Just a little writer

Her name was Marguerite Brunet, though France came to know her as La Montansier; and her story is a useful antidote to the comfortable assumption that people who claw their way up from the bottom of a rigged system will, upon arriving at the top, feel any particular urge to un-rig it.

Brunet was born in Bayonne in 1730. Her father, the aforementioned pinmaker, died when she was five; at around sixteen she moved to Paris, where an aunt introduced her to the capital's demimonde of kept women and their aristocratic keepers. By the brutal standards of that trade, she did well: her clientele came from the highest ranks. In 1750 a lover, newly appointed as a colonial intendant, took her to Martinique; when that cooled, she moved on to Saint-Domingue and reinvented herself as a marchande de modes - a fashion merchant. By 1753 she was back in France with a new name, "Mademoiselle Montansier", and a clear-eyed strategy: cultivate the courtiers who might prove useful later.

Her first attempt at the theatre, made only in her thirties (practically retirement age for an actress of the period), was as a performer, bankrolled by a wealthy young lover, the marquis de Saint-Contest. She debuted in Dunkerque and Nantes playing mothers and queens, and the audiences were not kind. The problem, apparently, was her accent: the actor Fleury, who later worked for her, described her as méridionale - southern - "in accent, in gestures, and in sentiments". Delightful at a dinner table; fatal in classical verse.

However - and this is where she parts company with most failed actresses of the age - Montansier simply changed sides of the curtain. She formed her own troupe, took it to Amiens, Caen and Nantes in 1766, and two years later pulled off the coup of her life: the theatrical privilege of Versailles itself, plus the right to entertain the court wherever it travelled.

A word about privileges, then - because this is where one needs to understand the context a bit. Provincial theatre under the old regime was a peculiar world. A privilège was an exclusive royal licence: whoever held it for a town or province enjoyed a legal monopoly on performances there, rival troupes were simply barred, and municipal authorities lost their traditional say over which players visited them. Better yet, the holder could levy the quart des spectacles - literally a quarter of the gross takings - on any acrobat, marionettist or minor foreign troupe in their territory. Some collected it even in towns they never visited, starving them of entertainment altogether.

This was the system Montansier used for her own advantage. Through the late 1760s and 1770s she snapped up privileges across Brittany, Normandy, Picardy and Anjou, running it with her lover and lifelong partner, the actor Neuville. Her political cover came from the most powerful women in France: first Louis XV's mistress Madame du Barry, then Queen Marie-Antoinette, who provided the support, permission and land for a brand-new playhouse in Versailles; the king and queen attended its opening night in 1777.

This was the empire in which poor de Verteuil learned what a labour dispute looked like. Mind you, royal favour cut both ways: shielded by the queen, her troupe staged French parodies of Italian operas at court in 1787, trampling the Comédie-Italienne's exclusive rights. Monopolies, it turned out, were sacred when they were hers.

Despite her ruthlessness, Fleury remembered her as "a charming woman", fair to her employees as far as her temper allowed, though "not the least in the world a friend of order"; her days belonged to the theatre, her nights to the gambling table. When a Rouen audience threw a letter onto the stage in 1787 demanding the removal of several actors, she responded with a masterly contrite letter in the local press, bowing to the authority of "the Public" and pleading for patience with a single tenor - good tenors being "rare, very rare". She knew precisely which audiences could be coerced and which had to be courted.

Then the Revolution arrived, the powers that be changed, and the tools of oppression were, if anything, sharpened. Montansier moved to Paris, opened a hugely successful theatre in the Palais-Royal in 1790, and in August 1793 - of all possible moments - inaugurated opposite the Bibliothèque Nationale a playhouse so magnificent that Parisians dubbed it the "Théâtre des Trois Millions". However, a monument to luxury at the height of the Terror attracted attention of the worst kind. Hébert's news-sheet accused her of financing her new theatre with highwaymen's loot, while and on 13 November 1793 Chaumette denounced her to the Paris Commune with the creative charge that the theatre had been funded by Marie-Antoinette so that it might catch fire and burn down the national library. The next day, the sixty-three-year-old Montansier and Neuville were in prison.

She survived - released in September 1794 - and spent years suing for compensation. However, the pattern of her life now ran in reverse: the woman who had once wielded arbitrary power was reduced to petitioning it. An opera house opened in 1801 to woo Bonaparte failed (he refused to attend - the surrounding streets were too convenient for assassins), and by the end of 1802 she was in prison again, this time for debt. Her old Palais-Royal theatre, meanwhile, was out-earning the Opera itself - so naturally Napoleon evicted the troupe in 1806, on the grounds that it offended the dignity of the Théâtre-Français next door (which was a rather nebulous charge) and that it was a notorious haunt of prostitutes (that was less spurious - the Arch-Chancellor Cambacérès was keeping one of its actresses; as you can imagine, his motives were not strictly artistic.)

She married Neuville at last in 1800, at seventy; he died soon afterwards. Of her own death my sources say nothing - though she lived long enough to see the Bourbons return, and to write to Louis XVIII requesting a yearly benefit performance to support her old age, citing nearly fifty years of service to the French stage.

The story of this genre - which would eventually conquer Versailles, produce some of the eighteenth century's most beloved music, and outlast the very monarchy that tried to suppress it - begins not in gilded salons but in the ramshackle booths of the Foire Saint-Germain and the Foire Saint-Laurent, the great seasonal trade fairs of Paris. These théâtres de la foire - literally, fairground theatres - had always been licensed to put on acrobatic shows, animal turns, and brief comic sketches as a way of luring customers to the commercial stalls.

Their great opportunity came in 1697, when the official Italian acting troupe in Paris made the catastrophic error of staging La Fausse Prude - a play widely understood to be a satire of Madame de Maintenon, the king's morganatic wife. The play was banned, the company disbanded, and the Italian actors sent packing into exile. This left Paris with only two official theatres: the Opéra and the Comédie-Française. Nature, as they say, abhors a vacuum - and so, apparently, did Parisian audiences. The fairground performers promptly seized the Italians' abandoned repertoire of short, irreverent farces heavy on song, dance, physical comedy, and what contemporary accounts politely term "lively imagination and fantasy." The public loved it. The official theatres did not.

Now, the Comédie-Française was not merely irritated by this upstart competition; it was genuinely threatened by it. In the first half of the century, the grand old institution was playing to houses that averaged roughly four hundred spectators per evening in a hall that held thirteen hundred (not exactly a roaring success by anyone's measure). The fairground theatres, meanwhile, were packing them in. The Comédie-Française responded in the time-honoured fashion of monopolists everywhere: it lobbied for the competition to be shut down.

And shut down it was - or rather, the authorities tried. In 1707, a decree forbade the fairground actors from performing plays with dialogue. Very well; they were reduced to monologues. Then another decree banned them from speaking at all. Very well; they would perform à la muette - in silent pantomime. But here is where the actors showed the kind of obstinate ingenuity that would define the genre they were in the process of inventing. They had enormous scrolls covered in song lyrics written in huge letters lowered from the flies above the stage, and the audience read the words and sang them out loud, set to well-known popular tunes called vaudevilles. These performances were called comédies à écriteaux - literally, "plays with signs".

In 1709, the Comédie-Française escalated matters further. Its actors actually hired their own theatre carpenters to physically storm and demolish the fairground stage. It was rebuilt in eight days.

The turning point came, as it so often does in ancien régime France, through a combination of financial desperation and bureaucratic horse-trading. The Opéra, staggering under enormous debts, decided in 1712 that it was willing to sell the fairground performers a licence to use singers, dancers, and stage sets - in exchange for a staggering annual fee that eventually reached 35,000 livres. Legally permitted to perform musical theatre at last, the fairground troupe adopted the name opéra-comique around 1714-1715. The term initially meant something quite specific: a play composed entirely of vaudevilles - those borrowed popular melodies - strung together one after another, with new words fitted to old tunes. It was not, at this stage, what anyone would call musically sophisticated. However, it was enormously entertaining, and it had the enormous advantage of being familiar. Everybody already knew the tunes.

The man who did most to give the early opéra-comique its literary respectability was Alain-René Lesage, who had previously written for the Comédie-Française itself. His Turcaret (1709) - a sharp, cynical satire on ruthless financiers in which there are no sympathetic characters whatsoever - had been a success there. But then Lesage, exhausted by the internal intrigues of the official actors, defected to the world of opera-comique. He also had the good sense to publish the fairground repertoire in ten volumes between 1721 and 1737, which means we actually know - and his contemporaries knew - what these pieces looked like.

In 1762, the government engineered the merger of the Opéra-Comique with the Comédie-Italienne, finally elevating this scrappy fairground entertainment to the status of an official, Crown-supported royal theatre. One critic described it as the moment the opéra-comique received its "letters of naturalization" - a peculiar turn of phrase, given that the genre had originated entirely within France's own borders. What he presumably meant was that it had finally been admitted to polite society. Indeed, it was admitted all the way to Versailles itself: by the 1770s and 1780s, opéra-comique largely dictated the theatrical seasons at the royal court.

By the end of the ancien régime, the opéra-comique was flourishing while the "real" opera - the grand tragédie lyrique - was, by most accounts, quietly dying.

In the first half of the century, the naval port of Brest was not exactly famed for its theatrical flair. What entertainment there was, was limited to itinerant troupes playing in a precarious wooden warehouse. Then everything changed when the local naval commander, Aymar Joseph, comte de Roquefeuil, conceived of a daring dream. He was not only a passionate theater enthusiast, but also convinced that a permanent theater was going to do wonders for his officers, many of whom were rather unruly scions of France’s noble families. A habit of rare theatre-going would, he was sure, maintain discipline, boost morale, and educate these young provincial recruits, deliberately diverting them from "gambling, taverns, fighting”… not to mention the local brothels. In 1762, he argued to his superiors in Versailles that Brest needed a theatre; indeed, the Navy itself needed it.

The king approved the project, providing a plot of land on the arsenal's parade grounds and - which was a much rarer occasion - a loan directly from the naval budget. Naval architect Antoine Choquet de Lindu was hired to design the building, envisioning a grand recreation complex for the troops. TheThéâtre de la Marine officially opened in late 1766, boasting an impressive 900 seats.

To pay back the construction loans and fund a permanent, year-round acting troupe, Roquefeuil instituted a mandatory subscription system for his men. The costs were automatically deducted from the monthly wages of naval officers, scaled by rank: captains initially paid seven livres a month, while young guards paid four. When the city magistrates attempted to make him share the authority over the theatre, Roquefeuil rebuffed them: he envisioned his project as something maintained by the Navy’s (and his) exclusive patronage, with everything - from repertoire to the design of posters - geared towards the officers, not regular townsfolk.

The repertoire consisted of comedies, tragedies, and lavish production of opera and ballet. In 1771, it was in Theatre de la Marine that the playwright Joseph Patrat famously staged a heavily doctored, pro-military version of Louis-Sébastien Mercier's originally anti-war play by the name of Le Déserteur.

However, Roquefeuil’s dream soon revealed to have too high a price… quite literally. A grand theater with a permanent, year-round troupe could not survive solely on the backs of military subscriptions, especially without cultivating a larger civilian audience the way… well, pretty much every single other theatre in the realm did. Theatre de la Marine gorged on money like some insatiable beast, and successive directors went bankrupt one after another—one of them, Fonpré de Fracanssale, even fled to the Caribbean in 1770 to escape a massive debt of over 42,000 livres. Refusing to abandon his pet project, or even to scale it down, Roquefeuil resorted to secretly diverting tens of thousands of livres from the royal naval treasury to cover the costs.

In the autumn of 1771, the Crown uncovered the catastrophic financial situation, realizing the theater had accumulated nearly 80,000 livres in unauthorized debt. The minister responsible for the Navy immediately cut off funding and ordered Roquefeuil to repay the stolen funds using the officers' ongoing subscription payments—a move that met with severe outrage. Without financial guarantees from the military, no private director agreed to assume the risk, and the Théâtre de la Marine closed its doors in 1772.

A later attempt to reopen it under the general patronage of the navy had a dramatic conclusion in the first year of the revolution.

When the naval authorities sought to ban the practice of throwing verses on stage, which they had previously allowed, the audience decided they were not going to take this arbitrary restriction lying down (or, rather, sitting down). Events came to a head on the closing night of the season. In early April 1789, the reading of one such a poem was not permitted despite the enthusiasm of many young men from the town, and a man sitting in the parquet called out for "the verses!". When the naval guards stepped in to arrest him, the audience rose up in support. A military officer responded by calling the guard to arms. The indignant spectators quickly emptied the theater. Crowds gathered in the streets, but were forced back. However, they did achieve one thing: the man who had been arrested was released just half an hour later. Besides, at this time, the assembly of the Third Estate was meeting in Brest to draw up their lists of grievances (cahiers de doléances ) to submit to the king, and its representatives took up the cause. They demanded that civilians who merely wanted to watch plays in their own hometown in peace were no longer be subjected to policing by the navy— one petition denounced the present order of things as "humiliations of military despotism."

Encouraged by this support, the public launched a severe strike, refusing to attend performances and actively discouraging other city residents from doing so. When the theater reopened in late April, the naval authorities saw rows upon rows of dark, empty seats. The same thing happened on the next night, and the next; indeed, it lasted for weeks to come. The citizens only relaxed their resolve after the local commander agreed to their demands - allow the town an equal share in the authority over the theatre and stop keeping the boxes exclusive to the aristocratic officers (and also stop these aristocratic officers from throwing local townsfolk out of these best seats whenever they wanted these for themselves, please).