1. For other “echoes,” see Hobsbawm, E. J., Echoes of the Marseillaise (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

2. Mason, Laura, Singing the French Revolution: Popular Culture and Politics, 1787–1799 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996Google Scholar), 143, 145, 147.

3. The birth of any new artistic genre is of course a complex phenomenon involving a variety of factors. The aim in what follows is to give due credit to “La Marseillaise” as one of the chief verbal-ideological sources of early Parisian melodrama, not to suggest that it was the only factor in the genre's invention.

4. Of Aristotle's six dramatic elements, music can only be touched on in passing. A full treatment of the musical aspects of Pixérécourt's first two melodramas would require a study of its own.

5. Hyslop, Gabrielle, “Pixérécourt and the French Melodrama Debate: Instructing Boulevard Theatre Audiences,” in Melodrama, ed. Redmond, James, vol. 14 of Themes in Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 61–85Google Scholar, at 63.

6. Brooks, Peter, The Melodramatic Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 15Google Scholar.

7. Buckley, Matthew, Tragedy Walks the Streets: The French Revolution in the Making of Modern Drama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Buckley, Matthew, “Refugee Theatre: Melodrama and Modernity's Loss,” Theatre Journal 61.2 (2009): 175–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8. Hyslop, 61–85.

9. Hunt, Lynn, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 190Google Scholar.

10. Hunt: “More study is needed before definitive conclusions about early melodrama can be reached” (186); Hyslop: “More work remains to be done on the politics of early melodrama” (67).

11. Furet, François, Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. Forster, Elborg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 27Google Scholar.

12. Pierre, Constant, Les Hymnes et chansons de la Révolution (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1904), 223Google Scholar; Vovelle, Michel, “La Marseillaise: War or Peace,” in Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, vol. 3: Symbols, ed. Nora, Pierre and Kritzman, Lawrence D., trans. Goldhammer, Arthur (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 29–76Google Scholar; Mason, 93–8. See also Tiersot, Julien, Histoire de la Marseillaise (Paris: Librarie Delagrave, 1915)Google Scholar; and Tiersot, Julien, “Historic and National Songs of France,” trans. Kindler, O. T., Musical Quarterly 6.4 (1920): 599–632CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13. Vovelle, 38.

14. Ibid., 36–40; Mason, 143; Goldhammer, Jesse, The Headless Republic: Sacrificial Violence in Modern French Thought (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 39–58Google Scholar.

15. Vovelle, 35–6; and Mason, 97–9. See also Scurr, Ruth, Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (New York: Henry Holt, 2006), 215Google Scholar.

16. Goldhammer, 48, 52, 52n54, 55.

17. For the rumors that there were traitors in these prisons, see The Reign of Terror: A Collection of Authentic Narratives of the Horrors Committed by the Revolutionary Government of France under Marat and Robespierre (London: Smithers, 1899)Google Scholar, 2 vols., 1: 211, 223. The statistic is Ternaux's, quoted in Mignet, François Auguste, The French Revolution from 1789 to 1815, ed. Thompson, J. W. (1824; reprint Philadelphia: John D. Morris, 1906)Google Scholar, 208n11. See also Scurr, 220; and Furet, François and Richet, Denis, French Revolution, trans. Hardman, Stephen (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1970), 156Google Scholar.

18. Vovelle, 36.

19. Furet, 60 (quote), 62–3, 184–5.

20. My translation from de Lisle's autograph and the first printed edition (Strasbourg: Danbach, 1792), as reproduced in facsimile in Tiersot, Histoire, 48–53.

21. Tiersot, “Historic and National Songs,” 617; also Vovelle, 33. That “La Marseillaise” is to some degree a pasticcio of the rhetoric of a political club is worth noting. A critic of melodrama would soon be alleging something similar about the new genre, saying that it was made out of two things: novels and political clubs. See Hunt, 183.

22. To words by Voltaire, it was performed repeatedly in 1791, and it was reproduced in Gorsas's newspaper Le Courrier des LXXXIII Départemens on 21 September 1791, 321–6. Courtesy of the University of Chicago Library Microfilm Collection, vol. 28 (Sept.–1 Oct. 1791), reel DC12.

23. The word “brothers” does not appear in “La Marseillaise.” Contra Hunt, who interprets the Revolution (and melodrama) through the lens of a “family romance” involving a parricidal “band of brothers,” de Lisle's revolutionaries are fathers themselves. Far from being parricides, they are depicted as defending their fathers, and their fatherland, from the “parricidal schemes” of counterrevolutionaries.

24. As quoted in Tiersot, “Historic and National Songs,” 617, my italics.

25. Ibid.; Vovelle, 33.

26. Hunt, 71–2.

27. Ariès, Philippe, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Baldrick, Robert (New York: Vintage, 1962), 26Google Scholar.

28. Ibid., 25–6, quotes at 26.

29. Ibid., 26–9, quote at 26.

30. Kant, Immanuel, “Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?” In Kant, Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 7, ed. Rosenkranz, K. and Schubert, F. W. (Leipzig: Voss, 1838), 145–54Google Scholar.

31. Ariès traces the eighteenth-century meaning of enfant all the way back to the Middle Ages.

32. Vovelle, 39.

33. Ibid., 37. A true children's chorus of this kind—i.e., one sung by children qua children, not as surrogates for adults, as in Vivaldi or Purcell—does not appear to exist in any musical play or opera before “La Marseillaise,” but it is common on stage thereafter.

34. See Vovelle's history of the anthem from 1792 to the Bourbon Restoration on 46ff.

35. Hunt, 27.

36. Graff, Harvey J., The Legacies of Literacy: Continuities and Contradictions in Western Culture and Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 192–220Google Scholar. Literacy rates varied widely depending on gender and region. Most of Graff's data show literacy rates below 40 percent.

37. Quoted in Tilby, Michael, “Ducray-Duminil's Victor, ou l'enfant de la forêt in the Context of the Revolution,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 249 (1987): 407–438Google Scholar, at 430, my italics.

38. They are also addressed throughout the plays with various other infantilizing forms of address such as “young man,” “young girl,” “little,” “my daughter,” “my son,” etc.

39. Billington, James H., Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith (London: Temple Smith, 1980), 56–9Google Scholar, 62–6; Furet, 25–7; Goldhammer, 40–6.

40. Voltaire, Samson, act 1, scene 4, in Voltaire, Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 1 (Paris: Furne, 1845), 213.

41. Schiller, , Sämmtliche Werke (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1834), 19Google Scholar.

42. Furet, 27.

43. In revolutionary propaganda, they were applied to nearly everyone, with “we” (the speaker/s) always idealized as the good patriotic enfants and “our enemies” (whoever they were) demonized as antidemocratic tyrans. Lazare Carnot understood the mechanism perfectly, noting how Robespierre always characterized his personal enemies as “enemies … of the people”: Nicholas, LazareCarnot, Marguerite, Reply of L.N.M. Carnot, Citizen of France … to the Report Made on the Conspiracy of the 18th Fructidor…, 3d ed. (London: J. Wright, 1799), 124Google Scholar. See Furet, 209, for the consequences of using such a vague definition of tyran.

44. See Aristotle, Poetics XIX, 1456a 33–1456b 5, trans. Bywater, Ingram, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. McKeon, Richard (New York: Random House, 1941)Google Scholar.

45. Furet, 70. Subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text.

46. And le traître, of course, is one of the two French terms traditionally used to describe what in English we call the “villain” or the “bad guy”; the other is le tyran.

47. In Stanza 5, de Lisle acknowledges the existence of people who were forced to fight us against their will and excludes them from the ranks of tyrans.

48. Pierre, 233; Mason, 94–101; Vovelle, 39.

49. Mason, quotes on 101, 143; see also 145, 147.

50. Furet and Richet, 351, 370.

51. He rejected both the meaning and the new title his song had acquired in Paris. See Vovelle, 36.

52. Michèle M. Root-Bernstein, Boulevard Theatre and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1981; Ann Arbor: UMI Research, 1984), 205–207; Pixérécourt, “Guerre au Mélodrame!” in Théâtre de René-Charles Guilbert de Pixérécourt, 3 vols. (Paris: Delaunay, 1818; reprint, Paris: J. N. Barba, n.d.), 1: 3–35; Pixérécourt, “Mélodrame,” trans. Gerould, Daniel, in Pixérécourt: Four Melodramas, ed. Gerould, Daniel and Carlson, Marvin (New York: Segal Theatre, 2002), 311–14, at 311–12Google Scholar; and Pixérécourt, “Dernières réflexions de l'auteur sur le mélodrame,” in Pixérécourt, R. C. Guilbert de, Théâtre Choisi, ed. Nodier, Charles, 4 vols. (1841–3; reprint, Genève: Slatkine Reprints, 1971), 4: 493–9Google Scholar.

53. Vovelle stresses the crucial role theatres played in spreading and popularizing the anthem; see 39.

54. See Mason, 99, where she argues that the vagueness of de Lisle's tyrans allowed Parisians “to personalize their enemy.”

55. Quoted in Soboul, Albert, The Parisian Sans-Culottes and the French Revolution, 1793–4 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), 30–2Google Scholar.

56. Quoted in ibid., 33.

57. Quoted in ibid., 35.

58. Participants in the Terror described such killings as a patriotic “duty” and a “necessity”; quoted in ibid., 32, 144.

59. Danton's speech as quoted in Mignet, 205; Saint-Just's speech as quoted in Billington, 69.

60. Quoted in Hunt, 79.

61. Furet and Richet, 156; Mignet, 198–205; Soboul, 143; Scurr, 223.

62. Furet and Richet, 328, 364–70.

63. Robespierre's comments on 10 August 1792, as quoted in Scurr, 216.

64. Root-Bernstein, 227.

65. Soboul, 19–20, 30; Harris, Jennifer, “The Red Cap of Liberty: A Study of Dress Worn by the French Revolutionary Partisans, 1789–1794,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 14.3 (1981): 283–312CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Shilliam, Nicola J., “Cocardes Nationales and Bonnets Rouges: Symbolic Headdresses of the French Revolution,” Journal of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 5 (1993): 104–31Google Scholar.

66. Stanislas Maillard, a leader in the attack on the Bastille, quoted in Shilliam, 112.

67. Ibid.

68. Ibid., 113.

69. Soboul, 19.

70. Quoted and trans. Shilliam, in Shilliam, 122.

71. Printed in Revolutions de Paris no. 209 (6–20 juillet 1793).

72. Harvey J. Graff, 192.

73. Quoted in Soboul, 19.

74. Quoted in ibid., 37.

75. The cap is being offered to the king on the end of a pike. See Shilliam, 123.

76. Vovelle reminds us of the full title of the painting, which is rarely recalled today; see 47–8. The image is available online at http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/delacroix/liberte/liberty.jpg.

77. He reentered France in the fall and was in Paris by 8 January 1793, but could have arrived toward the end of 1792. See Pixérécourt, “Souvenirs de la révolution,” in Pixérécourt, Théâtre Choisi, ed. Nodier, 2: xx–xxi.

78. Ibid., iii–vi, viii.

79. Ibid., viii.

80. Ibid., ix.

81. Like the tyran on the lam in Cœlina, act 3, scene 3. Pixérécourt, Cœlina, ou L'Enfant du mystère (Paris, 1801)Google Scholar.

82. Pixérécourt, “Souvenirs de la révolution,” xv–xvii.

83. Quoted in Maslan, Susan, Revolutionary Acts: Theatre, Democracy, and the French Revolution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 58Google Scholar.

84. Another popular revolutionary anthem of the period. See Mason, 43–4.

85. Maslan, 188–92, 206.

86. The words of the actor Delpeche, as quoted in Maslan, 187.

87. Quoted in Maslan, 188.

88. Root-Bernstein, 222–3.

89. Quoted in Maslan, 61.

90. Pixérécourt, “Souvenirs de la révolution,” xvii–xx. He claims that this play, Sélico, was never performed in Paris, but he is not telling the truth: it premièred at the Molière on 1 November 1793 and ran for five nights. See Tissier, André, Les Spectacles à Paris pendant la Révolution: Répertoire analytique, chronologique, et bibliographique, 2 vols. (Genève: Droz, 1992–2002), 2: 232Google Scholar, 473.

91. Quoted in Root-Bernstein, 215.

92. Ibid., 225.

93. Robinove, Phyllis S., “Voltaire's Theater on the Parisian Stage, 1789–1799,” French Review 32.6 (1959): 534–8Google Scholar, at 534.

94. Baxter, Denise Amy, “Two Brutuses: Violence, Virtue, and Politics in the Visual Culture of the French Revolution,” Eighteenth-Century Life 30.3 (2006): 51–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 58–9.

95. Ibid., 60.

96. The Marriage of Figaro, for example, makes the subordinates happy while humbling rather than killing the count, and the Oresteia brings joy to the people while acquitting a murderer and integrating the Furies into the life of the city; see Wise, Jennifer, “Tragedy as ‘an augury of a happy life,’” Arethusa 41.3 (2008): 381–410CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

97. Billington, 66. For the government's active use of the theatres for propaganda purposes, see also Friedland, Paul, Political Actors: Representative Bodies and Theatricality in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

98. Quoted in Root-Bernstein, 198.

99. Root-Bernstein, 198; Leon, Mechele, Molière, the French Revolution, and the Theatrical Afterlife (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009), 22CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rahill, Frank, The World of Melodrama (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1967), 11Google Scholar.

100. Kennedy, Emmet, “Taste and Revolution,” Canadian Journal of History / Annales canadiennes d'histoire 32 (December 1997): 375–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

101. Pixérécourt describes the reprieve only; “Souvenirs de la révolution,” xxvi. For the known details of his police work, see Edmond Estève, “Appendice: Observations de Guilbert de Pixérécourt sur les théâtres et la révolution,” Études de littérature préromantique (Paris: É. Champion, 1923), 201–203Google Scholar; and Hyslop, 61–85.

102. A warrant for his death had already been issued in Nancy, his hometown. See Pixérécourt, “Souvenirs de la révolution,” xxvi.

103. Kafka, Ben, “The Demon of Writing: Paperwork, Public Safety, and the Reign of Terror,” Representations 98.1 (2007): 1–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 7, 10.

104. Ibid., 13.

105. For the date of the “Rapport,” see Estève, 201. For Carnot's role in the government between 1793 and 1797, see Gueniffey, Patrice, “Carnot,” in A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, ed. Furet, François and Ozouf, Mona, trans. Goldhammer, Arthur (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 197–203Google Scholar.

106. Both printed in full by Estève in “Appendice,” 201–19.

107. Pixérécourt, “Spectacles, 7 Floréal,” 204.

108. Ibid., 201.

109. Pixérécourt, “Rapport,” 218.

110. Ibid., 215–218, quote on 218.

111. Ibid., 213.

112. Ibid., 218.

113. Estève half-heartedly attributes the vitriol to the frustration of a “debutant”; “Appendice 1,” 203.

114. Gueniffey, 199.

115. Carnot, “General System of Operations for the Next Campaign,” as quoted in Gueniffey, 199.

116. He signed orders, for example, for “the extermination” of state enemies such as the peasants of the Vendée: see Gueniffey, 199.

117. Carnot, Reply, 14–18, 24, 32, 49, 76, 78, 80–82, 90, 93–95, 98, 100–2, 108, 192, 196–199.

118. Pixérécourt, “Souvenirs de la révolution,” xxv.

119. Ibid., xxviii.

120. Vovelle, 36, discusses de Lisle's belief that Carnot was personally responsible for his suffering after 10 August.

121. Ibid., 36.

122. Ibid., 46.

123. For the sudden advent of a lucrative commercial theatre industry in Paris in the wake of the Revolution, see Root-Bernstein, 201; Rahill, 20; and Maslan, 15.

124. Pixérécourt, “Guerre au Mélodrame!” [1818], in Théâtre de René-Charles Guilbert de Pixérécourt, 1:14; Pixérécourt, “Mélodrame,” 311–13.

125. In defending melodrama, he points to his obligation to create plays “that suit their taste, their education, and especially their condition and financial means.” Pixérécourt, “Guerre au Mélodrame!” 14.

126. Tilby, Michael, “Ducray-Duminil's “Victor, ou L'Enfant de la forêt” in the Context of the Revolution,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century no. 249 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1987), 407–438Google Scholar, at 431. In one story, all the children of a village become soldiers against the tyrants who are threatening their good mothers and fathers. Tilby quotes the final lines: “Vive la république, qui enfante des héros! Mort … aux tyrans… !” (430).

127. Pixérécourt, , Victor, ou L'Enfant de la forêt (Paris: Barba, an VI de la République [1798])Google Scholar, act 2, scene 7. This first edition is published under the name R. C. Guilbert Pixerécourt. Subsequent citations, by act and scene numbers, are given parenthetically in the text.

128. The “la” falsely hints that “La Marseillaise” is about to be sung here. The 1798 text prints no song lyrics, but those provided in the 1803 text, about wine, seem to have been the ones that were sung.

129. There is a brief moment when he seems willing to reconsider and make them happy after all; but the arrival of one of his men with news of the impending attack is enough to restore him at once to his commitment to remaining a tyran (3.10–11).

130. Pixérécourt, “Dernières réflexions,” 496.

131. We have already heard from Michaud that the tyran's accomplice “confessed everything; his trial won't take long” (3.2). As Truguelin also confesses everything, we are led to expect that his trial will be similarly short.

132. There are dozens of such enfant epithets in both plays, too many to list.

133. In Cœlina, the difference is negligible.

134. According to his records, Pixérécourt wrote and staged over a hundred plays, sixty of them melodramas, and lived to see some thirty thousand performances of his work in France alone before his death in 1844. Pixérécourt, “Tableau chronologique de mes pieces,” in Pixérécourt, Théâtre Choisi, ed. Nodier, 1: lxxxvii.

135. Hartog, Willie G., “Liste des Traductions et des Adaptations,” in Hartog, Guilbert de Pixérécourt: Sa vie, son mélodrame, sa technique et son influence (Paris: Librarie ancienne, 1913), 235–40Google Scholar.

136. Melodrama remains one of the world's most popular genres to this day. It was recently described as “the dominant mode through which national consciousness, ideology, and nostalgia are articulated in non-Western culture.” See Sheetal Majithia, “Comparative Melodrama,” seminar prospectus for the American Comparative Literature Association, available at http://www.acla.org/acla2011/?p=638 (accessed 24 October 2011). Many thanks for this to one of my anonymous readers.