The Intellectual and His People. Jacques Ranciere
theatre opened up the theatrical box, with its lowered ceiling, its select public, and the mendacious frippery of its sets. It broke these walls to put theatrical action in the ‘outdoor air’ that was at the same time the backdrop of everyday life and the horizon of the infinite life in which ‘the soul of crowds’ could breathe freely.
But was the equivalence between the frisson of the Vosgian hills and that of the Aegean Sea a sufficient basis for the tragic grandeur of Le Diable marchand de goutte? This shows us the devil, disguised as a German peddler, use his trade in eau-de-vie to sow hatred in the village and set a son against his father. It is true that this village story, half realist and half fairy-tale, was enhanced by the Wagnerian struggle of a woman – the incarnation of love and pity – who offered her life as a sacrifice to hell in order to redeem the misdeeds of her husband and the evil of male egoism. But that was not enough, as the author himself recognized, to restore the grandeur of Aeschylus: ‘The sublime voice is silenced; the voice that has just awoken here amid these modest hills is simply the humblest stammering of an inglorious echo.’42
This people, devoid of great memories and the bearer of a young hope, had to rest content with the more modest expression of virtue that reflected in a minor key the spirit of soil and race: the sincerity of the work in which it would rediscover a little of its reality and its aspirations. Fraternity of ‘race’ – a word still certainly closer to its origins in Taine than to its future apocalypse – was the common description for this unproblematic circuit between author, actors and audience. Factory workers, a junior manager, college students, a teacher, an industrialist, a gardener and a representative on the departmental Conseil Général, acted in the play along with members of Pottecher’s own family. Recognizing familiar features in the author’s characters, they would be able to find, by an ‘instinctual fraternity’, the ‘precise gestures’, ‘natural intonations’ and ‘picturesque attitudes’ of a certain ‘popular type’.43 Thanks to them, a different fraternity would find expression between the public and the author writing for ‘men of the same race as himself, and almost of the same rank, men whose history, instincts, passions and inspirations he knows, and among whom he can, better than anywhere else, study and fix this reality from which every work of art draws its value.’44
The great community in which the vibrating soul of liberty breathed thus tended to boil down to a collusion between the village intellectual and his local territory. But the work’s ‘sincerity’ was not just a matter of this. It had in fact to obey a principle of maximum profitability. On penalty of being no more than a rural entertainment, it had to touch all the wellsprings capable of moving the unevenly cultivated energies of those who formed its public. ‘Simple as a twilight tale’ and constructed around a passion familiar to the local audience, it had to blend ‘comic lowness with the pathos of tragedy, and the fantastic with the exact quest for reality’.45 Suffice it to say that its ‘sincerity’ had to effect a precisely calibrated blend between realism – bitter and comic – and fairy-tale – neither too nebulous nor too familiar – in order to fix the contradictory investments of both its local and its lettered public. For the one, the scenes of rural life, allusions to everyday stories and traditional legends, served to procure a pleasure of recognition. For the other, these had to satisfy a mixed interest in the mists of legend and the exoticisms of naivety. Pottecher acknowledged this in the presentation of his second spectacle:
This taste for rustic pieces, for more or less naive idylls of action, is far more particular to the cultivated public and the educated minority than it is to the truly popular section of the audience to which the Théâtre du Peuple addresses itself.46
Country dwellers, just like urban workers, ‘prefer, to a theatre that presents themselves on stage, spectacles which, by the heroism of their passions and the novelty of their scenery and costumes, transport them far from themselves and their daily lives’, into ‘the unknown world of the ideal’.
Pottecher’s second spectacle, therefore, combined a farce, full of village folklore designed for the lettered class (Le Sotré de Noël), with a play of a quite different genre. Morteville related a conflict from time immemorial between mountain woodcutters and the people of an industrial town, stirred up by the intrigues of an intermediary, the dealer in hides. This is the classic theme of the combination of self-interest and backwardness against peace. But it was also a parable of the missionary action of young educated elements in the service of the people. The son of the village leader, Laurent, has come as an apostle to preach peace and instruction to the mountaineers. He falls victim to the fanaticisms inflamed by the intrigues of the dealer in hides, but his sacrifice, along with that of the wife of the woodcutters’ leader, will later serve the cause of peace between the two tribes. The annual performances of the Bussang theatre thus swung between dark dramas of backwardness – of peasant cupidity or superstition kept up by intrigue – and fairy-tale or comic entertainments based on local tradition. By way of this double form, they almost all dealt with the same theme: the encounter between peasant values and those of the city, the good and the bad ways of sticking with tradition or taking on the values of others. Le Sotré de Noël has the son of a peasant, who has spent time in the city and returned as a small businessman, opposed to an old peasant whose earthly cupidity blinds him to urban progress while exposing him to the embezzlement of a seedy business agent from the neighbouring town. L’Héritage has the solitary hillside as backdrop to the horrifying drama of a farmer conquered by his wife’s greed. The woman forces him to drive away his natural son, and she even sets under way an intrigue that leads to the boy being murdered by his father. Chacun cherche son trésor has a prince on the quest for a happy man coming into contact with various representative figures of the village world: the superstition of a greedy farmer, the manoeuvres of a plotting sacristan, the good humour of a philosophical shoemaker ruined by these intrigues and the bourgeois pretensions of his wife, the bragging of a good-looking soldier who has returned to the village – all this in the context of a traditional young people’s festival. Liberté, set during the Revolution, contrasts a traditionalist father with his son who has tasted the air of the revolutionary city and killed his aristocratic master when this man raised his hand to him: the conflict of two great social forces, liberty and tradition, called to reconcile themselves in the struggle for the endangered fatherland; while Le Lundi de la Pentecôte has two young people whose schooling has made them foreigners in their native world act as pacifiers at the centre of a grotesque conflict of village Montagues and Capulets.
This oscillation between the familiar and the grandiose, in both its form and its content, constantly tells the same story: the conflict that always has to be appeased between a world of local roots that is also one of egoism and prejudice, and a world of civilized values in which the great voice of the Ideal is steeped in the speech and manner of the city. This sustained externality was expressed even in the financial arrangement that supported the Bussang theatre. Though performances were free, costs were covered by putting on each year an advance premiere of the play that would be offered the next season to the popular public, for a paying audience of connoisseurs and benefactors. One day each year, therefore, the Théâtre du Peuple performed its own metaphor and warded off its own impossibility.
The exception and the rule
For certain people, to be sure, this impotence was the result of infidelity. In an article in the Revue d’art dramatique, Adrien Souberbielle criticized Pottecher for having betrayed ‘Michelet’s wish’. He had replaced the ‘embodied legend’ of national deeds with a symbolist legend created by the writer’s arbitrary will. But ‘legend is not imposed on the crowd by the initiative of an intellectual aristocracy . . . Legend is rather the “summed-up history, focused in simple and sublime images” by the spirit of the people. It is this that provides the fund of popular thought, while everything else is for them a frivolous tale soon forgotten.’47
The annual summer festival at Bussang, therefore, did not resolve the question of popular theatre. At the very most, it could play a pioneering role in that other requirement of art for the people: the objective of decentralization that – depending on convictions – could appeal to the people of Michelet, the ‘milieux’ of Taine, or the idylls of folklore. In fact, Pottecher’s work was followed in a variety of places where the encounter between the people and the lettered class, and the shock between old and new, took place in various ways. At Ploujean, near Morlaix,