Review of Backstage at the Revolution: How the Royal Paris Opera Survived the End of the Old Regime
The question at the heart of Victoria Johnson’s book is an intriguing one: how did the Paris Opera, or the Academie royale de musique as it was known during the Old Regime, avoid disbandment during the French Revolution? If any prerevolutionary institution exemplified the luxurious consumption an...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | en_US |
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University of Chicago Press
2012
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| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/72388 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8092-5008 |
| Summary: | The question at the heart of Victoria Johnson’s book is an intriguing one: how did the
Paris Opera, or the Academie royale de musique as it was known during the Old
Regime, avoid disbandment during the French Revolution? If any prerevolutionary
institution exemplified the luxurious consumption and aristocratic privilege decried by
the revolutionaries, the Opera was it. Yet the Paris Commune, which took over
governance of the Opera from the Maison du roi in February 1790, worked hard to
reorganize the institution for the glory of the new regime, and Maximilien Robespierre
and the Committee of Public Safety, in the midst of the Terror in the spring of 1794, approved the troupe’s relocation from a venue on the outskirts of town to a more
commercially viable site in the heart of the city. Although they agreed on little else,
almost all political partisans during the revolutionary decade believed that the government
needed to sustain the Paris Opera because of its importance to the vigorous
cultural nationalism of the period; in 1804, Napoleon recast the institution as the
Academie imperiale de musique, restoring most of the privileges the company had
enjoyed before 1789. |
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