the perspective of provincialcities, see Deck, Histoire du theatre francais a Strasbourg, 58–70; and Paris, Le theatrea Reims, 272–75.

151 See Bell, The Cult of the Nation, 16–17, 107–39.152 Roger Chartier, for example, suggests that the relationship between the ideas

circulated in printed texts and widespread changes in cultural beliefs and practicesamong readers was not direct but that the content of literature was “open to varied useand multiple interpretations.” See The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, trans.Lydia Cochrane (Durham, NC, 1991), esp. 67–91, quote on 85. See also Darnton’sresponse in Forbidden Best-Sellers, 169–246, esp. 180. On the importance of institu-tional culture, see Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of theFrench Enlightenment (Ithaca, NY, 1994), esp. 1–10, 90–135, 233–80.

153 On this group, see Jones, “Great Chain,” 18–19, and “Bourgeois Revolution Re-vivified,” 95–118.



770 Clay

France’s emerging cultural and civic institutions. Unlike academies, with theirreliance on patronage from the absolutist administration and also on Parisianmodels, these theater-building projects were organized to accommodate themeans, abilities, and desires of those in the community.154 The choices maderegarding issues such as design and administration would influence theatricalproduction and the experiences of urban audiences, often for decades to come.

Those establishing theaters, we have seen, were typically focused on local,personal, or financial concerns. Nonetheless, their collective actions helped tolaunch institutions that significantly affected cultural life in cities throughoutFrance. With these new public buildings they created a setting for an experi-ence that, in spite of its differences, took on similar contours in each locale.They invited large audiences in distant provinces to participate in France’sshared literary and musical heritage and to become more integrated into aFrench-speaking community. The renown of the Comedie-Francaise and ParisOpera notwithstanding, for tens of thousands of urban theatergoers these localplayhouses would become their most immediate—and for some their only—point of reference for experiencing French theater. From the perspective of thecapital, it may appear that “the keys to cultural power were all in Paris,” withits wealth of royally patronized institutions.155 When the experiences of Bor-deaux, Lille, or Le Mans are taken into account, however, a different picturecomes into focus. France’s cities, as well as their local civic leaders and en-trepreneurs, emerge as active participants in commercial cultural networks thatthey helped to create and define. By broading our perspective, we see culturalchange, and the participation in emerging national cultural networks that ithelped to bring about, cultivated locally and cast in a more organic light.

Rather than a coercive process of acculturation in which theater was forcedon a local population by the monarchy, the governor, or even its own municipalgovernment, the successful spread of public theater in eighteenth-centuryFrench cities was more commonly founded on a literal “buying in” to thepleasures of the stage. Approximately two-thirds of provincial theaters wereestablished by private individuals, and their actions, more often than not, wereinfluenced by the commercial possibilities associated with selling access tothis cultural commodity. Theaters, to be sure, provide only a narrow glimpseinto what were complex processes of change affecting cultural life in urbanFrance. For the creation of France’s network of public theaters, however, itwas the possibility of profits, together with the development of a new, com-mercially informed style of patronage, that made the difference.

154 On academies’ use of Parisian models as well as their reliance on patronage andmaterial support from the state, see Roche, Le siecle des lumieres, 18–31, 105, andFrance in the Enlightenment, 241–45.

155 Roche, France in the Enlightenment, 236.




APPENDIX

NEW PUBLIC THEATERS IN PROVINCIAL FRANCE, 1685–1790

For the purposes of this essay, I have categorized theaters according to which partypaid to build a public playhouse or to permanently convert an existing building to thispurpose. Public theaters for which an initial owner could not be determined were notincluded in this study. Private individuals or groups established at least the followingpublic theaters, listed with the year(s) of inauguration: Marseille (1685, 1695, 1733,1787); Lyon (1688, 1691); Montpellier (1692); Lille (1699, 1702, 1787); Metz (1712);Avignon (1734); Rennes (1737); La Rochelle (1742); Nantes (c. 1745); Versailles(1757, 1777); Aix (1758); Douai (1758, 1785); Montauban (1760); Tours (1761); An-gers (1763); Nevers (1765); Toulon (1766); Grenoble (1768); Rochefort (1769); Caen(1765); Abbeville (1770); Chalons-en-Champagne (1771); Cambrai (1773); Le Havre(1773, 1790); Beauvais (1775); Le Mans (1776); Rouen (1776); Dunkerque (1777);Reims (1777); Troyes (1777); Alencon (1778); Soissons (1778); Chalon-sur-Saone(1779); Lorient (1779); Laval (1780); Angouleme (1780); Quimper (1784); Arras(1785); Compiegne (1785); Pau (1786); Saint-Etienne (1787); Saumur (1788); andNımes (1789). The jeu de paume theater used in Reims prior to 1777 was also convertedby a private individual (date unknown). Municipal governments paid to construct orconvert theaters in (at least): Strasbourg (1701); Dijon (1719); Toulouse (1737); Bor-deaux (1738, 1755, 1780); Nancy (1748); Perpignan (1752); Metz (1752); Carpentras(1755); Montpellier (1755, also rebuilt by municipality after fire in 1787); Lyon (1728,1756); Clermont-Ferrand (1759); Auch (1761); Colmar (1768); Agen (1768); Limoges(1771); Saint-Quentin (1774); Bayonne (1774); Valenciennes (1781); Besancon (1784); andNantes (1788). Prominent aristocrats opened theaters to the public in Nancy (1755); Lu-neville (1766); and Macon (1772). The Crown contributed substantially to the buildingof the theater in Besancon (1784), and the Marine used financing from Versailles tobuild the theater in Brest (1766). Because the Crown and the city of Besancon sharedthe construction costs of the playhouse, this city is mentioned in two categories.



Patronage, Profits, and Public Theaters: Rethinking Cultural Unification in Ancien Régime France

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