Never have political questions disquieted the French as much as during the period that extends from 1789 to the establishment of the Third Republic in 1871, this nineteenth century that historians have sometimes called the century of revolutions. The history of France during this period is that of a continuously recommenced social reformation, which found its solution only in the years 1870–80, when it worked out a sort of national compromise around republican and bourgeois values.

The close ties between music and nationality in the last third of the nineteenth-century in Europe have been known for a long time. In her new book, Jann Pasler proposes to consider a heretofore less well-studied subject: the political (and civic) use of music by the Republican regime that was put in place in France after the military defeat in 1870.

This work breaks with the conventional methods of considering the music of that era. Forsaking both pure stylistic analysis and the traditional methods of social history, Pasler has assembled a considerable corpus of archival data, which she has reformulated around a transversal question: how is society ‘made’ by music? Rarely has work devoted to this period had so much supporting documentation, and been accorded, above all, so much careful interest in its organization. On behalf of this pressing matter of music history (a discipline usually preoccupied with scores), the author calls upon a range of cultural artefacts, including pamphlets articles from the press, a large quantity of images and collections of concert programmes.

Despite the wealth of information, however, it is nevertheless regrettable that she did not make more systematic use of the rich archives of the Ministry of Public Instruction (chief archives for reconstructing the involvement of the State in the dissemination of music in the nineteenth century). Generally speaking, the manuscript documents therein are absent from this book: for example, the private correspondence might have magnificently completed the documentation utilised in the book.

In spite of that, one savours page after page of this almost encyclopaedic attempt to capture the music of an era. The reader encounters a number of figures who are often neglected by the historiography of music: figures like Julien Tiersot, Louis-Albert Bourgault-Ducoudray, Alfred Bruneau, Léo Delibes, Théodore Dubois, Benjamin Godard, Victorin Joncières, Émile Paladilhe, Ernest Reyer and even Ambroise Thomas. Pasler has also made use of the testimony of music critics and politicians whose artistic involvement was crucial.

The reader will also welcome the manner in which the author deconstructs the acknowledged pantheon of French music by refusing to limit it to over-restrictive categories. Thus, one comes across references to the great department stores like Le Bon Marché, the halls of the café-concerts, or the cabarets like Ba-Ta-Clan or the Chat Noir, sites of music-making that are, of course, less well recognized than the Opéra, the Concerts Colonne, Pasdeloup or Lamoureux, the Conservatoire or the Société Nationale, but which are essential when one strives to understand the musical practices of the France of Jules GrévyFootnote 1 without judging their a priori value.

Pasler's book is also characterised by a profusion of interpretive concepts. The one given in the title of the work – the concept of public utility – is discussed at length at the outset of the book. But others interwoven throughout this monumental study include the access to music, assimilation, the public good, the notion of competition, those of democratisation, of distinction, of listening and of egalitarianism. The author offers for each theme some very personal views which surely will be eagerly debated by the specialists, but which have the capacity to stimulate considerable reflection.

The extensive material and wealth of interpretation, which open a myriad of avenues of enquiry – the elaboration of a new history of music, colonial music, music in the department stores, racial theories and so forth – poses a permanent invitation to revise inherited histories. Thus, previously studied problems such as Wagnerism or musical nationalism will be seen in a new light.

The argument revolves around two questions: who produces the meaning of music? and how does one proceed to use music for political ends? The answer alternates between the analysis of exceptional events (e.g., the campaign in favour of General Boulanger or the Universal Expositions) and the tracing of historical movements (popular musical education, standardization of practices) that had long-term effects on French society. It should be added that Pasler's work dedicates many pages to the exploration of the real upheaval that followed the multiplication of contacts with extra-European musical worlds: how the French succeeded in sonorously constructing the Republic – that very particular universality – while more and more musicians came from the four corners of the world to disturb the established order.

Ever since the work of Jürgen Habermas popularised it, the notion of a public space has known great success among scholars in the humanities.Footnote 2 Until now, however, few scholars have attempted to explore it in the musical domain. Beyond the discussion of ‘utility’, which runs through the book and could without difficulty be extended to most of the Western societies at the end of the nineteenth century, Composing the Citizen opens a more ‘local’ debate, by posing the question of a specifically French model at once according to the definition of a musical politics (in the sense of the actions taken by the State to convert an entire population to a republican regime) and according to the constitution of a political conception of music (as an instrument of civic harmony).