The Intellectual and His People. Jacques Ranciere

by a troupe of rural players, replacing the professionals in ‘unknown accents and a singular wild tongue’. This theatre, however, encouraged by Charles le Goffic, could still not have a truly revolutionary character, and the mediaevalist Gaston Paris expressed the desire that the Breton people’s ‘capacity to feel and convey the dramatic forms of religious ideas’ should serve today to express the union of men with and in God that was, according to Tolstoy, the religion of the age.48

      In Grenoble, Émile Roux-Parassac, promoter of both popular theatre and popular mountaineering, turned his double passion to good use by having presented to the people the story of a guide saving the rich man who had seduced his fiancée.49 In Poitou, an ‘elite made up of members of the Ethnographic Society and a certain number of guests’ attended, in the ruins of the Château de Salbart, the performance of Bonne Fée in honour of the Niort poet, M. Émile du Tiers. But ‘things get known quickly in the provinces, particularly in the countryside. The rumour spread far and wide that a play was to be shown at Salbart and a fairy would appear. Great emotion! People rushed in from all sides. When the show began, there were at least 1,500 or 2,000 people sitting wherever they could.’50

      Thus the Ethnographic Society’s theatre became de facto a popular theatre, despite the barrier of alexandrine lines. And under the impulse of a producer who took the name of Pierre Corneille as his pseudonym, this continued in the following years; they performed La Légende de Chambrille, another fairy tale acted by two intelligent and pretty working women in a deep and narrow gorge of the Puy d’Enfer, and Erinna, prêtresse d’Hésus, a Gallic and patriotic tragedy, in which the actors were enlightened amateurs and the characters were villagers.

      At all events, these attempts at ‘decentralization’ could not resolve the problem of a Parisian popular theatre. The Revue d’art dramatique, on the margin of the still young administrative prehistory of this theatre, took a bold initiative in 1899 and established a competition for the best popular theatre project. The successful candidate, Eugène Morel, showed a contrario the ineffectiveness of popular summer festivals. The point was not to create, by the magic of theatre, the moment of a one-off relationship between a work and an audience. Theatre was a site not of communion but of education; and education implied a certain discipline. It was necessary to start by ensuring the first precondition for any serious schooling, assiduousness. This formed habits and created a particular preparedness, rather than transmitting a specific content:

      It is only by seeing fine things that taste is formed; education demands repetition. To act on an audience effectively, one must have it constantly in hand. Occasional festivals may make more of a show, but their influence is zero. A random audience, attracted by one spectacle and repelled by another . . . does not advance. On the contrary, it is attracted only by flattering its worst instincts.51

      In order for the people to be ‘regularly summoned to beauty’, the solution lay not in free entry – a vestige of the one-off performances that the monarch would decree for the people – but rather in subscription, a form of aristocratic attendance at the great dramatic theatres that needed to be popularized. Subscription made the theatre a familiar place, in which one rediscovered one’s seats, neighbours, and habits:

      Once we have obtained, just once, the decision to subscribe, the worker will go to the theatre off his own bat, will let himself go there. There is nothing extraordinary about this; it is simply habit. It costs him no more to go than not to go. He arrives, and is happy to rediscover the people who were there last week, the actors he knows, etc. The theatre for him is a little business that he follows; there is ‘interest’ involved.52

      To strengthen this aspect, a collective membership drive was organized, and a restaurant reserved close to the theatre where it was possible to dine en famille, a newspaper that gave the emotion of the theatre an educational extension, exhibitions in the foyer, musical interludes supplied by local bands, plenary meetings of subscribers who judged plays presented in a competition, just as in ancient Athens, balls where the true art of dance was given pride of place, perhaps even open-air performances in summer and little trips – in short, everything that could ‘create a normal current, a permanent tendency, towards beauty’. In this way, the audience was kept sufficiently well in hand that the level of spectacles could be slowly but steadily raised.

      Halfway between activist enthusiasm and administrative constraint, Eugène Morel rediscovered the logic of Léon de Laborde, and defined, in the wake of his nationalized Schillerism, what could be called a trade-unionized Schillerism. His theatre association would quite naturally seek a certain clientele, that of professional organizations. The common conditions of work in a particular trade were eminently suited to establish audiences of subscribers. The character of festive conviviality would be thereby strengthened – once a year, the trade association could have its own review there – as well as its educational character: a condition would be met that was desirable for any school, a ‘public of equal intellectual level’. It would thus be possible, on each occasion, and according to the specific level of each occupational body, ‘to know in what language to address it and the means to be taken to raise its artistic understanding by a degree’.53

      This arrangement, however, raised a certain question. It was uncertain whether the associative structure was a means for educating the people to beauty, or whether the establishment of a certain regime of honest sociability was not the final purpose of the institution. This second hypothesis was suggested by Morel’s curious indifference to the question: ‘What shall we put on?’ That, he said provocatively, did not matter to us. Aesthetic education was first of all a revolution of habitus in the form of a Pascalian conversion. What was needed above all was to come and trustingly admire, and the rest would follow: ‘Admiration is not a state in which a fine performance immerses us, it is almost always a preliminary state, a disposition that the spectator has brought.’54

      In short, the motor of education was suggestion, and this was the particular aim that official support could promote:

      The government has to help us to say: ‘By coming to the Théâtre Populaire you honour your fatherland and yourself. You are going to hear fine things! You are going to hear beautiful things! The things you are going to hear are beautiful. Make the effort. You need to come to feel that this is beautiful.’

      And if this was not the case?

      We have said: it does not matter to us what is played. If our project is good, then it is so whatever is played.55

      What theatre for what people?

      Beyond any provocation, Romain Rolland expressed the voice of those who, believing less in the theatre than in the people, wanted to know what the people should be offered. He also preferred the mobilization of energies to the formation of habits. The notion of energy lay at the centre of the three commandments he set out for the popular theatre. This should be first of all a relaxation. That ruled out Wagnerian ‘sicknesses’ that the elite could keep for themselves, but also works that were too gloomy for many a friend of the people, such as Tolstoy’s Power of Darkness. Sadness should be ruled out in the sense of a diminution of vital power. The second law, in fact, was that this theatre should be a source of energy, a ‘bath of action’ in which the people, to prepare themselves for action, found in the poet ‘a good travelling companion, alert, jovial, heroic if need be, on whose arm they could lean, and whose good humour made them forget the fatigues of the road’.56 We should note this theatrical origin of the concept of fellow-traveller, which Rolland would apply to politics before Sartre did. Finally, the road in question was that of understanding oneself and the world: the theatre should be a guiding light for intelligence. In this production of light from the relaxation of the material, it was energy that held the decisive place. And this meant that almost all classical theatre was useless for the theatre of the people. ‘No beauty, no grandeur, could take the place of youth and life.’57 The ‘beautiful death’, which clever lecturers sought to inspire with new life by comparison with tales of everyday crime, should thus be opposed by a theatre of creation, bound up with the sufferings of life but also exalting its joys.

      Romain Rolland, however, found hardly a trace of this in the activist or commercial attempts that sought to anticipate the interminable official gestation of the popular theatre. The activist side was represented in particular by the theatre established