Apollo’s Angels

by Jennifer Homans

  Order was restored, but only just. With increasing frequency, dancers called in sick (and were then seen reveling in restaurants), shredded costumes they didn’t like, or appeared drunk onstage; the administration issued fines and whisked rebellious dancers off to prison. The point was to punish them, but it was also to get them to the theater on time, and to that end guards formally escorted imprisoned dancers to their dressing rooms each night and then returned them to their cells. In one particularly egregious incident in 1782, Marie Antoinette personally requested that Auguste Vestris perform in honor of a visiting dignitary. He claimed to be injured and refused. This was widely perceived as an insult to the queen’s authority, and Vestris’s actions created an uproar in Paris and provoked a flurry of cartoons and pamphlets. His father implored him to reconsider, but he defiantly went to prison instead. Raising the stakes, and well aware of his own talent, he then threatened to leave the theater forever. The queen, who by this time was wary of yet another scandal, relented and ordered his release. When Vestris, presumably healed, returned to the theater, his supporters and especially his critics came out in full force: tomatoes, verbal abuse (“on your knees, on your knees!”), and finally stones were hurled from the parterre, and the king’s guards moved in to restore order.8

  In 1789, faced with an escalating and crippling financial and political crisis, Louis XVI summoned the Estates General representing the three orders of French society: the clergy, the nobility, and the third estate (which accounted for everyone not in the first two estates, including lawyers, merchants, shopkeepers, the bourgeoisie, and of course the peasants). In anticipation, the Abbé Sieyès published his angry and passionate pamphlet What Is the Third Estate? in which he excoriated the “caste” of useless aristocrats parasitic on the rest of society and expressed, in the words of one historian, “the French Revolution’s biggest secret, which [would] form its deepest motivating force—hatred of the nobility.” For Sieyès, the nobility was despicable, a mere nothing, whereas the third estate was “everything.”9

  The Estates General came together in May 1789, and in June it declared itself the National Assembly. Paris grew tenser by the day: thanks in part to a failed harvest the year before, bread was expensive, men were unemployed, and peasants eager to escape the economic privation of the provinces were arriving in the capital hungry and agitated. On July 11 Louis XVI tried to assert his authority and take control of the deteriorating situation, dismissing and exiling the liberal minister Jacques Necker, a convenient scapegoat, and installing conservatives in his place. But it was too late. The next day, riots erupted in the streets of Paris, and when the palace guards were called out they turned on their king and sided with the people instead. Key royal institutions drew angry crowds and late that afternoon some three thousand men and women gathered outside the Opera, hurling insults and threatening to torch the theater. They insisted that performances be canceled and the doors to the theater shut. The nervous director hastily refunded all tickets and sent audiences home, but the crowd invaded the theater anyway and requisitioned all theatrical props resembling weapons or arms. They eventually moved on, but the authorities nonetheless arranged for firemen and soldiers to occupy and secure the theater overnight.

  The following day, crowds raided gun shops and ripped apart the hated city gates where excise on goods entering Paris was collected (the excise meant higher prices); on July 14 they broke into the Hôtel des Invalides in search of arms and then famously charged the Bastille. Executions began, and the rioters defiantly paraded the heads of their victims on pikes through the city. And if this were not enough, in the last weeks of July the Great Fear broke out across the countryside as disgruntled and enraged peasants attacked châteaux and abbeys, burned the documents upholding serfdom, and desecrated any symbols of clerical and aristocratic authority they could lay their hands on. On August 4 reform-minded aristocrats in the National Assembly set out to offer concessions that might calm the violent unrest. In an extraordinary and feverish session that stretched deep into the night, however, they came up with more than compromise: they ended up entirely renouncing their own feudal and aristocratic privileges.

  At the Opera, performances continued, but the institution came under intense scrutiny. An anonymous letter directed at the theater and entitled “While You Sleep, Brutus, Rome Is in Shackles” was the first salvo in a series of attacks, and several leading artists scrambled to respond. With careful respects paid to the king, they agreed that the Opera should be rescued from the “greedy” interests of incompetent directors. Its productions represented the “labor” of artists and thus belonged to them and them alone; the theater should return, they said, to self-rule by a committee of senior singers and dancers (themselves). Moreover, in a concession to the street, they insisted that the Opera should never again be a haven of the elite: it should also serve “the poorest class of decent citizens,” people, as they put it, “without a carriage.” The National Assembly took up the debate, and its members vehemently disputed the future of what many perceived to be a corrupt outpost of aristocratic privilege. The nobility, as one inflamed observer noted in 1790, had renounced its privileges: what about the Opera?10

  Maximilien Gardel’s brother Pierre had an answer. Pierre was perfectly positioned to grasp the difficulties facing ballet during the Revolution: born in 1758 and raised at the Opera, he became a prominent dancer, learned to make ballets at his brother’s side, and took over the position as lead ballet master in 1787, when Maximilien died. Artistically, Pierre remained deeply loyal to the ancien régime: tall, thin, and elegantly proportioned, he had (as Bournonville later put it) a “cold and ostensibly phlegmatic” appearance and the “rigid training” of a danseur noble. His dancing was restrained and formal, but Gardel also suffered from a weak constitution, which gave his movements a fragile look that inadvertently hinted at the weakness besetting the noble style as a whole. Gardel’s career was long and unblemished and testified to his sharp instinct for survival. Like the diplomat Talleyrand, Gardel slid with apparent ease from the king’s employ to the radical Revolution, rose to glittering prominence under Napoleon, and even maintained his hold during the restoration of the Bourbons. He did not finally retire until 1829, and then only reluctantly. Pierre Gardel thus reigned over ballet at the Opera for some forty-two years, and his career spanned the most turbulent and politically volatile period in modern French history.11

  In 1790, Gardel established himself with two extraordinarily successful ballets that lasted well into the next century: Télémaque dans l’île de Calipso and Psyché. Télémaque would reach its 413th performance in 1826, and when Psyché was retired from the stage three years later, it had been presented an astonishing 560 times, making it by far the most popular ballet of its time. These were strange works, however, pastiches of old habits and new forms, which signaled a deep ambivalence about the changes being forced on the capital by the Revolution. On one hand, Gardel seemed to be doing something new: he set aside the traditional finery of ballet and embraced the revolutionary fashion for antiquity and things Greek. Hoopskirts, powdered hair, buckled shoes, tight stockings, restricting fabrics that pinned back the shoulders and restrained the torso in corseted stiffness—all of this was gone and replaced by simple Grecian robes and flat sandals laced at the ankle or calf.

  Moreover, unlike his brother’s unselfconsciously light dances, Gardel’s Télémaque and Psyché were (as he himself said) a more elevated and spartan breed: ballets héroiques. Guimard’s ancien régime coquettes and village ingenues were thus out (she had wisely resigned from the Opera in May 1789). Gardel’s leading ballerina was his wife, Marie Gardel, who had an untarnished reputation as an upright and devoted spouse and mother—a fact much remarked on by those sympathetic to the moralizing tone of the Revolution. Gardel himself performed the lead male roles in his ballets, but he carefully tempered his proud and noble stance and appeared, for example, bent in thought: a man of the agora, not of the court.12

  On
the other hand, Gardel’s ballets, for all their classical resonance, were little more than eighteenth-century comic operas writ large. Audiences had no trouble following the plots: Télémaque drew on a well-known story by François Fénelon, and Psyché retold the legend of Cupid and Psyche. Both were set to scores that included the usual string of tunes from other operas and popular songs to help the action along. Lest they be perceived as light, however, the sets and scenic effects added a gloss of pomp and grandeur, and audiences were treated to the spectacle of a collapsing palace, mountains and craggy rocks that fell precipitously into the ocean, a boat set ablaze, thunder and lightning, and furies and demons hovering over a flaming abyss.

  But most of all, Gardel’s ballets had beautiful women—and lots of them. He had noticed, he said, that the public (“ever fair, ever just”) preferred to watch women rather than men onstage, so he searched for a plot that would accommodate: Télémaque had a cast of thirty-two women and two men, with the women decoratively and prominently arrayed across the stage. The ballet’s overwhelming feminine presence led one critic to note that it was quite simply “a ballet without men.” In one scene, for instance, Venus plotted to surround Amour (a man) with scantily clad lovesick nymphs who wooed, caressed, and enticed him to dance with them; in another the nymphs danced themselves into a frenzied bacchanalia and “jumped and turned” in dizzying circles.13

  Télémaque and Psyché were snapshots in time. Caught between the increasingly decadent ethos of the ancien régime and the dour spartan aesthetic of the Revolution, Gardel came up with a bloated and bastardized form, which tried to hold the splitting seams of the old ballet together. His ballets héroiques draped the conventional vaudeville pantomime in a cloak of classical seriousness, allowing audiences to indulge a taste for erotic preening, cooing nymphs, and comic trickery under the guise of high art. These ballets had the scale and pretense of Noverre’s most overwrought pantomimes, leavened with ample doses of sentiment in keeping with Maximilien Gardel’s lighter and more melodramatic style. To this mix of old forms, Pierre Gardel added a flair for the freedoms unleashed by the Revolution, not least the fashion for antiquity and simple costumes, which allowed him to undress his nymphs without seeming to compromise their modesty. The audiences of 1790 were delighted—but the men of 1792 were not fooled.

  In the spring and summer of that year the Revolution entered its radical phase. In April, France declared war on Austria, and on August 10, angry crowds of self-declared sans-culottes—ordinary men who wore simple trousers rather than the fancy breeches of the hated aristocracy—stormed the king’s palace. The monarchy fell. Radicals took power and the war escalated, merging dangerously with the cause of defending and spreading the Revolution. Patriotism surged, and with it the regime’s strident egalitarian rhetoric and penchant for violent recrimination against the “traitorous enemy” within. The Opera had closed briefly when the king was arrested in August, and when it reopened (with a benefit performance for widows and orphans) the stakes were changed completely: whatever leeway had existed while king and court survived was now gone. Performances now catered to revolutionary officials and soldiers, and free performances for the sans-culottes were routinely scheduled. Under the circumstances, Gardel prudently turned his talent to political productions and revolutionary festivals.

  In October 1792, working with the composer Gossec, he created L’Offrande à la Liberté, a “religious piece” that depicted a mythic revolutionary moment set to “La Marseillaise” and other patriotic songs. The performance opened in a village with crowds of soldiers and men, women, and children going about their business. The tocsin and trumpet sounded, calling the nation to battle, and the villagers busied themselves preparing and gathering arms, stopping occasionally to strike a tableau with weapons held aloft. In the last verse, the chorus sang at half voice, as if in prayer, and the actors and audience alike fell to their knees as the figure of Liberty, played by Mademoiselle Maillard (a known royalist), was lifted high onto an altar. The dancers ceremoniously placed offerings at her feet and lit sacred fires. A silence ensued in which the audience and performers gazed up in awe at Liberty. Then the tocsin sounded again, and the crowds took up their axes, torches, and pitchforks as the entire theater broke into song: “Aux armes, citoyens!”

  It was an ardent patriotic display, but failed to convince the Opera’s more puritanical critics. When the Terror, the most authoritarian phase of the Revolution, took hold in 1793, suspicion of the Opera as a hive of royalists and secret aristocrats intensified. The Opera’s directors were arrested and administration of the theater was turned over to a committee of artists, which lasted on and off until 1798. Troops were stationed outside the theater doors, censorship tightened, and vindictive secret agents filed regular reports on the activities of artists in this clandestine “aristocratic nest.” One former dancer (and courtesan) was arrested for her association with the “noble caste,” and Gardel and others sweated to prove their loyalty. (A list of some twenty-two singers and dancers who ought to be executed existed, but its author, the murderous Jacques Hébert, admitted that he did not act on the list because he liked to be entertained.) The journal Révolutions de Paris saluted the artists for the strides they had made in presenting productions “without dances, without ballets, without love, without fairy scenes,” and in 1794, Gardel and a group of artists carefully prepared a report swearing to “completely” abandon the Opera’s vice-ridden aristocratic repertory in favor of “decent” and virtuous republican productions.14

  By now, the distinction between theater and life had collapsed almost entirely and the Paris Opera became a staging ground for revolutionary festivals. These outdoor celebrations were not free-form gatherings of exuberant crowds but highly planned and rehearsed ritual reenactments of dramatic revolutionary moments set on a spectacular and grand scale with thousands of participants. The idea was not to perform but to relive what had really happened (one manuscript for a performance about the taking of the Bastille specified that “the action … should not be imitated but rendered exactly as it happened”); audiences were expected to participate rather than sit back to watch. The traffic between the festival grounds and the Opera stage was constant: Gardel’s scenario for L’Offrande was adapted as the script for The Festival of Reason on November 10, 1793, and in turn was recycled back onto the Opera stage as a performance. Similarly, La Triomphe de la République ou Le Camp de Grand Pré offered a compilation of scenes from various festivals, and in another instance a volunteer troupe of performers even went to the war front at Jemmapes to dance and stage a tableau for French troops, aptly entitled The Austrian Dance, or the Mill of Jemmapes. In 1794 Gardel pulled out the stops and helped stage the festival for the inauguration of the busts of the revolutionary martyrs Jean-Paul Marat and Louis-Michel Le Peletier, which featured a vast set built in to the Opera’s façade. Props from inside the Opera were also routinely dragged into the street for use in festivals, and costumed performers danced around innumerable liberty trees and even took a prominent role in Robespierre’s Festival of the Supreme Being, held at Notre Dame in 1794.15

  These revolutionary festivals have often been likened to the king’s spectacles, emptied of royal and religious pomp and refilled with revolutionary catechism. But while it is true that the Revolution inherited the Bourbon taste for epic display, the king’s ballets and festivities had been static affirmations of hierarchy and the status quo. The revolutionary festivals, by contrast, had a radical and missionary zeal: they obsessively repeated (and created) mythic moments of the Revolution so as to convert the populace to new ideals, new rituals—and new arrangements of power. Because dancers and ballet masters were so deeply involved in staging these events and because ballet had always been tied to the ceremonial life of the nation, the themes that ran through the festivals did not just fade away when the revolutionary moment passed: they took hold and changed ballet forever.

  First there were the women in white. Marie Antoinette posing as sh
epherdess in a muslin frock had set the tone, but in the course of the Revolution women dressed in simple white tunics (often modeled on antiquity) became powerful symbols of a nation cleansed of corruption and greed. These women represented purity and virtue, self-sacrifice, Liberty, and Reason: they were rosières every one. Indeed, groups of modest white-clad women figured in nearly every revolutionary festival, innocent figures who moved in graceful ways and never marred their beauty with speech. Their presence often signaled a dramatic climax or dénouement. In the celebration in honor of Marat and Le Peletier, for example, girls in white appeared at the pivotal moment just as the unveiling of the busts began; draped with garlands and tricolor sashes, they ceremonially offered palms. In the Festival of Reason (which was repeated in villages all over France), a woman played the lead role supported by an abundance of girls in white; and in the Festival of August 10, at the Temple de la Victoire, the white-clad girls arrived at the end of the ceremony and offered flowers and fruits to a prominently placed statue of Liberty. Their tableau served as a final soothing resolution. The artist Jacques-Louis David, who helped design and stage many a revolutionary festival, later recalled these women, “superb women, Monsieur; the Greek line in all its purity, beautiful young girls in chlamays throwing flowers; and then, throughout, anthems by Lebrun, Méhul, Rouget de Lisle.”16