Le Théâtre du Peuple

FOURTH CAHIER OF THE FIFTH SERIES

ROMAIN ROLLAND

The People’s Theater

To Maurice Pottecher, first founder in France of the People’s Theater

The new has come, the old has passed. — Schiller to Goethe, 1804

Author’s Preface

At the moment this cahier appears, the first serious efforts are being made to establish the People’s Theater in Paris. Already, since September, a regular Popular Theater has been open in Belleville. Another, this very week, has just opened in Clichy. The aim is, without fanfare, without extraordinary performances, through modest and regular work, to establish an uninterrupted flow between art and the people. Other similar attempts are to be made this year at various points in Paris. Alongside these sincere efforts, pretentious counterfeits, which attest at least to the power of the popular movement, are attempting to seize the fine name of People’s Theater in order to distort it. It is essential to distinguish ruthlessly between the popular movement and the parasites who strive to live at its expense. The People’s Theater is not a fashion article and a dilettantes’ plaything. It is the imperious expression of a new society, its thought and its voice; and it is, by the force of circumstances, at this hour of crisis, its war machine against a decrepit and fallen society. The coming years will be decisive for the People’s Theater of Paris. Not that anything can now prevent it from establishing itself. It is necessary, and it will be. But there must be no equivocation. It is not a matter of opening new old theaters whose title alone is new, bourgeois theaters trying to deceive by calling themselves popular. It is a matter of raising the Theater by and for the People. It is a matter of founding a new art for a new world.

Romain Rolland November 15, 1903

Introduction: The People and the Theater

A remarkable fact has occurred over the past ten years. French art, the most aristocratic of all arts, has noticed that the People exist. — It knew them well enough as material for speeches, novels, dramas, or paintings…

“An admirable subject to put into Latin verse!”…

But it did not reckon with them as a living being, a public, and a judge. (1) The progress of socialism has drawn the attention and the covetousness of artists toward the new sovereign, whose politicians had until then been the sole interpreters: authors and actors all in one. They in turn have discovered the people — discovered, if I dare say, a little in the manner in which today’s explorers discover an unknown land: as an outlet for their products. Authors want to introduce their works there; the State its repertoire, its actors, and its functionaries.

(1) Then the Belgian poet Rodenbach wrote: “Art is not made for the people. For it to be understood by the people, it would have to be lowered to their level.”

It is quite a comedy, where each plays his role; but perhaps no one has reason to find it a subject for irony; for perhaps no one is entirely safe from irony. After all, one must take people as they are, and not discourage private interest from seeking to merge, or naively merging, with the general interest, provided the latter benefits. And so it does; and from this great movement, which extends with too much force and universality for good not to be mixed with evil, and the thought of public utility with personal concerns, I shall retain only two facts: — First, the sudden importance acquired by the People in art — or rather, the importance attributed to the People; for the People, as usual, hardly speak, and everyone speaks for them. — And second, the extraordinary diversity of opinions that shelter under the general name of popular art.

In reality, among those who call themselves representatives of the People’s Theater, there are two absolutely opposed parties: some want to give the people the theater as it is, theater of whatever kind. Others want to bring forth from this new force — the People — a new form of art, a new theater. The former believe in the Theater. The latter place their hope in the People. Between them, no connection. Champions of the past. Champions of the future.

I need not say on which side the State has ranged itself. The State, by definition, and paradoxical as it may seem, is always of the past. However new the forms of life it represents, from the moment it represents them, it arrests them and freezes them. One does not fix life. It is the role of the State to petrify everything it touches, to make of every living ideal a bureaucratic ideal.

This ideal has been represented, in the present instance, by the Thirty Years of Theater organization. Thanks to its intelligent promoter, Mr. Adrien Bernheim, some classical performances have been given in the Parisian suburbs by actors from the major subsidized theaters. Immediately Mr. Bernheim and his friends exclaim: “The People’s Theater is founded!” — What a fine invention! One baptizes the bourgeois theater “popular theater,” and the trick is done! So nothing will change, and in this society in incessant transformation, art alone will remain immobile; we shall be condemned for eternity to a decrepit ideal, to a theater whose thought, style, and acting no longer have anything alive about them, to the degenerate tradition of a house of comedians!

I shall say later what I think of the undertaking of the Thirty Years of Theater. I shall try to speak of it with the respect that every generous attempt deserves. But it presupposes a confidence in the goodness of our civilization in general, and of our theater in particular, that I am far from sharing; and I shall combat its illusions without pity. These illusions, I know, are shared by the majority of minds in the current elite. That proves to us what we have long known: that there is little to count on from this elite for the future. It strives in vain to deceive: it is conservative and bourgeois, it belongs to the past; it cannot create the new society or the new art: it is disappearing. Life cannot be bound to death. And the art of the past is more than three-quarters dead. This is not a fact peculiar to our French art. It is a general fact. A past art never suffices for life; and often it risks harming it. The necessary condition of a healthy and normal life is the production of an art incessantly renewed, keeping pace with life.

I do not know whether the rising society will create its own new art. But what I do know is that if this art does not exist, there is no longer any living art; there is only a museum, one of those necropolises where the embalmed mummies of the past slumber. We have been raised in the worship of memories; it is difficult for us to free ourselves from them. A poetry envelops them and gives them those softened, blended tints of distant horizons. But from those beautiful forms that once pulsed, life has withdrawn, or withdraws from day to day. Even if some masterpieces, more robust than the rest, have preserved until our day a part of their power, it is not certain that this power is beneficial today. Nothing is good except in its place and in its time. One may believe that the good and the beautiful exist absolutely, that they are eternal ideas. But their expressions vary according to the forms of human minds; and those that made the charm and nobility of one century risk, transplanted into another, being monstrous and harmful.

One of the dangers of art noted by Tolstoy comes perhaps from the fact that these forces of the past, diverted from their purpose, transported into an environment to which they are not adapted, cause serious disorders. It is not only in morals that “a meridian decides truth” and “a river bounds it.” It is the same in art. Centuries proscribed the nude, in the name of scruples not only moral but aesthetic. The sculptors of the Middle Ages excluded it as deformed, thinking that “clothing is necessary to the grace of the body.” The painters of Giotto’s school found in the female body “no perfect measure.” (1) The men of the seventeenth century who knew Gothic architecture best (2) condemned it precisely in the name of the reasons that make us love it. A genius of the eighteenth century (3) was indignant, as at an insult, to be compared to Shakespeare. A great Italian painter (4) calls Flemish painting sacristy art, “good for women, monks, and the devout.” And the muzhik of whom Tolstoy speaks looks with disgust at the Venus de Milo. It is possible that the beautiful for the elite is the ugly for the crowd, that it does not answer their needs, which are as legitimate as ours. Let us not then impose, without examination, on the people of the twentieth century the art and thought of aristocratic and vanished societies.

(1) Cennino Cennini, in 1477. (2) Felibien, who had studied the churches of Paris; Perrault, etc. (3) Voltaire. (4) Michelangelo.

Moreover, the people’s theater has much better things to do than pick up the leftovers of the bourgeois theater. We do not wish to extend the clientele of the current theaters: it is not for them that we are working; we need take into consideration only the welfare of the people.

Table of Contents

FIRST PART: The Theater of the Past

• I. — Classical tragedy: Racine, Corneille.
• II. — The romantic drama.
• III. — The bourgeois theater.
• V. — The foreign repertoire. The Greek tragedians. Shakespeare. Schiller. Wagner.
• VI. — There exists in the past only a repertoire of popular readings, not of popular theater. — Readings are not sufficient. The theater is necessary.
• VII. — The Thirty Years of Theater and the popular galas.

SECOND PART: The New Theater

• I. — The precursors of the people’s theater: Rousseau, Diderot, the French Revolution, Michelet. — The first attempts at people’s theaters. — The Bussang theater.
• II. — The new theater. — Material and moral conditions.
• III. — Some genres of popular theater. — The melodrama.
• IV. — The historical epic.
• V. — Some other genres. — Social drama. — Rustic drama. — Circus.

THIRD PART: Beyond the Theater

• The festivals of the people. — Conclusion.

DOCUMENTS

• I. — Texts of the Revolution relating to theaters and popular festivals.
• II. — Plans of David’s festivals.
• III. — May performances (maggi) in Tuscany.
• IV. — The People’s Theater of Bussang.
• V. — Texts relating to the work of the Revue d’art dramatique to found a people’s theater in Paris.

The People’s Theater of Belleville. The People’s Theater of Clichy. The People’s Theater of Neuvy-sur-Loire (Nievre).

Bibliography.

The Theater of Neuvy-sur-Loire

Pierre, and Desenne, had the idea, following a performance of Courteline given by them for the benefit of the poor, of creating a People’s Theater that would be both an artistic and philanthropic endeavor. Its purpose, according to the very terms of their program, was to be: “1st, to give, four times a year, performances whose proceeds would be used for the immediate relief of all known miseries among the participating members of the association;

“2nd, to develop in the provinces intellectual culture and contribute to moral education.”

They appealed to the goodwill of the region, and this appeal was heard. Many workers and farm laborers lent their assistance. Friends helped them construct a mobile theater, set up in the Chavannes hall. Artists painted three sets, including a View of Neuvy.

On September 8, 1901, they gave Hennique’s The Death of the Duke of Enghien, Theuriet’s Jean-Marie, and Courteline’s Monsieur Badin. — In November 1901, the program included Brieux’s Blanchette and Courteline’s A Serious Client. — Their program also announced Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, Brieux’s The Substitutes, Jules Renard’s Poil de Carotte, Danton, etc.

This endeavor seems to have halted along the way; but it was fitting to note so original an initiative.