Fellow dancers, performers, researchers in dance studies, and historians fear not before this monumental title and its imposing 4,006 pages with over 7,000 entries. As daunting and possibly unappealing as they might seem at first glance, the four volumes of the Dictionnaire de l'Opéra de Paris sous l'Ancien Régime (1669–1791) is a fascinating resource and an important contribution to dance scholarship.

Following the publication of the first three volumes in 2019, volume 4 appeared in early 2020, just as France faced an important political crisis triggered by President Emmanuel Macron's neoliberal social reforms. On December 5, 2019, the dancers of the Paris Opéra, together with musicians and technicians, started one of the longest strikes in the history of this 350-year-old institution, protesting against the proposed pension reform that would abolish a provision in employment contracts dating back to 1698 that grants dancers retirement and full pension at age forty-two. While this provision acknowledged the special needs of dancers, Macron considered it an anachronism, a form of injustice, and a mark of inequality toward most of the population who cannot retire until age sixty-two.

How timely it is, then, for the dance community to be able to delve into this historiographic dictionary of the ancien régime. This work begins with Pierre Perrin's founding of l'Académie d'Opéra on June 28, 1669, and ends on September 3, 1791, three years after the Revolution, when the constitution established the separation of powers and the end of the hereditary monarchy. It was during this very ancien régime that dancers were revered as one of the country's most important treasures. In fact, it was Louis XIV in 1698 who established the full pension for the Paris Opéra dancers as a régime spécial (special status). This provision acknowledged specific arduousness inherent to the profession.

This publication, edited by Sylvie Bouissou, Pascal Denécheau, and France Marchal-Ninosque, is the result of a nine-year collaboration. These three experts of the French opera in the baroque period, dramatic art, and history of institutions—together with fifty specialists from Italy, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Holland—set out to craft an “exact cartography” of the opera within the history of the Opéra de Paris. Funded by the prestigious National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), the Ministry of Culture, as well as the University of Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, the dictionary covers the Lully, the Rameau, and the Gluck periods.

Building upon eighteenth-century scholarship and especially Louis-François Beffara's Dictionnaire de l'Académie royale de musique (Reference Beffara1783–1784) and his several alphabetic dictionaries, this historiographic dictionary reaches much further in the quest for completeness. It examines the life of the iconic institution—intra and extra muros—its repertory, the artists, and administrators—as well as key aesthetic and historic notions. No one is overlooked: composers, dramaturgs, maîtres de ballet, costume designers, decorators, and machine operators, as well as the entire artistic and administrative staff, have separate entries. The editors’ focus on inclusiveness and the importance of a collective within this elitist and highly hierarchical institution is a pioneering feat of this project.

As they conceived of the dictionary as an “exact cartography,” from the very beginning of the project, the editors thought it critical to focus equally on dance, music, and text. These three pillars of the French opera are, in the words of the editors, what differentiates and makes it unique in comparison to the Italian or the English opera. Too often relegated to an accessory position in French scholarship and reduced to mere anecdotes within musicology, dance studies finds here its deserved place.

How did the mapping of the dance entries begin? Under the direction of France Marchal-Ninosque, four specialists—Marina Nordera, Françoise Dartois-Lapeyre, Bianca Maurmayr, and Julie De Bellis—contributed the dance entries, dedicating 729 to actrices dansantes (dancing actresses), 569 to acteurs dansants (dancing actors), and fifty-three to maîtres de ballets (ballet masters). Ten entries focus on teaching institutions, including Académie de danse, Théâtre des Élèves de la danse pour l'Opéra, Aide de l’École de danse, and École de danse.

Who were the dancers in the ancien régime? How did they move? What roles did they take? What was the financial status of actrices dansantes? How did criticism of the time participate in the construction of a gendered discourse? These are some of the many questions that find detailed answers in this dictionary that invites us to read by petits morceaux (by small bits), in a manner of “consulecture,” as the lexicographer Alain Rey calls this intellectually agreeable relationship between reading and researching (Reference Rey2011).

Marina Nordera, professor of dance at the Université de Nice Sophia Antipolis, particularly pays close attention to the exploration of gender in the eighteenth century and the status of a gesture. In the entry on Marie-Françoise Rampon Lyonnois (l'ainée), not only do we learn that she was a brilliant technician whose style was playful and merry, but we are drawn into the archives of comparative aesthetic and movement analysis. Lyonnois was the first dancer to have executed la gargouillade, a “brilliant and difficult step dedicated to the arrival of winds, demons and spirits of fire” that Marie Allard took up. However, Mlle Camargo never performed this “indecent” step in which, “as one leg lifts and forms a tour de jambe en-dehors, the other leg engages at the same time in a tour de jambe en-dedans. The dancer falls on the starting leg in a semi-pirouette while the other leg stays in air” (2019, 3:624—625).

Vigorous steps that demanded a lot of strength were indeed traditionally performed by men. The entry offers the aesthetic and political implications of la gargouillade as an example of the progressive introduction of the masculine vocabulary into the feminine dance (2019, 3:625). This close attention to the body, while working with archival documents, represents what Arlette Farge refers to as the essence of a historian's work (Reference Farge and Scott-Railton2015, 54). Indeed, Nordera uses the archives as a vantage point from which she brings to light new forms of knowledge—in this case observing the eighteenth-century dancers from a gender perspective—that would otherwise have remained shrouded in obscurity by the descriptive approach traditionally used in dictionaries.

As the editors assumed the demanding task of meticulously tracing the dancers’ careers, several major challenges arose. For example, multiple members of a single family might have the same name (the Camargo sisters, the Dupré, the Malter, the Javillier, or the Laval). In such cases, the difficulty concerned the attribution of roles susceptible to being performed by several members of the same family. Hence, in the entries on the Camargo sisters, all three dancing actresses—Marie-Anne Cupis de Camargo (l'aînée), with a variant of Sophie; Anne-Catherine Cupis de Camargo (la cadette); and Marie-Anne Cupis de Camargo (la cadette)—the reader now can discern the specific roles that each of these artists had.

Each entry serves as a tableau vivant, an illustration of dancers’ lives and careers. Four methodological approaches emerge throughout this archival work. The contributors began by systematically examining the opéra archives and its registers, which allowed them to distinguish the artists’ signatures. With that information in hand, they tackled the intriguing issue of homonyms. By combing through the front matter of the 840 livrets that catalogue the artists, the contributors could then determine the exact distributions of roles and the hierarchical status of the artists (solo, pas de deux, quadrilles, etc.). They analyzed the press and the almanacs of the period, and in particular, Les Spectacles de Paris. Finally, the contributors consulted and gathered the existing bibliographies and archival sets, which were then cited at the end of each entry. Consistent combining and incessant cross-checking made possible the retracing of the artists’ careers.

Conceiving of a dictionary presupposes choices and the establishment of strict specifications for writing an entry. While this dictionary is a remarkable tool for researchers, it is indeed not for the faint of heart, as the abbreviations and the format of entries take some time to get used to. But just as the work in the archives may be demanding, yet ever so alluring, in its phase of combing, so is consulting this dictionary. While some entries would have benefited from a more in-depth critical analysis, this publication brings dance studies to the fore. By paying significant attention to dance throughout a period of 120 years, studied for the first time as a continuum, this dictionary contributes to filling the gap in contemporary French scholarship.

As this review is being written, the worldwide pandemic has put a halt to Macron's pension reforms. The 2020 season at the Opéra de Paris has been suspended, as have been the dancers’ strikes to defend the retirement clause of 1698.Footnote ¹ One hopes that their action will raise the collective consciousness that a basic human right, such as retirement, should be granted to all dancers beyond the walls of the Opéra de Paris. We cannot help but wonder what would miraculously lessen the toll this profession takes on the artists’ physical and mental state in the twenty-first century that would justify this reform, that is, instead, a giant leap backward.