Abstract
“Short of opening a brothel on stage one could not penetrate the conditions of prostitution more deeply than the play had, and therefore it was not possible to authorize its performance.”1 These were the words of the Minister of Beaux-Arts in the French legislature during a debate in 1891 on the censorship of a naturalist play entitled La Fille Elisa. Throughout the nineteenth century the system of preventive censorship (censure preventive) required that each play performed on the stage in France receive a visa from a board of censors employed as civil servants. Naturalist theatre posed difficult challenges for preventive censorship. The categories traditionally used by the censor to spot objectionable material—words, images, and depictions identifiable in a script prior to the actual performance—were inadequate in the face of the new aesthetic methods and social concerns of naturalist playwrights and directors. The government attempted to censor them on general as opposed to narrow technical grounds, but this approach was difficult to legitimate and met resistance, which ultimately helped to bring this firmly established institution to an end. In 1904, the French theatre was freed from this restrictive practice.
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Notes
For Germany, Peter Jelavich, “Paradoxes of Censorship in Modern Germany,” in Mark S. Micale and Robert L. Diede (eds.), Enlightenment, Passion, Modernity: Historical Essays in European Thought and Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000)
John Russell Stephens, The Censorship of English Drama, 1824–1901 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980)
John Johnston, The Lord Chamberlains Blue Pencil (London: Hodder & Stroughton, 1990)
Tracy C. Davis, The Economics of the British Stage, 1800–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Margaret Moffat, Rousseau et la querelle du théâtre au 18eme siècle (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1970), 14.
See Rosalind Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth Century France (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982), 37–45.
Mona Ozouf’“Regeneration” in François Furet and Mona Ozouf (eds.), Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 781–790.
F.W.J. Hemmings, Theatre and the State in France, 1760–1905 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 204–214.
Hemmings, Theatre and the State in France, 1760–1905, 223; Odile Krakovitch, Hugo Censuré: La Liberté au théâtre au XIXe siècle (Paris: Calman-Levy, 1985), 251.
Venita Datta, Birth of a National Icon: The Literary Avant-Garde and the Origins of the Intellectual in France (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1999), 138
Eugenia Herbert, The Artist and Social Reform: France and Belgium, 1885–1898 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1961), 162.
Christophe Charle, Naissance des“intellectuels” 1880–1900 (Paris: Les Éditions de minuit, 1990), 111–113.
Gregory S. Brown, “Reconsidering the Censorship of Writers in Eighteenth-Century France: Civility, State Power, and the Public Théâtre in the Enlightenment,” Journal of Modern History, vol. 75 (June 2003), 238–240.
Carol E. Harrison, The Bourgeois Citizen in Nineteenth Century France: Gender, Sociability, and the Uses of Emulation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 34–35.
André Antoine, Mes souvenirs sur le Théâtre Libre (Paris: Arthème Fayard & Cie., 1921), 219.
Benjamin quoted in Mary Louise Roberts, “Gender, Consumption, and Commodity Culture,” AHR vol. 103, no. 3 (June 1998), 817–818.
Alain Corbin, Les Filles de noce: Misère sexuelle et prostitution aux 19e et 20e siècles (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1978)
Judith Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980)
T.J. Clark, The Pain ting ofModern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers (New York: Knopf 1984)
Jill Harsin, Policing Prostitution in Nineteenth Century Paris (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985)
Odile Krakovitch, Hugo Censuré: La Liberté au théâtre au XIXe Siècle (Paris: Calman-Levy, 1985), 252.
See Philip Nord, Republican Moment: Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 13.
Krakovitch, Hugo Censuré-, 253–254. The idea of the public itself addressing social and political issues direcdy foreshadows Dürkheims discussion of the role of authority and the response of intellectuals during the Dreyfus Affair. See Emile Dürkheim, “Individualism and the Intellectuals”in Robert Bellah (ed.), On Morality and Society, ed. Robert Bellah (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 43–57
Gary Stark, “The Censorship of Literary Naturalism, 1885–1895,” 333; Jean Graham-Jones, “Broken Pencils and Crouching Dictators: Issues of Censorship in Contemporary Argentine Theatre,” Theatre Journal, 53 (2001), 605.
On the ralliement see John McManners, Church and State in France, 1870–1914 (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 75–93.
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© 2005 Sally Debra Charnow
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Charnow, S.D. (2005). The Politics of Preventive Censorship. In: Theatre, Politics, and Markets in Fin-de-Siècle Paris. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-05458-6_3
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