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Books > History > World history > 1750 to 1900
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Political Actors - Representative Bodies and Theatricality in the Age of the French Revolution (Paperback)
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Political Actors - Representative Bodies and Theatricality in the Age of the French Revolution (Paperback)
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From the start of the French Revolution, contemporary observers
were struck by the overwhelming theatricality of political events.
Examples of convergence between theater and politics included the
election of dramatic actors to powerful political and military
positions and reports that deputies to the National Assembly were
taking acting lessons and planting paid "claqueurs" in the audience
to applaud their employers on demand. Meanwhile, in a mock national
assembly that gathered in an enormous circus pavilion in the center
of Paris, spectators paid for the privilege of acting the role of
political representatives for a day.Paul Friedland argues that
politics and theater became virtually indistinguishable during the
Revolutionary period because of a parallel evolution in the
theories of theatrical and political representation. Prior to the
mid-eighteenth century, actors on political and theatrical stages
saw their task as embodying a fictional entity in one case a
character in a play, in the other, the corpus mysticum of the
French nation. Friedland details the significant ways in which
after 1750 the work of both was redefined. Dramatic actors were
coached to portray their parts abstractly, in a manner that seemed
realistic to the audience. With the creation of the National
Assembly, abstract representation also triumphed in the political
arena. In a break from the past, this legislature did not claim to
be the nation, but rather to speak on its behalf. According to
Friedland, this new form of representation brought about a sharp
demarcation between actors on both stages and their audience, one
that relegated spectators to the role of passive observers of a
performance that was given for their benefit but without their
direct participation. Political Actors, a landmark contribution to
eighteenth-century studies, furthers understanding not only of the
French Revolution but also of the very nature of modern
representative democracy."
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