The Contested Parterre

Eighteenth-century French theaters held a crowd that was mostly not wealthy. Standing in the pit were clerks, students, soldiers, and merchants, with an occasional nobleman among them, while most of the upper class watched from the boxes. The parterre, as this pit was called, could make up two-thirds of a house, and its unruly habits eventually boiled over into major riots in the years just before the Revolution. This study looks at French theater audiences from the bottom of the room, showing how conflicts within the pit mirrored strains within the Old Regime.

The book brings the crowded floor to life: men jostling one another, drinking, relieving themselves, and heckling performers over their acting. It follows the Bourbon court, and later the Enlightenment thinkers who opposed it, as they tried to rein in this behavior through both appeals to good manners and the use of force, with little success. Over time the parterre came to stand for a broader, more political idea of the public, one that revealed how poorly the government could respond to the claims of its subjects.

Written as a contribution to scholarly debate about the public sphere, the book is presented as the first full examination of the parterre's place in the political culture of eighteenth-century France.