The Beauty of Revolt: Anarchist Theatre in the Belle Époque

Abstract

Parallels between twenty-first century terrorists and nineteenth-century dynamitards have prompted renewed interest in French anarchists of the Belle Epoque. But their cultural lives and dramatic experiments remain much less well known. This chapter sheds light on a fascinating network of anarchist individuals, groups, and communes, exploring the connections they imagined—and sought to realize—between beauty, art, and revolt, and charting their attempts at social and popular theatre as a means of creating liberated individuals. The theme of beauty as revolt offers a fruitful means of understanding and connecting the brief, experimental Theâtre d’Art Social, the misleadingly-entitled Theâtre Civique (intended to create defiant citizens, not a docile electorate), and the theatre and song of anarchist communes and communities in and around Paris in the years immediately preceding the First World War.