Le théâtre social
The Social Theatre
Jean Jaurès
Citizens,
In announcing a lecture on the Social Theatre, I have used an expression somewhat too general and somewhat vague, for the theatre is always necessarily social in the sense that it is always the expression of a determinate society. But I have thought above all — and it is the point upon which I wish to call your attention — of the theatre considered as a means of social struggle, as a means of hastening the decomposition of a given society and of preparing the advent of a new one. It is in this spirit that the brief and powerful work of Marsolleau is conceived, which you — which we — are about to hear presently. You will find in it the revolt, the warning of those who suffer and who signify to the society of today that the hour of iniquity must soon pass.
Well then, the day when the theatre of socialist tendency becomes acclimated, the day when it spreads, the day when it imposes itself upon power itself, and when it is no longer only social allegories like those of Marsolleau that are performed upon the stage but veritable human dramas in which the principles and forces of the new society are the very mainspring of the drama — that day, citizens, the Social Revolution will be very near to accomplishing itself. For the theatre is not, and by its constitution cannot be, a force of the avant-garde; it proclaims ideas only long after they have been proclaimed elsewhere, in the book; and it proclaims ideas only when they have already arrived, by the book, by speech, by the novel, by science, at a degree of social maturity at which these ideas impose themselves upon the vast public.
And why is it so? Why is the theatre destined much less to inaugurate new ideas than to register the growth and announce, so to speak, the approaching triumph of ideas whose success has already been prepared elsewhere? — Why? But first of all because the ruling powers, the societies, are far more frightened by new ideas brought to the stage than by new ideas propagated by the book. New ideas brought to the stage, the claims of the suffering and rising classes brought to the theatre — this is no longer merely the new idea going to find the individual in the recollection of solitary reading; it is the proletarian, it is the exploited one, it is the crushed one rising up, so to speak, in flesh and blood and demanding his emancipation from all. (Applause)
THE SOCIAL THEATRE
This is what has frightened the rulers at all times, and that is why new ideas, revolutionary ideas, mount the stage only when they have already climbed, so to speak, step by step, to the domination of minds; that is why if, as may be presumed from many symptoms, the social theatre is destined soon to assert itself, this will be an excellent symptom of the progress of our ideas. The drama is already, in some measure, the prologue of the Revolution itself, since, like the Revolution, it sets the crowds in motion.
Citizens, what I am telling you is verified by what may be called the social history of the theatre. For a century and a half — from the second half of the eighteenth century until today — we may, from the social point of view, distinguish in the theatre three principal moments, three principal periods.
First, in the second half of the eighteenth century, it contributes to the preparation of the French Revolution and to the advent of bourgeois society; — then, in the first half and almost throughout the whole extent of the nineteenth century, it appears as a partial criticism which bourgeois society, vanquished by the evidence of its own evils and its own contradictions, is obliged to apply to itself. This is what we observe partially, incompletely, in Dumas fils; in a bolder and more extensive fashion, in Ibsen; — and finally, we enter, with the dramatic works of Hauptmann — Before Dawn, The Weavers — with works in the vein of Marsolleau’s, with the banned Germinal of Zola… (Applause. — Cries of: Long live Zola!)… we enter into the period when it is no longer bourgeois society that timidly criticises itself, when it is the proletariat, when it is the working mass that begins to mount the stage.
I was saying that in the second half of the last century the theatre had contributed to the advent, to the preparation of bourgeois society — but, it must be said, with a strange timidity. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the intellectual movement, the social movement was far bolder than the theatre of the time. There was a prodigious movement of ideas in that Encyclopaedia which was little by little undermining through criticism all the old dogmas and preparing the sovereignty of reason. There was a prodigious social movement in that growing bourgeoisie of industry, of great commerce, of the great manufacturing cities, of the great ports — in that great bourgeoisie of Lyon, Nantes, Bordeaux, Paris, of all those cities where the new forms of labour were beginning. There was also a muffled surge of anger and revolt among those peasants, exploited for centuries, but who were beginning to glimpse the possibility of shaking off the feudal yoke. Well, of all this there is an echo in the theatre of the time: in Diderot, in Beaumarchais, in Schiller — but a muffled and weakened echo, since, once more, power stifled the vibrations of revolutionary thought when it wished to manifest itself in the theatre.
There is a striking example of this in one of Diderot’s major theatrical works: The Father of the Family. Diderot was, as you know, one of the boldest and at the same time most vast minds of the eighteenth century, and he had the sense that, beneath the new bourgeoisie that was forming, there were in the world of the workers and in the world of the peasants unknown depths of wretchedness and suffering, and he would have wished to call the attention of his contemporaries — even the attention of the great, of the powerful — to these unknown depths of suffering. Thus, in his dedication of The Father of the Family, addressed to Her Most Serene Highness Madame the Princess of Nassau-Saarbrücken, he tries to invite her to accustom her own children to know the misery of the people:
“I have,” he says, “a taste for useful things, and if I can pass it on to them, façades and public squares will touch them less than a heap of manure on which they will see naked children playing, while a peasant woman seated on the threshold of her cottage holds a younger one attached to her breast, and while swarthy men busy themselves in a hundred different ways with the common subsistence.
“They will be less deliciously moved by the sight of a colonnade than if, passing through a hamlet, they notice the ears of the sheaf emerging through the half-open walls of a farm.
“I want them to see misery so that they may be sensible to it and so that they may know from their own experience that there are around them men like themselves, perhaps more essential than themselves, who have scarcely straw to lie upon and who lack bread.
“My son, if you wish to know the truth, go out, I shall say to him, spread yourself among the different conditions, see the countryside, enter a cottage, question the one who inhabits it — or rather look at his bed, his bread, his dwelling, his clothing, and you will know what your flatterers will seek to hide from you.
“Recall often to yourself that it takes only one wicked and powerful man for a hundred thousand other men to weep, groan, and curse their existence.”
Citizens, it is in these terms that the great Encyclopaedist, the great worker of revolutionary thought, addressed to a princess the dedication of his drama; and with such a dedication, one might expect that in the drama itself there would be marvellous boldnesses concerning the struggle of the characters. There is a peasant in peasant’s dress who appears bent over his stick; one imagines he is going to complain, to cry out this suffering, this lack of bread, to reveal this poor straw or this manure on which the naked children lie… But no, he comes merely to appear for a minute, and why? — To offer to pay a higher rent for the land than the peasant who already occupies it. And the peasant appears no more, and Diderot gives him no further speech, because that cry and that speech, falling from the height of the stage, would have communicated to society a revolutionary shock that the ruling powers do not permit.
And look, in the work of Beaumarchais, dazzling and sparkling as it is: what a disproportion with the enormous revolutionary movement that was in preparation! Yes indeed, Figaro criticises the choices of the rulers, the choices they make of their functionaries: “A calculator was needed — a dancer obtained the post.” Yes indeed, he says to the noblemen: “You gave yourself, Monseigneur, the trouble of being born…” But what are these short arrows, what are these brief sparks, extinguished as soon as lit, compared to the enormous social movement that was taking place!
I therefore have the right to say that the theatre can only translate imperfectly, insufficiently, the vast social movement of societies in transformation; and it is one more reason, when the signs of a new drama of socialist tendency begin to appear, for us to say: there must be a very strong maturity of the new idea for it to begin to take theatrical form.
One of the most curious works of this first period, one of those in which the bourgeois social problem begins to be posed in a gripping fashion, is the famous drama by Schiller performed in Germany in 1782 under the title The Robbers. One may say that it is the first manifestation of what may be called bourgeois anarchist thought.
You know, citizens, what Schiller’s drama is: the son of a bourgeois, studying at Leipzig, has run up debts; but he has a generous and noble heart; his father would have pardoned him if there had not been, beside the father, another son who poisons his wounds and who persuades the father to curse the generous but undisciplined child who, at one moment, abuses life. And thus disgusted, thus broken-hearted, this young man little by little enters into revolt against society as a whole, and he gathers around him all the malcontents, all the crushed, all those who suffer, and with them he forms an association of a very particular, very strange brigandage — an association of brigands who realise justice, who strike only the guilty: the lord who exploits his vassals, the lawyer who, by subterfuges, has lost the case of the one who was in the right… In short, it is a society of bourgeois brigands who carry out executions against the old princely and feudal world in the name of the principles of a new justice. Ah! certainly Schiller takes care not to approve this attempt to the end, and in the end, from disaster to disaster and from disappointment to disappointment, the young rebel goes to deliver himself up to justice. But it is all the same a very striking sign of the mysterious labour that was then going on in minds, of the revolutionary fermentation of the young German bourgeoisie, that it could acclaim, even admire, under this form of brigandage, the new revolutionary thrust. But note it well — and this is the characteristic of that time: among these rebels, among these anarchists of the end of the eighteenth century, there is not a single worker. Not a single worker from the factories, not a single worker from the mines of Saxony, not a single worker from the weaving mills of Silesia. At that time, only the bourgeoisie recognised in itself the right to Revolution; the proletariat was below the revolutionary level, and it is ruined merchants, exasperated nobles, embittered shopkeepers, young men who have nourished their brains with books but who no longer find a function to fulfil — it is all the embittered, all the rebels of the bourgeoisie who form this anarchist troop.
This is the characteristic of the end of the eighteenth century: the Revolution in all its forms directed by the bourgeoisie; the theatre marches with it, in its fashion, to assure this preponderance of the bourgeois class. But we are going to see soon a working class.
Oh! citizens, it does not appear all at once. For nearly half a century, we are going to see the bourgeois regime spread itself, triumph; and if it is obliged, as I said at the outset, to criticise itself partially, if it is obliged to confess its own vices and its own contradictions, it does not accept that it should be another class than the bourgeois class that addresses these reproaches to it. It is the bourgeoisie, still powerful enough to criticise and censure itself.
Take the work of Dumas fils; I shall say that it is one quarter revolutionary and three quarters conservative and bourgeois. It is essentially conservative and bourgeois, since Dumas fils accepts the principle of the present family founded upon the individual right of transmissible property. Whoever accepts the family thus constituted — that is to say, resting not upon the free agreement of equal wills and of persons having an equal right to development, but resting upon a simple contract of property, superior to all contracts of affection — that person, however bold he may appear on certain secondary questions, is fundamentally a conservative of bourgeois society. (Lively movement of approval)
Well, Dumas never attacks the family thus constituted, because he never attacks the individual and capitalist property that is its foundation. But he cannot fail to recognise that this constitution of the family regulated by the Civil Code, that this individual property, very often clashes with the affections, with the most natural and deepest feelings of humanity. He cannot fail to recognise that sometimes — rarely, according to him — the fallen woman, the courtesan, as his theatre says, has preserved a nobility of soul that ought to allow her to resume her place within the framework of regular society, if the rigours of property did not forbid it. And he cannot fail to recognise either with what suffering the natural child is burdened. He cannot fail to recognise either how many times the perpetuity — the former perpetuity of marriage before divorce — was an obstacle to the loyalty, to the sincerity of natural feelings. And that is why Dumas pleaded, in some of his works — not in all — pleaded for the fallen woman; that is why he pleaded in favour of divorce; that is why he pleaded for the natural child. But it was not a fundamentally revolutionary work, for he wished, by correcting the worst excesses, the essential vices of the legal family founded on individual property — he wished, by reforming it, to maintain it; and it was, at bottom, a criticism with a conservative tendency.
There has been, from the moral point of view, a more extensive and more profound criticism, directed against all the hypocrisies, against all the lies of bourgeois society: that which the great Norwegian poet Ibsen directed. You know that Ibsen belonged at first to a rich family; that having suddenly lost his fortune, he was in a position to discover how many apparent affections and friendships were tied only to the possession of wealth; then, when he tried, as a creator of art, to produce, to translate his first revolt, he came up against the indifference or the hostility or the stupidity of most of his fellow citizens. A new revolt grew in him; he cast a penetrating and bitter gaze upon the bourgeois society that enveloped him, and everywhere denounced the lie and the oppression. There was the old pietist, conservative society of small peasants and small bourgeois; then there was the lie of the Church; finally, the capitalists arrived to overturn, to create new conditions, employing all sorts of ruses and iniquities to concentrate, to monopolise, buying up in advance the land for the vast operations, the vast speculations. So that, from whatever side Ibsen looked — toward the old conservative forms of society or toward the new form of capitalism — he saw everywhere nothing but disguise, hypocrisy, consideration attached to what grows by any means whatsoever; and in this sort of mêlée of blind interests, the petty bourgeoisie — routinised, sheep-like, blind — entertaining itself with wretched gossip, following at random those who defame or those who imagine, but incapable of discerning the truth. And Ibsen cried: Everywhere disguise! Everywhere hypocrisy! Everywhere lies! Give liberty back to individuals! (Lively applause)
Citizens, you see what the difference is between Ibsen’s point of view and the point of view of the revolutionary socialists, as Marx, for example, defines it. According to Marx, there is a struggle of one class against another class, of the proletarian class against the capitalist class, the possessors; and all the lies, all the social iniquities will disappear only through the triumph of the proletarian class, which will itself disappear in its own victory, by raising all men — exploited and exploiters — to a common liberty. It is therefore, in socialist thought, in Marxist thought, the struggle of a class bearing within it the hope of the humanity of tomorrow — it is therefore the struggle of one class against another class that is the great mainspring of progress; and it would be useless to appeal to the idea of justice, to the idea of truth, it would be useless to protest against the hypocrisies, the lies of the society of today, if the new class interested in the disappearance of these lies did not hasten the hour of emancipation. On the contrary — whereas, in Marxist thought, the social drama is constituted today by the struggle of one class against another class — in Ibsen, it is the struggle of an individual, of the individual who wants the truth, who wants thought, who finds it and who speaks it, against a whole society of convention, oppression, and lies.
It would seem, then, that there is antagonism between Ibsen’s point of view and Marx’s point of view. And yet, in the German social democracy, and also in our own socialist conscience, the two tendencies are reconciled, and we are ready to criticise, to denounce the abuses of the old capitalist society — with the strength that the organised proletarian class gives us, on the one hand — with the strength that the power of truth gives us, protesting against a society that falsifies everything, that distributes everywhere lies and error… that slips beneath the most pompous and beautiful appearances all sorts of adulterated goods, that deceives, that creates the right of all to the vote by universal suffrage and that falsifies it by corruption, by ignorance, by oppression, by lies; that glorifies the holy union of hearts in the family and that corrupts this supposed union of hearts by mercantile preoccupations; that pours forth in floods the newspapers, the press, but that infects all these pieces of paper with the lies that capital proclaims… (Lively applause)
Therefore, we have the right to protest against the society of today, not only with Marx, in the name of the proletariat that suffers, but also with Ibsen, in the name of truth that is dying… (Applause, cries of: Down with Rochefort! and prolonged booing) — Let us not shrink an enormous movement like this one to crushing a man — and what a man!
Therefore, I observe, citizens, that however revolutionary, in some of its tendencies — in some only… (A voice: too few)… the work of Ibsen may be, it is not fully so, in the sense of the real and complete social movement. For, strange to say, despite all he has written up to these last days, Ibsen, in all his works, was ignorant of the formation of a proletariat; he was ignorant of the existence of a working class. In one of his works, there is a foreman who is obliged, in order not to be dismissed by his great employer, to do a job of deception, to launch to sea a ship whose hold is known to be rotten and cannot be repaired in time; and this foreman says to his employer: Do not dismiss me; what do you want my family to live on if you dismiss me? And they will say to me: it is your fault… — And there is not for a minute in this man the thought that he might find help in distress or combat alongside other workers, exploited like himself. Ibsen is ignorant of the march, the constitution of a proletariat that organises itself and that will be the true instrument, not only — as I have said — of revolution, but of truth; and in short, in Ibsen, however bold a part of his work may appear, it is still bourgeois society that criticises itself.
But here, nevertheless, after many delays, even in the theatre, is the advent of the proletariat, the advent of the working class. It appeared in the work of Germinal, in Hauptmann. I scarcely need to tell you that in Before Dawn there are hardly any characters other than peasants, miners of Silesia, and that in The Weavers the true character is that incredibly suffering and incredibly tortured crowd of the weavers of Silesia, who revolt only under the spur of extreme pain.
This is, therefore, from now on, a social progress belatedly registered by the theatre — and it is indeed the verification of the law I was translating at the outset, for the working class, as a conscious, designated class, has existed for at least half a century. It has existed at least since the June Days of 1848; at that time it clearly separated itself, clearly distinguished itself from the other classes and clearly separated itself from the bourgeois democracy, to constitute a new class. It is therefore at least half a century since the proletariat has been, in history, a character with its own distinct face.
It has begun to mount the stage only for some years now, and even there it speaks very timidly, for Hauptmann’s Weavers are the weavers of half a century ago. He painted the great strikes of Silesia of 1840 and 1855 — strikes in which the weavers have not a single socialist idea, not a single idea of organisation. It is only the overworked human beast that rises up, so to speak, by the instinctive spring of its loins, because it feels that the burden is going to break them. It is the elementary, instinctive revolt of the crushed beast that rises up in a last spasm — it is not yet the conscious, deliberate organisation animated by an idea. That proletariat — it has not yet mounted the stage; or rather, I believe we are going to hear this evening one of its first cries, which probably presages others…
A voice. — And La Clairière? And Les Mauvais Bergers?
Citizen Jaurès. — I am coming to them, I thank you; it was in my plan to speak of them, to mention La Clairière and Les Mauvais Bergers. You are right to recall them; I wished to mark them, to note them precisely as one of the numerous symptoms of this new socialist tendency of the theatre.
But note it well: neither in Les Mauvais Bergers nor in La Clairière, which are rather — this is not a criticism I am making, it is a necessary distinction for which you will not reproach me — which are rather works of libertarian tendency than of socialist tendency, it is the individual, the worker who rises up and makes claims; it is not the organised Proletariat. And I was right to say in this sense — note that I am not criticising, I am not objecting — I find very interesting and remarkable the artistic attempts of Descaves; I find it very interesting to show individuals, workers and proletarians, who, without waiting for the complete social organisation by the organised proletariat, try to create a small colony of free and solidary men. I find this very interesting; I find it one of the symptoms of the social effervescence that is beginning to manifest itself in the theatre. But I cannot say that it is a scenic affirmation of the proletariat organised as a revolutionary class.
But note, citizens and comrades, that in this sense the work of Descaves, the work of Mirbeau are not the only symptoms. There are indeed many works of bourgeois appearance — I mean by that works that have no explicit revolutionary conclusion — which today, by the sole fact that the atmosphere is saturated with revolutionary socialism, take on, perhaps without the will of their author, revolutionary conclusions.
What strikes me is that today the creators of the theatre, in the criticism they apply to bourgeois society, go more boldly, more profoundly, more cruelly to the very bottom of the lie. Thus, for example, the criticism made of the laws of the Church and the family is much more bitter, more profound, more dissolving, more revolutionary in the work of Paul Hervieu than in that of Alexandre Dumas; and thus the simple study of facts, apparently impartial and objective, that Brieux in La Robe Rouge has made of the magistracy leaves not a crumb of the judicial institution. I do not know what the personal thoughts of Brieux are, but I say that he has done revolutionary work, because the Revolution itself, without his knowledge, at the moment when he was putting the scalpel into society, pushed his arm so that he drove it in…
I therefore have the right to say that under this varied, multiple form, there is indeed being prepared a sort of socialist renewal of the theatre; and it is thus that, by a simultaneous thrust of all forces, by the progress of the organised working class, by the new orientation of art, it is thus that little by little everything converges toward the new society. And that is our strength, comrades and friends: that despite the division of society into classes, our ideal today is so powerful, so true, so beautiful, that it responds so fully to the economic evolution and to the needs of conscience, that no one today can think without thinking a little with us — even those who believe they are fighting us.
Well then! Let us help this great movement — by producing, by thinking, by organising ourselves, by trying to interpret in silence, in our thought, all the phenomena of social life and intellectual life. You are going to see presently, in the work of Marsolleau brought here, the affirmation of revolt. Yes, revolt is a necessary stage of progress in human society. Reclus, in his book Evolution and Revolution, has marked this with extreme force. There were long periods of human existence when the earth, poorly cultivated, did not in fact furnish enough subsistence to men, when resignation was in a sense a physiological necessity. But today resignation is, in those who suffer, a survival from that period, for the earth could nourish all those who live if society were better organised; and from tomorrow on, there are social plagues, like unemployment, that could disappear if the working class were unanimous in its revolt and demanded their disappearance.
There is, therefore, in Marsolleau’s work, a ferment that we can and must retain; and thus, seizing all the forces of movement and progress, wherever they come from, all together, citizens and comrades, we shall prepare a new society — until the day when humanity will no longer need to translate upon the stage, upon the boards, the conflicts or the dreams of its own life; until the day when all men will be free enough, educated enough, conscious enough to be at once the spectators and the actors of the great social and human drama; when all men will live a life liberal and noble enough that sometimes they may pause to watch the march of humanity at work and rejoice in that harmonious march, as in the most beautiful of works of art — but this one a living, multiple, immense work, which will be confounded with emancipated humanity. (Long and lively applause. Repeated cries of: Long live Jaurès!)
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PARIS — 16, rue de la Sorbonne, on the second floor
FOURTH CAHIER OF THE SECOND SERIES
Hubert Lagardelle
The Intellectuals before Socialism
Comrades,
Socialism has become, in the evolution of the modern world, a factor of too considerable an importance for any of you to wish, systematically or through negligence, to continue to be ignorant of its tendencies.
As a moral ideal, it must rally all the consciences which, in the disorder of present society and in the presence of the bankruptcy of the Christian ideal and of bourgeois liberalism, seek to give a new meaning — deeper and more elevated — to life.
As a scientific conception, it must satisfy all minds anxious for truth, since it provides the key to modern becoming and since it constitutes, at the present hour — being the natural conclusion of the industrial and democratic evolution of this century — both the historical truth and the economic truth.
As a class party, finally, it must bring together all the exploited of the present society, intellectuals as well as manual workers, since capitalism has degraded to the condition of merchandise the intelligence of the former, like the labour power of the latter.
Comrades,
For these three reasons, you must know socialism and you must come to us. You will find in the Group of Collectivist Students of Paris a serious and free milieu of study, propaganda, and action, thanks to which you will be able to emerge from your intellectual solitude, so dangerous and so desiccating, and to find the occasion — by realising the harmonious balance of practice and theory — to become complete men. A moral benefit greater still: you will acquire, in contact with workers, the sense of discipline and solidarity, at the same time as that noble modesty by which are truly recognised all those who, participating in an objective and collective work, have quickly stripped themselves of all the subjective, sentimental, and mystical illusions engendered by pride, vanity, and selfishness.
The group, in fact, has taken part in all the manifestations of socialist and worker life: it adheres to the organised socialist party, whose programme and tactics it accepts, as defined in national and international congresses and summarised by the formula: International understanding and action of workers, political and economic organisation of the proletariat into a class party for the conquest of power and the socialisation of the means of production and exchange — that is to say, the transformation of capitalist society into a collectivist or communist society.
Widely open to all who recognise these principles, the group thus thinks to show that common action does not require absolute uniformity of thought, and that there is not, in the theoretical nuances that separate socialists, any invincible obstacle to Unity.
Paris, the 14th of November 1900
The Group of Collectivist Students