The introduction to the book describes the main claims in Theater, War, and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France and Its Empire. Readers are introduced to major terms in the book, including the military–theatrical complex, military–theatrical experiences, and the national–military phenomenon. The book’s arguments are discussed in the context of France’s evoling geopolitical goals from 1765 to 1794 and with the help of several critical approaches, including Theater and Performance Studies, Gender Studies, and the cultural history of the French military. The end of the Introduction lays out the structure of the book and posits several key questions that the study hopes to answer.

Chapter 3 provides a critical reconstitution of pre-revolutionary military performance environments. First is a description of the development and operations of the Théâtre de la Marine in Brest, the only public theater that was built and financed by France’s war administration and where Joseph Patrat’s manipulated version of Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s Le Déserteur made its metropolitan French debut. The chapter’s second part focuses on the Comédie (Theater) in Cap-Français (now Cap-Haïtien), the largest and most frequented theater in the colonial Caribbean. In addition to describing the military, racial, and gendered features of theatrical life in Saint-Domingue, this chapter connects Cap-Français’ Comédie, which was built in 1764 and which catered in part to the city’s large soldier population, to a network of military-infused theaters in French provincial cities such as Metz, Besançon, Lille, Perpignan, and Brest.

The coda considers the effect of the eighteen-year closure during the Interregnum on the commercial theater’s phenomenology of uncertainty. When Thomas Killigrew and William Davenant were granted patents to form theater companies by Charles II in 1660, they did not return to the practices of the earlier theatrical era, instead outfitting playhouses with the perspective sets and proscenium frames of court and Continental performance. The coda demonstrates that heroic drama, the first major genre to emerge under these new performance conditions, favored resolution rather than ambiguity. In John Dryden’s vision of the new genre, majestic spectacles that aimed to control spectators’ imaginations replaced the ambivalent metatheatricality of the earlier theater. The Restoration theater, the coda suggests, ultimately rejected the uncertainty that had defined theatrical experience from the late sixteenth to mid-seventeenth century.