On the morrow of Brumaire, apparently for the sake of allaying public excitement, certain topical plays were banned, such as La PSche aux Jacobins and Mariniers de Saint-Cloud, which were considered impolitic. A few days later the Minister of Police demanded that 'new dramatic works be submitted for examination by the Central Bureau before their performance*. This was the birth certificate of an institution that was to be only too often in the news; the Censorship.
No doubt the mischievous spirit of the audience and its fondness for 'applications' had something to do with the excessive zeal of the officials who thereafter wielded the scissors - dim hack writers richly rewarded for lending the Government their assistance. In justice to them it must be said that they did not spare themselves trouble, and that their scruples were sometimes touching.
In a play entitled Henry IV et d'Aubigne, one of them asked the author to replace Henry by Francis the First, 'who at least did not belong to a fallen royal family'. Another insisted on the substitution, in Le Man prudent, of the titles of chevalier and baron for those of vicomte and marquis, unknown to imperial nobility. But the finest specimen of all was furnished by Nogaret, who flatly forbade the performance of a comedy in which a servant had the audacity to bear the name of Dubois-that of the Prefect of Police himself!
So long as the censors concerned themselves only with the insipid productions of their contemporaries, they might be forgiven, but their guilt became more serious when they proceeded to attack the classics, banning Merope without even giving a reason for it, pruning Athalie, Cinna, Britannicus and Le Marriage de Figaro, turning Sganarelle, ou le Cocu imaginaire into Sganarelle, ou le Mart qui se croit trompe, returning Heraclitus shorn of a number of passages but enriched by a long tirade in which the poet-censor Esmenard vindicated Napoleon's right to the throne:
'The worthy Emperors whose footsteps we follow, Children of Fortune, children of the Legions, Counted, instead of forebears, their own great deeds/
This posthumous collaboration with the author of Le Cid must have astonished some people. But after all, as Fouche said, "were not Esmenard's lines as good as Corneille's?*
A chronicler in the pay of the Government asserted one day that there was no censorship in France. 'Freedom of thought is the main conquest of the century, and the Emperor wishes it to be respected/ An assertion not easily reconciled with the exploits of the champions of expurgation, It may be said, however, that they pursued their activities in the sphere of politics far more than in that of morals, in which the audience itself played the part of censor.
Very broad-minded in real life, it evinced the most sensitive prudery as soon as it entered a theatre; and this was not the least paradoxical side of this singular epoch. 'People are determined to have virtue on the stage*, said Geoffrey, 'because there must be some somewhere/
In conformity with this principle, the dramatist must not introduce a woman deceiving her husband, nor a girl being seduced, still less a divorced wife. Behind the footlights, henceforth, there must be no more illegitimate couples, amorous adventures or even ill-matched unions —one of which, between a gallant colonel and a widow too young for him, was hissed at the Theatre-Frangais. Only edifying comedies were called for, as a restful change from an existence that was usually not edifying at all.
The playwrights of the Empire were to be pitied, for their profession cannot have been an easy one. If those of the following generation had been obliged to observe the same rules, we should have had neither the romantic dramas, nor the plays of Dumas, nor even those of honest fimUe Augier.
As for our authors of today, without the providential resource of adultery and a few other minor sins on which their fancy feeds, they could not write two scenes. Or else they would be as boring as the works of Etienne, or of Alexandre DuvaL
CHAPTER XII. THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE
The way people talked — Napoleon's malapropisms — The style noble — The sensational novel — The lachrymose mania — Jean-Jacques's walking-stick — The fashion for practical jokes
WIT and taste are riches that revolutions are not apt to set much store by. When a country has spent ten years trying to shed its skin, when its life has moved from the drawing-room to the street, it is hardly surprising to find a generation like that of the Empire springing up as a result of the experiment — with a somewhat summary culture, an almost childish sensibility, and a fondness for high-sounding words and hollow phrases, in short, rather lacking at times in a sense of humour.
It was what circumstances had made it, admirable in some ways, a trifle ridiculous in others, very different in any case from the France of the eighteenth century, whose nimble, versatile spirit had reigned so long supreme.
Some people accused the newcomers of talking a strange language. Poor Mme de Genlis had little hair left, but it stood on end when she heard expressions such as Cela est farce, Cela coute gros, or tine bonne trotte instead of une bonne course; un castor instead of un chapeau; votre demoiselle instead of votre fille.
Imagine her feelings if she were to be told that Bonaparte often made much more serious mistakes; that he might even say— so Chaptal declares — armistice for amnistie, rentes uoyag&res for rentes viageres, lies Philippiques for lies Philippines, point fulminant for point culminantl But these malapropisms — of which the last was perhaps merely the affectation of an artilleryman - were not really very surprising from the lips of a little Corsican gentleman who had begun rather late in life to speak the language of Paris, and might mispronounce certain terms he had not heard aright to begin with.
Opera Comique in the Rue Feydeau
The Odeon
Chairs for hire
At the milliner's shop (Paintings by Chalon)
These trifling mistakes did not prevent him in any case from proving, almost from the first, a great writer, capable when need was of hitting on a striking expression, a vivid, direct phrase. If among the 6,000 Frenchmen who boasted of wielding a pen during his reign, many had possessed the like gifts, the literary level of the Empire would certainly have been higher.
Save for two brilliant exceptions — Chateaubriand and Mme de Stael —it was decidedly low, but for this the mediocrity of public taste was no doubt responsible. An epoch has the writers it deserves, and this one suffered from serious defects that were sufficient to explain the situation.
If the high-flown oratory of La Harpe roused his hearers to enthusiasm, if a bookseller could offer Delille 30,000 francs for the manuscript of his Pitie, if a woman could think of saying to Chenedolle 'Your lines are as lofty as the cedars of Lebanon!', if the novels of Mme Cottin and Mme Kriidener shattered the nerves of thousands of readers, male and female, it was because these sorry productions gratified a triple passion shared by all their contemporaries: a passion for a high-falutin style, misnamed noble y a passion for dramatic situations and a passion for tears.
Never say anything simply: this was the first principle for both prose-writers and poets. As for the latter, one can hardly blame them, for they were only following the rules of the game when they called man a mortal, marriage hymen and war Bettona. Delille may even be forgiven the astonishing periphrases in which he specialized. This is his description of an umbrella:
'This precious, adaptable implement, displaying the art of both whalebone and silk.. /
and he calls the pig
"The frigid celibate, inapt to pleasure, Of the table's luxury unfortunate martyr/