Dramatic Authorship and the Honor of Men of Letters in Eighteenth-Century France Gregory S. Brown Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Volume 27, 1998, pp. 259-282 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/sec.2010.0111 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/267205/summary Access provided at 7 Jan 2020 11:23 GMT from Queen Mary University of London (+1 other institution account) Dramatic Authorship and the Honor of Men of Letters in Eighteenth-Century France GREGORY S. BROWN "When [the Minister] learned that I had rushed into print, he . . . had me removed from his employ, on the pretext that a love for letters is incompatible with a mind for business. . . . When I returned to Madrid, I wanted to try again my literary talents, and the theater appeared to me a field of honor." Figaro, in Le Barbier de Seville' In traditional literary historiography, the above citation would be evidence of the subordinated position of writers in eighteenth-century French society and of their desire for autonomy from such protectors as "the Minister" who Umits what his client could write and prevents him from taking his work into print and onto the literary marketplace. Such a reading then would explain Figaro's tum to the theater as a move towards greater independence as a writer, since presumably playwrights could present their work directly to a commercial public and thereby escape subordination to an elite patron.2 Yet Figaro goes on to equate theater not with the writer's independence, but with his "honor," suggesting that as a writer, he sought not the potential for economic autonomy offered by the market for print, but recognition of his social prominence or honorabilité, which could come only from elites.3 Figaro's creator, Pierre-Augustin Carón de Beaumarchais, exemplified an Old Regime bourgeois who sought social prominence through dramatic 259 260 / BROWN authorship. From his own life, Beaumarchais understood that recognition as a man of letters in eighteenth-century France depended less on actual literary production than on conducting oneself according to specifically elite norms of behavior, so as to be recognized as "honorable." At the same time, Beaumarchais—more than most of his contemporaries—understood that the emergence of a more socially heterogeneous "public" of theater spectators and readers of print created a new form of social prominence, which differed from the prominence conferred by elite protectors.4 Most of all, Beaumarchais realized that playwriting for the royal theater, the Comédie-Française, offered a unique opportunity for an aspiring man of letters to demonstrate his adherence to elite norms (by showing disdain for the idea of writing for material gain rather than glory), while at the same time reaching a broad public (through commercial performances and subsequent, printed editions of his plays). This paper, therefore, explores the strategies of Beaumarchais and other aspiring writers to reposition themselves more prominently in literary life by becoming identified publicly as playwrights for the Comédie-Française. First, it explains why being a playwright for the Comédie-Française was important in the latter half of the century. Then, it considers who these would-be writers were by developing a sociological profile of those seeking to be identified as playwrights for the royal theater. Next, it explores writers' strategies for identifying themselves publicly with the Comédie-Française. Finally, it places their strategies in the context of Old Regime society, before offering conclusions about the history and historiography of writers generally in eighteenth-century Europe. I During the reign of Louis XIV, literary patronage in France had been largely consolidated into the court at Versailles; concomitantly, writers were pulled away from their traditional patrons among the provincial nobility, who had sponsored salons, circles and provincial academies and theaters in the early and mid-seventeenth century. This centralization, while limiting the number of writers who could benefit, increased the prestige available to those few who did enjoy elite sponsorship.5 The result was heightened competition among those seeking to identify themselves as writers through royal sinecures, royal academic memberships, and other visible links to the court and the crown. However, in the latter decades of the Old Regime, this centraliza- tion trend was reversed, and royal patronage itself declined—thereby reduc- ing the number of writers who could use it to ensure their prominence as honorable. No longer able to depend on provincial aristocrats and distanced Dramatic Authorship and the Honor of Men of tetters / 261 from the royal court, later eighteenth-century writers had to find new ways to identify themselves as "men of letters" and to justify the prominent place in society which they believed appropriate to them. The locus of an identification as a writer, therefore, shifted again in the latter half of the century, from the court to the informal but highly stratified networks of Parisian elites. No matter how much they wrote, how widely their works circulated, or how well their works succeeded commercially, would-be men of letters needed visible markers of their association with the socially and culturally prominent to be accepted as fully legitimate participants in literary life. Consequently, those on the margins of literary life faced an antinomy between a reality of dependency on elites and an ideal of autonomy offered by the public. To become clients of elites, aspiring men of letters had to appear disinterested in their own gain to demonstrate their honorability, while at the same time gaining enough acclaim to come to the attention of potential protectors in the first place. From this indeterminant position, one of the few strategies available to them was to have a play performed successfully on the stage of the royal theater. In the mid-seventeenth century, at Cardinal Richelieu's palace, as yet unestablished writers such as Pierre Corneille and then Jean Racine had won elite recognition, even as they gained acclaim from acommercial audience.6 Then, in 1680, royal Letters Patent established a single royal troupe for Paris and the court, which became known as the Comédie-Française. Performing primarily for a commercial, Parisian audience, the troupe members remained in the service of and sanctioned by the King, supervised from Versailles. As both an emanation of the court and an urban, commercial venue, the Comédie enjoyed at once unrivaled prestige in the eyes of elites and a monopoly on commercial performances of spokenlanguage works in French.7 Moreover, its great prestige was accessible ostensibly to any would-be playwright who could have a work performed by the theater and favorably received by its public. Unlike state theaters elsewhere in Europe, the ComédieFrançaise had no house playwright or dramaturge. Other than for royal command performances at Versailles or Fontainbleau, the troupe members enjoyed great discretion in composing their repertory for commercial performances in the capital, choosing plays from among unsolicited works submitted by external playwrights. In principle, then, the Comédie-Française offered to up-and-coming writers a chance to present their work before a commercial public while, at the same time, demonstrating to courtly and urban elites their personal suitability for acceptance into the Parisian monde as men of letters. Yet, in making their selections, the actors generally preferred works by writers known personally to them, to the theater's audience, or its protectors and supervisors at court: four dukes holding the office of First 262 / BROWN Gentlemen of the King's Bedchamber. The Comédie-Française therefore exercised an important gatekeeper function, determining which among the aspiring writers would or would not be able to put their work—and to position themselves as writers—before the elites who were the theater's tradi- tional constituency, as well as what was becoming in the later eighteenth century a broader theater-going public. For later eighteenth-century writers, dramatic authorship then meant not only writing plays; it could also be a strategy for social positioning. Aspiring writers, if they succeeded in having their work well received on the Comédie's stage, could thereby attain renown among the theater's multiple publics, from the audience in attendance, to the Parisian and provincial press, to the elite monde of the capital, and to the court. No other institution could bring a previously uncelebrated writer such acclaim so quickly, while enhancing rather than diminishing his honorability and thereby establishing his status as an honorable man of letters.8 In general, writing plays commanded a higher degree of respect than other forms of expression, such as the writing of novels. According to the literary historian John Pappas, "If a young writer wished to become celebrated as rapidly as possible in salon society ... his surest means was to become a successful playwright."9 Moreover, writing for the official, royal theater could grant prestige without the notoriety associated with publication in print or with performance in one of the less prestigious, more commercialized venues, such as the Comédie-Italienne or the boulevard and fair theaters. While authoring mixed genre and parodie plays for fair theaters and the Italienne could and certainly did bring some writers to prominence in the early decades of the century, such prominence was not as honorable in the eyes of courtly and urban elites. Thus, both Pierre Carlet de Chamblain (Marivaux) and Alexis Piron, despite their successes on the fair theater and Italienne stages, respectively, continued to strive to have classical tragedies performed by the Française as a way to alter their identification with burlesque genres and venues, which inhibited their full acceptance into elite Parisian social and literary life. Marivaux stmggled to overcome a reputation as a fair-theater author; only after he had ceased writing for the Italienne could his impeccably mondaine protector, Madame de Tencin, wage a successful campaign for his election to the Académie française in 1742. Even then, his reception into that august body created a scandal, and Marivaux continued to be seen in elite networks as less than fully honorable until Madame de Geoffrin ultimately evicted him from her salon in 1753. Piron, too, became too closely identified with parodie plays and secondary venues to win acceptance among what he called gens d'esprit. For decades after his successes at fair theaters in the 1720s and the success of Métromanie at the Française in 1738, he still sought to have a classical tragedy performed by the Française which he hoped would "re-establish my glory." In the 1750s, he complained bitterly in corre- Dramatic Authorship and the Honor of Men of tetters / 263 spondence of his lack of "reputation as a man of letters" and of academic memberships. For an edition of his complete works, he wrote a new preface to Métromanie, stating that while his verse may not have been glorious, he deserved to be seen as "an honorable man."10 A public association with the Comédie-Française became an even greater distinction for playwrights in the middle decades of the century, when its actors and supervisors actively enforced its monopoly against boulevard theaters, such as Jean Monnet's Opéra-Comique. In 1762, the Comédie-Italienne ceased to rival the Française, when the former acquired the exclusive license to perform comic operas; for the next eighteen years, the Italienne performed almost no new spoken-language plays in French. In 1780, when the reconstituted Italienne once again began performing new French plays, it remained a clearly less prestigious option for authors, and there was very little crossover of its authors to the Comédie-Française.11 Crossover was even less common in the second half of the century for authors at boulevard theaters, who generally were already members of these secondary troupes and did not aspire to the status of a Comédie-Française playwright. Although there were a few boulevard authors who submitted works to the official theater, they generally had little success. More importantly, according to Michèle Root-Bernstein, boulevard authors had little desire to leave their "niche" and to enter social networks tied to the Comédie-Française.12 ΠWho, then, were the playwrights identified with the royal stage? One may construct a prosopography of Comédie-Française authors from the twentytwo members of the Société des auteurs dramatiques (SAD), which was formed in 1777 of most of the living playwrights whose plays had been performed at the Comédie-Française. At the direction of the First Gentlemen, Beaumarchais had founded the SAD by gathering "the most honorable and well-behaved authors" to provide their views on the theater's operating regulations, which had been an ongoing source of disagreement between playwrights and the troupe. Although three performed authors living in 1777 declined to participate in the SAD due to age or distance from Paris, and three others were not considered worthy of membership, the group included all those who identified themselves as playwrights for the Comédie-Française and who were accepted by their peers and the First Gentlemen as suitable to claim the status of "dramatic author" for the royal theater.13 This group can be compared to the profile compiled by Robert Damton of several thousand published authors in France between 1757 and 1784.14 As a whole, the social background of the SAD membership appears slightly inferior to that of the universe of writers as a whole. For example, Damton shows 264 / BROWN that roughly 11 percent of latter eighteenth-century authors were from noble families and 16 percent were non-nobles from the legal and judicial milieu. Among the twenty-two playwrights, only two were noble, although three others were from landowning families. Moreover and most significantly, at least ten of the twenty-two were from non-noble legal, financial or administrative backgrounds. Of the rest, at least five dramatic authors were of artisanal or poor origins, a higher proportion than in Darnton's sample. The dramatic authors appear even less impressive when compared to the profile of members of eighteenth-century academies, as studied by Daniel Roche (for the provinces) and Martin Edwards (for the Académie française in Paris).15 The first and second estates and direct beneficiaries of court patronage were significantly less represented in the SAD than in either the provincial academies or the Académie française. Roche has demonstrated that of six thousand members of eighteenth-century provincial academies, 57 percent were from the privileged orders, while Edwards finds well over half the eighteenth-century members of the Académie française benefitted from direct patronage, a sinecure, or a beneficed position in the Church. By contrast, most of the dramatic authors were generally not bom with social standing and did not hold honorific positions or sinecures. This comparison suggests that for those hoping to acquire such prominence and thereby legitimate their claims to be "men of letters," the Comédie-Française offered a possibility to gain access to the social and economic capital that members of academies had acquired through birth, patronage or a sinecure. In terms of age, the playwrights were widely scattered, ranging from twenty-eight years old to seventy-one; the average age was forty-eight at the time of the group's formation. This can be compared with Edwards's finding that the members of the Académie française were, on average, age forty-four at election, a statistic which remained steady across the century. Yet of the twenty SAD's founding members not already in the Académie, seventeen were at or past this age in 1777. After having devoted their best years to their literary efforts and not having much to show for it, they may have seen the Comédie as their only remaining avenue for advancement to prominence. Moreover, only two of the authors had their first play performed at the Comédie-Française before the age of thirty, and seventeen had their premiere there between the ages of thirty and forty, suggesting that playwrights made their entry into the Parisian literary milieu relatively late in life, beyond the midpoint of their adulthood. Given the amount of social capital accumulation—what we might call "networking"—necessary to attain a sinecure or election to the Académie, me Comédie-Française may have appeared as a way for those less well connected to make up ground quickly. Unlike the members of the provincial academies and far from those of the Académie française, most of the members of the SAD were very much still Dramatic Authorship and the Honor of Men of tetters / 265 in search of the means to establish themselves as honorable men of letters, and the most evident source of such status was the Comédie-Française. m However, this sociological profile, while suggesting a pattern among authors who succeeded in having plays performed at the Comédie between 1750 and 1777, does not reveal much about the motivation to submit a play to the Comédie for those who saw in dramatic authorship an opportunity to position themselves as men of letters. Therefore, one must next consider why and how did writers approach the Comédie-Française in order to discover what function the official theater served in their strategies for social positioning through playwriting. Alain Viala, in his study of over five hundred authorial trajectories in the mid-seventeenth century, perceives two principal authorial trajectories, of which the more classic was the stratégie de réussite (the social climbing strategy). Authors on this trajectory attained financial and social support incrementally, first from institutional sources such as provincial academies and salons. Through institutional participations, would-be men of letters cultivated patrons, who in tum helped them continue their advance to more prestigious sinecurial positions, in Paris, at the court, and ultimately perhaps the Académie française.16 In the eighteenth century, the last author to follow such a trajectory was Voltaire.17 Arouet le jeune, of course, became known first as a playwright with the Comédie-Française's staging of Oedipe in November 1718. Favorable audience response led him to dedicate the first printed edition to the Regent, the duc d'Orléans. When the due accepted the dedication, the young writer felt himself to have arrived as a man of letters, and he signalled his social repositioning by affecting the name, "Voltaire."18 Then in April 1725, the success of his second tragedy, Hérode et Mariamne, allowed him to reposition himself further. Several months after the play's successful second premiere, and just as the printed preface appeared attributing his motivation as a writer to a desire to please "the public," Voltaire wrote to the marquise de Bernière and Nicolas Tieriot soliciting a position at court. In response, the financier Pâris-Duverney offered him a pension and invited him into the Queen's entourage. Voltaire's letter expressing gratitude to the marquise demonstrates his understanding that while the success of his tragedies had brought him to the attention of the court, the acceptability conferred upon him by Pâris-Duverney's invitation established him as a man of letters. Moreover, this incident demonstrates that gaining admission into the elite monde through a typically early modem strategy of clientelism was fully compatible with a printed declaration of his motivation as a writer to please the "public."19 For the rest of his life, Voltaire continued to write plays for the royal troupe, but 266 / BROWN from this point on, the Comédie ceased to be his primary source of social value. Having gained recognition as a man of letters, he could openly and successfully seek further elite protection, which led to his appointment as royal historiographer in 1745 and election the following year to the Académie. The SAD members, generally a generation younger than Voltaire, found such a paththrough salons and academies to court sinecures largely blocked to them. In response, several instead pursued a modified form of the second trajectory identified by Viala, that of the stratégie de succès (the smash-hit strategy). Authors on this trajectory generated renown more broadly than would be possible in salons or provincial academies; instead of gaining support through the cultivation of a personal relationship with a patron, they sought it from a largely anonymous "public." As had been the case in the seventeenth century, the most accessible means for a late eighteenth-century author to generate support for himself before such a public was the theater, especially the Comédie-Française—due to its combination of great prestige and limited barriers to entry for prospective playwrights.20 In the 1750s, the Comédie-Française therefore became a vehicle for positioning by those with education and aspirations to prominence but without a clear means to convert their intellectual capital into social status. An exemplary aspirant to prominence as a man of letters was Jean-François Marmontel.21 Marmontel, the son of a provincial stonecutter, smdied first with a local Jesuit cleric, and then on a scholarship at the nearby Collège de Mauriat. From there, Marmontel went to a seminar at Clermont and then continued his novitiate as an instmctor at the Collège des Bernardins in Toulouse. There, he became involved in the city's rich literary life, including academies, theaters and the celebrated Jeux floraux, an annual literary competition. In 1744, he won a prize in this competition—an entry into literary life not that dissimilar from that of Voltaire, despite their evident differences in social origins. The turning point in Marmontel's trajectory came in 1745 when, after reading Marmontel's favorable review of his own writings, Voltaire urged him to submit a play to the Comédie-Française. Voltaire invited Marmontel to Paris and assured him that he would "look after the fate of a young man that he protected."22 Thanks to Voltaire's intervention, the Comédie staged Marmontel's classical tragedy, Denis le Tyran, in February 1748, which in tum led to further invitations to aristocratic gatherings. After the success of his tragedy, he no longer identified himself as the "abbé Marmontel" but as "Monsieur de Marmontel, man of letters." Although he never again enjoyed much success at the Comédie, he would not need it. Having already entered into the Parisian monde, his social stature was never again in doubt, and he won election to the Académie française in 1763. Marmontel fully understood the important role Voltaire, classical tragedy and the Comédie-Française had played in his ascent, recalling in his Mémoires Dramatic Authorship and the Honor of Men of tetters / 267 that the royal theater had not been "open to anyone and most of the authors had to rum to genres situated outside of the purely classical tradition," which forced them to have their work performed in other, less prestigious venues.23 A different, although highly indicative, trajectory was that of Charles Palissot de Montenoy.24 Palissot was typical of later eighteenth-century dramatic authors in that he was bom to a family on the margins of "honorability" and anxious that its son advance to a higher station. Palissot's mother descended from Hapsburg military officers, and his father enjoyed personal nobility through an office in Lorraine. While his family saw to his education, it could not bequeath him wealth or place him directly in traditional avenues of advancement such as the law, the church or the military. Like Marmontel, Palissot was educated not by a tutor (as were many sons of those already well established in the elite) but by a local cleric, who then sent him on to receive a classical education at a nearby collège in Nancy. His education led him to Paris, where his father had intended him to prepare for a career in the priesthood or at the bar. However, after less than a year in Paris, Palissot submitted his first play—a classical tragedy—to the Comédie, which summarily rejected the work of such an unknown. At this point, Palissot lacked the sponsorship from which Marmontel had benefitted. However, after returning to Nancy, Palissot acquired two important patrons: the comte de Stainville (the future duc de Choiseul) and the de de Lorraine (the former King of Poland).25 With their help, Palissot tried, like Marmontel, to convert his intellectual capital—his formal, classical education—into social prominence by writing for the theater, first in Nancy and then returning to the Comédie-Française. As is well known, Palissot's career took an unexpected tum for the worse in the early 1760s, with the famous polemics surrounding his plays Le Cercle (1755) and Les Philosophes (1760).26 In terms of his social positioning, Palissot's literary quarrels became problematic not because of his alignment with the anti-Enlightenment dévot party, but because he entered into these controversies without the approval of his protectors. When Choiseul backed away from supporting him in 1763, Palissot provisionally had to leave Paris— and literary life. His letters to Choiseul from the later 1760s protested that he had committed no violations of honnêteté but had nevertheless been the vic- tim of "libels," which he asked the duke to have suppressed. Responding through intermediaries, Choiseul attested to his continuing affection for Palissot but demurred from defending him.27 Palissot had broken the unwritten mies of clientelism, which were central to eighteenth-century authorship. Thus, his effort to use the theater and particularly the Comédie-Française to benefit from his education and social standing failed. For most of the 1760s and 1770s, as Palissot repeatedly tried to re-establish himself in Parisian literary life, he continued to submit plays to 268 / BROWN the royal theater but to no avail. Much later, Palissot would retum to prominence as a member of die imperial Institut de France. In the short term, though, even as his experience differed significantly from that of Marmontel, Palissot's attempts to regain recognition as an honorable man of letters through play writing for the royal theater demonstrate similar characteristics to Marmontel's trajectory—a classical education; aspirations to upward mobility not satisfied through other routes; a tum to dramaturgy, first to the genre of classical tragedy; and a need for protection to have one's plays performed and well received at the Comédie-Française. Whereas Marmontel and Palissot both began their careers prior to the reorganization of the Comédie-Française in 1757, those who entered literary life beginning in the 1760s and 1770s, such as Louis-Sébastien Mercier and Jean-François Cailhava d'Estendoux, brought different instincts and confronted changed circumstances. Mercier, the son of a Parisian diamond merchant with a minor charge at court, studied at the Collège de Quatre Nations in Paris, while Cailhava (of unknown familial origins) attended a secondary school in Toulouse.28 Both began their literary careers like their predecessors, seeking institutional affiliations through academic prize competitions. However, in their thirties, an age when their predecessors had already begun to ascend progressively through such institutions, Cailhava and Mercier both rather consciously disdained this strategy, declining to solicit brokers or patrons within Parisian networks. Nevertheless, each submitted plays to the Comédie Française, believing that the royal theater alone could provide access to the broad public they hoped to reach. In his Mémoires historiques, Cailhava recalled arriving in Paris in 1760, following the moderately successful staging of one of his plays in Toulouse.29 He depicted himself as burning with youthful, eamest desire to become a man of letters but having become fmstrated with the need to find a protector. A well-known playwright, Pierre Laurent Buirette de Belloy, intervened to get two of his comedies performed by the Comédie-Française, but neither was well received by the audience; Cailhava blamed the failures on the actors' disinterested performances. Beginning in 1772, he wrote a series of letters to the royal troupe and the First Gentlemen asking them to perform more of his plays, ultimately employing a conventional tactic of aspiring playwrights of renouncing his royalties (part d'auteur), although retaining his other prerogatives (droits) such as the privilege of distributing free tickets.30 Although in continual correspondence with the Comédie and the court, he lacked sufficient protection to be identified as a man of honor whose concerns needed to be respected by the actors or First Gentlemen. Thus, he turned to another strategy by authoring and having printed a treatise on comic theory, De Vart de la comédie (1772), from which he extracted and reprinted a pamphlet, Les Causes de la décadence du théâtre (1775). This brochure Dramatic Authorship and the Honor of Men of tetters / 269 called for an end to the Comédie's monopoly and criticized the royal theater's orientation towards the court rather than the more socially heterogeneous French "Nation." During these years, he also wrote musical comedies for the Comédie-Italienne, although his clear interest remained in classical comedy. In 1777, he achieved commercial success on the Comédie-Française stage with L'Egoiste. In the late 1770s and early 178Os, he continued to promote his plays to the Française and the First Gentlemen, although he remained critical of the theater's actors and supervisors and of other authors directly connected to the court. At the same time, he continued to renounce his royalties to show that, as he wrote the troupe, he was "pursuing [this] career of honor" as a playwright for the sole benefit of "the public."31 Finally, in 1784, Cailhava became "attached" to the house of the due d'Orléans, leader of the aristocratic opposition, whose acquisition of the theater at the Palais Royal created a legitimate alternative to the Française. To Cailhava, this new theater represented the "second troupe" for which he had long argued. In this new venue, he became a playwright without becoming corrupted by the "decadence" of the court and its emanations, or losing stature through an identification with overly commercial, burlesque, boulevard theaters. In the final years of the Old Regime, his affiliation with an alternative source of protection and support allowed him at once to claim prominence as an honorable "man of letters" by disdaining writing for material gain and to continue to indict the "decadence" of court-sponsored theater.32 In 1789, he deftly repositioned himself again, adopting his long-standing criticisms of the Comédie's monopoly to a call for revolutionary "liberty of the theaters." He wrote a new preface to Causes de la décadence, dedicating the work to the new Commune of Paris, which had taken over authority for the public theaters from the First Gentlemen. Then in 1790, in a printed Mémoire against the troupe, Cailhava refashioned his arguments for a "second troupe" into claims for including the "liberty of theaters," citing the National Assembly's "Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen."33 Mercier's trajectory was similar. After completing his education in Paris and a brief stint as a professor of classical rhetoric in Bordeaux, he undertook a series of unsuccessful attempts to win academic prize competitions by writing short, verse heroides. Failing to gain notice in this way and denied by Choiseul entry into the service of a diplomat, he turned to prose. His Utopian novel L'An 2440 (1771) became one of the best-selling books of the eighteenth century but brought him little honor.34 At this point, in his early thirties, Mercier had been seeking to establish himself as a man of letters for a number of years, and he decided to write plays with the intention of submitting them to the Comédie-Française.35 When the Comédie rejected his first play and accepted but did not stage his second, Mercier grew frustrated at the troupe's lack of enthusiasm for the work of an unknown and unprotected 270 / BROWN writer. Accordingly, he altered his strategy, producing an extended treatise on dramaturgy, Du Théâtre (1772), which also attacked the Comédie- Française's monopoly as the source of the actors' haughtiness. In response, the troupe broke off all contact with him, prompting Mercier to bring lawsuits against the troupe and its protectors, the First Gentlemen, whom he further attacked in three printed mémoires judiciaires in 1775. Sarah Maza has shown how in printed mémoires judiciaires, late Old Regime lawyers used melodramatic and highly figurative language to represent interpersonal conflicts between individuals of different status as broader, social conflicts. Moreover, because they were uncensored and circulated in large numbers, mémoires generated notorious scandals, which the lawyerauthors of such mémoires intended to be judged not only by the magistrates to whom they ostensibly addressed their cases, but also by the readers whom they described abstractly as "the public."36 In his mémoires, Mercier (and the barrister Pierre-Paul-Nicolas Henrion de Pansey) challenged the authority of the troupe "to judge the authors and their works," charging that the actors used their monopoly and affiliation with the court to abuse both men of letters and their "public" by arrogantly humiliating young playwrights. Furthermore, they accused the troupe members of exercising their authority arbitrarily and despotically, of composing the repertory to serve their own vanity rather than the public. From this general claim, Mercier then moved to his own case, accusing the troupe of acting dishonorably, emphasizing the actors' utter disregard for his honor as a man of letters. Dramatic authors, he argued, should be judged only by the "public" for whom they work; by excluding from its stage honorable writers, the troupe violated the "infinitely respectable rights" of the public and hindered the cultural development of the French "nation." On behalf of not only himself but of any writer equally moral and honnête and of "the public generally," Mercier asked that the First Gentlemen rewrite the theater's regulations so that "the judgement of these plays be referred to Men of Letters." Moreover, Mercier asked the magistrates of the Parlement of Paris personally to recognize his "rights ... as a citizen" and to grant "protection" to himself and those he described as "patriotic" men of letters.37 Thus, despite their high degree of education and thorough knowledge of classical aesthetics and dramaturgy, both Mercier and Cailhava found that to become a dramatic author required protection. In response, they both turned away from the royal theater and the mondains networks surrounding it. Drawing on their training in classical rhetoric which instructed orators to praise the virtues of their audience and denigrate themselves, they appealed instead to an abstraction they addressed alternately as "the public" and "the nation." At the same time, by now thoroughly familiar with the unwritten mies of Old Regime literary life, they could not remove themselves entirely from a need Dramatic Authorship and the Honor of Men of tetters / 271 for and preoccupation with elite "protection" (Cailhava from Orléans; Mercier from the Parlementary magistrates). Therefore, receiving such protection remained for them fully compatible both witii representing themselves as honorable servants of the "public" and with making printed attacks on the corruption of the court and the Comédie-Française. IV At the same time, the 1770s also saw the appearance of another profile of would-be men of letters—without extensive formal education but with greater pre-existing social standing, in the form of "protection." After the reorganization in 1757, the Comédie-Française functioned without an annual royal subsidy, and in the 1770s, the troupe increasingly chose plays it saw as having commercial potential, even when such works broke with classical dramaturgical principles.38 Thus, a formal, classical education ceased to be a prerequisite for having a workstaged and well received if the troupe could be convinced of the merits of a given author or play. While some aspiring playwrights saw this change as an opening for more direct confrontations with the troupe, others saw it as an even greater opportunity for protectors at court to intervene on their own behalf. Typifying an informally educated but well-connected writer for whom the Comédie-Française made possible recognition as a man of letters was Beau- marchais.39 His birth to an artisanal family and his exploits in his father's watch shop are well known; however, the key aspect of Beaumarchais's background was his experience as a youth at the court, where he acquired an appreciation for the importance of protection and a sense of how to cultivate it. After serving as a music tutor to the King's daughters in the 1750s, Beaumarchais entered into the employ of the aged Pâris-Duvemay, whose financial ventures brought him some wealth but little prestige. In the mid1760s, he wrote parades—nonclassical, comic plays drawn from market culture, to be performed in aristocratic homes. For him to author and stage such works required less classical leaming and more social access than the first works of Marmontel in Toulouse or those of Palissot in Nancy. Then, in the late 1760s, Beaumarchais submitted two plays to the Comédie-Française, which, in a departure from the established pattern, were not classical tragedies but rather were presented as of the "serious genre" or drame. Eventually, of course, Beaumarchais enjoyed great success at the Comédie-Française with his Barbier de Seville in 1775 and Manage de Figaro in 1784. Without discounting either his literary genius or his use of printed legal briefs (such as those directed against the magistrate Goezmann in 1773-1774) to acquire notoriety, Beaumarchais's self-positioning as a playwright and man of letters depended primarily on his asmte exploitation of the protection provided 272 / BROWN him by such courtiers as the Count de Maurepas and on his relationships with other, more prestigious authors (including by now Marmontel). His ability to project a public persona as a maverick willing and able to undermine classicism, social hierarchy and absolutism (that is, Figaro) and at the same time, to adhere to elite norms of honorable comportment and to advance within mondaines and court hierarchies explain Beaumarchais's singularity as a playwright for the Comédie-Française and as a man of letters in the late Old Regime. His singular combination of two kinds of social prominence explains why he—and neither more prestigious writers such as Marmontel or La Harpe nor writers publicly declared as anti-court dissidents, such as Cailhava or Mercier—founded and led the SAD. Because he was so concerned with establishing his honnêteté as a dramatic author and a man of letters; because he was so commercially successful as a playwright; and especially because of his position as a client of prominent courtiers yet a marginal figure in Parisian literary life, Beaumarchais offers perhaps the most interesting case of an aspiring man of letters for whom playwriting for the Comédie-Française served as a strategy for social positioning. His trajectory, although less common among ComédieFrançaise playwrights in the 1760s and 1770s, would in the 1780s represent an alternative model for would-be writers who had little classical leaming but lofty social aspirations and a knack for acquiring protection and using it to their advantage. After the success of Le Mariage de Figaro in 1784, Beaumarchais developed a close alliance with members of the royal troupe, putting him in a position to exercise influence on behalf of would-be playwrights. When in the final years of the Old Regime, several young and aspiring authors modeled themselves explicitly on Beaumarchais, however, they were disappointed by his refusal to exercise his newly won influence on their behalf. In the "Préface sans caractère" to the printed edition of her unperformed play, Le Philosophe corrigé, Olympe de Gouges complained of the unwillingness of "M. C[aron] de B[eaumarchais]" to aid her own efforts to become socially identified as a "woman of letters" through playwriting for the royal theater. Beaumarchais was even less helpful as a broker for MarieJoseph Chénier, against whom he actively intervened by writing a letter disparaging Chénier's Charles IX to the royal troupe on 9 November 1789. Far from a maverick or an insolent, Beaumarchais, by the end of the Old Regime, enjoyed enough prominence as an honorable man of letters that he sought to protect his status by defending the most prominent institution of literary life from newcomers.40 In light of these two different trajectories, it can be added that very few authors began a dramatic career in the years 1760-1780 with both education and pre-existing social standing—or protection or the ethos to acquire it. In effect, such a winning combination would probably have placed someone out Dramatic Authorship and the Honor of Men of tetters / 273 of the field of playwriting, since the concern for status would be less acute. For example, the marquis de Bièvre, a Parisian aristocrat, did not feel the need to write a play in order to consider himself to be "working for" the Comédie-Française in the 1770s. Rather, he considered himself a patron to the theater, especially its actors. In 1777, Bièvre intervened against Beaumarchais and the SAD in its attempt to have the Comédie's regulations revised in their favor. In memoranda Bièvre prepared on behalf of the troupe at this time, he—like many of the authors—described himself as "working" in the "dramatic career... for the Comédie-Française," although he had, at that time, never submitted a play.41 He had no need to reposition himself socially, so his claim of an affiliation with the Comédie-Française did not necessitate justification through the submission, acceptance and performance of a play. Playwriting was necessary for those who needed a means to invest existing social or intellectual capital and convert it into status—not those who had it already. What, then, can be determined about dramatic authorship as a strategy of social positioning in eighteenth-century Paris? The prosopographical profile of Comédie-Française playwrights in 1777 suggests that "the career" of playwriting was chosen primarily by those whose background—especially their education or social standing—led them to aspire to social prominence as a writer, but who lacked the means to achieve it through avenues other than the royal theater. For the most part, these were aspirants who had been unable, in their prime years, to gain entry into other institutions such as salons or academies. Without such institutional participations, they had reached their forties poorly positioned for sinecurial positions, which would not only have supported them financially but would also have distinguished them as "men of letters." Moreover, based on the exemplary, individual trajectories, it is clear that playwriting required a would-be author to acquire or exploit some degree of protection, no matter the level of education. Yet these examples have all been of authors who did achieve some degree of success at the Comédie; they evidently chose not only to submit plays to the royal theater but to continue to pursue this often difficult strategy. To conclude, therefore, it will be useful to consider writers' decisions to submit plays to the Comédie-Française by comparing dramatic authorship to courtiership. Much like the decision of a late seventeenth- or early eighteenth-century aristocrat to establish a residence at Versailles, the decision to submit a play to the Comédie-Française and to pursue dramatic authorship implicated status-conscious individuals in a distinct social system, with its own set of values that were neither economically rational nor consistent with 274 / BROWN the priorities of society at large. According to the analysis of Norbert Elias, the decision to "go to court"required some degree of start-up capital—not only wealth but a certain pre-existing standing within elite hierarchies. The court therefore became a fomm in which to enhance that standing or to convert it to other forms of capital, such as political power. Once implicated in court society, the constant stmggle for status acquisition took priority over all other activities, to the point that wealthy nobles impoverished themselves through conspicuous consumption and humiliated themselves before the king to maintain and gain status and to demonstrate that status to the other participants in that social system. Representing publicly one's status in this context was essential, because "only in court society could its members preserve... their personal identity" as prominent elites and men of honor.42 In the same way, to become a dramatic author and man of letters required some capital—social or intellectual. As did the court for aristocrats, the Comédie-Française offered a mechanism to convert that capital into status with respect to a peer group and, moreover, to society at large. The similarity of the situation confronted by aspiring writers seeking to establish an identity as men of letters to that of courtiers is evident in Mercier's statement to the SAD in April 1778 that although the Comédie-Française had evicted him in a humiliating manner from the theater and announced it wanted nothing further to do with him, he was still willing to make amends in order to preserve his "literary existence."43 Once having entered into this system, authors continued to pursue success on the Comédie's stage through a variety of self-abnegating, clientelistic strategies, such as renouncing royalties, in order to be able to identify themselves with the royal theater—and thereby to gain and maintain recognition of themselves as honorable. To this end, many playwrights established personal familiarity with troupe members, to whom they addressed themselves in the language of fidelity and affection characteristic of patron-client relations. For those such as Voltaire and Marmontel who entered into such relations in the first half of the century en route to establishing themselves as men of letters, the troupe members responded as they anticipated, reciprocating their courtesy with favorable treatment. However, playwrights who entered literary life in the 1760s and 70s such as Cailhava and Mercier, found that the Comédiens, despite mim- icking the language and gestures of traditional patron-client relations, had neither the social prestige nor the desire to serve as protectors and to help aspiring but unknown writers legitimate their claims to social prominence. Although the Comédie-Française could serve the function of a prince around whom a "court society" of men of letters could arise, the actors and actresses who composed it could not be ousted to reciprocate by protecting their wouldbe clients, an attribute that had been central to patronage of writers in the past. Moreover, a protector had to enjoy a secure social position of sufficient Dramatic Authorship and the Honor of Men of tetters / 275 status as to be able to—let alone, want to—confer status on a client and thereby augment his or her own position. Since troupe members were themselves of marginal status to society at large and within the elite, they were poorly positioned as individuals to serve in the role authors desired from the royal theater as an institution. Early modem courtiers, of course, served simultaneously as patrons and clients, according to a code of honorable etiquette, which demanded deference towards those above and generosity towards those below. Even while subordinating those dependent upon him, a polite courtier could act in such a way—through his protection and advancement of his protégé—as to allow the client to be seen by others as retaining a degree of personal autonomy and therefore having elite status himself as well.44 It was precisely this etiquette which troupe members, individually and collectively, failed to demonstrate in their comportment towards authors unknown to them, such as Cailhava, Mercier, Beaumarchais and de Gouges. While these authors responded to this situation differently, each might be described as being in what Elias calls "an established-outsider relationship" in which playwrights "suffered under the humiliation inflicted... by court nobles" (for which one could the troupe members) even as "it was precisely their recognition [the writer] sought, precisely by them he wanted to be regarded and treated as a man of equal worth."45 VI Because of their identification with the Comédie-Française rather than elite patrons, playwrights have generally been thought by literary historians to have been not only among the most prestigious and best remunerated of writers in eighteenth-century France, but to have gained their fortune and fame in their own right. Dramatic authors are therefore seen as precursors of autonomous, modem intellectuals, free from subordination to any other individual or institution and able to challenge social hierarchy and constituted authority, such as Beaumarchais in the traditional reading of Figaro.46 For example, one of the most insightful scholars of eighteenth-century French cultural life, Roger Chartier, has suggested that of all writers, the "most favored" and "precocious" were dramatic authors, because they drew revenue from both performances of their plays and the sale of their scripts to print- ers.47 However, the evidence and arguments presented above would question such an emphasis on revenues as markers of authorial status and such a claim that dramatic authors were more autonomous than others. Indeed, the fore- going discussion of the status of playwrights suggests that the desire to become a dramatic author for the royal theater, especially after 1750, was a 276 / BROWN strategic decision taken by those self-consciously aware of being marginal to, and seeking to identify themselves more closely with, Old Regime elites. Although many dramatic authors complained of mistreatment by the Comédie- Française, they had, by and large, been even more frustrated with the degree of respect they commanded prior to submitting plays to the monopolistic theater. Indeed, most of these writers sacrificed what appear as their material interests to be able to identify with the official theater—its actors and supervisors—and thereby reposition themselves more prominently. The existence of a growing, commercial market for their work and the prevalence of a rhetoric in which writers claimed that they worked primarily for "the public" do not imply that they were either autonomous from traditional hierarchies or sought to break the constraints of traditional norms of elite comportment. Instead, this study of their strategic practices has shown that many sought to position themselves according to ideals of the Republic of Letters inherited from the Renaissance, although modified due to institutional changes brought on by the reforming efforts of the Old Regime state and by a breakdown in traditional forms of elite protection and clientage. Thus, individual strategic maneuvers to acquire and represent personal status in terms of honor remained characteristic of dramatic authors who saw themselves as "men of letters" in the latter half of the eighteenth century. In the long term, the social status and identity of men of letters would be transformed, so writers would come to represent themselves not in relation to but against the state and individual or institutional protectors, such as the Comédie. From this more autonomous and modem posture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they would claim to write disinterestedly for and in the name of, society at large, positioning themselves not as Renaissance men of honor but as rational, critical intellectuals.48 However, this transforma- tion—if indeed, it is complete, even today—was certainly not felt by those in late eighteenth-century France seeking to become identified as playwrights; in their experience and self-conception, Voltaire's ideal of the Philosophe was no less a fictional character than Beaumarchais's Figaro. NOTES Earlier versions of this essay were presented to the East-Central American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and the Society for French Historical Studies. For comments helpful in drafting and revising this essay, the author wishes to thank Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Carla Hesse, Jeffrey Ravel, Donald C. Spinelli, Alain Viala, Isser Woloch, and two anonymous readers for SECC. Dramatic Authorship and the Honor of Men of Letters / 277 1. Pierre-Augustin Carón de Beaumarchais, Le Barbier de Seville, 1: 2, ed. Pierre Larthomas, Oeuvres de Beaumarchais (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 293-94. Unless noted, translations are my own. 2. For example, see Frédéric Grendel, Beaumarchais: The Man Who Was Figaro, trans. Roger Greaves (New York: Crowell, 1977), which is indicative of most Beaumarchais scholarship. Broader but equally traditional in viewing eighteenth-century authors as striving for autonomy against social elites and constituted political authority is Haydn Mason, French Writers and their Society, 1715-1800 (London: Macmillan, 1982). The social status of writers in later eighteenth-century France is examined more subtly in Robert Darnton's celebrated "The High Enlightenment and Low Life of Literature," in Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1982), 1-40 and in Darnton's attempt to demonstrate statistically his hypothesis in "The Facts of Literary Life in Eighteenth-Century France," in Keith M. Baker, ed. The Political Culture of the Old Regime (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1989), 1: 265-76. Two useful but very different overviews of this question are John Lough, Writer and Public in France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978) 164—274, and Eric Walter, "Les écrivains et le champ littéraire," in HenriJean Martin and Roger Charrier, eds. Histoire de Γ édition française (Paris: Promodis, 1984) 2: 382-99. "Men of letters" is, of course, a gender-specific translation of a gender neutral term, "gens de lettres." While there were eighteenth-century women who sought to define themselves as writers through dramatic authorship, Beaumarchais and most of the other playwrights studied in this article were selfconsciously "men of letters." On the gendering of literature in Old Regime France, see Elizabeth C. Goldsmith and Dena Goodman, eds., Going Public: Women and Publishing in Early Modem France (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1995). 3. "Elites" here means those, from whatever order, aware that they hold a predominance of wealth, power and status and, based on that self-awareness, engage in a process of distinction from the rest of society. Recent historiography on Old Regime French elites has emphasized that this self-conception was formed largely through networks of association characterized by a specific pattern of comportment, which in turn came to be the crucial marker of elite distinction. See the discussion of eighteenth-century elites in Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret et al., Histoire des élites en France (Paris: Tallandier, 1991), epecially Ariette Jouanna's discussion of "honorabilité" "honnêteté" and "honneur" (86) and Chaussinand-Nogaret's description of the "protection" accorded to artists and writers as a source of "honorabilité' for both patrons and clients alike (141). In greater detail on codes of honor among early modem French elites, see Kristen Neuschel, Word of Honor: Interpreting Noble Culture in Sixteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1989), Sharon Kettering, Patrons, Brokers and Clients in Seventeenth-Century France (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986) and Robert A. Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993), 15-30. 4. On the importance of polite comportment to the eighteenth-century French Republic of Letters, see Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1994) and Daniel 278 / BROWN Roche, "République des lettres ou royaume des moraux?" Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine 43 (1996): 293-306. On the social prominence conferred on writers by "the public," see Hélène Merlin, Public et littérature en France au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1995) and Goodman. For an overview of recent litera- ture on "the public" in eighteenth-century Europe, see Margaret C. Jacob, "The Mental Landscape of the Eighteenth-Century Public," Eighteenth-Century Studies 28 (1994): 95-113. 5. On the centralization of literary patronage during and after the reign of Louis XIV, see Alain Viala, Naissance de l'écrivain (Paris: Minuit, 1985), 51-85. On the practices and significance of aristocratic and royal patronage for dramatic authors in the seventeenth century, see Jean Dubu, "La Condition sociale de l'écrivain du théâtre," XVIIe Siècle 39 (1958): 149-83, esp. 162-67. Changes in the ideological function of literary patronage in early modern society are explored in Fanny NépoteDesmarres, "Le classique et l'ambiguïté de l'homme de lettres," Littératures classiques 19 (1993): 77-85, which argues that patronage (especially by the crown) provided not only remuneration but also a justification of writers' privileged status, despite being commoners. 6. On the trajectories of Racine and Corneille from provincial bourgeois to courtier through playwriting, see Viala, 214-32. 7. On the institutional and social history of Paris public theater from the reign of Louis XIV to the end of the Old Regime, see Pierre Mélèse, Le théâtre et le public à Paris sous Louis .XVV(1934; reprint, Geneva: Slatkine, 1976); Henri La Grave, Le Théâtre et le public à Paris de 1715 à 1750 (Paris: Klincksieck, 1972); Martine de Rougemont, La Vie théâtrale en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Champion, 1988); F. W. J. Hemmings, Theatre and State in France, 1760-1905 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994), 1-63 and Jeffrey Ravel, The Contested Parterre: Public Theater and French Political Culture, 1680-1791 (forthcoming). 8. On the status and identity of late Old Regime playwrights in relation to patrons, actors, the court, and audiences, see Gregory S. Brown, "A Field of Honor: The Cultural Politics of Playwriting in Eighteenth-Century France" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1997). 9. John Pappas, "The Role of the Poet in Eighteenth-Century French Society," in Phillip Crane, ed. Authors and Their Centuries, Univ. of South Carolina French Literature Series, vol. 1 (1974), 97-115. Pappas discusses playwrights at 103-8. 10. On Marivaux's exclusion from the Parisian monde and the poor regard in which he was held by the leading Philosophes, see the dated but detailed Gustave Larroumet, Marivaux: Sa vie et ses oeuvres, 2nd ed. (Paris: Hachette, 1894) 70 and Harry Redman, Jr., "Marivaux's Reputation Among His Contemporaries," Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 47 (1966), 37-155. Piron's complaints are expressed in letters reprinted in Gunnar von Proschwitz, ed. Alexis Piron, epistolier (Göteborg, Sweden: Rundquists Boktryckeri, 1982), Letters 7, 10 and 38; in E. Lavaquery, ed., Lettres de Piron (Angers: Gaultier et Thébert, 1920), 73 and 86. The new preface to Métromanie was prepared for his Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Duchesne, 1758). See the discussion of both Marivaux and Piron in "Field of Honor," chap. 1. Dramatic Authorship and the Honor of Men of tetters / 279 11. The repertories for this period can be compared by consulting Charles D. Brenner, The Théâtre Italien, 1716-1793 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1961) and A. Joannidès, La Comédie-Française (Paris: Plön, 1901). 12. Michèle Root-Bernstein, Boulevard Theater and Revolution (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1984), 167-96. 13. Bibliothèque Nationale, Département des Manuscrits [BN-MSS], Fonds Français 9228, f. 43, and Archives familiales Beaumarchais XI, III, 19. Citations are from correspondence in June 1777, between one of the First Gentlemen, the due de Duras, and Beaumarchais. Performed authors who declined to participate in the SAD in 1777 were Jean-François de La Harpe, Denis Diderot and Charles Collé, although La Harpe would later become an active member. Voltaire, who would have been an extremely unlikely participant, was not contacted. Excluded were Charles Palissot de Montenoy, Jean-Baptiste Lonvai de la Saussaye, and Charles-Georges Fenouillet de Falbaire for having violated norms of polite comportment toward the troupe and the First Gentlemen. The formation of the SAD, and the declared and implicit criteria of participation, are discussed in "Field of Honor," chap. 5. 14. Darnton, "Facts." The prosopographical profile of the 22 SAD members is based on information from from their dossiers in the Bibliothèque de la Comédie Française (BCF); from the police dossiers kept on certain of the authors by the Inspecteur d'Hémery (BN-MSS, Nouvelles Acquisitions Françaises 10781-83); and from the following sources: L'Espion Anglais (1783) vol. 7, bk. 6, 193-94; J. S. Ersch, La France littéraire, 3 vols. (Hambourg: Hoffman, 1797); J.-M. Quérard, La France littéraire, 12 vols. (Paris: Maisonneuve, n.d.); Joannidès, La Comédie- Française, and J.-P. Beaumarchais et al., eds, Dictionnaire des littérateurs de la langue française, 4 vols. (Paris: Bordas, 1987). 15. Daniel Roche, Le Siècle des Lumières en province (Paris: Mouton, 1978) 1: 194-197; Martin Edwards, "The Judgement of Distinction: The Académie Française and Interpretive Communities in Eighteenth-Century France," (3rd cycle diss., European University Institute [Florence, Italy], 1995), chap. 2, 10-34. 16. Viala charts the career trajectories of 559 seventeenth-century authors in Naissance, 305-16, and summarizes the two "strategies" on 183-85. "Strategy," as used here, does not imply intentional, self-interested action but rather the instinctive application to a given social situation of "practical knowledge," acquired through previous encounters with similar situations. See Pierre Bourdieu, Sociology in Question (London: Sage, 1993), 72-75 and The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1993), 161-75. 17. René Pomeau et al., Voltaire et son temps, 5 vols. (Oxford: Alden Press, 1994). Vols. 1-2 detail Voltaire's many institutional participations in Paris and elsewhere during his rise to prominence. 18. Letter D79 in the "definitive edition" of the "Correspondence and Related Doocuments" ed. Theodore Bestermann, vols. 85-135, Complete Works of Voltaire (Geneva and Oxford: Institut Voltaire, 1968); it is the first letter he signs "Voltaire." 19. Voltaire, Letters D252-D255. On the audience responses to performances of the first and second versions of this play in 1724 and 1725, respectively, see Ravel, 280 / BROWN "La Reine Boit! Print, Performance, and Theater Publics in France, 1724-1725," Eighteenth-Century Studies 29 (1996): 391^11. 20. The same would be true for the nineteenth century as well, according to Christophe Charle, La Crise littéraire à l'époque du naturalisme (Paris: Presses de l'Ecole Normale Supérieure, 1979), who argues that for writers of humble origins, the theater offered fewer chances for advancement but a potentially much more rewarding outcome, if successful. 21. The following is based on documents in Marmontel's dossier at the BCF and on Jean-François Marmontel, Mémoires, ed. John Renwick, 2 vols. (ClermontFerrand: Bussac, 1972). See also Renwick, "Jean-François Marmontel: The Formative Years, 1753-1765," Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 76 (1970): 139-232, esp. 145-52; and S. Lenel, Un Homme de lettres au XVIIIe siècle: Marmontel (1970; Paris: 1909). 19-79. Peter France writes of Marmontel's trajectory as exemplary of an eighteenth-century writer as a "social performer" in Politeness and Its Discontents (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992), 116-21. 22. Voltaire's letter is D 3257; Marmontel recounts the incident in a 1786 letter to the Marquis de Vulvy, reprinted in Oeuvres posthumes de Marmontel (Paris, 1804) 1: 172. 23. Marmontel, Mémoires 1: 185. 24. The following is based primarily on Charles Palissot de Montenoy, "Mémoires sur la vie de l'auteur," in Oeuvres de M. Palissot, 7 vols. (Liège, 1777) 1: x-xxxix. The only full-scale study of Palissot's entire career is the detailed but dated Daniel Delafarge, La Vie et l'oeuvre de Palissot, 1730-1814 (Paris: Hachette, 1912). 25. In 1748, Etienne François Stainville, a Nancy native, resigned his infantry officership and entered into diplomatic service. In the late 1750s and early 60s, as he began to raise his profile at court, he assembled an entourage, including writers. As the duc de Choiseul, he served as foreign minister in the 1760s, and even after being forced from office in 1770, he remained the leader of the aristocratic "Queen's faction." Moreover, he is one of the last great avatars of court aristocratic ethos, which may explain both the extent and limits of his "protection" of writers such as Palissot. Stanislas Leszcynski—King of Poland until 1736, then duc de Lorraine, and father of King Louis XV's Queen Marie—sponsored the local academy of Nancy. 26. Recent scholarship on Palissot concentrates on the affair of Les Philosophes: Paul Benhamou, "La guerre de Palissot contre Diderot," in Anne Chouillet, ed., Les Ennemis de Diderot (Geneva: Klincksieck, 1993), 17-29, and Colin Duckworth, "Voltaire's L'écossaise and Palissot's Les Philosophes," Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 87 (1972): 333-51. 27. Oeuvres de M. Palissot, A: 41-59. 28. Aside from the dated Charles G. Rowe, Jean-François Cailhava d'Estendoux (Ph.D. diss. Indiana Univ., 1936), there is neither a biography of Cailhava nor any recent study of his comic theories or his plays. He narrated his own trajectory as an aspiring playwright in the "Préface générale" and the "Mémoires historiques sur mes pièces" in his Théâtre, 2 vols. (Paris, 1781). On Mercier's background, see Louis Béclard, Sébastien Mercier (Paris, 1903) and Nina Ratner Gelbart, Opposition and Feminine Journalism in Old Regime France (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Dramatic Authorship and the Honor of Men of Letters I 281 Univ. of California Press, 1987), 210-40. On his career as a dramatist, see Gilles Girard, "Louis-Sébastien Mercier, dramaturge," (3rd cycle diss., Université d'AixMarseilles, 1970). On many aspects of his life and writing, see Enrico Rufi, Le rêve laïque de Mercier (Oxford: Voltaire Institute, 1995) and the articles in Jean-Claude Bonnet, ed. Louis Sébastien Mercier: un hérétique en littérature (Paris: Mercure, 1995). 29. Théâtre de Cailhava (Paris, 1781) 1: 10-98. 30. These letters are preserved in the BCF dossier, "Cailhava," file 1. 31. BCF, "Cailhava," file 3. 32. BCF, "Cailhava," file 1, no. 2 is a letter from early 1789 to the ComédieFrançaise, asking its actors to cease performing his plays, which he had given to the "second troupe," the Palais-Royal theater. 33. Causes de la décadence, "nouvelle édition" (Paris: Royez, 1789) 12-45; Mémoire pour Jean-François Cailhava, en réponse à des défenses faites par les Comédiens français aux Directeurs du Théâtre du Palais-Royal déjouer ses pièces (Paris: Bould, [1790]). 34. Although L'An 2440 was, according to Robert Damton, one of the bestselling "forbidden books" of eighteenth-century France, it was clandestinely published and most of the copies which circulated in France did not bear the author's name, nor did most contemporary periodicals credit the book to Mercier. See Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Eighteenth-Century France (New York: Norton, 1995), 63; Everett C. Wilkie, "Mercier's L'An 2440: Its Publishing History during the Author's Lifetime," Harvard Library Bulletin 32 (1984), 613-36, and Gregory S. Brown, "Enlightenment Responses to Utopian Literature: Three Periodicals as Case Studies," Utopian Studies 5.1 (1994), 48-71. 35. Mercier described his intention to "follow for a while the career of the the- ater" in a letter of 10 July 1770 to his mentor, Antoine-Léonard Thomas of the Académie française (Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, MSS 15078, vol. 2, f. 4). 36. Sarah Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1993). 37. [Henrion de Pansey] Mémoire à consulter et consultation pour le Sieur Mercier; Contre la troupe des Comédiens Français ordinaires du Roi; Premier Mémoire pour le Sieur Mercier Contre la Troupe des Comédiens Français; Requête au Roi, pour le Sr. Mercier. These mémoires and Mercier's relations with the Parlementary magistrates are discussed in "Field of Honor," chap. 4. 38. On Comédie-Française finances in this period, see Claude Alasseur, La Comédie Française au XVIIIe siècle: Étude économique (Paris: Mouton, 1967). Its financial situation became even more precarious in 1776 when its cashier, Néelle, embezzled nearly 85,000 livres (BCF, "Deliberations du Comité de la Comédie, 1769-1791," f. 52). 39. The best biography of Beaumarchais remains Louis de Loménie, Beaumarchais et son temps, 2 vols. (Paris, 1858), although Loménie presents a celebratory, caricatural view of Beaumarchais as a cultural and social maverick, which has been oft repeated and little challenged in subsequent scholarship. Of late, there has been renewed interest in Beaumarchais, made possible in part by the long-delayed publi- 282 / BROWN cation of selected correspondence and other documents, in Brian Morton and Donald C. Spinelli, eds., Correspondance de Beaumarchais (Paris: Nizet, 1972) and in Gunnar and Mavis von Proschwitz, eds. Beaumarchais et le 'Courrier de l'Europe ' (Oxford: Taylor Institution, 1991). 40. Olympe de Gouges, Le Philosophe corrigé (Paris, 1786), 11. Beaumarchais's letter is reprinted from the BAF in Loménie, 2: 436-37. 41. These documents are reproduced in Gabriel Maréschal de Bièvre, Le Marquis de Bièvre (Paris: Pion, 1910), 132-50. 42. Norbert Elias, The Court Society, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon, 1983), 99. 43. Archives Nationales, Ol 845, no. 13. 44. Neuschel, 77-102; Kettering, 12-39. With specific respect to writers at court, see Mario Biagioli's discussion of the "micro-physics of patronage" as a "social system" in which both writers and patrons fashioned self-conceptions and in turn represented those conceptions of themselves to others, in his Galileo, Courtier (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993). 45. Elias, Mozart, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge: Polity, 1993), 35. 46. A particularly egregious example is Claude Petitfrère, Le Scandale du "Mariage de Figaro" (Paris: Editions Complexes, 1989), 14—44. 47. Roger Chartier, "Trajectoires et tensions culturelles de l'Ancien Régime," in Les Formes de la culture, vol. 4 of André Burguière and Jacques Revel, eds., Histoire de la France (Paris: Seuil, 1993), 373. Chartier, however, astutely emphasizes that in general, protection remained essential to writers not only for financial support but as sources of their sense of themselves as writers, from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment. See his "Figures of the Author," in The Order of Books (Cambridge: Polity, 1994), 25-59. 48. On the emergence of "intellectuals" as a social type and a group with a specific intellectual agenda in nineteenth-century France and Europe, see Christophe Charle, Naissance des 'intellectuels,' 1880-1900 (Paris: Minuit, 1990) and Les intellectuels en Europe au XIXe siècle (Paris: Seuil, 1996). The presumption that this process begins in the Age of Enlightenment—when men of letters come to the fore as equals to and even opponents of those who formerly would have been their protectors and patrons—is central to most historiographical models linking the social, political and cultural modernization of France and, by implication, Europe generally. Two particularly influential examples are Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856; reprint, New York: Harper, 1955) and Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. T. Burger and F. Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989). On differing eighteenth-century ideals of writers and their implication for literary property legislation during the Revolution, see Carla Hesse, "Enlightenment Epistemology and the Laws of Authorship in Revolutionary France, 1777-1793," Representations 30 (1990), 10937.