From Siege to Lock-out: An Actors' Strike at the Comédie-Française in 1765

Extract

The aims and ambitions of this article are initially fairly limited. I want to examine a series of events which occurred at the Comédie-Française in April and May of 1765, leading to a complete disruption of normal performances at the theatre, to the imprisonment of most of the company's leading actors, and to the temporary withdrawal from performance of what might otherwise have been eighteenth-century France's biggest ‘box-office hit’, Le Siège de Calais, a patriotic tragedy by Pierre-Laurent Buirette de Belloy. In themselves these events, sometimes known as l'affaire Dubois after the actor most directly involved in them, are little more than a bizarre and sporadically scurrilous footnote to the theatrical history of France in the eighteenth century. But the more one examines them, the more they illuminate certain rather murky areas of literary and social history, two areas in particular: firstly, the social relations of the acting profession at a time when it was, despite considerable pressure from numerous sources, still barred en bloc from the sacraments of the Catholic church; and secondly, the degree of autonomy which could be said to have existed for a company which was, legally, a kind of workers' co-operative but which, at any rate at that stage, operated within a rather ill-defined administrative limbo (it was simultaneously autonomous and totally subject to noble whim). The strike which brought about the cancellation of performances of Le siège de Calais in April 1765 is, then, a specific and in no way typical event, but one which draws together a number of historical strands – literary, theatrical, economic, moral and political – in a particularly interesting way. I want, in the course of this article, to deal with two questions – questions to which I do not really feel able to give definitive answers but which may, when examined, cast doubt upon one or two familiar preconceptions about the nature of the eighteenth-century theatre as a profession, and at the same time open up certain areas of enquiry with regard to the theatre as a material reality rather than a predominantly literary or artistic form. The questions are in themselves quite simple: why did the sociétaires of the Comédie-Française refuse, on Monday, 15th April 1765, to perform a play which, given its enormous success earlier in the year, it was very much in their economic interests to present? And why did the resulting situation become so irreducible that, far from the usual discreet pressures being brought to bear on the relevant authorities to resolve the dispute, it led to the imprisonment of three of the most popular ‘stars’ of the century, and to an effective lockout lasting for almost a month?