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Actress to Activist: Mlle Clairon in the Public Sphere of the 1760s1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 July 2009

Jeffrey S. Ravel
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Extract

In his Paradoxe sur le comédien, written around 1770 but not published until the nineteenth century, the French philosophe Denis Diderot argued that the great actors of his day suppressed their individuality onstage; rather than personally experiencing the emotions called for by the playwright, they denied their own private subjectivity in order to create a more seamless public illusion. By an act of self-effacement, therefore, they paradoxically rendered themselves capable of impersonating anyone. In his essay, Diderot repeatedly turned to the example of his contemporary, the Comédie-Française actress Mlle Clairon, to illustrate this phenomenon. Off the stage, the philosopher claimed, Clairon was physically unimposing, and displays of her true feelings in the privacy of her home seemed artificial and unconvincing. In the theatre, however, she swelled in size and emotional presence until she dominated an audience and deepened the sentiments invoked by the playwright. According to Diderot, in the moment of public performance she was double: both the “little Clairon” and the “great Agrippina”, the socially inconsequential actress and a mythic heroine of the French stage.

Type
Special Section: Feminists Theorize the Past
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 35 , Issue 1 , May 1994 , pp. 73 - 86
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1994

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References

Endnotes

2 Diderot, Denis, Paradoxe sur le comédien, (Paris: Editions GF-Flammarion, 1981), 129–130, 137, 157, 169–170Google Scholar. See the nuanced and historically sensitive discussion of this text in Roach, Joseph, The Player's Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting, (Newark, DE: Delaware University Press, 1985), 116–159Google Scholar.

3 Habermas, Jürgen, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Burger, Thomas (Cambridge, MA, 1989)Google Scholar; Landes, Joan, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988)Google Scholar. Subsequent work engaged with Landes includes Keith Baker, Michael, “Defining the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France: Variations on a Theme by Habermas” in Calhoun, Craig, ed. Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1992): 181–211Google Scholar; Gordon, Daniel, “Philosophy, Sociology, and Gender in the Enlightenment Conception of the Public Sphere,” French Historical Studies 17 (Fall 1992): 882–911CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sarah Maza, “Women, the Bourgeoisie, and the Public Sphere: Response to Daniel Gordon and David Bell,” ibid., 935–50; Gordon's response, ibid., 951–53; and Goodman, Dena, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the Enlightenment, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

4 For the Gallican Church's ban on players in the eighteenth century, see McManners, John, Abbés and Actresses: The Church and the Theatrical Profession in Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986)Google Scholar.

5 For more details on the civil and ecclesiastical restrictions imposed on the members of the Comédie-Française in the eighteenth century, see Maugras, Gaston, Les Comédiens hors la loi (Paris, 1887): 195–227Google Scholar; and Lagrave, Henri, “La Comédie-Française au XVIIIe siècle ou les contradictions d'un privilége,” Revue de l'histoire du théâtre 2 (1980)Google Scholar.

6 Chartier, Roger, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution trans. Cochrane, Lydia (Durham, N.C., 1991)Google Scholar; Ozouf, Mona, “‘Public Opinion’ at the End of the Old Regime,” Journal of Modern History 60, suppl. (September 1988): S1–S21CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Baker, Keith Michael, “Public Opinion as Political Invention,” in Inventing the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990): 167–199CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 For detailed analyses of Rousseau's anti-theatrical position, see Moffat, M.M., Rousseau et la querelle du théâtre au VIIIe siècle (Paris, 1930), 59–111Google Scholar, and Barish, Jonas, The Anti-Theatrical Prejudice (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981), 256–294Google Scholar.

8 Clairon's “memoirs,” which were probably based on notes she had made but written without her authorization, appeared at the end of her life: Mémoires d'Hippolyte Clairon et réflexions sur l'art dramatique, publiés par elle-même (Paris, 1799)Google Scholar. The most complete biography is de Goncourt, Edmond, Mademoiselle Clairon, D'Après ses correspondances et les rapports de police du temps (Paris, 1889)Google Scholar, a work useful for its many transcriptions of contemporary documents but also notable for its misogynistic hostility towards its subject.

9 Goncourt, Mademoiselle Clairon, 87–90.

10 Roach, The player's Passion, 155.

11 I discuss these issues in Ravel, Jeffrey S., The Police and the Parterre: Cultural Politics and the Paris Public Theater, 1680–1789 (Ph.D. diss, Berkeley, 1991)Google Scholar; and “Seating the Public: Spheres and Loathing in the Paris Theaters, 1777–1788,” French Historical Studies 18 (Spring 1993): 173–210CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Goncourt, Mademoiselle Clairon, 299–302, 313–15; Grimm, Friedrich Melchior et al. Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique (Paris, 1877–1882), 6:51, 65–66Google Scholar. For the 1759 Comédie-Française attendance figures, see Lancaster, Henry C., The Comédie-Française 1701–1774. Plays, Actors, Spectators, Finances (Philadelphia, 1951), 792–793Google Scholar.

13 Straub, Kristina, Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth-Century Players and Sexual Ideology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992)Google Scholar. See also Howe, Elizabeth, The First English Actresses: Women and Drama, 1660–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

14 de la Bataille, Gaillard, Histoire de Mademoiselle Cronel, dite Frétillon, actrice de la Comédie de Rouen, écrite par elle-même (1739)Google Scholar. The unflattering nickname derives from the French verb frétiller, to wriggle or to fidget. On the political implications of pornographic literature in early modern Europe, see the essays in Hunt, Lynn, ed. The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800 (New York, 1993)Google Scholar.

15 See the account of these events in Goncourt, Mademoiselle Clairon, 104–07, in particular d'Alembert's letter to Voltaire in September 1760 lauding Clairon as a “philosophe.”

16 Clairon, Mémoires, 192–94. See also Boysse, E., ed. Journal de Papillon de la Ferté, intendant et controlleur de l'argenterie, menus-plaisirs et affaires du Roi, 1756–1780, (Paris, 1887): 74Google Scholar.

17 Clairon, Mémoires, 194.

18 Barbier, also a lawyer at the Parisian bar, wrote that Huerne was a “…a fifty-year-old man, ill at ease, who lost a practice that had very few clients…” (Chronique de la Régence et du règne de Louis XV (1718–1763) ou Journal de Barbier, Paris, 1885, 7:364, my translation.)Google Scholar

19 Quoted in Maugras, Les Comédiens, 259.

20 Voltaire, , Correspondence and Related Documents, Besterman, Theodore, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968–1977; hereafter Best.) D9755, Voltaire to d'Argental, 27 April 1761Google Scholar.

21 Barbier, , Journal de la régence, 7:366–367Google Scholar.

22 Voltaire, , Conversation de M. l'Intendant des Menus en exercice avec M. l'Abbé Grizel, republished in Oeuvres complètes (Paris, 1877): 24:239–254Google Scholar.

23 See Maugras, Le Comédiens, 274–78. The most interesting of these affairs involved the troupe's insistence to pay for a mass memorializing the tragic playwright Crebillon père upon the occasion of his death in 1763. The Archbishop of Paris refused to allow the players to commission the service in any parish under his jurisdiction, so Clairon and the players found a Church under the jurisdiction of the Knights of Malta. The Archbishop insisted upon a punishment for the Church's curé, which the players protested by threatening to go on strike at the theater; Clairon insisted upon contesting the continued excommunication of the players, “whom the King pays in order that they can go to Hell.” The players' efforts were unsuccessful, however, and the poor curé was condemned to three months at the Seminary and the forfeiture of his salary.

24 Judging by attendance figures, which dipped below one thousand people only twice, and boxoffice receipts, which never fell below three thousand livres per night, public demand for the play was initially inexhaustible. (Lancaster, The Comédie-Française, 812.) For more on Belloy's play, see Roddick, Nick, “From Siege to Lock-out: An Actors' Strike at the Comédie-Française in 1765,” Theatre Research International n.s. 4 (October 1978): 45–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Brenner, Clarence D., L'Histoire nationale dans la tragédie française du XVIIIe siècle (Berkeley, 1929), 251–266Google Scholar.

25 Collé, Charles, Journal et mémoires les hommes de lettres, les ouvrages dramatiques et les événements les plus mémorables du regne de Louis XV (1748–1772), Bonhomme, H., ed. (Paris, 1868), 3:25–27Google Scholar; de Bachaumont, Louis Petit, Mémoires secrets pour servir à l'histoire des lettres de la république des lettres en France. (London 1777–1789), 2:178–179Google Scholar; Correspondence littéraire, 4:240–244Google Scholar.

26 Correspondence littéraire, 4:239–240, 244Google Scholar; Collé, , Journal, 3:27–28Google Scholar.

27 Goncourt, Mademoiselle Clairon, 136.

28 Boysse, , ed. Journal de Papillon, 162, 164Google Scholar.

29 See Clairon's letter to the British actor Garrick, quoted in Goncourt, Mademoiselle Clairon, 149.

30 Best. D12577, Voltaire to Clairon, 1 May 1765.

31 Best. D12856, Voltaire to Clairon, 30 August 1765; Best. D12885, Voltaire to Clairon, 16 September 1765; Goncourt, Mademoiselle Clairon, 143, n. 2.

32 Best. D13157, Voltaire to de la Voute, 4 February 1766; Best. D13190, Voltaire to de la Voute, 1 March 1766.

33 Best. D13168, Voltaire to Clairon, 12 February 1766.

34 Correspondance littéraire (Paris, 1877), 6:492Google Scholar.

35 The deliberations of the King's Council on this matter are described in Maugraes, Les Comédiens, 323; Goncourt, Mademoiselle Clairon, 146–47; Moffat, Rousseau et la querelle, 229; and Clairon, Mémoires, 210–13.

36 See, for example, Best. D13252, Voltaire to Clairon, 15 April 1766.

37 Correspondance littéraire, (Paris, 1877), 7:11Google Scholar.

38 Quoted in Maugras, Les Comédiens, 326.