Political Theater Censorship in Nineteenth-Century France in Comparative European Perspective

Abstract

Nineteenth-century French political theater censorship was fundamentally in the mainstream of continental European drama censorship, yet it also reflected unique French characteristics. As elsewhere, because theater was viewed as so important during this era of European history, stage censorship occupied a huge amount of the time and energy of French officials and especially focused on proposed texts that were feared as threatening the existing political, legal and class order. Moreover, given the especial fear of the poor and illiterate throughout Europe after the French revolution, and the far greater access of the ‘dark masses’ to the stage as compared with print media, both French authorities and their European counterparts paid particular attention to productions presented in venues which especially attracted the lower classes. Although resistance to the theater censorship began earlier and was more intense in France than elsewhere, French resistance techniques were quite similar to those used elsewhere. However, French theater censorship reflected the unique characteristics of the country in three ways: (1) because the theater was probably even more important in France than anywhere else in continental Europe, censorship also seems to have been more important, and it clearly engaged the attention of both the authorities and the opposition more than elsewhere; (2) the centralized-authoritarian-bureaucratic nature of nineteenth-century French politics was reflected in highly centralized censorship decisions which were not subject to court appeal, unlike in several other European countries; and (3) the extraordinary instability of nineteenth-century French politics was completely and accurately reflected in French theater censorship history, which, to a degree unknown elsewhere in Europe, was repeatedly abolished, reinstated, tightened or loosened in a clear echo of broader political currents.