The Fourth Estate at the Fourth Wall: Newspapers on Stage in July Monarchy France
200
The Fourth Estate at the Fourth Wall: Newspapers on Stage in July Monarchy France
200Paperback
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780810140356 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Northwestern University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/15/2019 |
| Pages: | 200 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Press Personified
Even after annual subscription prices had been lowered to forty francs, newspapers remained well beyond the means of most Parisians. An occasional trip to the theater, however, was not. Once there, audiences could laugh and sing along as actors playing the major new newspaper titles discussed their own behaviors. Actors in newsprint accessories and sashes emblazoned with the names of the papers they stood for brought debate about the priorities of the commercial press to audiences broader than those the press was able to reach directly. Vaudevilles personified the press and ideas associated with it, the better to question newspapers' claims. The popularity of such an approach reveals a significant overlap in readership and spectatorship: playwrights would not write jokes unless they thought their audiences would understand and be amused by their references. The capacity of spectators to interpret staged material, which Jacques Rancière has defended, was essential to the success of plays about newspapers. Wherever audience members stood along the spectrum of engagement with the new press, their comprehension of jokes about it was necessary to the success of vaudevilles that treated the subject. The most popular theatrical genre of the July Monarchy, vaudeville was attentive to public tastes and concerns: plays that did not entertain folded quickly. The combination of vaudeville's commercial responsiveness, its focus on humorous critique (especially in year-end revues), and its uses of embodiment to make points about social institutions make it a particularly useful lens through which to examine popular response to the mediation proposed by the early mass press.
Vaudeville and the press had evolved in parallel since at least the seventeenth century. When Théophraste Renaudot founded his weekly Gazette in 1631, vaudevilles were subversive songs about the news of the day, which were often sung on the Pont Neuf in Paris. In the eighteenth century, vaudeville songs were integrated into plays, particularly those performed at theaters where speaking roles were not allowed. The system of privilèges allowed only a few theaters to stage plays that involved dialogue, restricting the rest to inventive combinations of pantomime, song, and written speech. Vaudevilles were popular attractions at the annual Saint-Germain and Saint Laurent fairs, where they avoided restrictions on speaking parts, first by having characters pull scrolls from one pocket, display them, and return them to the other pocket, and then by hanging écriteaux, panels with text on them, from the front of the stage.
Martine de Rougemont explains how this worked: Pour aider à comprendre les comédies à la muette ou en écriteaux, les forains les accompagnent de la musique des chansons connues, que l'on appelle vaudevilles ... Les paroles des écriteaux sont adaptées à la coupe de ces chansons, elles en constituent des couplets nouveaux, qui allient le charme du familier et de l'inattendu. Pour aider le spectateur analphabète, ou simplement myope, quelqu'un chantera ces couplets : soit un acteur en scène ou en coulisses si la police le permet, soit des compères placés parmi le public et qui l'entraînent à chanter avec eux. Double intérêt : un texte est entendu, auquel chacun a le sentiment de participer.
To help audiences understand the plays that were silent or had text panels, troupes accompanied them with well-known tunes, which were referred to as vaudevilles. ... The text on the panels was adapted to the lines of the songs, it provided new couplets, which mixed the charm of the familiar and the unexpected. To help the illiterate (or simply myopic) spectator, someone sang the new lyrics, either an actor on stage or in the wings if the police allowed it, or shills in the audience who got people to sing with them. Double advantage: a text was heard, and each spectator felt he had participated in it.
At such fairground theater, vaudeville established a tendency to recast the familiar in a skeptical mode by putting new lyrics to old tunes. Displaying texts and asking the audience to sing them encouraged participation not unlike the kind that would later be elicited by July Monarchy vaudevilles that brought newspapers on stage and asked audiences to consider their social roles.
With the Revolution, the restrictions due to the privilège system were lifted, and the vaudeville as a dramatic genre got its first permanent theater, the Théâtre du Vaudeville, which opened in 1792. Vaudevilles, which were now plays with dialogue and songs, whose new lyrics were sung to preexisting tunes, retained the irreverent attitude of their earlier form as well as the expectation of audience participation. In the nineteenth century, this tradition continued, particularly in the form of year-end vaudeville revues, which commented on recent plays, joked about inventions of the previous twelve months, and critiqued or hailed press innovations and events.
For press innovations were, themselves, considered worthy of coverage both in newspapers and in theatrical revues. Vaudevilles were sometimes used to promote newly founded newspapers, but they as often commentedon how such publications affected the shape of the public sphere, without seeking to condone or condemn them per se. Several year-end vaudeville revues included the use of advertisements to reduce subscription prices as one of the important events of 1836, even as they aired doubts about the consequences of such innovation. Comparing their commentary on the phenomenon to that of Le Charivari, a humorous center-left illustrated newspaper, which also covered it, reveals that a satirical newspaper and satirical plays could treat the same material similarly while still doing quite different work socially. Le Charivari of January 2 and 3, 1837, pointed out in its section on "VAUDEVILLE–PALAIS ROYAL&nd ash;AMBIGU" that "ces trois théâtres sont les seuls qui aient sacrifié, cette année, à la mode des revues de fin d'année. L'an 1836 a été jugé le soir, à la lumière des quinquets, comme Le Charivari l'avait jugé le matin, à la première page de son numéro du 31 décembre" (these three theaters are the only ones who followed the trend of staging year-end revues this year. The year 1836 was judged in the evening by the light of the oil lamps, just as Le Charivari had judged it in the morning, on the first page of its December 31 issue).
The first page of the December 31, 1836, issue of Le Charivari did, indeed, present a scene highly reminiscent of the openings of most vaudeville revues. The author of the article summons the year 1836 to appear before him and accuses her of being dull. The description of her appearance has a great deal in common with the sort of allegorical costuming practiced in vaudeville revues:
Elle était vêtue d'une robe dont l'étoffe primitive avait disparu sous les différentes applications qu'on y avait faites. D'un côté, on voyait un exemplaire-spécimen de la Presse, journal à 40 francs ; de l'autre, le numéro du Moniteur où fut annoncée la défaite de Constantine ; elle portait par-devant une affiche de M. Musard et une annonce de M. Mozart, brevetés tous deux, l'un pour le bruit que fait sa musique, et l'autre pour le bruit que ne fait pas son papier. Sur l'autre face était étalée une énorme affiche de la Porte-St-Martin, qui montrait écrit en gros caractères : "Invention simple à l'usage des simples, par M. Balisson de Rougemont."
The original fabric of her dress had disappeared under examples of its uses. One side displayed the sample issue of La Presse, a 40-franc newspaper, the other showed the issue of the Moniteur that told of the defeat of Constantine. On her front she wore a poster for Musard and an advertisement for Mozart, patented, both of them, one for the noise made by his music and the other for the lack of noise made by his paper. Her back was covered by an enormous poster for the Porte-St-Martin theater, whose bold type touted a "Simple invention for simple people, by Balisson de Rougemont."
Vaudeville revues routinely staged the old and the new year as an old and a young woman, and they made a practice of costuming figures associated with the press in newspapers. The anonymous journalist for Le Charivari combined the two tendencies, dressing the personification of 1836 in newspapers and advertisements to proclaim the age of press publicity. What is more, the newspapers used to dress 1836 were specific numbers of named papers, one of them indicating a media innovation and the other a military loss. Such specificity did not characterize vaudeville images of the press. The poster cited at the end of the quoted passage, however, forgoes details to make fun of all the plays staged at the Porte Saint-Martin. Unlike the press, the theater is treated as an unchanging series of simple-minded entertainments. Individual issues of newspapers are contrasted against the generic treatment of yet another indistinguishable play by Balisson de Rougemont. This newspaper's description of year-end vaudeville revues privileged datelines and downplayed theatrical authorship. Le Charivari's article also made a newspaper event the clincher in an argument about whether or not the year 1836 would be cursed for her misdeeds. The 1836 character, having stated, "J'aime mieux être maudite qu'oubliée" (I'd rather be cursed than forgotten), achieves her goal by pointing out that she killed Carrel. It was, however, Émile de Girardin who killed Armand Carrel in a duel over calumny (see introduction), but this death of one newspaper editor at the hands of another is the culminating example of the vices of 1836. The article concludes with "1836! Carrel!"
Two of the vaudeville revues to which the Charivari journalist compared this article had also staged the press, but in their versions, characters representing La Presse and Le Siècle (at the Ambigu-comique) and the feuilleton and La Gazette des tribunaux (at the Palais-Royal) were personified by actors. As such they were put before theater audiences as institutions to be judged. Whereas Le Charivari's article privileged the newspaper's ability to mark time by documenting events, the vaudevilles' newspaper characters proclaimed their editorial principles while playing on the more incongruous aspects of their social roles. In the Palais-Royal's revue (L'Année sur la sellette by Courcy, Bayard, and Théaulon), La Gazette des tribunaux has come to report on the trial of 1836 for her readers, who love a good adultery case, while Feuilleton advertises his grand format and forty- franc price and is teased for not always having seen the plays and events he covers in his columns. With the birth of the serial novel (or roman-feuilleton) in 1836 and the increased emphasis on relatively nonpolitical parts of the new press, the feuilleton was a section in transition and was the subject (and sometimes location) of much debate about the role of commerce in the new press. At the end of 1836, both Le Charivari and L'Année sur la sellette deemed forty-franc subscriptions to have been a notable event of the year, but the newspaper tied its invention to an identifiable issue of La Presse, while the vaudeville had the feuilleton laud the logic of advertisement, reinforcing the idea that information published in the rez-de-chaussée would henceforth be entirely commercially determined. Having declared itself to be treating the same events as the vaudeville revues, Le Charivari reports on them as news, while the vaudevilles analyze the social implications of commercializing the press. Le Charivari may have been one of the more contestatory publications of the period, but vaudevilles paid more attention to the institutional and social effects of commercial publicity.
Vaudeville revues were expert at using temporarily anonymous figures to say revealing things about newspapers. Characters representing publications and social phenomena associated with the press appeared in costumes meant to recall or comment on their role in society, but definitive identification usually occurred during the dialogue. One of the annual revues mentioned in the Charivari article, Clairville and Delatour's 1836 dans la lune, cast La Presse and Le Siècle as allegorical characters who represented both the newspapers in question and the entities for which they were named (the press and the century). The characters are young, as befits new inventions; La Presse is dressed in a paper printer's hat reminiscent of the Trois Glorieuses and subsequent struggles over press freedom, while Le Siècle is clad "en argent," which could be money or silver. When the play's narrator, Gaillard, asks La Presse whether she is the press of 1830, La Presse says that no, she is the press of 1836. When another character asks, "Est-ce que ce n'est pas la même chose" (Isn't that the same thing?), she responds:
Non vraiment, la Presse de 1830 malgré son penchant pour la démocratie ne s'adressait qu'aux personnes riches, elle parlait du peuple aux gens qui ne la comprenaient, et qui avaient intérêt à ne la pas comprendre, moi je m'adresse à la classe ouvrière, je livre mon esprit aux personnes indigentes ; je distribue mes bienfaits dans la rue.
No, truly, for the press of 1830, despite its penchant for democracy, addressed itself only to the rich: it spoke of the people to those who did not understand them and had no interest in doing so. I address myself to the working class, I share my wit with poor people; I distribute my benefits in the street.
Gaillard reacts by saying, "ce n'est pas beau" (that's not nice), and by arguing that such largesse "n'est guère propre à vous attirer l'estime, à vous donner de la considération" (is unlikely to attract esteem or consideration). He takes advantage of the press's allegorical onstage existence as a woman to accuse her of prostituting herself. This was an accusation frequently leveled against the new press (and particularly La Presse) because of its dependence on commercial publicity. Ambiguity over which press this is — the newspaper or the institution — allows the characters to air multiple perspectives on the advantages and dangers of the press's new commercial model.
For the scene is not a one-sided critique. La Presse has an answer for Gaillard: "Au contraire," she retorts, "ne vivonsnous pas à une époque de popularité. Conspiration, révolution, réputation, tout s'est fait dans la rue, c'est de là que sont sortis beaucoup de nos grands hommes et qui sait, peut-être quelques-unes de nos grandes dames" (do we not live in an age of popularity? Conspiracy, revolution, reputation, everything starts out in the street — that's where many of our great men and who knows, perhaps some of our great ladies, come from). She concludes her case with the argument that Émile de Girardin had put forth in response to critics of his new model for newspapers: advertising revenue allowed for the democratization of the press's readership, so more people had more access to a supposedly impartial mix of information.
In a sort of hymn to the fourth estate as imagined by Girardin, La Presse sings:
Vous le savez la France était bien sombre, Notre Paris n'était qu'un noir tombeau, / Et tout un peuple allait mourir dans l'ombre. / Quand de la presse apparut le flambeau : / Et ce flambeau qui brillait à la ronde / Fut un soleil qui vous montra vos droits ; / De sa lumière il éclairait le monde, / De ses rayons il aveuglait les rois. / Et cependant j'étais encore si fière / Que je craignais de me mésallier / Je parlais bien pour la classe ouvrière, / Mais je fuyais le toit de l'ouvrier. / Je me donnais à prix d'or au plus riche / Que mon langage offensait bien souvent ; / Vous me voyez moins bégueule et moins chiche, / Au peuple seul j'appartiens maintenant ... J'ai dans ses rangs, propagé mes lumières, / Je l'ai guidé, mes travaux l'ont instruit, / Et, si sa main brisa les réverbères, / C'est qu'il vit clair au milieu de la nuit.
France was somber, you know, Paris was a dark tomb / And an entire population was going to die in ignorance. / When the light of the press appeared / And this torch that shone all around / was a sun that showed you your rights; / It lit up the world with its light, / With its rays it blinded kings. And yet, I was still so proud / That I was afraid of marrying beneath myself / I spoke for the working class / but avoided its home. / Expensive, I gave myself to the rich / who were often offended by my words; / I stand before you less prudish, less mean, / I belong to the people now. ... I have spread my light among them, / I've guided them, my work has educated them, / And, if streetlights were broken by their hand, / It's because they could see through the dark.
For all her glorious self-promotion, though, La Presse is mocked for her forward ways by onlookers: "Tudieu! Quelle gaillarde !" (Zounds! What a bawd!) says one, "ce pauvre Siècle aura toutes les peines du monde à la suivre" (poor Siècle will have a world of trouble following her). The nineteenth century's ability to keep up with its new media and the competition between the two newspapers whose invention launched its latest expansion are confounded. The figures in this scene perform the jumble into which press innovations have thrown information transmission. For the sophisticated spectator, the multiple meanings would seem clever. For the less acute, the basic claims of the new press are laid out in La Presse's song. Any audience confusion surrounding those claims was a potential indication that they had not been fulfilled, as was the laughter their critique elicited. The inherent polyvalence of allegorical figures allows both pedagogy about media and critiques of the press to coexist when newspapers are personified. This is a clever solution to the dilemma of how to amuse socially mixed audiences. If nothing else, characters who represented newspapers ensured that messages about the new role of the press were being delivered and debated by people, not just in print. Year-end vaudeville revues showed and told their audiences that what once would have been negotiated between citizens was now being debated between newspapers.
For the press in question is both categorically ambiguous (are these figures Girardin's La Presse and Dutacq's Le Siècle, or are they the press and the century?) and historically precise. The ambiguity, in addition to allowing for exposition, also gestures to the fact that much of the press did follow La Presse's lead quite quickly, cutting their subscription prices and increasing advertising. La Presse's songs place this movement in time. This is not the heroic press of 1830, whose resistance to government censorship helped initiate the July Monarchy. It is the press of 1836, whose agenda is different and has to do with getting information to the people, teaching new members of the electorate. By endowing newspapers with bodies,which they were then accused of using inappropriately, plays could critique the press's reliance on seduction, which operated through a combination of entertaining content and advertising's ability to create desire.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Fourth Estate at the Fourth Wall"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Northwestern University Press.
Excerpted by permission of Northwestern University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.