The allure of ‘liberté’

Napoléon III's legislation was long-awaited, prepared following national consultation, and (according to those who actually drafted it) intended to inject France with artistic vitality by removing longstanding obstacles to theatrical expansion. Audiences were to benefit from a proliferation of good theatre, and artists eager to cement their careers with success in Paris sensed the arrival of opportunities they had long been denied under a system so rigidly compartmentalised, genre by genre, that it hindered both opportunity and experiment.Footnote ⁶ Now, with the exception of the national flagships in Paris – the Opéra, the Opéra-Comique and the Théâtre-Lyrique – France's theatres were to be run essentially as private enterprises. New venues could be built and operated with a minimum of official intervention (mainly involving censorship), and they could each put on a variety of genres, including experimental ones. From idealist, centralist and Parisian perspectives the legislation offered everything: a catalyst to creativity, an end to the repressive monopolies that bedevilled regional theatre provision, and the opening up of new performing spaces for classic and popular masterpieces some of which had hitherto been cooped up in national theatres where they took up space that could be given over to living artists. What could possibly go wrong?

Admittedly, the prospects for the regions looked less immediately rosy, but that was in part because they were almost all in a financially parlous state. Municipal theatre managers had long considered bankruptcy an occupational hazard, and across the country and the century large numbers of them terminated their contracts just before the bailiffs arrived. The costs of grand opera in particular were now breaking the back of even the largest regional companies, and the genre was far beyond the capacities of their smaller, travelling cousins, for which vaudeville was the most complex musical genre they could usually mount. Opera seasons had begun to shrink as early as the late 1840s as a way of saving money, leaving many orchestral musicians with lean weeks either side of the summer spa season. Meanwhile, in the interests of social justice town councils routinely specified the ticket prices their contracted theatre managers could charge in each section of the theatre, and in the interests of their members' livings composer and author unions raised their royalty rates. Regional managers had to pay the Poor Tax out of their takings, too – usually around 10 per cent and to be paid irrespective of whether they broke even. Even with subsidies, which rose inexorably from the 1830s onwards, they struggled to balance the books. This was the side of the often strained town council/theatre manager relationship on which La Publicité's anecdote did not elaborate: the fact that although theatre managers enjoyed and sometimes abused monopoly rights, they were all too frequently reduced to begging the council for bailouts. Something had to change.

Support for liberalising measures was fuelled considerably by widespread suspicion of those vestiges of ‘feudalism’ and ‘privilege’ embodied in the role of the municipal ‘Directeur des théâtres’. The middle of the century is replete with tales of licensed managers restricting access and muzzling competition, not only, as in Biarritz, by effecting temporary closures during a company's absence, but, in larger centres, by refusing on purely economic grounds to run all the theatre buildings they controlled.Footnote ⁷ And this despite the notion that theatre was a right and not a pleasure. In other respects, consumer power prevailed in ways which probably encouraged indirect support for deregulation because they focused on the ‘them’ and ‘us’ relationship created by the manager's privileged position. While the passive protest of staying away from the theatre was open to everyone, the only moment at which audiences could actively and collectively influence artistic standards was via the annual public auditions for principals – ‘débuts’ – with which the manager accountable to his local audience was duty bound to start the season. Ticket holders were, after all, indirectly paying his council subsidy via their taxes, as well as directly via the box office. Those with season tickets had even more cause. Here was their opportunity to hold their licensed manager to account, and they took full advantage of it with shouting, whistling and occasionally missile-throwing. Precisely because such evenings could become riotous, préfets, who represented the State at regional levels, and commentators mindful of their town's national image, tended to favour abolishing the débuts system. For very different (selfish) reasons, the vast majority of theatre managers would have voted the same way.Footnote ⁸ Mayors, who needed to demonstrate accountability to their tax-paying residents, tended instead to favour reforming the existing system.Footnote ⁹ Among journalists and pamphleteers a general (and erroneous) assumption existed that a ‘liberté des théâtres’ would make ‘débuts’ redundant because it would sever the link between privilege and accountability.Footnote ¹⁰ This, too, seemed a good reason to support it.

Proposals for reform in the guise of pamphlets, articles and petitions landed on the desk of the Ministre des Beaux-Arts regularly during the first half of the century, resulting in two abortive attempts at new legislation in 1848–9 and 1853 – the latter specifically targeted at the problems the regions faced.Footnote ¹¹ The process began again with a similar ministerial consultation document of 8 September 1862 from the comte Alexandre Colonna-Walewski, Ministre d'État et des Beaux-Arts, asking regional representatives for diagnoses of the problems and advice on how best to proceed, but dwelling especially on the public order problems of the existing ‘débuts’ system.Footnote ¹² This time there was a following wind: a major press campaign in favour of liberalisation doubtless helped demonstrate the extent of support for a reform Napoléon III apparently desired, and Walewski showed considerable determination to ensure the draft legislation's successful progress, even though during 1863 the theatre's portfolio passed out of his hands and into those of the maréchal Vaillant at the Maison de l'Empereur, and even though there was resistance to the new law among civil servants.Footnote ¹³

The devil in the detail

When the law was finally passed in 1864, it made no distinction between Paris and the rest of the country. Therein lay its fatal flaw, for from a regional perspective there was indeed plenty to go wrong. Anyone with knowledge of the complex financial ecology of regional theatre would have recognised that onto an already deficit-ridden system it imposed extra costs that someone – entrepreneurs, municipalities, consumers or a combination thereof – would have to bear. In short, Napoléon III's overturning of the repressive theatre system instituted by Napoléon I did not facilitate artistic expansion, grandeur or originality in the newly liberated private sector; it did precisely the opposite both in Paris and the regions. As my closing example will illustrate, its consequences were decisive in freeing up a commercial entertainment sector whose drive and popularity left the legislation's intended beneficiaries – spoken theatre and opera – in considerable difficulty. Indeed the unexpected reversal of opera's fortune in favour of opera-bouffe, operetta and music-hall chanson was such that one theatre manager quipped despairingly that it should have been called the ‘liberté des cafés-concerts’.Footnote ¹⁴ Central to the legislation's failure across France was the one-size, regions-blind nature of its text. And yet for other reasons – mostly to do with the belated timing of its arrival – it failed in Paris too.

Signed by maréchal Vaillant, and in accordance with Napoléon III's apparent wishes, the legislation's opening article read that as of 1 July, any person of acceptable moral standing could, having made a declaration to the authorities, build or manage a theatre at their own risk. At a stroke, this sentence seemed to sweep away all monopolies, contracts and privileges together with the limitations on venues and repertory that went with them. While it did not mean that all repertory was openly available (censorship remained in place, the national theatres had to adhere to their allotted genres, and author and publisher permissions were still required before recent works could be staged), the theatre world's feudalism and its enforced compression in an environment of urban expansion were at an end. Moreover, and despite the pervasive rhetoric of theatre as art and education in government and journalistic documents alike, the legislation indirectly recognised that French theatre was a competitive industry that could and should operate as independently of government restriction as possible. Hence the emphasis on ‘liberté’.

Deregulation was warmly welcomed in the capital as an end to privilege, repression, and an outdated system of royal or imperial patronage. In the regions, too, and especially among those wishing to starve opera in order to regenerate good drama, it commanded strong support.Footnote ¹⁵ And the very word ‘liberté’ appeared intoxicating.Footnote ¹⁶ Nevertheless, the legislation did not enforce and was not intended to imply an entirely free market. In a dilution of the long-standing requirement (dating from an Ordonnance of 8 December 1824) that municipal councils with resident companies should support them financially, Vaillant mitigated the impact of the opening sentence with the suggestion that: ‘Theatres that appear especially worthy of encouragement may be subsidised, either by the State or by communes’.Footnote ¹⁷ As worded, this sentence contained neither a recommendation nor a requirement: it simply outlined the existence of a legitimate exception to the norm. Vaillant's introduction to the decree as published in the Moniteur universel offered a partial gloss: such theatres would be models, raising artistic standards within the new legislative framework. There was, however, no further detail. Once again Paris and the regions were treated as one; moreover there was no acknowledgement that adequate subsidy was precisely what town councils were currently struggling to provide. Finally, there was no hint as to whether monies might now flow outwards from Paris, with the State supplementing municipal support. In August, when Vaillant spoke about the legislation at the Paris Conservatoire's annual prize-giving ceremony, addressing musicians and actors together, he revealed a still narrower vision, applauding its potential to support artistic expansion and regeneration in spoken theatre alone:

In practice, the ‘subsidy clause’ allowed the national theatres in Paris to pursue business as usual, their managers working to a contract in return for state funding. And it was intended to suggest the same to the mayors of town councils as they and their colleagues pondered the appropriate response to the new Paris legislation. Yet it did not – or at least, not consistently – which meant that Vaillant had belatedly to make his meaning explicit in a circular of 28 April 1864 to préfets in which he wrote, unconvincingly, that he was trying to ‘foresee the difficulties which implementation of the decree of 6 January last might raise’, and in which he enjoined the préfet of each Département – governmental supervisors to the country's mayors – to ensure that town councils not only maintained subsidies, but added new ones.Footnote ¹⁹ Even as it broadcast ‘liberty’, then, the legislation created a potential division between regulated and deregulated areas of theatrical activity, and outside Paris the boundaries were left for individual councils to decide. The result was a period of chaotic experimentation, with U-turns aplenty leading to short-termism and planning blight. The results, duly inherited by the Third Republic, left the reformist Agénor Bardoux, Ministre des Beaux-Arts, preparing to redraft the legislation yet again in 1878, in the face of demonstrable failure in the capital and (as he discovered in light of regional consultation) worse consequences everywhere else.

The free market/public subsidy division sparked impassioned debate, even within constituencies one might expect to show solidarity. The most immediately affected were the professional associations that supported authors – playwrights and composers alike. In responses that provided an uncanny mirror of Vaillant's (and Napoléon III's) lack of understanding of regional pressures, the Société des Compositeurs drafted complaints to the Senate about the unfair competition which the subsidised sector, meaning the Paris flagship theatres, represented for those out in the cold:

On the other hand, Jules Ruelle, editor of the Messager des théâtres and a staunch supporter of the legislation on behalf of the royalty collection societies his paper represented, gladly inferred from the legislation's text that for the regions full municipal underwriting – régie – would become the default guarantor of artistic standards, with each council owning its opera house, paying a full staff, maintaining its own wardrobe and scenery store, and engaging a salaried administrative manager instead of contracting with an entrepreneur.Footnote ²¹ Everything depended on where one wished to find the legislation's point of balance between competition and protection – and for whom.Footnote ²² In short, the law had been badly drafted. Interpretations of its text, its implications and its strengths and weaknesses, were to vary wildly. Vaillant's initiative of 28 April was a vain shutting of the stable door.

Consequences

Disruption was prolonged, for in raising the question of subsidy by mentioning it as optional within an act of deregulation the legislation had problematised it anew. This was as true in the capital as elsewhere. In 1866 Gustave Bertrand argued, as part of an extended essay on how to fund the Opéra and the Opéra-Comique, that not all ‘industries’ were equal, and that in this regard theatre was comparable to artisanal concerns such as the Gobelins tapestry workshops and the Sèvres porcelain factories, which still benefited from government money. He found the alternative unacceptable:

Such embourgeoisement – recalibration of the monumental to a domestic scale – was anathema to him, as indeed it was to other supporters of subsidy, who invariably adopted a version of Vaillant's ‘model theatres’ argument. National disaster, however, made downsizing a distinct possibility given the financial exigencies of defeat by Prussia. In the early Third Republic, when disparagement of Second Empire frivolity was at its height and when one might assume the state anxious to preserve the highest standards at its model theatres come what may, subsidy for the Paris flagships had to be defended vigorously. In 1873, for instance, L'Art musical reported the annual discussions at the Commission des Théâtres:

Beyond questions of national pride, the background to such debates was that for those who expected operatic regeneration, the medium-term Parisian experience of deregulation was harsh. No new private venture succeeded in creating and retaining a new audience for opera or in providing the new operatic opportunities the legislation seemed to offer to living composers. In addition, deregulation could not stem the tide of public opinion in favour of operetta and the café-concert. Bertrand, for instance, would surely have felt both depressed at and vindicated by the Parisian operatic map during the Exposition Universelle year of 1867, which saw Offenbach's opéras-bouffes occupy three deregulated Paris stages while new large-scale opera was available on subsidised ones only.Footnote ²⁵ It must also have been galling for French opera composers to see that the monumental new work the Opéra staged during the Exposition was by an Italian, albeit with French librettists (Verdi's Don Carlos), while during the same period the unmissable musical comedy was by a German (Offenbach's La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein). But to make matters worse for opera professionals, café-concert legislation was progressively breached after 1864 and liberalised under the theatres administrator Camille Doucet on 31 March 1867. With costumes and props now officially sanctioned, these popular entertainments came ever closer to sung theatre while remaining resolutely entertainment-centred.Footnote ²⁶ They seemed, in other words, to represent the best of both worlds: theatre without didactic intent or artistic stuffiness, and comprising everything from the noble or gracious sentiments of the aria to the raciest double-entendre of chanson lyrics that could be got through the censors' office. Belatedly, what composers and opera critics saw as the consequences of deregulation in Paris was the squeezing out of ‘independent’ opera between cushioned but generically restrictive national theatres on the one hand and a dynamic entertainment sector on the other.

But what of the regions? It is worth turning back to L'Art musical, a publisher's journal which, like Jules Ruelle's Messager des théâtres, backed deregulation to the hilt. On 28 April 1864 – the very day of Vaillant's attempt to shut the stable door – its readers would have found the following front-page editorial.

This was neither an over-reaction nor the misreading of a blip as a sign of long-term difficulty. Almost a year later even the official line as presented to members of the Chambre des Députés in February 1865, in the Exposé de la situation de l'Empire, read like an exercise in the lowering of expectation:

In early 1864 the most immediately serious problem was twofold. First, incumbent regional managers were either resigning or demanding enhanced terms that would fill the funding gap the government had just created by abolishing their right to tax competitors. Second, councils in major operatic centres were adhering to the letter of the legislation's ‘subsidy’ clause rather than to its spirit. And while I have found no hint that any council with a resident company discussed the logical free-market extreme of selling off its municipal theatre buildings, sacking its permanent staff and casting its theatrical responsibilities to the winds, sub-committees were routinely reconsidering subsidy policies ab initio, and councils were not all making the Paris-approved decision. These latter events, rather than the personal stories of resignation and financial brinkmanship, were what reached the papers first, helping spread a sense of panic. As reported with horror by ‘RALPH’, by March 1864 the councils of two contrasting theatrical towns – Marseille and Le Havre – had already interpreted the legislation as indicating that a free market should reign. They had abolished their subsidies, with the result that no grand opera company could be hired for the 1864–5 season.Footnote ²⁹ The manager of all three of Le Havre's theatres from 1859, the seasoned François-Jules Juclier, had responded to the ‘liberté’ legislation by expressing the wish to run just the two secondary theatres, the Variétés and the Théâtre-Napoléon.Footnote ³⁰ In turn, and in a move signalling rejection of an outmoded age of public accountability, the town put the Grand-Théâtre's management up for auction to the highest (sealed) bidder, precisely in the manner of entertainment venues such as the bullfighting arenas in the Midi.Footnote ³¹

Yet it was the Marseille decision that was the most shocking, not least because with a subsidy of 220,000 francs, it was on paper the most heavily council-supported theatrical venture in regional France. A dispatch from the Marseille correspondent for the Messager des théâtres simply said – perhaps directed at Ruelle himself – ‘it's a measure I leave you to ponder’.Footnote ³² At L'Art musical, ‘RALPH’ feared a domino effect: ‘It is to be presumed that other provincial town councils will imitate that of Marseille’.Footnote ³³ His concern was not for disappointed local audiences: it was for composers deprived of their royalties by the shrinking of the opera market at the very moment when it was supposed to expand. (And if it was Escudier writing, it was also doubtless to do with the prospect of lost revenue for his publishing house, for which Verdi – much-loved in Marseille – was an operatic money-spinner.) Quite apart from the imprecise wording of the legislation, its timing actively invited the feared ‘domino’ effect. The period December to March was the traditional time for town councils to advertise for new managers and to debate and revise their theatre contracts, subsidy levels included. Vaillant's announcement of November 1863 had given every council in the country the opportunity to change its provision in time for the coming season. In the medium term, as managers' contracts came up for renewal, copies of municipal cahiers des charges were swapped between towns as mayors and préfets wrote to each other, asking ‘What do you do normally?’ and, more important, ‘What are you planning to do now?’ In the coming years, all the major towns with resident theatre companies would experience agonised municipal council discussions about different forms of subsidy, or whether to award it at all. The pattern that emerged was absolutely consistent: no subsidy, no grand opera company. Regional managers could survive on ticket revenues if they put on plays, operetta, vaudeville and fairytale spectaculars (féeries). They could usually manage old-style opéra-comique. But France's flagship genre was out of the question, as was bel canto opera, and even the more expansive of recent opéras-comiques could pose difficulty.Footnote ³⁴

For town halls part of the ‘liberté’ problem was that initial decisions made on finances meant nothing as the theatrical season progressed. However generous the agreed budget line for the new theatrical season, more likely than not managers would be pleading for concessions by New Year, at which point councillors had a gun to their heads not only because of public demand and the need to see public investment rewarded by artistic success, but because the livelihoods of lowly theatre workers for whom they had moral and/or legal responsibility depended on the theatre remaining open.Footnote ³⁵ As Hemmings indicated for Paris: these latter workers were the real casualties of deregulation because before 1864 their pay was guaranteed either by the state/municipality or by the incoming manager in the event of a bankruptcy cutting a season short.Footnote ³⁶ It is hardly surprising, then, that where theatre finance was concerned, council meetings were protracted, that the same arguments kept reappearing in new guises, and that councils occasionally took a hard line from the outset. In 1865 one Marseille critic described subsidy, in their brave new world of deregulation, as ‘a favour’;Footnote ³⁷ but Lille had, even before 1864, worked on the basis that a grand opera season was the exception not the rule; its subsidy allocations were therefore only occasional.Footnote ³⁸ The more representative pre-1864 scenario, however, is provided by Toulouse, which during the July Monarchy was accustomed to a year-long lyric season but whose council had seriously considered ending all subsidy on principle, and therefore all hope of opera, as early as 1845. In a decision that took three meetings to reach and in which they debated everything from municipal régie at one extreme to abandonment of all financial aid at the other, councillors finally decided instead to overturn their theatre committee's recommendation, to double the 1845–6 subsidy of 25,000 for 1846–7, and to preserve their opera company.Footnote ³⁹

In 1864 itself the legislation's effects were almost immediate, bringing the Messager des théâtres a steady stream of unwelcome news. Ruelle had not only written in praise of liberalisation but had frequently, in the period between January and March 1864, poured scorn on the fears of others. He fell silent on the subject of ‘liberté’ as news of spreading chaos emerged week by week, especially as the new autumn season started up. Avignon had cut its subsidy and was trying to import whatever opera it could on a temporary basis.Footnote ⁴⁰ Rouen was ‘cut off from good music’ at the Théâtre des Arts until the council reconsidered its decision.Footnote ⁴¹ From Dijon, correspondent Nicholas Fétu was disillusioned at the results of the council's lowering the subsidy by 5,000 francs, writing ‘Here, as doubtless elsewhere, theatre deregulation has simply signalled backwards movement’.Footnote ⁴² Toulon's correspondent, B. Pietra, captured the sense of desperation brought by uncertainty and planning blight: ‘As you know, my dear director, this year we nearly had no opera, and nearly no theatre, even; the subsidy was first abolished, then restored, then abolished again, then restored permanently. Oh, the fragility of council affairs!’Footnote ⁴³

The towns mentioned above would have counted as ‘secondary’ within France. Among most of the metropolitan centres – Lyon, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Rouen, Lille and (at a pinch) Nantes – the situation was a little more stable. In 1864 Lyon's manager Raphaël Félix was mid-contract and the council did nothing immediately (although Félix, in common with so many of his colleagues, began a campaign of special pleading for enhanced terms). Lille retained its subsidy. Toulouse likewise, but the debate was fractious, with some support for a subsidy-free period of experimentation.Footnote ⁴⁴ Nantes heard and rejected an impassioned plea for a return to régie from councillor J.-B. Guilley, but also voted for the status quo.Footnote ⁴⁵ While such decisions to maintain subsidy levels might seem to bode well, they did not, for the simple reason that the end to privilege had brought with it an end to a manager's rights to tax artistic competitors via the traditional percentage cut of their ticket revenues. To the combination of subsidy and cross-subsidy there entered, then, a third form of necessary or at least desirable support: cash compensation to bridge the gap.Footnote ⁴⁶ Only Bordeaux, it seems, responded decisively to such an idea, estimating at 24–25,000 francs the loss that its next manager would suffer as a result of being unable to top-slice rival entertainments, and raising its subsidy accordingly.Footnote ⁴⁷ Its council debated its theatre contract early, on 18 January, at which point Marseille had not made its shocking decision. To the delight of the préfet of the Gironde, the newly elected and opera-loving mayor G. Henry Brochon persuaded colleagues that the decision other towns had before them was whether to maintain or to raise their subsidy level, and that ‘no one is dreaming of reducing it’.Footnote ⁴⁸ The atmosphere at Marseille a month or so later was very different, and the ‘liberté’ question was turned on its head as councillors – in contrast to those in Bordeaux – began to think the unthinkable.

Marseille I: crisis

A word on Marseille's particular character is in order here, for although it was France's second operatic city in the mid-1860s, the foundations of its operatic prestige were shakier than those of either Lyon or Bordeaux. Its status rested on two things: it invariably topped the league tables of municipal subsidy, and its theatres were being run by the bullish and seemingly invincible Olivier Halanzier, the most capable regional theatre manager in the country. In the short term, neither of these aspects of its reputation would survive the ‘liberté’. Though comparable to Bordeaux in many ways, Marseille lacked the operatic pride that came as much from the architecture of Bordeaux's incomparable eighteenth-century theatre building as from its musical tradition. And unlike Lyon which had the huge Célestins theatre as well as the Grand-Théâtre, Marseille had only one building large enough to mount the most prestigious operas. Moreover (and this was unusual in France), the council did not even own the Grand-Theâtre building. In addition, council decision-making was volatile, with debate on anything from schools to cemeteries routinely more explosive than in either Lyon or Bordeaux. As Halanzier well knew, at budget-setting time nothing was ever guaranteed.

Having seen the theatres bill as submitted to the Conseil d'État, Halanzier submitted a pre-emptive resignation (pointedly, effective 1 July 1864) as early as 18 November 1863. Once it was made law he restated his intention and argued that his position as the licensed manager of Marseille's theatres had been rendered null and void by ‘force majeure’.Footnote ⁴⁹ He would have had in mind Article 7 of the legislation, which stated that ‘Current theatre managers, apart from those of the subsidised theatres [meaning the state theatres], are and remain released from all the clauses and conditions of their contracts with the Administration, to the extent that they are contrary to the present decree.’Footnote ⁵⁰ On 4 March the town council debated the legality of his resignation in light of that very Article, and discussed the question of subsidy. It decided, against the wishes of the mayor (whose predictions of artistic doom had in any case been cast aside by the consultative committee), that the spirit of the 6 January decree was to let market forces dictate the theatre industry. Accepting Halanzier's resignation, it decided to withdraw all subsidy to its theatres beyond payment of the rent for the Grand-Théâtre, the Salle Beauvau, which was not council property. The incoming mayor Bernex, who made the closing substantive contribution, summed up the cumulative logic of the meeting:

Tellingly, the Secretary General of the Bouches du Rhône, acting on behalf of the sénateur (préfet), approved the decision relating to Halanzier but not that relating to the subsidy cut – although the latter went ahead anyway.Footnote ⁵²

Marseille was journalistically well prepared for the council's decision. The main Republican daily, the Sémaphore, was consistently blunt, for Gustave Bénédit, who was one of the most ardent supporters of deregulation as a test of market equilibrium, was also its regular music critic. Within his music column Bénédit had spent much of 1863 and the early part of 1864 diagnosing the ills of the privilege system, collating and critiquing the writings of other interested parties in Nantes, Lyon and Rouen, and laying much of the blame for regional decadence on greedy tenors whose salaries absorbed inordinate amounts of subsidy and who needed cutting down to size. Remove the subsidy, he wrote, and the market will regulate the problem.Footnote ⁵³ To an extent he even predicted – with equanimity – the likely outcome, although he thought it would be only temporary. Marseille's grand opera tradition would be halted:

To members of a council in a port with commerce at its core, this kind of argument made sense. Writing anonymously in 1863 to press for full deregulation in response to the Walewski consultation, Marius Roux – councillor, future collaborator with Zola on Les Mystères de Marseille, and critic of opera's parasitic hold over spoken theatre – looked forward to a system in which ‘the manager's role would be restricted … to the pure and simple presentation of what we shall allow ourselves to refer to as their merchandise’.Footnote ⁵⁵ The moral: because opera is business, not art, market failure is an invitation to replace it with something more saleable. Without sharing the foreboding of those who saw the Italian system imploding following unification, Bénédit looked to Florence for a model and inferred that a major cause for the French crisis was nothing other than public apathy. A letter of 2 June 1864 to the mayor of Lyon explained that he had always been against subsidy because if a small Tuscan town with barely 60,000 inhabitants could sustain a dozen unsubsidised opera houses he did not see why Marseille could not succeed proportionately if it was what its inhabitants truly desired.Footnote ⁵⁶

Adaptive behaviour

Traditional modes of regional organisation ensured that the disruption brought about by the 1864 deregulation extended beyond subsidy. The new encouragement for competition within a single town meant that one of grand opera's supporting props – cross-subsidy from a second theatre specialising in drama and vaudeville – was removed.Footnote ⁵⁷ Under the licensing system a single manager in a two-theatre town could use the profits from plays at one venue to cross-subsidise opera at the other. Separating two theatres in order to break up a monopoly simply increased the chances that the opera house manager would run into financial difficulty, or that no aspiring manager would risk putting together an opera company. In February 1864, Rouen council, which owned none of the town's theatre buildings, suffered a setback similar to that at Le Havre. It found that the secondary buildings had been let for the coming season, but that even with its customary subsidy the jewel in the crown, the Théâtre des Arts, had no takers: without the element of cross-subsidy in addition to previous subsidy levels, no manager would touch the opera house deal.Footnote ⁵⁸ Another supporter of deregulation, editor of L'Univers musical Louis Roger, reported on the Rouen council's embarrassment; but he had no answer to a conundrum on which the free market had silently pronounced, noting with a humility unusual among journalists: ‘For my part I must say I have no idea how one can get out of this hole. It requires thought.’Footnote ⁵⁹

Such problems encouraged two divergent forms of adaptive behaviour. The first saw entrepreneurs running for municipal cover, taking refuge in pro-rata salary systems in which expenditure would by definition never exceed revenue, or shifting financial responsibility elsewhere. Strasbourg's councillors, for instance, received seven applications to run its main theatre in 1864–5, among which were two requests for municipal régie (not a good sign among supposed entrepreneurs) and one for an artists' co-operative (signalling a fundamental lack of financial confidence).Footnote ⁶⁰ The following year the new manager – who had agreed to run the theatre on the standard model of the ‘financially liable manager’ (directeur responsible) – asked the council to take over the salaries of the chorus, thereby transforming them into municipal employees.Footnote ⁶¹ At the other extreme, managers engaged in collusive practices aimed at effecting a return to something approaching older monopolies.

There was nothing in the legislation, beyond an appeal to the spirit of competition and encouragement to break from past practices, to prohibit the monopolistic running of theatres; but the ambiguity signalled another flaw in the legislation's design, and councils anxious to ensure that they were not indirectly subsidising entertainment rather than art tended to support generic separation as per Paris, with one manager per theatre. In Lille during an exceptional season (1867–8), the council authorised two partner managers, Briet and Bertrand, to run the Théâtre de Lille and the Théâtre des Variétés in tandem. Their subsidy – a considerable 66,000 francs which rose to 80,000 once benefits in kind were added – raised expectations, which they amply fulfilled with reprises of L'Africaine, Les Huguenots, Les Martyrs and Norma and new productions of Mignon and Roméo et Juliette, together with Offenbach's La Grande-duchesse and Jean qui pleure. They put on forty operas and eighty-three dramatic works during the season, reaping healthy profits. The following year, however, the council decided to separate the two businesses while maintaining the operatic subsidy. Briet was to stay at the Théâtre de Lille; Bertrand was to run the Variétés alone, without subsidy. Nevertheless, the two men decided to continue as before. As related with sang-froid by the local historian Léon Lefebvre in 1903, the results mixed the farcical with the artistically catastrophic:

What happened in Lille in 1868–9 was not an isolated occurrence, and it reflected the very same recognition of the need for subsidy and cross-subsidy that had caused such embarrassment in Rouen in the wake of the legislation's promulgation. In preparation for his second managership in Lyon, in 1869, Halanzier negotiated council and prefectorial approval for a similar arrangement, bidding to run the Grand-Théâtre and the much larger Célestins together, with an associate.Footnote ⁶³ The only other system that seemed to offer any hope – touted by Bordeaux as a sign of success because it had enabled it to run for twelve years without a managerial bankruptcy – was the traditional ‘emergency measure’ of a performers' co-operative working on pro-rata wages.Footnote ⁶⁴

Amid such evidence of scrabbling to stay afloat, the broader irony here is that the story of the ‘liberté des théâtres’ is more complex than one of brute Parisian blindness to regional difference, just as it is more complex than the Biarritz mayor's tale of theatre managers whose privileges worked contrary to the good of society. Walewski's consultation process of 1862 was thorough, its questions taking nothing for granted save that the regions needed a cure and that both diagnosis and prescription were best provided by those who inhabited them. But the legislation's move from Walewski's office to that of Vaillant, and its progress towards Napoléon III's stated aim of free competition, signalled a move away from regional sensitivity and towards a vision centred much more closely on the shape of theatrical provision in the capital. In the process, Vaillant seems to have misjudged several things. In his zeal to improve the dissemination of classical plays he underestimated the importance of opera, and therefore made inadequate provision for sustaining it within a new theatrical order. He underestimated the power of municipal free-marketeers who sought to stop local opera productions from haemorrhaging public money by stopping opera production altogether. And finally, he assumed that under deregulation public taste would remain wedded to traditional modes of educational entertainment rather than migrating to operetta, to the café-concert, and to other forms of musical spectacular. A closing return to the story of Marseille, the catalyst for the capital's shocked re-evaluation of deregulation, graphically illustrates the impact of these interlocking phenomena.

Marseille II: the ‘experiment’

With Halanzier gone, the musical content of the 1864–5 season at the Grand-Théâtre under a new manager was dominated by sixty consecutive performances of Peau d'âne, a Perrault-based féerie in which lavish scenery and costumes dazzled capacity audiences. Neither of the two main papers – the Sémaphore de Marseille and La Publicité – condemned the subsidy cut or its immediate consequences. There was a tone of regret in the latter; but no outrage.Footnote ⁶⁵ The town was conducting an experiment with the new legislation, and it had to be given time to reach its conclusion. In fact, Marseille did not go entirely opera-less during 1864–5, but opera came at a high aesthetic and reputational price. Visiting companies played at both the city's theatres – from Italy, doing a few weeks of Italian opera in January and April, and from Toulon at the Grand-Théâtre, doing Guillaume Tell, Halévy's Les Mousquetaires de la reine and La Juive, and Boieldieu's La Dame blanche. The Toulon company gave two performances of the Rossini, and the other operas each for one night only.Footnote ⁶⁶ Accordingly, a city renowned for its French grand opera enjoyed just three nights of it during the entire season, borrowing it from a second-tier company along the coast. In Marseille, despite high ticket prices (or perhaps because of them), neither Italian visit broke even. Bénédit was disappointed, but took the opportunity to lecture his readers on the fact that expensive singers had to be paid for – by someone – and it seemed fair enough to expect audiences to bear the brunt.Footnote ⁶⁷ Even he, though, seems to have acknowledged by the summer of 1865 that the experiment had yielded unintended and unacceptable results: in particular, deregulation was now affecting spoken theatre adversely, with ribaldry replacing delicacy and good taste.Footnote ⁶⁸ The municipal council, temporarily chastened by the year's events, voted in its highest subsidy to date (250,000 francs) for 1865–6, and restored both the ‘débuts’ system and price-capping. As the mayor of Marseille wrote to his opposite number in Nantes in 1866, ‘A year's experiment has been proven sufficient.’Footnote ⁶⁹ Bénédit went silent, even omitting to report on the opening of the new theatre season. Meanwhile, Halanzier returned in triumph having made his point via his own brand of silence, and grand opera came back as though nothing had happened.Footnote ⁷⁰

Yet a mere two years later similar destabilisation occurred, and with consequences that illustrated the increasingly powerful presence of operetta and the café-concert at opera's expense.Footnote ⁷¹ Marseille was not alone here: the impact of deregulation on the relationship between opera and its entertainment-sector cousins was swift in France's other major urban centres – principally Lille, Lyon and Bordeaux – which also had thriving café-concerts in working-class areas. And while operetta could, in the early years after deregulation, be neutralised from the point of view of competition between theatres by being absorbed into the diet of a town's Grand-Théâtre, there were municipalities where artistic pride blocked such moves (Rouen, for instance, banned it at the Théâtre des Arts until 1890).Footnote ⁷² And with the liberalisation of cafés-concerts themselves in 1867 the number of potential venues for the operetta repertory expanded quickly.

Marseille's opera crisis of 1867 saw Halanzier in the middle of the fray once more. His contract having technically finished in May 1867, mayor Bernex tried to lure him back for the 1867–8 season.Footnote ⁷³ But Halanzier's attempt to put together a company over the summer failed for want of a heroic tenor of high enough quality, and after July, when he decided not to sign any contract with Marseille after all, the council bargained so hard over subsidy with potential managers – eventually cutting it entirely – that the Grand-Théâtre remained closed for the first ten weeks of the season.Footnote ⁷⁴ Marseille's chaos was humiliating: opera lovers would have to travel to Aix-en-Provence, reported one of the latter's journalists gleefully, to feed their habit.Footnote ⁷⁵ The fallout was reported week by week and from multiple perspectives by the news-sheet La Publicité. It was a picture of institutional breakdown combined with solutions offering dangerously creative precedents. The conductor was reduced to advertising private music lessonsFootnote ⁷⁶ and the orchestral musicians gave impromptu concerts.Footnote ⁷⁷ But, and with the blessing of the préfet, the core members of the Grand-Théâtre company were offered work elsewhere in the city: the corps de ballet (and the chorus) were to be found on stage at the two largest cafés-concerts, the Alcazar and the Casino.Footnote ⁷⁸ This new ecology broke down genre barriers that opera's providers badly needed to be kept intact. In short, it offered swift proof of the mobility of singers and dancers from high to low theatrical genres, especially given that some of those who had moved to the cafés-concerts stayed there once the Grand-Théâtre was finally in possession of a manager, Husson, and had to be replaced.Footnote ⁷⁹ Mobility in this direction provided one of the most disturbing lessons of deregulation: that musicians and dancers on whom the French state and its municipal representatives had bestowed free education could just as easily find work in the entertainment sector as in that of high art, thereby giving the state and its taxpayers nothing in return for its investment. Such was, at least, the widely held view among regional officials and municipal theatre managers by the time of Agénor Bardoux's 1878 review of the French theatre industry.Footnote ⁸⁰

However, among those with less to lose the same signs could be interpreted differently. The hybridity of Marseille's theatrical map in 1867 prompted H. Bondilh, one of La Publicité's writers, to call for a permanent end to subsidy at the Salle Beauvau on the basis that public support was an outdated and elitist phenomenon. Instead, he argued, cafés-concerts should be allowed to become full cafés-théâtres doing operetta for the ‘real public’ – the working classes. Operetta had proved its worth in similar circumstances at the Alcazar in Paris, he wrote; an extension of the official liberality shown in the present crisis would allow the same in Marseille, where the two main cafés-concerts were supplemented by around ten smaller venues, each of which also stood to benefit from such opening-up of the theatre market.Footnote ⁸¹ It is hardly surprising that he also reiterated a view increasingly present in town council discussions across the country: that municipal taxes should not be levied indiscriminately when they helped subsidise a luxury industry in which poorer taxpayers had no interest and which they had too little spare cash to enjoy.

The opposite view rested on an identical diagnosis: create an operatic vacuum and operetta will fill it. Whether that operetta was mounted at cafés-concerts or at secondary theatres such as Marseille's Gymnase was immaterial. In any case it was hardly prophecy to utter such thoughts, since it simply described what was happening in Marseille during the 1867 interregnum at the Beauvau. In a lead editorial for La Publicité, which presented both sides of the debate, the critic Karl Schmidt launched an attack on the genre that had, over the previous several weeks, swamped the town's musical life. His confidence bolstered by the belief that the Grand-Théâtre managership had finally been settled, he wrote:

The anticipated manager Albert Vizentini would return the singers, dancers and musicians currently exiled to the Alcazar and the Casino, to their rightful place; the Marseillais, claimed Schmidt, were metaphorically shouting ‘No more Offenbach!’Footnote ⁸³ Schmidt, as it happened, was mistaken twice over: Vizentini's contract fell through and it took until December to install Husson; and, as we have seen, not all the musical ‘exiles’ wished to return.

The slippage in La Publicité between the satirical or risqué chanson of the café-concert, and the genres of opéra-bouffe and operetta, is significant: all were threats if one believed in a musical hierarchy topped by opera, because all appealed more to pleasure than to edification, could attract larger audiences than opera, and could also (as they did in Paris) tempt traditional opera-goers away from their once-favoured haunts. Audience behaviour was changing, and while state intervention served to maintain the operatic status quo in the capital, the refusal of central government to support the regions financially left them alone in uncharted waters. The regions were always fragile, but it was deregulation that fatally unbalanced its ecosystem, brought everything into question, and provided no answers beyond those that individuals, or individual municipalities, carved out for themselves. At a time when the chanson and the café-concert were becoming ever more theatrical, it exploded the idea that large-scale opera had universal appeal and that its civilising force – as implied in the 1824 legislation that had seemingly presaged the rise of grand opera – brought with it unquestionable rights to subsidy in the name of the general populace. With such subsidy now a ‘favour’ at most, suddenly, rudely, opera was brought face to face with market forces.

The lessons of 1864

If deregulation taught both Paris and the regions one thing, it was that it takes a single breach of a dam to flood an entire landscape. In the end, the Marseille crises of 1864 and 1867 were not so much about the provision of subsidy to keep grand opera healthy, as about its capacity to hold in check a vibrant commercial sector ready to overwhelm it with related, and hugely popular, modes of entertainment. The national experiment with deregulation took no time whatever to demonstrate that a free market would lead in precisely the opposite direction from that which Vaillant intended. And yet its failure on its own terms as a specifically artistic and educational measure prompted no attempt at corrective government intervention until 1878 – the other side of a lost war and amid a succession of unstable national administrations. Moreover, that intervention – yet another request for information from préfets, mayors and theatre managers – was never acted upon, interrupted as it was by yet another change of government. Agénor Bardoux, whose ministerial portfolio combined education with the arts, regarded the ‘liberté’ as a national cultural disaster, and framed his supposedly disinterested request for information with unprecedented frankness about theatrical ‘decadence’ across the country. How, he asked, could the interests of art, of the public, and of artists be best served? How could the lowering of standards in theatre, noted by ‘lots of excellent minds’ and attributed to the 1864 decree, be reversed?Footnote ⁸⁴ In Republican France the answer was not obvious: as the mayor of Bordeaux put it, repeal of such a hard-won ‘liberté’ was politically unthinkable, however ill-conceived one might consider the original legislation.Footnote ⁸⁵ With a double-whammy of theatrical ‘liberté’ in 1864 and café-concert liberalisation in 1867, in terms of highbrow art the regions had been left to fend for themselves.

It is hardly surprising, then, that it should have been Bardoux's consultation document that prompted a wave of calls for a step-change in investment in French theatre from both local and central government. The proposed solutions coming from around France ranged widely but represented a concerted move away from trust in the individual financial responsibility of the entrepreneur. They included municipal régie to cover permanent theatre workers such as chorus, orchestra, corps de ballet and backstage staff, with a pro-rata system for principals;Footnote ⁸⁶ full municipal régie;Footnote ⁸⁷ closer policing of theatrical competition at ministerial, rather than prefectorial, level;Footnote ⁸⁸ and, at the extreme, central government subsidy. Where there were mixed messages, public money still loomed large as part of the solution: a response from Toulouse which started by acclaiming deregulation in principle nevertheless called for either régie for each town's Grand-Théâtre (to make each municipality function like a mini-Paris) or state funding (to assimilate theatre to the status of the great French museums).Footnote ⁸⁹ Where new music was concerned, the idea of state funding was seized upon most creatively by the theatre commission at Lyon – which had already raised a decentralist flag in July 1865 when it became the only regional theatre to secure the title ‘Imperial’. This time, the commission, whose membership included the Wagnerian Henry Coutagne, decided at a meeting of 29 November 1878, in response to Bardoux's consultation, that the failure of the new Théâtre-Lyrique in Paris was an opportunity for the diversion of part of its subsidy to Lyon in return for the mounting of new works at the Grand-Théâtre.Footnote ⁹⁰ It was an audacious call, but it worked, and it brought them 20,000 francs to support the world premiere of Saint-Saëns's Etienne Marcel in 1879. News of the grant spread quickly, with the sous-préfet of Blaye knowing about it even before the official news was relayed to Lyon on 20 December.Footnote ⁹¹ To a decentralist such as him it seemed like a sign of genuine progress, and one of the few ways of counteracting the ‘scourge’ (plaie) of the café-concert. In something approaching a turning of the tables, his response to Bardoux's consultation boiled down to the notion that since it was central government that had made a chronic problem acute, it was the responsibility of central government to bankroll the remedy. It was only a short step to the project outlined to Bardoux the following year – the year he left office – by a certain L. Fabert, who advocated a special ‘Regional Theatres’ service run out of the Ministry itself.Footnote ⁹² It is of course somewhat ironic that calls for centralisation and decentralisation alike should be predicated upon financial backing from Paris.Footnote ⁹³

For all that it was never intended to bring about the full industrialisation of theatre, deregulation wrenched operatic France into a commercial age from which the war of 1870 and its economic aftermath ensured it would not be able to return. Especially given the bankruptcies that followed the sudden expansion of the theatre industry after the original 1791 deregulation, we might ask whether it could ever have worked in opera's favour; but in 1864 there was certainly too much momentum behind operetta and the café-concert for opera not to suffer in comparison. Moreover the interpenetration of genres – with operetta routinely presented on subsidised regional stages and, after 1867, in cafés-concerts too – was a further blow. As for the Classical theatre that Vaillant had championed so effusively at the Paris Conservatoire in 1864: regionally, it was left for dead. Finally, the war of 1870 simply secured what 1864 had established, because for all the rhetoric about turning away from frivolity, in straitened times during the early Third Republic operetta thrived not just because it was popular, but because it was cheap.

Yet if operetta and the double-entendre of the café-concert chanson were generic threats in terms of ticket sales and municipal artistic pride, they were, in financial terms, only the most visible part of a complex problem many aspects of which either lay beyond municipal and entrepreneurial control, or involved hidden costs some of which municipalities resented having thrust upon them by central government in the name of ‘freedom’. Ironically, the newly optional ‘artistic’ subsidy lay at the heart of such costs: but the minimum level at which it could reasonably be set had to take into account shifting inter-relationships between a manager's taxation and cross-subsidy rights, his liabilities in respect of the Poor Tax and author royalties, an ever-shortening operatic season leaving ‘municipal’ theatre workers unoccupied but still requiring payment, and the need to ensure that the theatre was widely accessible across social classes, that recruited artists were acceptable to the public, and that repertory underwent regular renewal.Footnote ⁹⁴ There is no hint in the legislation or the documents accompanying it that maréchal Vaillant took account of any of these concerns in 1863. Those which were unique to the ecology of the regions seem to have escaped his Parisian mindset entirely. Among short-term consequences we can cite endemic destabilisation allowing entertainment genres to break through barriers that were supposed to keep them at bay; among medium-term consequences we can point to enduring weakness in the regions' capacity to effect a much-desired artistic decentralisation towards the end of the century in several major cities – among them notably Rouen (the first officially ‘national’ regional theatre since Lyon in 1865) and Lyon itself (often dubbed the ‘French Bayreuth’).Footnote ⁹⁵ While the national theatres could expect a measure of continuity, metropolitan France knew only uncertainty and perennial change. And while neither subsidies nor grand opera disappeared for good in the wake of 1864, the consequences of deregulation rendered France's most prestigious musical genre vulnerable as never before.