Robert Macaire and the Code Civil. Notes about the Political Economy of the French Theater, after Bonaparte

Young Karl Marx was fascinated by the societal shifts of the French Revolution. A crucial tenet of this revolutionary rupture, Marx argues, is the proclamation of the absoluteness of private property, confirmed in the famous article 544 of the Code Civil of Napoléon Bonaparte, 1804: ‘La propriété est le droit de jouir et de disposer des choses de la manière la plus absolue […]’. The sanctity of property has reshaped the class structure of (French) society and explains, consequently the political instability and the realignment of political coalitions, in the first half of the 19th century, eventually leading to the advent of the Second Empire of Louis Bonaparte. On a completely different level, another revolutionary rupture, in the cultural domain, might have a significance almost comparable to the new legal-political status of property. The liberation of the theatre in 1791 – the abolition of censorship ánd the end of the institutional privilege of the Comédie-française – changes profoundly (and for a long time) the balance between official repertory theatre and the commercial theatre of the Boulevard du Temple. The figure of the actor Talma – member of the Comédie-française but dismissed for his revolutionary activism, coach of performance of rhetoric for Napoléon, finally the first commercial star of French theatre – embodies this shift. The changes caused by this rupture resulted in new theatrical genres – the mélodrame of Pixerécourt and others –, in new balances of power between (star-)actors and playwrights, and, most importantly, between stage and audience. In my paper, I want to look for intertwinements between these two paradigmatic shifts in the French (and European) society of the early 19th century. The mélodrame characters of Robert Macaire, in L’Auberge des Adrets (Antier, Saint-Amand & Polyanthe, 1823) and of Jean le Chiffonnier, in Le Chiffonnier de Paris (Félix Pyat, 1847), both created by Frédérick Lemaître, the most (in)famous star-actor of the French 19th century, will be central in this exercise. These characters, together with Lemaîtres interpretation, exemplify the contradictions of the profound societal and political-economical shifts in Western society. They are the result of the new regime of property and contract, as created by the Code Civil, but they interrogate at the same time, and quite radically, the new social inequalities, both in symbolic and in pecuniary status, caused by economic liberalism. No Macaire, iconic maverick, without absolute property, no Macaire, hero of the free stage, without uncensored (commercial) theatre. 'Romantic mélodrame', as an institutionalized performance practice, simultaneously confirms and challenges the consequences of trade capitalism.

Keywords:Theatre, 19th Century, Melodrama, Robert Macaire, Frédérick Lemaître, Code Napoléon

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