French Literature Reviews - 2026

C. Feilla, The Sentimental Theater of the French Revolution
Theatre and Performance

Cecilia Feilla, The Sentimental Theater of the French Revolution

Burlington, VT/ London, UK: Ashgate, coll. “Performance in the Long Eighteenth Century: Studies in Theatre, Music, Dance,” March 2013.

ISBN : 9781409411635

274 pages

Price: 49.50 EUR

Publisher's Overview:

Smoothly blending performance theory, literary analysis, and historical insights, Cecilia Feilla explores the mutually dependent discourses of feeling and politics and their impact on the theatre and theatre audiences during the French Revolution. Remarkably, the most frequently performed and popular plays from 1789 to 1799 were not the political action pieces that have been the subject of much literary and historical criticism, but rather sentimental dramas and comedies, many of which originated on the stages of the Old Regime. Feilla suggests that theatre provided an important bridge from affective communities of sentimentality to active political communities of the nation, arguing that the performance of virtue on stage served to foster the passage from private emotion to public virtue and allowed groups such as women, children, and the poor who were excluded from direct political participation to imagine a new and inclusive social and political structure. Providing close readings of texts by, among others, Denis Diderot, Collot d'Herbois, and Voltaire, Feilla maps the ways in which continuities and innovations in the theatre from 1760 to 1800 set the stage for the nineteenth century. Her book revitalizes and enriches our understanding of the significance of sentimental drama, showing that it was central to the way that drama both shaped and was shaped by political culture.

Contents:

Introduction

The Bestsellers of the French Revolution, or, why sentimentality dominated the Revolutionary stage: four case studies (La Mère coupable, Le Déserteur, Fénelon, and Les Deux petits savoyards)

Revolutionary tableaux: Diderot, David, and the sentimental frame of politics

Sentimental vows and the affective bonds of social contract: national and private theatricals in Collot d’Herbois’s La Famille Patriote (1790)

Virtue’s proofs: Paméla on stage and on trial during the Terror

Virtuous citizen, suffering father: Voltaire’s Brutus and the sentimentalization of political tragedy

Acting revolution: Talma and the sentimental body

Bibliography

About the Author:

Cecilia Feilla is Associate Professor in the Department of Literature and Language at Marymount Manhattan College, USA.

During the long eighteenth century, European stages frequently engaged with the shifting boundaries between private sensibility and public duty, a dynamic central to the development of modern theatrical and political consciousness. The interplay between emotion and civic identity occupied many writers, philosophers, and dramatists who sought to define virtue through performance. Within French literary history, the evolution from Enlightenment aesthetics to the upheavals of 1789 generated varied dramatic forms that reflected contemporary debates on community, representation, and the social contract across shifting political regimes.

Cecilia Feilla examines popular plays from 1789 to 1799, investigating how sentimental drama intersected with revolutionary politics and performance culture. The study explores works by Denis Diderot, Voltaire, and other figures, tracing the connection between private feeling and public virtue on stage. Readers interested in eighteenth-century French literature, theatre history, and the cultural dimensions of the French Revolution may find this volume relevant to their research.