The Melodramatic Thread by Lehning James R.;

Author:Lehning, James R.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Indiana University Press

5. Commercial Spectacles in Postwar Paris

An underlying theme of this book has been the parallels between the dramatic culture of France—the development of genres and styles that marked French theater and film—and the country’s political culture. The performances I have examined thus far illustrate how, both in theaters and in more obviously political spaces, the melodramatic form, with its Manichean division of the world into good and evil, its plot centered on threats to and the rescue of virtue, and its inability to restore the unity of the world, has been a dominant mark of French culture at least since the Revolution. The era after the Liberation in 1945 in some respects seemed to move away from the simplistic vision of melodrama, however, instead addressing directly the ambiguities of a postwar France marked by increased commercialization and prosperity, but also moral complexity.

In a play presented on French radio on April 24, 1951, Bernard Zimmer illustrated these characteristics of the postwar world. Zimmer retold the story of Charlotte Corday, the assassin of Marat. His play begins not in the late eighteenth century, but in the mid-twentieth, in a meeting between the author of a play on Charlotte and a producer, a M. Grüsegott. Grüsegott suggests politely a “small change” in the play—that the man kill the woman. The author’s response is one of disbelief: “What? You want Marat to kill Charlotte Corday? … Impossible!” When Grüsegott asks why, the author responds, “Because, among us, a schoolchild of seven knows that Charlotte Corday ‘really’ killed Marat!” Confronted not only with the reality of the past, but also that this is a commonplace in French culture, Grüsegott regretfully agrees: “What a shame! The man killing the woman is more commercial!”1 In a few lines of dialogue, the play highlights not the clear-cut virtue and vice of melodramas but the varied pressures placed on both the author and Charlotte. These pressures included not only the long-standing ones of the meaning of the actions of Charlotte Corday and Maximilien Robespierre, and the ambiguities of those messages for France after the experience of the Second World War, Vichy, and the Occupation. Rather, the play also suggests the commercialization of representation and its distance from its referent that Guy Debord highlighted in the 1970s.

This chapter will examine the ways in which the thread of melodrama found its way into attempts to deal with the complexities of postwar French political culture. As in previous chapters, representations of the legacy of the French Revolution play significant roles in this culture. Yet even as these dramatizations moved to escape the long-standing traditions of French theatrical and political performance, they nevertheless were influenced by the melodramatic sensibility that was such an important part of those traditions. In the experimental theater of Ariane Mnouchkine and her Théâtre du Soleil, and in the celebration of the Bicentennial of the Revolution in 1989, we will see that the spectaculars of French political culture adopted new terms for expressing the older message of the virtue

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