After the Fall: The Chute of a Play, Droits d'Auteur, and Literary Property in the Old Regime

Abstract

This article addresses the advent of literary property in the Parisian commercial theater between 1680 and 1780, a process that occurred at the intersection of developments in royal regulation, court culture, commercial demands, and the status of writers. It brings together these issues in a study of a practice known as “the fall [ la chute ],” by which the royal theater determined ownership of plays on its repertory. It explains first how the fall, in theory, reconciled the theater’s multiple mandates—serving the king and the Parisian public, sustaining itself economically from commercial revenues, and providing a venue for France’s leading men of letters—to develop a distinctly French literary tradition. Then, through discussion of multiple instances of disputes over ownership of plays which had “fallen” and by considering the arguments advanced in the name of two prominent eighteenth-century authors, Pierre-Laurent Buirette de Belloy and Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, it explores the specific meaning of droits d’auteur and “literary property [ propriete litteraire ]” sought by playwrights for their fallen plays. Arguing that existing scholarship on literary property has looked only to the Book Trade and thus overemphasized the importance of Lockean ideas of property, Kantian ideas of genius, and Smithian ideas of the market, it argues instead for an understanding of Old Regime literary property as analogous to seigneurial property. In so doing, the article leads us to reconsider the relationship among Enlightenment ideas, the status of men of letters, and the commercialization of public life on the eve of the Revolution.