France's “cultural exception” is an economic concept that separates cultural products from regular commodities. A system of government-funded subsidies and tax exemptions shields films, artwork, theatre, and other art forms from market forces. Proponents of the cultural exception often point to a tradition of state-funded arts sponsorship begun in Louis XIV's day. In her new book, Stagestruck: The Business of Theater in Eighteenth-Century France and Its Colonies, Lauren Clay challenges this genealogy to great success. Clay contends that culture and commodity are not mutually exclusive and that ever since the decades before the French Revolution, the two have been inseparably linked. Clay aligns théâtromanie—that new and explosive eighteenth-century passion for theatre—with a more general desire for nonessential goods triggered by urban and economic growth in Western Europe. Her book draws on extensive archival research to shed light on practices, relations, and opportunities created by the new theatrical marketplace. In place of the traditional model of cultural communication, in which influence and innovation flow from center to periphery, Clay's study offers an account of the commercial roots of France's first theatre industry, one that grew out of the complex network of trade and communication between Paris and the provincial and colonial cities that made up France's commercial public sphere.
The first two chapters show theatre's rise to prominence in cities where trade was most active. Chapter 1, “Investing in the Arts,” demonstrates that it was private individuals, not royal authorities, who transformed provincial playhouses from ramshackle tennis courts to architectural gems that became new “emblem[s] of civic pride” (39) that were nevertheless built by private investors. Theatre societies, modeled off of joint stock companies such as the East India Company, recruited members from the aristocracy as well as the artisanal classes. These new arts patrons, motivated by civic and economic ambitions, paid for projects the state supported but was unwilling to shoulder. Chapter 2, “Designing the Civic Playhouse,” reminds us that the most famous eighteenth-century playhouses were devoted equally to arts and commerce. This connection is evident in a number of playhouses in Lyon and Nantes and in Victor Louis's Grand Théâtre de Bordeaux. Clay's incisive analysis of the latter shows that the theatre celebrated new forms of commerce that enabled its existence, from the luxury clothing shops included in the building to Jean-Baptiste Robin's ornate ceiling fresco, which features a sea captain flanked by enslaved Africans.
The next two chapters examine theatrical business practices in the face of competing consumer demands and soaring entertainment costs. Chapter 3, “The Extent and Limits of State Intervention,” focuses on Brest's troubled Théâtre de la Marine, France's first and only year-round military theatre. The author highlights disputes over mandatory season tickets for soldiers, as well as military–civilian conflicts over high-status seating. These disputes suggest that reasons of state were subject to the laws of commerce. Military theatre failed in part because it could not meet audience demand. Chapter 4, “Directors and the Business of Performing,” turns back to the private sector to show how a new breed of theatre directors used variety and novelty needed for “selling the stage” (122) in an increasingly risky commercialized landscape. Analysis of two women directors, Madame Destouches-Lobreau and Mademoiselle Montansier, supports the author's claim that the eighteenth-century theatre industry was not essentially exclusive of women. According to Clay, female directors such as Destouches-Lobreau and Montansier “do not seem to have met with opposition on the basis of their sex” (111).
Chapters 5 and 6 look at how the commercialization of theatre affected actors and audiences. Chapter 5, “The Work of Acting,” documents hiring practices, contract negotiation, and labor mediation. Clay shows that royal patronage, too, could be subject to market demands, for although provincial playhouses looked up to the king's troupe of Paris's Comédie-Française as mediators and advisors in labor disputes, influence cut both ways. The king's players relied on provincial playhouses to make “themselves into France's first national stars” (159) and increase their prestige as well as salaries. Chapter 6, “Consumers of Culture,” draws on an impressive range of sources to illustrate the opinions and behavior of prerevolutionary ticketholders. Travel diaries, police reports, and statistical analysis suggest that theatregoing was a unique form of public expression at a time when speech and behavior were heavily controlled by the state. Ritual crowd behaviors like boycotting date back to festive traditions of the sixteenth century, but by the eighteenth century, theatregoers increasingly justified disobedience in the language of commerce.
In the final chapter, “The Production of Theater in the Colonies,” Clay offers a groundbreaking comparative study of theatre in the French Caribbean. The author shows how theatre enforced but also sometimes radically questioned racial boundaries, bringing up “issues of assimilation and integration that were too fraught and controversial to be directly addressed elsewhere in colonial society” (224). Clay explores the various ways in which free people of color participated in colonial theatre not only as spectators but as patrons, actors, musicians, and directors. As the author concludes, at least a decade before the French and the Haitian revolutions, “in the colony's theaters, directors, performers, and audiences had already begun to entertain the vision of a changed society” (224).
This brief summary cannot capture the detail and rigor of Clay's thoroughly researched book, which adds much-needed emphasis on labor, race, gender, and economics to the study of eighteenth-century French theatre. It would be fascinating to learn whether provincial and colonial men and women involved in less visible aspects of theatre labor (such as carpenters, painters, and seamstresses) also benefited from “what contemporaries recognized as a distinctly individualistic and egalitarian ethos” (231). These questions speak to the richness of Clay's intriguing book, required reading for anyone interested in theatre studies, French and French colonial history, or labor history.
