Light comedy and farce similarly relied upon a thin layer of contemporary social relevance, with marriage, the ménage à trois, and the pretensions of the lower middle class as the main subjects. In farce in particular, social criticism passed from being an end to a means, and the return to sanity at the end of the plays confirmed the audience’s assumption that the world would ultimately always conform to expected and accepted standards. The classic examples of the genre are the plays of Eugène-Marin Labiche, notably Un Chapeau de paille d’Italie (1851; The Italian Straw Hat).
When their taste ventured into something more literary, Second Empire audiences were obliged to look to the fantastical comedies of Alfred de Musset, written 30 years earlier but not staged until the 1850s and ’60s. In light comedy proper and costume drama, the leading figure of the age was George Bernard Shaw’s bugbear, Victorien Sardou. But the most successful genre of all was undoubtedly operetta, especially the absurd comedies of the collaborators Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, whose work was set to music by Jacques Offenbach. La Belle Hélène (1864; Fair Helen), in which a frivolous pastiche of Classical legend is spiced by an acute satire on the manners, morals, and values of the court of Napoleon III, was the nearest thing to political satire that the French stage could boast for 20 years.
The Franco-German War and the consequent collapse of the empire had little perceptible effect on mainline theatre, though Offenbach lost favour because of his German associations. Attempts by other writers (Flaubert, the Goncourts, Zola) to establish a more genuinely realistic form of theatre failed, partly because public taste and theatrical commercialism made experiment nearly impossible and partly because the plays written were theatrically incompetent. The only effective Naturalist dramatist was Henry-François Becque.
That Becque owed his success to André Antoine, the founder and director of the Théâtre Libre (1887–96), is symptomatic of the way in which literary theatre in the last decades of the century was largely dependent for its revival on small-scale directorial experimentation. Antoine, who aimed at creating a unity between the staging (decor and acting style) of a play and its content, in the interest of total realism, introduced Paris to the drama of Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg. From 1891 Paul Fort, founder of the Théâtre d’Art, and his successor, Aurélien Lugné-Poë, who restyled the company as the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, applied Antoine’s principles to the creation of antinaturalistic theatre. It was these little experimental companies that principally staged Symbolist plays and began to explore the spectacular resources of the stage, including puppet theatre and shadow plays, as well as the theatre’s capacity to create a new antirealist drama focused on ideas, fantasy, and dream. Most productions were of minor work (by, for example, Auguste, comte de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, and Rachilde [Marguerite Eymery]); even the Belgian Maurice Maeterlinck, whose influence made itself felt throughout Europe, won only small, select audiences for such plays as Pelléas et Mélisande (1892; Eng. trans. Pelleas and Melisande), Monna Vanna (1902; Eng. trans. Monna Vanna), and the celebrated children’s play L’Oiseau bleu (1908; The Blue Bird). The significance of such theatrical innovation was felt more widely in the following century. Alfred Jarry’s Ubu roi (King Ubu), a vicious lampoon on the violence of despotic rule, has been said to foreshadow Surrealism and the Theatre of the Absurd. The play opened at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre on December 11, 1896, played to pandemonium and near-riot, and closed the following night. Naturalism
The argument for the existence of a distinctive Naturalist school of writing depends on the joint publication, in 1880, of Les Soirées de Médan, a volume of short stories by Émile Zola, Guy de Maupassant, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Henry Céard, Léon Hennique, and Paul Alexis. The Naturalists purported to take a more scientifically analytic approach to the presentation of reality than had their predecessors, treating dissection as a prerequisite for description. Hence Zola’s attachment to the term naturalisme, borrowed from Hippolyte Taine, the positivist philosopher who claimed for literary criticism the status of a branch of psychology. It is difficult to find a coherent statement of the Naturalist theoretical position. Zola’s work notes are fragmentary, and his public statements about the novel are all distorted by their polemical purpose—particularly the essay “Le Roman expérimental” (1880; “The Experimental Novel”), in which he developed a parallel between the methods of the novelist and those of the experimental scientist. An examination of the views held in common by Zola, Maupassant (in, for example, “Le Roman,” the introductory text to his novel Pierre et Jean [1888; Pierre and Jean]), and Huysmans indicates that the basis of Naturalism can best be defined as the analytic study of a given milieu, the demonstration of a deterministic relation between milieu and characters, the application of a (more or less) mechanistic theory of psychology, and the rejection of any sort of idealism. However, like Flaubert, the Naturalists did not see reality as capable of any simple objective transcription. Zola and Maupassant accepted as part of literary truth the transposition of reality through the temperament of the individual writer and the role played by form in the construction of the real. Zola
Émile Zola’s Naturalism depends on the extensive documentation that he undertook before writing each novel. This extensiveness is emphasized by the subtitle of his 20-novel cycle Les Rougon-Macquart: histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le second Empire (“The Rougon-Macquart: Natural and Social History of a Family Under the Second Empire”). The linking of so many novels through a single family and the emphasis on the deterministic effects of heredity and environment confirm the scientific purpose. Zola’s canvas is broader than Flaubert’s or even Balzac’s: he handles subjects as diverse as a miners’ strike in Germinal (1885; Eng. trans. Germinal), working-class alcoholism in L’Assommoir (1877; Eng. trans. The Drunkard or L’Assommoir), the sexual decadence of the upper classes in La Curée (1872; The Kill) and Nana (1880; Eng. trans. Nana), and the ferocious attachment of the peasantry to their land in La Terre (1887; Earth). But there are countless examples of manipulation of facts, particularly in the chronology of the novels, which show that for Zola documentary accuracy was not paramount. Indeed, his work notes reveal that he saw the scientific principles underlying the novels as a literary device to hold them together and thus strengthen the personal vision of reality that they contained. The sense of period and family unity is soon submerged, as Zola becomes both poet and moralist in his portrayal of contemporary values. All the major novels are dominated by symbolically anthropomorphized forces that control and destroy both individual and mass. Thus the mine in Germinal is represented as a voracious beast devouring those who work in it. This tendency to symbolism, which for Zola is a mode of both analysis and commentary, can be seen in an even more extreme form in the reinterpretation of the Genesis story in La Faute de l’abbé Mouret (1875; The Sin of Father Mouret). As the cycle progresses, the sense of a doomed society rushing toward the apocalypse grows, to be confirmed in Zola’s penultimate novel, on the Franco-German War, La Débâcle (1892; The Debacle).