French Literature Reviews - 2026
C. Charle, Théâtres en capitales. Naissance de la société du spectacle à Paris, Berlin, Londres et Vienne.
Theatre and Performance
Théâtres en capitales. Naissance de la société du spectacle à Paris, Berlin, Londres et Vienne
Christophe Charle
Published on: 15/10/2008
Publisher: Albin Michel
Series: bibliotheque histoire
ISBN: 978-2-226-18701-7
EAN: 9782226187017
No. of pages: 572 pages
Publisher's price: 29.00€
Theater, café-concert, and music-hall yesterday; cinema, television, and the internet today: the spectacle is a defining feature of open societies in the democratic age.
It is through the spectacle that we stage our passions, pleasures, moods, and our yearning for elsewhere and otherness. Everything thus begins with the theater, with Paris as its capital between 1860 and 1914—an era when the stage was the primary form of urban entertainment, and when the structures of free cultural enterprise were taking shape across Europe. Paris, Berlin, London, and Vienna: the comparative approach to the world of authors, theater managers, actresses, actors, and audiences works brilliantly here.
For while the underlying logic is everywhere the same, each performance in each of the four capitals brings to life a distinct culture and society—a fictional society on stage, and a real society in the auditorium and after the show. Why success, why scandal, why indifference, why oblivion? These are some of the pressing questions illuminated by this masterly study, which is just as instructive for understanding the world of yesterday as that of today.
Contents:
THE SOCIETIES OF THE SPECTACLE
The Century of Theaters
Theater Managers: Between Speculation and Vocation
Actors and Actresses in Search of Characters
The Public's Favorite Authors
In Search of Success
SOCIETIES ON STAGE
Audiences in London and Paris
Paris, Europe's Theatrical Capital?
Society in Performance
Plot Twists: Morality and Politics on Stage
"One Must Absolutely Be Modern"
Christophe Charle, professor of contemporary history at the University of Paris-I, director of the Institute of Modern and Contemporary History, is the author of nearly twenty books.
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An article on this work can be read on the laviedesidees.fr website:
"The Theater Market", by J.-C. Yon.
This work was also the subject of an article in Libération (8/1/09):
Europe on Stage
Review
Theater. Christophe Charle's comprehensive study on the rise of the spectacle.
DOMINIQUE KALIFA
Christophe Charle, Théâtres en capitales. Naissance de la société du spectacle à Paris, Berlin, Londres et Vienne, Albin Michel, 572 pp., 29 euros.
Theater was one of the major cultural phenomena of the 19th century. From melodrama, which drew working-class and boisterous crowds, to the "bourgeois" or upscale halls of fashionable neighborhoods, it constituted the primary collective pastime of the era, accessible to all social groups. This well-known phenomenon has inspired hundreds of books focusing on a single author, genre, theater, or meticulously tracing the lives of famous actresses. But Christophe Charle's book is of a different nature.
Far from the "enchanted vision sustained by traditional histories of the theater," the author has conducted a dense and exhaustive historical investigation. He has done so using his characteristic tools: those of a "statistical and objectivist" social history, fortified by concepts borrowed from Pierre Bourdieu's sociology, as well as comparativism, systematically contrasting the situation in Paris with those of other European capitals—London, Berlin, and Vienna. The aim is to "reconstitute the network of interacting relationships within the theatrical world"—those that govern the "society of the spectacle," a colorful world where managers, authors, and actors clash, alongside the relationships that organize the audience or project themselves onto the stage through theatrical representation. The resulting book is a true magnum opus, destined to leave a lasting mark on the historiography of the performing arts.
Hierarchy. The sheer mass of information gathered is considerable. Charle first demonstrates the extraordinary surge in theatrical supply during the second half of the century, driven by the expansion of urban audiences and their thirst for leisure, as well as by progressive political liberalization. The number of venues more than doubled, the number of plays exploded (500 in London in 1914), and the potential audience grew continuously: 200,000 people in Berlin, 250,000 in Paris, 400,000 in London. In Paris, over 5 million tickets were sold annually by the end of the century! However, this growth came at the cost of a clear hierarchization that favored bourgeois theaters deemed more "profitable." The social approach favored here reveals another trend, first initiated in London and soon exported to other capitals: in a market that had become speculative and competitive, career prospects grew more selective, widening disparities and accelerating turnover. The exceptional success of a few "stars," mostly female, masked the growing precarity affecting almost all theatrical professions. This led to the birth of the first professional associations in Paris and London as early as the 1840s.
These transformations also affected the audience. Rising ticket prices, new venues, and new schedules gradually eroded working-class attendance and the clamor of yesteryear. These crowds migrated to other forms of entertainment—café-concerts, music halls, fairgrounds, or sporting events—where emotional license could still be freely expressed. In theaters, by contrast, new forms of listening and behavior inspired by the concert hall were cultivated.
The author did not stop at this external approach. He also sought to capture the social representations at work on stage, doing so as a historian who rejects any value judgment in favor of sticking strictly to the plays actually acclaimed by contemporaries. The finding is clear: everywhere, there is a discernible "shift of the public toward easy genres." Dramas and historical plays, so popular at the beginning of the century, receded in favor of laughter, light entertainment, and musical theater. What triumphed was vaudeville and comedy of manners. In Paris, successful authors went by the names of Meilhac and Halévy, Flers and Cavaillet, and later Labiche, Feydeau, or Victorien Sardou, whose La Famille Benoiton, a satire of the nouveau riche bourgeoisie, ran for nine months. A strange social homology seemed to link the world of the auditorium with that of the stage.
"Modernity." Yet, within this art of convention and complicity, critical perspectives also pierced through. Profit-driven business practices were put on trial, and the excessive aspirations and hypocrisy of social roles were mocked. Women, in particular, asserted rights that the immense resonance of these plays—reaching up to 500,000 spectators for the most popular ones, at a time when a bestselling novel rarely exceeded 100,000 copies—helped gradually disseminate. In this sense, the theater also served as a "voluntary or involuntary laboratory of our modernity." As for the alternative stages created at the end of the 19th century—Antoine's Théâtre Libre in Paris, the Freie Bühne in Berlin, Shaw's plays in London, or Schnitzler's in Vienna—they constituted major poles of innovation and resistance against moral and political conservatism, even if they achieved little public success. They were nonetheless essential, Christophe Charle insists, because it is across all genres combined—popular, literary, and bourgeois—that theatrical activity succeeded in articulating the emotions and expectations of the century, before cinema offered society another mode of representation.
Historians of culture have long examined how the rise of mass urban entertainment transformed European urban life during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this comparative study, Christophe Charle investigates the theatrical worlds of Paris, Berlin, London, and Vienna between 1860 and 1914. The volume explores the professional trajectories of theater managers, actors, actresses, and authors within a rapidly expanding leisure market.
The analysis traces the economic and institutional developments that shaped the performing arts, noting the proliferation of venues, shifting audience demographics, and the growing commercialization of dramatic production. Attention is also given to the thematic content of successful plays, highlighting the relationship between stage representations and contemporary social norms. Readers interested in European cultural history and the origins of modern media entertainment may find this comparative inquiry particularly relevant for understanding the roots of contemporary spectacle.