Charles 9 Uproar: Philosophie Moderne Revolution
’ In this pamphlet, he lists philosophy’s principal heroes as “Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, d’Alembert, Diderot, Mably, Raynal and Helvétius.” These philosophes had served society during their lives and now “from the tomb” inspired the Revolution, including the upheaval transforming the theater. How did “la philosophie moderne” evolve before 1789 from the writings of the philosophes into a formidable force reordering all of society? Via their writings, their example, and society’s mounting persecution of them. Chénier particularly stressed the unwitting contribution of the bishops who for years fought from the pulpit, issuing pastoral circulars denouncing la philosophie and its “doctrine abominable” as the source of all misfortune. If “philosophy”
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At stake was the social function of culture itself. During the summer of 1789, those resisting the staging of Charles IX often embraced even full freedom of the press. What they disputed was not freedom of expression as such but rather any right to stage material that was not just topical but politically, religiously, and socially divisive. Freedom of the theater existed nowhere, and never had, and promised to be a major extension of liberty, opening up a vast new thought-world to innumerable city-dwellers who were not fully literate. In eighteenth-century England, the press was (partially) free, assuredly, but the theater remained rigidly controlled, and more tightly than ever since Horace Walpole’s time. Theater culture stands apart from the world of print by being experienced collectively in an atmosphere of heightened emotion in which the semiliterate fully participate. The “antitheatricalism” of Chénier’s opponents played on the evidently acute danger of unchaining previously restrained popular emotion. No true freedom of expression can exist, retorted Chénier and Brissot, where theater aligns with conventional thinking. This is why, subsequently, stringent control of the theater was one of the most vital aspects of Robespierre’s dictatorship during the months from June 1793 to July
At stake was the social function of culture itself. During the summer of 1789, those resisting the staging of Charles IX often embraced even full freedom of the press. What they disputed was not freedom of expression as such but rather any right to stage material that was not just topical but politically, religiously, and socially divisive. Freedom of the theater existed nowhere, and never had, and promised to be a major extension of liberty, opening up a vast new thought-world to innumerable city-dwellers who were not fully literate. In eighteenth-century England, the press was (partially) free, assuredly, but the theater remained rigidly controlled, and more tightly than ever since Horace Walpole’s time. Theater culture stands apart from the world of print by being experienced collectively in an atmosphere of heightened emotion in which the semiliterate fully participate. The “antitheatricalism” of Chénier’s opponents played on the evidently acute danger of unchaining previously restrained popular emotion. No true freedom of expression can exist, retorted Chénier and Brissot, where theater aligns with conventional thinking. This is why, subsequently, stringent control of the theater was one of the most vital aspects of Robespierre’s dictatorship during the months from June 1793 to July