Relations between the central government and the theatre under the ancien régime were not nearly so close in the provinces as in Paris, and depended to a greater degree on local conditions and circumstances than on the control and supervision of the court and the court magnates. Nevertheless a considerable, though apparently unconcerted, effort was made in the second half of the eighteenth century to endow most large centres of population with at least one major theatre, providing what a modern historian has called ‘the infrastructure of French theatrical activity down to the Second Empire’. The process was not entirely uniform: new theatres were erected chiefly at seaports and along the land frontiers, where the passage of travellers led to a heightened demand for entertainment; but they were also established at certain inland towns, Lyons, Toulouse, Montpellier, Caen. Atheatre conferred a certain lustre on a town, and to possess one was a matter of local pride, held in check however by the grudging attitude of local taxpayers; for every theatrical enterprise demanded at some point, if only when a new building was under construction, financial assistance which the national Treasury was in no condition to provide.

Even before this building programme was embarked on, there is evidence that earlier strolling players were being, here and there, replaced by fixed and settled companies (troupes sédentaires rather than ambulantes), performing solely for the enjoyment of their fellow townsmen or occasionally shuttling to and fro between two neigh bouring centres of population.