Theater and the commercialization of culture in eighteenth-century France

In the last fifty years of the ancien regime, commercial theater in France was transformed. Provincial and colonial cities constructed dozens of new municipal playhouses, and many began to hire local theater companies to entertain urban crowds with comedy, tragedy, opera, and ballet. Theater's growing popularity created new opportunities for actors, directors, and investors to profit from the business of entertaining, contributing to theater's rapid spread. Resulting developments in architecture, financing, and the organization of acting companies laid the foundations for modern commercial entertainment.;This history of France's theater industry seeks to understand the influence of this medium on urban society and French identity. These new municipal theaters furthered the process by which bourgeois became French men and women, revealing the importance of commercialization in the cultural unification of urban France in the eighteenth century.;By shifting perspective from the capital to urban France as a whole, however, this project challenges assumptions of Parisian hegemony over eighteenth-century cultural life. Rather than being imposed upon provincial cities, cultural life was built up in the periphery out of local initiative, and in response to local needs, abilities, and concerns. Paris did mediate the forms that French cultural life would take, but less through political initiatives or elite cultural discourses than through the intervention of the royal theater company, the Comedie-Francaise.;The first three chapters of this dissertation analyze the role of municipal theaters as cultural institutions in urban society, focusing on theaters as civic monuments, the politics of theater's expansion, and the new patrons and publics that emerged. The next two chapters examine the work and personal life of actors and actresses, specifically the role of the Comedie-Francaise in overseeing the business of theater in France and the opportunities accorded to women in the theater world. The final chapter looks to the colonial playhouses of Saint-Domingue to explore issues of race, politics, and the role of culture in expressing colonial and metropolitan identity.