Conference Agenda

Eighteenth-century opéra-comique emerged at the intersection of popular theatrical practice, institutional regulation, and the expanding public sphere. Situated between fairground performance and royal privilege, the genre evolved under juridical and administrative constraints that shaped not only its modes of representation but also its capacity to circulate and authorize knowledge. This paper approaches opéra-comique as a site of epistemic redistribution: part of a theatrical dispositif through which legal knowledge was translated from discursive regimes of authority and subjection into publicly intelligible and affectively persuasive form.

Rather than treating law as thematic content, the study considers it as an enunciative mode structured by statements, discursive formations, constitutive absences, and regimes of visibility. From an archaeological perspective on discourse, drawing on archival evidence from the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Archives nationales, together with literary, theatrical, and musical texts as well as legal-historical sources, this paper examines how legal authority becomes legible, credible, and emotionally compelling within the popular theatrical culture of opéra-comique, and how subjectivity is configured as observable under disciplinary power. It focuses on legally inflected opéra-comique works from the 1760s to the 1780s and asks: how are procedures, jurisdictions, and forms of legitimacy dramatized? What kinds of juridical subject positions, institutional actors, and legal issues are staged? How does musical rhetoric operate as a form of pre-judgment, shaping collective sensibility prior to formal adjudication?

By foregrounding the opéra-comique’s negotiation of private laws and jurisdictional authority in the decades preceding the Revolution, the paper argues that opéra-comique functioned as a moderately counter-institutional arena in which epistemic hierarchies were subtly recalibrated. As an artistic genre with social agency, it participated in the construction, preservation, and relocation of juridical legitimacy.

Opéra-comique complicates dominant models of knowledge production in the late Ancien Régime. It reveals how theatrical culture participated in reshaping epistemic authority within the late Ancien Régime, not by overtly contesting institutions, but by rearticulating the conditions under which legal knowledge could be seen, heard, and felt. The genre thus offers an illustrative example of how popular theatrical performance can mediate epistemic asymmetries and redistribute interpretive power within the public sphere.

The glittering 1952 revival of Rameau's Les Indes galantes was widely regarded as one of the triumphs of French Fourth Republic opera. The press celebrated the production as evidence that, although a devastating war had damaged France’s economy, its artistic superiority remained intact. These cultural claims took on greater urgency as American influence in France increased, the Cold War intensified, and France struggled to maintain its colonies and global status. This revival, like much of French Fourth Republic opera, has received little scholarly attention, and its narrative of success remains unexamined. This presentation, however, reveals how remarkable its uncontroversial reception was and argues that the production was carefully framed to suit the current cultural-political context.

Recent premieres at the Opéra had been the subject of substantial debates. The uproar over Milhaud’s 1950 Bolivar had been so contentious that journalists dubbed it a querelle. Bolivar had come under fire in part because of the colonial context of its plot, which focused on the liberation of South American colonies. Yet, Les Indes galantes, a production set almost entirely in exotic locales with colonial connotations, received no comparable debate—positive or negative—in the press. Drawing on materials from the Opéra archives and contemporary press, this presentation argues that Les Indes galantes enacted a soothing and sumptuous display of ‘colonial culture’ deeply familiar to French audiences that eclipsed its potential for controversy. For example, while changes to the score were deeply debated, the decision to relocate the fourth entrée of the opéra-ballet from a North American forest to a highly exoticized tropical coastal jungle went unchallenged. Maurice Lehmann, head administrator at the Opéra, seems to have mastered the grand opera tactic of using luxury and spectacle to contain potentially volatile subjects. Les Indes galantes evoked nostalgia for a time of French greatness. Instead of turmoil and controversy, it offered a fantasy of prosperity and splendor in which France remained the center of the artistic world.

About three months after the onset of the Terror, a thirteen-year-old teenager, Joseph Barra, was killed on December 7, 1793, in Vendée during combat after uttering “Long Live the Republic.” The death of this young soldier during the Terror came to Maximilien Robespierre’s attention, who made a motion at the National Convention to commemorate his death. The National Convention subsequently commissioned composer Grétry to compose an opera about him. The opera, Joseph Barra, was performed at the Opéra Comique. The score of this opera was never published, but the autograph manuscript was examined by two music scholars (Pierquin 1991; Bartlet 1992).

This paper aims to place Barra’s death and commemoration in the discourse of female citizenship. What has not been examined in published music scholarship, however, is that Barra died about a month after the death of the woman of letters, Olympe de Gouges, on the guillotine. Shifting the emphasis from Grétry’s activities during the Revolution to the political discourse about Barra’s death from December 1793 through July 1794 indicates that the discourse on female citizenship has been overlooked in music research. While Barra was primarily celebrated as a patriot, he was also simultaneously honored as a good son who wished to care for his mother on the battlefield. The National Convention gave a pension to Barra’s mother and credited her as a “citizen mother.”

This paper presents evidence from sources that have not been examined in music research, including tableaus, engravings, writings, odes, songs, hymns by leading cultural figures in that period, such as Méhul, Cambini, David, Thomas Rousseau, Charles Nodier, and forms of commemoration of Barra not only in Paris, but also in Strasbourg, Avignon, and Dijon. While mothers were presented categorically in revolutionary festivals (Pasler 2009) and the notion of female citizen was sometimes employed as an insult (Darlow 2012), the case of Barra indicates that Robespierre and other Jacobins awarded Barra’s mother for her work as a passive citizen (Sewell 1994). Thus, the Terror framed some female citizens as useful and defended select mothers as passive citizens, even though de Gouges, also a mother, was guillotined.