Citizens of Utopia: Popular Theatre and the Republican State

Abstract

Drawing on rich archival evidence, this Chapter demonstrates that popular theatre was as integral to the republican project of using culture to shape citizens as the more widely studied examples of state education and popular music. Whether in small-scale government commissions or in the establishment of the Théâtre National Populaire in the years after the First World War, successive governments sought in popular theatre to counter Catholic structures and traditions, imagining a secular space for the experience of civic communion and republican morality. Nevertheless, their utopian project was beset by persistent difficulties, not only in visualizing the republican people but also in finding playwrights, suitable locations, and funding—and ultimately in attracting the people themselves.