In 1872 the co-directors of the Opéra-Comique, Camille Du Locle and Adolphe de Leuven, approached Georges Bizet and proposed that he write an opera in collaboration with the librettists Ludovic Halevy and Henri Meilhac. De Leuven offered Bizet three scenarios as suggestions, but Bizet rejected them in favor of an idea to which he held tenaciously, even in the face of what became the severe opposition of his collaborators: he insisted that the new work be based on Mérimée's Carmen. From our vantage point, over a century after Bizet's Carmen triumphed as a masterpiece, we may have difficulty seeing his choice as problematic. But this choice contributed to de Leuven's decision to resign, provoked rebellions among the performers and incited the wrath of music critics before the public finally embraced Bizet's vision – unfortunately, only after his death.

During this period, France had two subsidized opera houses: the Opéra and the Opéra-Comique, which differed with respect to both target audience and musical genre. The Opéra commissioned and presented French Grand Opera to an upper-class clientele, while the Opéra-Comique specialized in the production of opérascomiques, largely geared for a family-oriented bourgeoisie. A century earlier the genre of opéra-comique had been a vehicle for social satire, aimed in part at puncturing the stuffy conventions of elite operatic procedures. In place of lavish spectacle and uninterrupted singing, opéras-comiques featured a style that alternated lyrical expression with spoken dialogue, and they focused on more topical subject matter.