Le Docteur noir : A French Romantic Drama in Blackface

Abstract

In recent years, studies of black and Orientalist characters in nineteenth-century French prose fiction and poetry have proliferated. 1 Scholarly attention to theatrical works featuring people of color, while growing, has developed far more slowly. 2 This disparity may be explained, to some extent, by the non-canonical status of the majority of those playwrights whose texts include non-white characters and by the conventional nature of their pieces, most of which were written for the popular theaters located on the Boulevards of Paris. Yet given the resurgence of interest in French melodrama over the past twenty-five years, such an explanation is not entirely satisfactory. 3 My purpose here, however, is not so much to explain why there have been relatively few scholarly analyses of non-European figures in nineteenth-century French drama as it is to add to existing studies on the subject. To that end, I propose to undertake an examination of Le Docteur noir, a Romantic (melo)drama by Auguste Anicet-Bourgeois and Philippe Dumanoir that opened a successful run at the Théâtre de la Porte-Saint-Martin on 30 July 1846 and was soon consecrated by the creation of a parody entitled Le Docteur blanc, ou Pierrot dans les colonies at the Théâtre des Funambules (12 Oct. 1846). 4