POPULAR THEATRE AND POLITICAL UTOPIA IN FRANCE

An interview with Dr Jessica Wardhaugh, Department of French Studies

We only need think back to the 1990s and "Cool Britannia" to see how popular culture can be harnessed to reflect the political motives of its age. In this interview, French scholar Dr Wardhaugh explains how the theatre in fin de siècle France gives us an insight into the politics of the era, and how Parisian anarchist theatre-makers came to be funded by the government.

When we think of late 19th and early 20th-century popular theatre in France, cabaret and the Moulin Rouge may spring directly to mind. In reality lots of political groups from the left and right jostled to create theatre for working-class people, both as a reaction against that form of popular culture and also to spread their own views. Dr Jessica Wardhaugh in the University of Warwick’s Department of French Studies has researched the period extensively and reveals what this desire to educate the people politically tells us about French history and culture at the time.

In 1890s Paris the young, aesthetic-looking Louis Lumet was a committed anarchist writer and militant. His anarchist theatre productions espoused strongly anti-government views whilst he tore the French Third Republic apart in his political essays. Paradoxically, a couple of years later he was transformed from scourge of the police to receiving funding from the government for his cultural initiative ‘Art pour tous’ (art for all).

Political leaders and activists turned to art both to develop their ideologies and to provide a focus for political association at grass-roots level.

“Like many of their contemporaries, the Parisian anarchists were convinced of the didactic importance of the theatre for actors and audience alike” explains Dr Wardhaugh. Why so? “Political leaders and activists turned to art both to develop their ideologies and to provide a focus for political association at grass-roots level … clandestine performances at political meetings could elude censorship, a more difficult feat in the case of film screenings.”

The relationship between art, theatre, politics and community wasn’t particularly a French phenomenon. Popular theatre was in favour in Russia both before and after 1917. German Volkstheater flourished in the late 19th century. Cities had boomed following the industrial revolution and with a sense of idealism, political groups vied to create communities out of the proletariat. What were the problems, however, of using art to create a narrow political community, and could art really be moulded to a narrow political and didactic purpose?

France’s republican governments’ attempts to create a republican community through theatre were, by and large, a failure, says Dr Wardhaugh. They founded a national popular theatre in 1920 but their subsidised ticket policy didn’t have the desired effect. Those who already attended the theatre took advantage of cheaper tickets whereas new attendees were persistently thin on the ground.

It wasn’t for lack of ambition on the governments’ part. The Trocadero Palace (pictured, right) in which the new National Popular Theatre was housed had been built in the 1870s for an international exhibition and could hold four to five thousand people. To its detriment it was unheated and located in an elite part of Paris far away from the working-class suburbs. The government hadn’t thought through who the ‘people’ were and what they actually wanted from their entertainment.

Then there was the problem of finding suitable plays for the republican cause. “State initiatives, while in many cases imbued with very real idealism, were generally the least successful attempts at popular theatre, foundering on a dearth of suitable authors, and on a fundamental difficulty in staging a convincing image of the republican people” continues Dr Wardhaugh. “The government would have loved to have had more ideological plays written but didn’t find the authors to do that.”

Theatre directors and authors were often of the inclination that state-sponsored theatre would be a rival to their own productions. The National Popular Theatre staged a patriotic and strongly republican celebration on 11 November 1920. The Festival of Republican Song, with mostly amateur local choirs performing to represent the republican people, celebrated both the 50th anniversary of the Third Republic and victory in the Great War. Such enthusiasm didn’t last. Whilst the government wanted to showcase new playwrights to educate citizens in a kind of French revival of ancient Greek theatre, the plays weren’t forthcoming and instead their repertoire was composed of French classics such as Racine, Hugo and Molière. Within the government itself was also an uncertainty to commit to funding popular theatre in the long term.

It was a crisis of confidence. Meanwhile, where the government was failing, other groups prospered. “Popular theatre initiatives flourished among regionalists, Catholics, anarchists, socialists, Communists and royalists, all of whom held very different understandings of the people to that of the state.” Where these groups had the advantage over government initiatives was that they already had an existing community of supporters and a ready-made audience. Some (notably the regionalists) also managed to secure state funding.

Regionalist groups on the periphery of France had long declared their own culture and identity at odds with the central government.

This led to the paradox of Louis Lumet’s artistic initiatives being subsidised by the establishment, showing the “paradoxical workings of cultural politics, which led in some cases to unrepentant royalists and equally recalcitrant anarchists being awarded state funding for their partisan initiatives”. These weren’t the only strange situations. Regionalist groups on the periphery of France had long declared their own culture and identity at odds with the central government. “You can imagine the centralised state had always had problems in drawing them in” says Dr Wardhaugh. Yet folk theatre, often performed in local dialect or language, came to attract state subsidy. It had an opposing yet reliant relationship with the prevailing political powers.

“French popular theatre in this period offers a striking insight into the creation of political communities in both theory and practice. In contrast to the relatively unsuccessful initiatives at the centre, popular theatre flourished at the political and geographical peripheries of France, suggesting the challenges of creating a republican community, and the vitality of some of the political communities inimical to the ‘official’ Third Republic. Yet these rival communities, despite their anti-government or anti-state rhetoric, could often be strongly reliant on the state in practice,” concludes Dr Wardhaugh.

After World War II, national popular theatre found a new building to call home. By now, though, there was a total political shift in what the idea of popular theatre was. Whereas before the government wanted to bring Molière to the proletariat, now the focus was more on white-collar workers who wanted to educate and better themselves. The old pre-war days had gone.

By Penelope Jenkins