The evolution of musical comedy in eighteenth-century France begins with the bawdy opéras-comiques at the Foires Saint-Germain and Saint-Laurent, develops into the refined opéras-comiques performed at the official Opéra-Comique theatre and resurges with a return to the same principles, as the vaudeville, along the Boulevard and at the Opéra-Comique. I will chart the relationship between aesthetic development and audience response and posit that the audience's appreciation of comic musical theatre in the eighteenth century is fuelled by their experience of guilty pleasure in the act of reception.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the opéras-comiques of the Foires are aesthetically distinct from the official theatrical fare at the three royal theatres, the Comédie Française, the Opéra and the Comédie Italienne. The early shows are characterised by low bawdy humour, popular familiar music and audience participation. The aesthetic form of the genre largely breaks free from the rules governing the official theatre. The plots and themes are disrespectful, sometimes satirical, and depict a topsy-turvy world in which the socially inferior triumph over their social superiors: servant bests master, children best parents or women best men. The music for these shows was vaudeville, the setting of new words to a familiar tune, which could either be a popular song or a parody using a well-known piece of music from a contemporary opera. In both instances, one of the principal reasons why the music needed to be familiar was to facilitate the participation of the public. The Forains were silenced by royal decree on several occasions and, in order to outwit the authorities, the performers encouraged the audience to sing in their stead, as famously described by the Frères Parfaict:
… quelques personnes imaginèrent de substituer à cette prose des couplets des airs connus qu'on nomme vaudevilles … Pour faciliter la lecture de ces couplets, l'orchestre en jouait l'air, et des gens gagés par la troupe et placés au parquet et aux amphithéâtres les chantaient et par ce moyen engagaient les spectateurs à les imiter.(1)
All these elements were gradually lost as the genre developed: the earthy, bodily humour was removed in favour of a more romantic and sentimental tone; composers started to write original music and the topsy-turvy plot was altered to incorporate an idealised view of the lower classes which depicted them as frequently naïve and always loyal.
The nature of the performance as a socio-cultural event also changed dramatically from the genre's beginnings in the Foires to its incorporation within the official theatrical hierarchy in 1762, when the Opéra-Comique was merged with the Comédie Italienne. The first performances at the Foires were in small, open temporary booths. Performances were part of the rich cultural world of the Foires which brought together many different aspects of contemporary daily life. The audience mingled not only with each other but with the actors. Moreover, as a number of researchers have now established, the audiences for the Foires were also drawn from a broad cross-section of society and therefore represented a diverse social spectrum. In 1727, the German teacher Joachim Christophe Nemeitz described the Foire Saint-Germain in his guide for young foreign aristocrats staying in Paris:
Là, tout est pêle-mêle, maîtres, valets et lacquais; filous et honnêtes gens se coudoient. Les courtesans les plus raffinées, les filles les plus jolies, les filous les plus habiles sont comme entrelacés ensemble.
The other clear indication of the presence of an upper class audience is the high degree of cultural referencing and self-reflexivity. Many of the early opéras-comiques are parodies of operas, which suggest that at least some of the audience, to appreciate the parody fully, must have been familiar with the original productions. There are also numerous references to the other theatres of Paris, usually in relation to the status of the Théâtre de la Foire itself. In Les Funerailles de la Foire (1722), the character of La Foire begs the Comédie-Française's forgiveness "D'avoir par mes traits de Satire, Détaché de vous tant de gens".(3) There is an element of self-publicity and self-aggrandisement, particularly as the Forains were protesting against their enforced closure, but it is clear the official theatres were deeply concerned by the threat posed by the Théâtre de la Foire. One has only to consider the number of complaints filed against the Forains by the Comédie-Française actors to understand the strength of their concern. This suggests that the audience that could be expected to attend the Comédie-Française, the Comédie-Italienne and the Opéra were choosing also to frequent the Foires. The Foire, and the market place, was particularly conducive to gathering a socially diverse public because it was a place of exchange and therefore also a meeting place between high and low culture. The economic exchange which ostensibly brings the audience together develops, through the many entertainments available at the Foires, into a cultural exchange.
Again, the open temporary performance-space and the socially mixed audience were lost in the genre's development. A permanent Opéra-Comique theatre was built in the Foire in 1712 and remained at its heart throughout the 1720s but in the 1730s moved away from the bustling commercial atmosphere. As the Frères Parfaict note in 1731:
Les propriétaires des boutiques de la Foire Saint Germain s'appercevant sensiblement que l'éloignement des loges des Spectacles leur causoit une perte considérable, [...]. (4)
A new theatre was built to house the Opéra-Comique in 1735 and lavishly redecorated in 1752 when, after an interdiction of six years, the Opéra-Comique reopened under the directorship of Jean Monnet. Monnet used the reopening as a chance to "reposition" his theatre, criticising the previous director, Pontau, for having allowed valets to take possession of the parterre, thus alienating la bonne compagnie. Monnet wanted to restore decency and order. He banned valets, closed the actresses' dressing rooms to importunate visitors and hired a professional orchestra; these measures appear to have had the desired effect. In the second half of the century, the newly official Opéra-Comique was frequented predominantly by the bourgeoisie and the noblesse, as Grimm notes: "Ce n'est point le peuple qui fréquente chez nous les spectacles, c'est une coterie particulière de gens de monde, de gens d'arts et de lettres, de personnages des deux sexes à qui leur rang ou leur fortune a permis de cultiver leur esprit."(5)
At the same time as Monnet and the new generation of opéra-comique writers were ridding the genre of its popular performance style and mixed audience, the genre in its early comic mode was revived along the Boulevard du Temple. Initially, the two principal troupes were run by Jean-Baptiste Nicolet, who moved his small theatre from the Foire Saint-Germain to the boulevard in 1759, and Nicolas-Médard Audinot, also a former fairground actor and playwright, who moved in next to Nicolet in 1769. Both men had regular musicians and dancers in their troupes and brought much of the discarded opéra-comique repertory with them. The principal elements lost in the purification of the opéra-comique were rediscovered in the musical entertainments along the boulevard: the low, bawdy humour, the use of vaudevilles and, most significantly, the performance space as part of a general culture of economic and cultural exchange, attended by a diverse audience. The social commentator Louis-Sébastien Mercier made several references to the diversity of the public along the boulevard:
La foule y abonde; et c'est une raison de plus pour examiner l'attrait qui porte la multitude vers des théâtres que chacun dit dédaigner, et que chacun fréquente … (6)
Exactly what Mercier means by "la foule" is debatable but his reference to the fact that everyone claims to despise the boulevard genre suggests he is referring to the upper classes for whom the low comedy of the boulevard should have been culturally unacceptable. Attempts were made to prevent the upper classes from attending the boulevard theatres and in 1769 Papillon de la Ferté, the Intendant of Petty Entertainments, reduced the price of theatre seats stating "It is hoped by this expedient to chase out the well-to-do public" (7) ; his hopes were ill-founded. In fact, in 1778 Nicolet actually installed small boxes in his theatre for the upper classes to use. The only real effect of the decrease in ticket prices was to increase the lower-class public:
those whom one called the people under the old regime did not tire of going [to the minor theatres]: because they were hardly discriminating in their choice of pleasure, they found it at Nicolet's in all genres and at every price. (8) (From Coup d'oeil rapide sur les spectacles de Paris, 1792)
By implication, of course, the upper classes were equally undiscriminating !
Although the boulevard musical comedies did not achieve anywhere near the same level of actual bodily participation, in terms of inviting the audience to sing along, they nonetheless drew on the same reserves of shared cultural knowledge and were also keen to solicit the support of their audience. Furthermore, the return to the use of popular and familiar vaudeville songs would most likely have evoked a spirit of participation and community. Taconet, Nicolet's preferred and most prolific playwright, as well as one of his most popular actors, was unafraid to appeal directly and humbly to the audience. At the end of the published script for Les Fous des Boulevards, there is a Compliment delivered by the actor at the closure of Nicolet's theatre in 1760. Taconet's opinions are couched in a fable which recounts the story of a poor, badly dressed stranger who arrives at a vineyard and starts to collect up the fruit neglected by the proud and haughty neighbours of the vintner. However, when those neighbours notice he is harvesting the grapes, they come and attack the stranger who is only saved when the vintner intervenes:
Disant à ceux qui l'avoient maltraité,
Adieu, Messieurs, vous pouvez faire
Vendanges ailleurs. Ma vigne n'est sur terre
Que pour nourrir l'humanité.(9)
As Taconet goes on to explain to the audience: "le Vigneron rempli d'humanité, c'est vous, Messieurs, dont les bontés veulent bien encourager nos foibles talens".(10) He gives the audience the most important role in his fable and therefore in the real relations between theatres and their audiences in the second half of the eighteenth century. It is far more than an appeal for support, it is an acceptance that without the audience the boulevard would have nothing with which to create its performances but at the same time it extends this humble position to that of the official theatres: he grants the audience the power of creation.
What is the relationship between the two cycles, that of aesthetic development and that of audience composition? Why did the upper classes continue to seek out precisely that which the purification process had eliminated? I believe the key lies in the quotes of Nemeitz and Mercier. Neimetz's evocative description captures something of the illicit thrill that the more socially privileged visitors to the Foires might be expected to feel when mixing with their social inferiors. This is an important aspect of the freedom associated with musical comedy, not only does it set its own rules for performance but it allows the upper classes the voyeuristic freedom to engage with a social group and a style of entertainment not generally considered suitable to their station in society. The picture Mercier paints of the Foires and boulevard theatres is typically one of vulgar profanity. Referring to the Foire Saint-Germain, he wrote "La charlatanerie grossière est là sur son trône" (11), whilst the various plays and musical comedies along the boulevards were "des pièces licencieuses, où triomphent le vice et la grossièreté" (12). However, Mercier's descriptions whilst seemingly deploring the depravity on display also hint at a frisson of excitement at the lewdness of the lower classes and their entertainments. He describes a trip to one of the cabarets along the boulevard in which the clientèle sing along to vaudevilles, and reassuringly adds: "Vous n'y viendrez jamais délicats lecteurs; j'y suis allé pour vous." Mercier, a great observer of Parisian life is not, one suspects, as uninvolved an observer as he would have us believe. He continues:
C'est là un réceptacle de la lie du peuple. Mais la vie des gueux a une franchise qui mérite d'être mieux observée; car les passions qui sont à nu ont une originalité piquante. (13)
Mercier's language, his reference to the piquancy of the passions on show suggests an interest bordering on titillation. The sense that these entertainments were something forbidden added to the excitement. His description of the theatres is equally loaded.
Ces petits spectacles sont des lieux de prostitution précoce, et l'on voit chez des farceurs l'étalage scandaleux de toutes les dévergondées. (14)
He notes that the salles des farceurs are nearly always packed out, at which point comes his telling admission that it is the boulevard theatres that "chacun dit dédaigner, et que chacun fréquente". In 1765 the Encyclopédie described the genre thus:
L'opéra-comique ne consiste que dans le choix d'un sujet qui produise des scènes bouffonnes, des représentations assez peu épurées et des vaudevilles dont le petit peuple fait délice. (15)
Although this clearly does not represent the reality of the situation it demonstrates the manner in which the genre was automatically associated with the lower classes in official critical discourse. For the upper and middle class audience members then, the pleasure is twofold. Firstly, the performance was heavily regulated and the audience would have been well aware that on occasion certain elements were illegal. Secondly, there was the frisson to be experienced by the very fact of attending a form of entertainment perceived as being for the lower classes; a sense of entering another world, and one associated with the thrill of the immoral.
The musical comedies of the eighteenth century also represented freedom. Freedom, in terms of the performance, from the classical rules of theatre, from bienséance and from the intellectual and the educative; instead the audience received a performance which defined its own rules, which frequently revelled in vulgarity and which celebrated the body and physical expression. In his essay Les Trois Théâtres (1777), Des Essarts well illustrates the difference in perception between the official high art theatre and the low art of the Foires and boulevard:
Nos Pièces de Théâtre ne sont plus aujourd'hui des farces grossières et obscènes, & nos Acteurs des Bateleurs faits pour amuser la populace. Nous avons relégué cette classe d'hommes méprisables sur les tréteaux des Boulevards de la Capitale, & dans les places publiques. Par les précautions que le Gouvernement a prises pour perfectionner la Comédie en France, & par les effets de la protection dont nos Rois ont honoré, depuis un siècle, le Théâtre François, nos Pièces n'offrent plus les dangers qu'elles présentoient dans l'enfance & la barbarie d'un Art que le siècle dernier a vu porter à la perfection. (16)
The fact that the popular theatre of the Foires and Boulevard was still considered to be in a state of barbaric infancy meant that it was not subject to the same demand for perfection. There was also a social freedom: to attend a popular performance, at the Foire or along the Boulevard, was a mark of liberty from the strict segregation of society and its laws. It was culture as part of everyday life rather than separate from it. From the genre's inception, Lesage was clear that it was impossible to apply the classical rules of theatre. He argues that the opéra-comique had its own rules and regulations, for example, that it was imperative that scenes were not too long. Piron, an unashamed defender of the Foire, was far less tentative and not only rejects but celebrates the alternative he provides:
Il ne faut pas chercher [...] ni régularité, ni plan, ni conduite; mais beaucoup de gaîté & d'excellentes plaisanteries.(17)
For Piron his work is characterised by disorder and laughter, neither of which can be regulated for.
J'avoue qu'il s'y rencontre par-ci, par-là, quelques traits libres; mais c'est de cette liberté, qui, de tout temps, caractérisa les Spectacles de la Foire, & que le gôut du Public exige de nos Pièces, malgré nous & les Auteurs. D'ailleurs les traits libres passent par les oreilles, sans les blesser, & vont à l'imagination, pour la divertir [...]. (18)
Piron underlines the inextricable link that has existed "de tout temps" between freedom and the Foire shows. The fact that Lesage and Piron felt the need to justify and explain the perceived shortcomings of their genre indicates a sense of guilt on their part at failing to live up to the accepted norms of high art theatre. As Piron implies, it was the audience themselves who demanded this freedom.
How might these observations regarding the variety of guilty pleasure to be had in the act of receiving a performance of French musical comedy in the eighteenth century help us to redefine our understanding of popular culture? The two aspects that I would like to propose as defining popular culture are those of egalitarian participation and, directly related to this, that of guilty pleasure. Even today, popular culture is more often than not considered to be mindless and the consumption of popular culture an activity we feel we have to make excuses for. This is a tendency noted by Ien Ang, who highlights the way those who appreciate popular culture define themselves and their pleasures defensively in relation to the negative associations of popular culture. (19) She contends that pleasure can be variously produced by internalising, negotiating or neutralising with 'surface irony' that ideology and that this tendency to excuse, to justify or adopt a position of irony is the result of the discrepancy between the values traditionally placed on culture artefacts and the real value placed on artefacts of popular culture by an audience. I would suggest that guilty pleasure is an effect of the audience's awareness of this discrepancy. Popular or low culture is the "other" to official high art culture, an "other" which exerts both repugnance and fascination. Popular culture performance becomes a meeting place and exchange between these two opposing cultures. It is this aesthetic of exchange, both internally in terms of the audience's relationship to the performance, and externally, in terms of their relationship to each other and the social event of theatre attendance, which defines the popular in French musical comedy of the eighteenth century. For this to take place however, the right performance environment is needed. When the audience becomes homogeneous, the exchange, and the guilty pleasure of that exchange, is absent and therefore the genre reinvents itself in a new environment. When the Opéra-Comique loses the juxtaposition of high and low, the upper class audience returns to the boulevard to seek the exchange there. Correspondingly, the possibility of pleasure in egalitarian participation is also only truly realised when the audience is diverse. It is impossible for a mixed audience to approach or receive any performance in a uniform manner but the aesthetics of musical comedy generate equality through performance by creating an audience who are "in the know" vis-à-vis the genre and its rules.
French musical comedy struggled for its survival in the eighteenth century and in this struggle the genre's most important ally was the audience whose support was enlisted through participation. The participatory mode of reception is inextricably linked to the illicit nature of the genre and one of its attractions. In the Foires, the performers communicated to their audience using the audience's own knowledge and active participation. Along the boulevard, participation was requested simply through the act of being present at the performance. In both cases the audience were more than willing to oblige in exchange for the guilty pleasure of sharing a performance that was free from the rules of artistic, social and cultural bienséance. By asking the audience to engage bodily, through participation or simply through physical presence, a temporary moment of social harmony is created through performance.
NOTES
1. Frères Parfaict, Mémoire pour servir à l'histoire des Spectacles de la Foire Par un acteur forain (Paris: Chez Briasson, 1743), pp. 109-110.
2. Quoted in Théâtre de la Foire, ed. Isabelle & Jean-Louis Vissière (Paris: Éditions Desjonquères, 2000), p. 6.
3. Alain-René Lesage & Jacques Philippe Orneval, Les Funerailles de la Foire (Amsterdam: Zacharie Chatelin, 1722), p. 398.
4. Lesage & Orneval, Les Funerailles, pp. 64-65.
5. Quoted in Philippe Vendrix, L'Opéra-Comique en France au XVIIIe siècle (Liège: Mardaga, 1992), p. 201.
6. Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Tableau de Paris (Tomes I & II), ed. Jean-Claude Bonnet (Paris: Mercure de France, (1782-1789) 1994), Tome 1, p. 284.
7. Quoted in Michèle Root-Bernstein, Boulevard Theater and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1981), p. 51.
8. Root-Bernstein, Boulevard Theater, p. 64.
9. Toussaint-Gaspard Taconet, Compliment prononcé par l'auteur A la clôture du Théâtre, printed in Les Fous des Boulevards (Paris: Ballard, 1760), p. 64.
10. Taconet, Compliment, p. 64.
11. Mercier, Tableau (Tome 1), p. 538.
12. Mercier, Mon bonnet de nuit, suivi de Du Théâtre (Paris: Mercure de France, 1999), p. 1334.
13. Mercier, Tableau (Tome II), p. 179.
14. Mercier, Tableau (Tome II), p. 287.
15. Quoted in Vendrix, L'Opéra-Comique, p. 11.
16. Des Essarts, Les Trois Théâtres de Paris (Paris: Lacombe, 1777), pp. 135-36.
17. Piron, Tirésias in Théâtre de la Foire ou l'Opéra-Comique (Tome VI), reprint of 10 volume 1737 Paris edition (Genève: Slatkine Reprints, 1969), p. 89.
18. Piron, Tirésias, p. 92.
19. Ien Ang, 'Dallas and the Ideology of Mass Culture' in John Storey, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, A Reader, 2nd ed. (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1998), pp. 267-74.