Made to Please: Vaudeville and Obscene Parisian Media, 1750-1793

Harmon, Jenna M

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-3e4p-7q43

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Made to Please: Vaudeville and Obscene Parisian Media, 1750-1793

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The vaudeville remains an oft-overlooked genre of French song that was popularized by Paris’s fairground theaters and street singers on the Pont Neuf. Many histories of French music point to the middle of the eighteenth century as the period when the vaudeville began its rapid disappearance from the city’s musical landscape, following the arrival of the Italian comic bouffons. So thorough was the triumph of Italianate vocal music over the vaudeville that the playwright Charles Collé was moved to declare the genre “totally out of fashion” by 1768. Modern scholars have seized on this narrative, and regard the vaudeville as a stepping stone on the way toward the more innovative, cosmopolitan-sounding lyric theater of opéra-comique. However, by turning to collections of obscene, late eighteenth-century play collections, all of which contain “obsolete” vaudevilles, it seems clear that previous historiographic estimations of the vaudeville require re-assessment. This dissertation offers a more holistic engagement with the different spaces where vaudevilles could be heard after 1750 by charting their circulation between public stages and private spaces, and in particular, the théâtres de société. My work identifies and supplies modern notation for the musical indications, known as timbres, which partially recovers these vaudevilles for modern audiences, and allows them to once again hear many melodies that have been largely forgotten. Close readings of two play collections intended for private theaters, the Théâtre de campagne ou les débauches de l’esprit (1755/1758) and the Théâtre d’amour (ca. 1770s), show how vaudevilles continued to attract authors even after their alleged demise on the public theaters, especially when it came to articulations of sexuality. Obscenity became an increasingly fundamental attribute of the vaudeville during the Revolutionary period, as evidenced by three representative texts: Les Fouteries chantantes (1791), L’Autrichienne en goguettes, ou l’orgie royale (1789), and Le Branle des Capucins ou le 1001e tour de Marie-Antoinette (1791). Analyzing the vaudevilles contained within these works demonstrates the ongoing appeal of the genre after 1750, and shows the complex systems of intertextual reference at work in even the most vulgar of these songs.

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