Charles 9 Uproar: Philosophie Moderne Revolution
’ In this pamphlet, he lists philosophy’s principal heroes as “Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, d’Alembert, Diderot, Mably, Raynal and Helvétius.” These philosophes had served society during their lives and now “from the tomb” inspired the Revolution, including the upheaval transforming the theater. How did “la philosophie moderne” evolve before 1789 from the writings of the philosophes into a formidable force reordering all of society? Via their writings, their example, and society’s mounting persecution of them. Chénier particularly stressed the unwitting contribution of the bishops who for years fought from the pulpit, issuing pastoral circulars denouncing la philosophie and its “doctrine abominable” as the source of all misfortune. If “philosophy”
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had pervaded France in recent decades, entered the royal council, and entrenched itself in aristocratic homes, and men had finally become “reasonable” in many respects, revolutionary France owed it all to those enlightened writers and thinkers banned and hounded before 1788, not just by the Crown but by the judiciary and religious authority.
The 1789–90 Charles IX uproar was a major cultural revolutionary episode with implications extending far beyond freedom of expression.
At stake was the social function of culture itself. During the summer of 1789, those resisting the staging of Charles IX often embraced even full freedom of the press. What they disputed was not freedom of expression as such but rather any right to stage material that was not just topical but politically, religiously, and socially divisive. Freedom of the theater existed nowhere, and never had, and promised to be a major extension of liberty, opening up a vast new thought-world to innumerable city-dwellers who were not fully literate. In eighteenth-century England, the press was (partially) free, assuredly, but the theater remained rigidly controlled, and more tightly than ever since Horace Walpole’s time. Theater culture stands apart from the world of print by being experienced collectively in an atmosphere of heightened emotion in which the semiliterate fully participate. The “antitheatricalism” of Chénier’s opponents played on the evidently acute danger of unchaining previously restrained popular emotion. No true freedom of expression can exist, retorted Chénier and Brissot, where theater aligns with conventional thinking. This is why, subsequently, stringent control of the theater was one of the most vital aspects of Robespierre’s dictatorship during the months from June 1793 to July
1794.
Theater reflects the people’s will only where free from control and the conventions to which, historically, it has been subjected. Potentially, the stage, held Chénier and other republican stalwarts of the 1789 theater controversy, was a more potent agent of change than even books and reading. In July 1789, the newly reformed Paris city government had to intervene. Both sides to the dispute accepted society had entered a new era of freedom, and that the theater represented a potent agent of reeducation. In terms of the much-discussed but not-yet-proclaimed Declaration of the Rights of Man, Chénier and Brissot might appear fully justified. But in fact the anti-republican conservative and moderate opposition arguably held the more logical position. After all, France was a monarchy, they pointed out, that had always proclaimed Catholicism the state church: any play purposely depicting monarchy and Catholicism as odious was therefore contrary to the existing constitution, public order, and the public interest. Charles IX not only dramatized the reprehensibility of “tyranny” and “fanaticism,” but by declaring the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre a monstrous crime committed by king and Church directly equated monarchy with “tyranny” and Catholicism with “fanaticism.”
The new, enlightened mayor of Paris, the astronomer Jean-Sylvain Bailly, opposing the staging of Charles IX, sharply distinguished, like British ministers, between liberty of the press and freedom of theater, because in the theater people experience spectacles collectively and, as he put it, “s’électrisent” (mutually electrify each other), becoming all too readily disruptive of public order and good morals. Several commentators agreed that the multitude was unpredictable and easily steered in the wrong direction by “unpatriotic” writers. Backed by the mayor, the actors briefly gained the initiative. But the republicans mobilized support in the Paris sections against Bailly, in part by buying up large quantities of tickets and packing performances with their supporters. On August 19, 1789, demonstrators disrupted a performance at the Comédie-Française, calling out from the pit for Charles IX. There was no official permission for this, retorted the actors, to which the demonstrators replied: “no more permissions!”
As Brissot, Nicolas de Condorcet, and the democratic republicans gained ground in Paris municipal politics, so did Chénier and the other republican publicists embroiled in the capital’s theater wars. Finally, on November 4, 1789, with the theater’s name officially changed from Comédie-Française to Théâtre de la Nation, the play was staged contrary to the actors’ wishes. On opening night, both Danton, who had attended some rehearsals, and Mirabeau figured among the audience, their presence endorsing the play’s message. As the curtain rose, Danton, despite his huge girth, leaped onto the stage to direct the applause. Staged for several months over the winter of 1789–90, Charles IX was indeed a landmark in theater history, inaugurating an era characterized (until Robespierre’s coup) by an entirely new close alignment of the stage with “philosophy.”
The “moderates” succeeded in dampening down Paris’s theater wars somewhat during early 1790, but the furor resumed with undiminished intensity as the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille approached. The July 14, 1790, first anniversary precipitated a wave of emotion not only across France but also across the entire pro-Revolution intelligentsia in Britain, Holland, Belgium, the United States, and Germany as well. At Hamburg, Georg Heinrich Sieveking organized a grand all-day festival and banquet for eighty guests on his property at nearby Harvestehude. Those present included numerous noted intellectuals and literary figures, among them the son of the great philologist Reimarus, Johann Albert Heinrich Reimarus (1729–1814); his famous unmarried sister, Elise Reimarus (1735–1805), a friend of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Moses Mendelssohn; the former leader of the Illuminati in Protestant Germany, Adolph Freiherr von Knigge (1752–96), among the foremost supporters of the French Revolution outside France; and the celebrated German poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (1724–1803). The banquet, accompanied by live music, a women’s choir, discharge of ceremonial cannon, and two revolutionary odes by Klopstock, lasted all day, the participants successively toasting the “happiness of France,” the glorious July 14, the French National Assembly, Bailly, Lafayette, Mirabeau, and Klopstock. The men, sporting tricolor cockades, and the women, wearing white dresses with tricolor sashes and hats with tricolor cockades, ate, listened to speeches, and sang, raising their glasses to numerous ideologically charged toasts, including to “prompt consequences” and an end to princely Despotismus in Germany.
had pervaded France in recent decades, entered the royal council, and entrenched itself in aristocratic homes, and men had finally become “reasonable” in many respects, revolutionary France owed it all to those enlightened writers and thinkers banned and hounded before 1788, not just by the Crown but by the judiciary and religious authority.
The 1789–90 Charles IX uproar was a major cultural revolutionary episode with implications extending far beyond freedom of expression.
At stake was the social function of culture itself. During the summer of 1789, those resisting the staging of Charles IX often embraced even full freedom of the press. What they disputed was not freedom of expression as such but rather any right to stage material that was not just topical but politically, religiously, and socially divisive. Freedom of the theater existed nowhere, and never had, and promised to be a major extension of liberty, opening up a vast new thought-world to innumerable city-dwellers who were not fully literate. In eighteenth-century England, the press was (partially) free, assuredly, but the theater remained rigidly controlled, and more tightly than ever since Horace Walpole’s time. Theater culture stands apart from the world of print by being experienced collectively in an atmosphere of heightened emotion in which the semiliterate fully participate. The “antitheatricalism” of Chénier’s opponents played on the evidently acute danger of unchaining previously restrained popular emotion. No true freedom of expression can exist, retorted Chénier and Brissot, where theater aligns with conventional thinking. This is why, subsequently, stringent control of the theater was one of the most vital aspects of Robespierre’s dictatorship during the months from June 1793 to July
1794.
Theater reflects the people’s will only where free from control and the conventions to which, historically, it has been subjected. Potentially, the stage, held Chénier and other republican stalwarts of the 1789 theater controversy, was a more potent agent of change than even books and reading. In July 1789, the newly reformed Paris city government had to intervene. Both sides to the dispute accepted society had entered a new era of freedom, and that the theater represented a potent agent of reeducation. In terms of the much-discussed but not-yet-proclaimed Declaration of the Rights of Man, Chénier and Brissot might appear fully justified. But in fact the anti-republican conservative and moderate opposition arguably held the more logical position. After all, France was a monarchy, they pointed out, that had always proclaimed Catholicism the state church: any play purposely depicting monarchy and Catholicism as odious was therefore contrary to the existing constitution, public order, and the public interest. Charles IX not only dramatized the reprehensibility of “tyranny” and “fanaticism,” but by declaring the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre a monstrous crime committed by king and Church directly equated monarchy with “tyranny” and Catholicism with “fanaticism.”
The new, enlightened mayor of Paris, the astronomer Jean-Sylvain Bailly, opposing the staging of Charles IX, sharply distinguished, like British ministers, between liberty of the press and freedom of theater, because in the theater people experience spectacles collectively and, as he put it, “s’électrisent” (mutually electrify each other), becoming all too readily disruptive of public order and good morals. Several commentators agreed that the multitude was unpredictable and easily steered in the wrong direction by “unpatriotic” writers. Backed by the mayor, the actors briefly gained the initiative. But the republicans mobilized support in the Paris sections against Bailly, in part by buying up large quantities of tickets and packing performances with their supporters. On August 19, 1789, demonstrators disrupted a performance at the Comédie-Française, calling out from the pit for Charles IX. There was no official permission for this, retorted the actors, to which the demonstrators replied: “no more permissions!”
As Brissot, Nicolas de Condorcet, and the democratic republicans gained ground in Paris municipal politics, so did Chénier and the other republican publicists embroiled in the capital’s theater wars. Finally, on November 4, 1789, with the theater’s name officially changed from Comédie-Française to Théâtre de la Nation, the play was staged contrary to the actors’ wishes. On opening night, both Danton, who had attended some rehearsals, and Mirabeau figured among the audience, their presence endorsing the play’s message. As the curtain rose, Danton, despite his huge girth, leaped onto the stage to direct the applause. Staged for several months over the winter of 1789–90, Charles IX was indeed a landmark in theater history, inaugurating an era characterized (until Robespierre’s coup) by an entirely new close alignment of the stage with “philosophy.”
The “moderates” succeeded in dampening down Paris’s theater wars somewhat during early 1790, but the furor resumed with undiminished intensity as the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille approached. The July 14, 1790, first anniversary precipitated a wave of emotion not only across France but also across the entire pro-Revolution intelligentsia in Britain, Holland, Belgium, the United States, and Germany as well. At Hamburg, Georg Heinrich Sieveking organized a grand all-day festival and banquet for eighty guests on his property at nearby Harvestehude. Those present included numerous noted intellectuals and literary figures, among them the son of the great philologist Reimarus, Johann Albert Heinrich Reimarus (1729–1814); his famous unmarried sister, Elise Reimarus (1735–1805), a friend of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Moses Mendelssohn; the former leader of the Illuminati in Protestant Germany, Adolph Freiherr von Knigge (1752–96), among the foremost supporters of the French Revolution outside France; and the celebrated German poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (1724–1803). The banquet, accompanied by live music, a women’s choir, discharge of ceremonial cannon, and two revolutionary odes by Klopstock, lasted all day, the participants successively toasting the “happiness of France,” the glorious July 14, the French National Assembly, Bailly, Lafayette, Mirabeau, and Klopstock. The men, sporting tricolor cockades, and the women, wearing white dresses with tricolor sashes and hats with tricolor cockades, ate, listened to speeches, and sang, raising their glasses to numerous ideologically charged toasts, including to “prompt consequences” and an end to princely Despotismus in Germany.