But the contradictions in Noverre’s work were also those of his age, and the difficulties of reconciling pantomime with the conventions of ballet were not easily resolved. As Gluck rightly saw, the two clashed: stylistically and philosophically they did not belong in the same aesthetic world. Noverre was inevitably torn between his duties as a French ballet master and his drive to set his art on a new course. And although he saw himself as a man of the future, it is important to realize just how enmeshed he was with the past. Even his most radical prescriptions had a seventeenth-century feel: he wanted ballet to be elevated and ennobled and to aspire to the heights of tragedy, and he was a lifelong defender of the etiquette and formal principles of the high noble style of dance.
History, however, was moving beyond him. In the coming decades ballet would indeed be radically reformed, but not in the ways envisaged by Noverre or the other eighteenth-century dancers and ballet masters we have discussed. They had fought on one front only: pantomime. The result was lasting. They gave us the story ballet and—perhaps most important of all—the reasons to believe in it. But the other front had been left unattended. The formal steps, poses, and aristocratic look of ballet were still fully intact, the etiquette and manners of the court alive and well in the French noble style. Noverre was the wrong generation to engage this fight, but the fact remained: the only way to really reform ballet was to dismantle its formal structures—to get inside and change the way dancers moved. The aristocratic principles that organized the body had to be fully reexamined—or, more radically, overthrown. It was a formidable challenge, and it would take the French Revolution to accomplish it.
*Tax farmers collected duties and taxes on behalf of the king. The financiers involved often became wealthy men, and they were a convenient and hated symbol of the abuses and inequalities perpetuated by the French monarchy under the ancien régime.
*Deschamps was eventually forced to flee Paris but was imprisoned by police in Lyon. She escaped but never managed to regain her stature. She died in abject misery sometime in the early 1770s.
No part of literature is more closely or more abundantly linked to the present state of society than the theater. The theater of one period will never suit the next if a major revolution has changed the mores and laws in between.
—ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE
Nowadays, one who lingers on in this world has witnessed not only the death of men, but also the death of ideas: principles, customs, tastes, pleasures, pains, feelings—nothing resembles what he used to know. He is of a different race from the human species in whose midst he is ending his days.
—FRANÇOIS-RENÉ DE CHATEAUBRIAND
1770s the Paris Opera was in crisis. In spite of its royal privilege and regular infusions of cash from the monarchy or the city of Paris, the Opera, like the state itself, was suffering from chronic financial strain. To most observers the problem (in addition to the usual mismanagement) was clear: the rival Comédie Italienne, which performed lively comic operas, was drawing audiences from the Opera at an alarming rate. To address this situation, the city of Paris appointed the maverick Anne-Pierre-Jacques de Vismes du Valgay to overhaul the languishing institution and revive its fiscal and artistic fortunes. Young, bright, and shrewdly arrogant, de Vismes was both authoritarian and modernizing: he posted a sign outside his office that read “Order, Justice, Firmness” and then proceeded to unlock the doors of French high culture. He brought in foreign singers and Italian operas, and as if this were not enough, he also programmed pantomime ballets with low melodramatic themes more suited to the boulevard than to the king’s theater.1
De Vismes’s reforms presented an opening, and Maximilien Gardel, who had supported and then overtaken Noverre, was quick to seize the opportunity. He spent the next ten years until his death in 1787 staging highly successful “vaudeville pantomimes” (as Noverre disparagingly called them) and other light works that used stock characters and familiar plots, usually drawn from existing comic opera librettos. He made ballets about sweet village girls, upright small-town folk, and lovers torn apart and reunited through the trickery of confused identities. His ballets were heartwarming and sentimental—no kings, gods, or goddesses need apply. In Ninette à la cour (1778), for example, a young village girl, Ninette, is in love with Colas, a peasant boy. But when the king passes through town, he falls for Ninette’s simple beauty. She is spirited off to court where she is dressed in hoopskirts and adorned with diamonds. True to her origins, however, she mocks the unwieldy costumes and insists on exchanging her jewels for a bouquet of fresh flowers. A dancing master arrives to teach her the fine art of comportment, but she is overly exuberant and awkward and stubbornly resists his exercises. Nonetheless, she goes to the ball and makes good by contriving to set the social order aright: through a series of maneuvers, she makes the king fall in love with a comtesse and then throws herself into the arms of her beloved Colas. They all dance.2
Gardel’s ballets about sweet young girls were not always just sweet, however; at times they also took on political overtones. In 1783 he staged La rosière, depicting a widely admired real-life village tradition in which villagers nominated three young virgins and presented them to the lord of the manor. He chose one of the three and blessed her with a dowry, and the villagers gathered to celebrate her virtue. In the 1770s, however, this quaint custom had been the subject of a highly publicized cause célèbre. A rosière from the village of Salency had been abducted by the local lord of the manor, who rode roughshod over tradition (he fancied the girl for himself) and rudely ignored the protests of scandalized villagers. Parisian lawyers jumped on the case and eagerly defended the virtue of the ill-used rosière; her chaste innocence, they said, represented the purity of the French nation contrasted to the corrupting power of the lord of the manor and his arbitrary use of authority. Against this background, Gardel’s ballet carefully glorified the young girl in all her innocence. Many people appreciated the work for its vindication of Rousseauian virtue, but Gardel was also roundly chastised by at least one critic for allowing village customs to encroach on French high culture: “a Rosière at the Opera?!”3
Gardel had lowered the tone, and not only with the plots and characters he chose: he generally collaborated with comic-opera composers such as François-Joseph Gossec and André-Ernest-Modest Grétry, who deftly wove popular songs into their ballet scores. Working closely with these composers, Gardel ingeniously managed to sidestep the knotty problem (which had so haunted and engrossed Noverre) of how to tell a story with movement and mime. Audiences generally knew the words to these songs by heart, and the familiar tunes thus scripted the ballet—pantomime was far more legible when accompanied by a text running through the minds of spectators. It was a commonplace technique with origins in the Parisian fairgrounds: effective but distinctly déclassé.
Fittingly, Gardel’s leading ballerina was Madeleine Guimard (1743–1816), a lovely dancer who promised to be the Marie Sallé of her generation. Trained in the noble genre, she was elegant and poised and had a strong feel for pantomime. But Guimard had none of Sallé’s physical or artistic substance. Nicknamed “the Graceful Skeleton,” she was small-boned and waif-like and had a way of sketching out steps as if they were a mere shadow of themselves. Her talent lay in her uncanny ability to suffuse simple movements with a semblance of grandeur and to endow noble gestures with a natural grace. Over and again observers expressed amazement that Guimard, whose aristocratic carriage and manners were so exemplary, managed to “perform so authentically the steps, the walk and the manners of a peasant girl leaving her village for the first time.” Audiences loved her because she brought out the queen in the peasant—and the peasant in the queen.4
They also loved her, however, because she made them love her. An astute publicist, Guimard self-consciously created her own image. She did little to hide the fact that she was a bastard child of low birth who had made good through talent and beauty. Moreover, like so many dancers before her, she was also a brazen courtesan:
she juggled the affections of Jean-Benjamin de La Borde, first gentleman-in-waiting to the king and governor of the Louvre; the Prince de Soubise, a marshal of France; and (to the delight of the gossip mill) M. Louis-Sextius de Jarente, the bishop of Orleans. Courtesy of her wealthy and well-placed protectors, she lived in the fashionable district of the Chaussée d’Antin in an ostentatious private town house designed by the fashionable architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, with a fanciful interior by Jean-Honoré Fragonard (later completed by Jacques-Louis David). She also had a country house in nearby Pantin with a private theater where she offered erotic entertainments—sensuous peasant dances performed with abandon—to invited guests, including highly placed ladies and clergy who sat in boxes with grilled fronts designed to shield their delicate reputations. As if to balance her moral bank account, however, she also made a great show of visiting the poor and showering (her lovers’) silver on the needy. All of this reflected back onstage, giving Guimard the aura of a glamorous woman of considerable wealth and power, but also that of a kindhearted girl whose heart lay with the simple villagers she so aptly portrayed in Gardel’s ballets.
Guimard’s favored dance partner was the young and flamboyant Auguste Vestris (1760–1842). Nearly twenty years her junior, Vestris was also an illegitimate child, the son of the “god of the dance,” Gaetan Vestris, and the ballerina Marie Allard. He had been trained in the noble style by his father, who himself had been taught by the preeminent danseur noble, Louis Dupré—a distinguished line that reached back directly to the era of Louis XIV. As a child, Auguste obediently took on his father’s mantle, but by the 1780s he had become a rebellious upstart whose instincts veered in an altogether different direction. He was physically compact and strong, with muscular legs and a nonchalant air that was more casual than graceful. He became a virtuoso dancer and excelled in jumps and rapid pirouettes unfurled with athletic ease. There was something unsettling about his agility and acrobatics, however, and one commentator noted that although such tours de force certainly “astound the crowds,” they were also a “shock to men of taste.”5
So they were. But Gardel, Guimard, and Vestris did not come out of nowhere. The erosion of the high noble style and the race to more popular forms reflected a far-reaching crisis in French society: the absolute authority of the monarchy was in a state of precipitate decline. The evidence was everywhere, but it was poignantly revealed in the person of Louis XVI (1754–1793), whose profound ambivalence for the ceremony and ritual of royal power handicapped him from the start. His own coronation in 1775 was a halfhearted affair that barely lived up to the majesty and splendor accorded past kings. Reluctant to spend money on such a lavish display of his own person, Louis hesitated, and although the ceremony proceeded according to custom, it had a fake, staged look that boded ill for the future of his reign. The Duc de Croy lamented that it had been “all too reminiscent of the opera,” and he deplored “the new custom of applauding the king and queen as if they were onstage.”6
Louis, however, was ill-prepared to play the king of France, whether onstage or in life. He was a reserved and childlike man who preferred his domestic solitude to the pomp of court and who liked to escape his royal duties to hunt animals, chase stray cats, or tinker with locks. Tellingly, rather than display himself in public, he preferred to observe the magnificent gardens at Versailles through a telescope located high above the fray in a purpose-built private alcove. When required, he stoically submitted to court etiquette and maintained a façade of appearances, but this really was a show, and whenever possible he preferred simple and relaxed dress and manners. Moreover, his queen did little to strengthen the image of king and state. Marie Antoinette arrived at Versailles from Vienna a poorly educated and diffident adolescent of fifteen. Plunged into a labyrinth of politics and intrigue, and tormented by the court’s agonizing scrutiny of her sexual relations with the king as she failed to produce an heir, her behavior was erratic and she became the object of scandal, vicious gossip, and scatological speculation—all of which further eroded royal authority.
Her clothes did not help. The queen’s sartorial excesses were legendary, and she gleefully conspired with dressmakers and hairdressers to come up with ever more decadent and ostentatious gowns and poufs, which made her hair the site of whole battle scenes constructed with the help of thickly applied pomade and powder. At the Trianon (her private mini-palace at Versailles), however, she discarded her hoopskirts and wigs in favor of simple white frocks; she liked to tend animals and play at being a shepherdess. Whatever they thought of these bucolic fantasies, aristocratic ladies dutifully followed the queen’s lead and donned modest white muslin dresses in droves. Yet for all her sartorial fame, Marie Antoinette was as much a cipher as an original, and her seemingly outlandish tastes merely expressed an emerging social fact. In the late eighteenth century, strict codes of dress regulating appearance across all orders of society crumbled: aristocrats began dressing down and emulating the relaxed clothing of the lower orders, while maids took to dressing up and could be found at market in hoopskirts. Fashion was said (emphatically and for the first time) to be fickle and mercurial, like the queen herself—although this was also a way of describing the striking collapse of social distinction.
The Paris Opera did not go unaffected. Louis XVI was indifferent to opera and ballet, and he was the first French king willfully to neglect the symbolism of this royal institution—his box was often conspicuously empty. He left the Opera to his queen, but she was hardly a paragon of royal authority, and in the course of the 1780s the customs and etiquette that had governed the Opera since its inception noticeably frayed. Seating arrangements fell into disarray: wealthy bourgeois and non-nobles increasingly occupied the once-coveted first-ring boxes, and instead of seating his guests in advance the king perfunctorily passed a list of names to Opera administrators, leaving distinguished visitors to scramble for position once they entered the hall. Patrons were becoming more concerned with sight lines than with the social geography of the theater; the queen herself moved from her time-honored first-ring post to a second-ring box not far from the notorious dancer and courtesan Anne-Victoire Dervieux (Guimard’s fiercest offstage competitor).
Other hierarchies eroded too. Traditionally audiences had turned—quite literally—to the king and his nobility to gauge their own reactions to an opera or ballet. There was no “public” to please—there was only the king and his court, and his authority had been considered absolute. Indeed, until the mid- to late eighteenth century, the word public did not even refer (as it does today) to an agora or external arena where discussion or debate might take place; it simply described general or universal truths (as opposed to particular or private individual interests), and the king (next to God) possessed them. He was the public. Even as his authority began to decline and other voices rushed to represent the public, the custom of looking to the king and les grands for approval persisted. By the 1780s, however, this was less and less the case.
In this changed environment, seeing became more important than being seen. In 1781 the opera house burned down, and when it was reconstructed designers took advantage of the opportunity to accommodate the shift in audience attention. In the new theater, the boxes did not face straight into the house but were slanted instead to face the stage: better sight lines, less social visibility. Even dress became less rigorously formal, and in the mid-1780s the Marquis de Conflans appeared at the Opera wearing the latest English fashion: the once requisite silk stockings and powdered wig were gone and the marquis sported instead a simple black dress coat with his hair neatly cut and unpowdered.
Thus Gardel was not dumbing ballet down; he was merely keeping up with the times. Indeed, the image cut by the rich and fashionable Madeleine Guimard as she frolicked onstage as Ninette or a rosière was perfectly in keeping with royal taste: Marie Antoinette could not have captured her era (or herself) more accurately. In his own way, Vestris too became something of a parody of his celebrated father. Onstage Gaetan had p
ossessed unerring manners, and his instruction was much sought after by ladies making a debut at court; Auguste, by contrast, won audiences with his muscular virtuosity and bold breaches of taste.
All of this might have worked to advantage. Ever since Molière, after all, popular theatrical styles and renegade performers had rescued ballet from a tendency to sterile pomp and pretense. But Gardel was no Molière, and the era of Louis XVI did not possess the talent or cultural resources to revitalize ballet from within. If Gardel’s productions were charming and entertaining, they were also conventional and predictable: more pantomime than dance, they pulled ballet away from its founding principles—not only because (as people at the time feared) they poached so readily from the boulevard theaters, but because they revealed a startling loss of confidence in its intrinsically aristocratic character.
Backstage, things were even worse. Administrators complained bitterly that artists were getting out of control, and in the late 1770s and through the 1780s episodes of brash insubordination increased. Adding insult to injury, dancers and singers unabashedly (if at moments somewhat comically) adopted the rhetoric associated with the headstrong Parisian Parlement, which itself was taking an increasingly outspoken stand against monarchical “despotism.” Thus Baron Grimm reported that the artists of the Opera (seeking to oust an unpopular director) formed a “congress,” which met at Guimard’s house, and at one point the dancers even refused point-blank to dance. Officials scoffed at this “parliamentary parody” but often lacked the will and conviction to stand up to the dancers’ demands. In 1781 the artists demanded that a committee of performers be allowed to have a strong say in managing the theater, and the administration buckled. The reign of artists that followed, however, was predictably disastrous: vanity and petty recriminations spilled into the open; artists showed up when and where they felt like it, spoke rudely and out of turn, and generally disrupted the smooth running of the theater. The charade quickly lost its romance and Auguste Vestris, among others, requested that he be exempt from the tedious administrative meetings, which were interfering with his training regimen.7
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