Od zespołu do przedsiębiorstwa teatralnego. Oficjalne sceny Paryża XVIII wieku – rozwój i kontrola

The military and economic dominance of France in Europe waned in the 18th century, but paradoxically, that century was also the golden age of cultural influence of France on other countries of the Old World. A large number of courts established theatres that were often perceived as local versions of the Comédie-Française, because they replicated the same model of maintaining close ties between the court and the stage, understood as a place that was supposed to promote and reinforce the official model of civilisation. Yet at the same time, the Comédie-Française as well as other “official stages” of 18th-century France (the Opéra, Comédie-Italienne, and the Opéra-Comique later on) that enjoyed royal support (mostly through monopoly, direct subsidies, and sometimes through preferential terms and conditions of lending theatre halls) became increasingly effective in breaking their ties with Versailles and becoming bourgeois theatres to a larger extent. Growing competition from unlicensed private stages, which had been trying out different ways of circumventing the royal monopolies, forced the officially sanctioned theatres to seek new management solutions and new aesthetics. The search for form was very often obstructed by attempts made by Louis XV and Louis XVI to maintain royal control over the spectacles: though the monarchs themselves were not interested in theatre as such, they introduced a complex system of control and scrutiny. Thus, the official stages had to struggle with criticism from the audiences that demanded change, but they were restricted by organisational decisions being made externally. It was also the time when the conviction about conservatism of officially sanctioned stages, the Comedie-Française in particular, took roots. And though the stage would not, indeed, act as a motor of formal change, the ensemble was not to blame here. Eighteenth-century courts of Europe did not pay attention to the intricacies of the system of ties and connexions (between the court and the bourgeois audience, between the official stages and the unofficial ones) that had been shaping the theatrical life of the French capital of the period. Instead, they mostly relied on simplified and obsolete 17th-century beliefs about the theatre at the French court, while the theatre on the Seine was entering a completely new phase of development.