After the Last Bow: The Fate of Superannuated Actors in Nineteenth-Century France

1993 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 94-103
Author(s):  
F. W. T. Hemmings
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Small Farm ◽  
Acute Distress ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
Personal Savings ◽  
Starting A Business ◽  
The Revolution

One of the incidental attractions of joining the Comédie-Française had always been that the Society could be relied on to look after the well-being of its veteran members even after they had left the stage, provided that they had given it a full twenty years' service counting from the date of their promotion to the rank of societaire. The policy of paying retirement pensions to superannuated actors at the royal theatre antedates even the coming into being of the Comédie-Française. In his Théâtre françois of 1674, Chappuzeau mentions the custom which had already grown up at that time for a new entrant to pay the older one whom he was replacing ‘une pension honnête’ out of his own earnings, so as to provide the retired actor with an income permitting him to live out his remaining days without falling into destitution. On 17 May 1728 the system was regularized by a proclamation to the effect that ‘les acteurs et actrices qui se retireraient jouiraient à l'avenir d'une pension viagère de mille livies, soit qu'ils eussent eu part entière, demi-part ou même un quart de part’; and although these arrangements fell into abeyance during the Revolution, causing acute distress to several former sociétaires who had only their personal savings to fall back on, they were reinstated by the Act of Association which all members of the Society were required to sign in 1804: clause 12 laid it down that ‘le sociétaire qui se retirera après vingt ans de service aura droit à une pension viagère de 2000 francs de la part du Gouvernement et à une pension égale de la part de la Société’. Even if they had no other resources, 4000 francs a year would relieve an ex-actor of serious financial anxieties; and since they might still be in their early forties when they took retirement, there was nothing to prevent them starting a business if they wished or cultivating a small farm in the country.

Proudhon and the Problem of Community

1967 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 457-477 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Ritter
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Individual Freedom ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
The Revolution

The problem of community, as Proudhon understands it, is to reconcil individual freedom with social peace. His political theorizing can best be seen as a prolonged effort to achieve this reconciliation. Proudhon was not at all original in placing the problem of community, as thus conceived, at the top of his agenda. He was simply responding in the usual way to the challenge presented by the Revolution to all writers on politics in early nineteenth-century France.- By disrupting social order at the same time that it awakened demands for freedom, the Revolution had made an answer to the problem of community both urgent and difficult. A reconstructed French community both free and safe was clearly needed, but how could it be achieved? If pressing demands for freedom were met, a tenuous social peace would be endangered, while if peace were secured, demands for fredom would go unsatisfied. The need and the difficulty of reconciling peace and freedom under the circumstances prevailing in France led Proudhon, like so many of his contemporaries, to devote himself to finding an answer to the problem of community.

The Gender of Rosalind

1991 ◽  
Vol 7 (26) ◽  
pp. 113-125
Author(s):  
Jan Kott
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Critical Approach ◽  
As You Like It ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
Recurrent Theme ◽  
The Revolution

In this issue, we present two contrasting views on the issue of gender in Shakespeare – specifically, the gender of the heroine-hero of As you Like It, Rosalind-Ganymede. Both articles relate the character to conventions of acting and of sexuality in Shakespeare's England and our own: but in this first essay Jan Kott connects the play also with another ‘historic moment’ when androgyny became a recurrent theme, the period following the Revolution and the Restoration in nineteenth-century France – notably as reflected in Gautier's novel, Mademoiselle de Maupin, in which an amateur performance of As You Like It, and the sex of its leading player, assume a central significance. Jan Kott has been an advisory editor of Theatre Quarterly and of NTQ since the journals began publication, and a regular contributor to both – most recently, on the current preoccupations of Grotowski, in NTQ23. Since the seminal publication of Shakespeare Our Contemporary in 1965, he has been a leading exponent of a critical approach which links the study of drama, the practice of performance, and the forms of culture in which both have their roots.

Who Was This Man?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mitch Kachun
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Life Experiences ◽  
Broad Context ◽  
Military Power ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Revolution

Chapter 1 introduces the broad context of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world in which Crispus Attucks lived, describes the events of the Boston Massacre, and assesses what we know about Attucks’s life. It also addresses some of the most widely known speculations and unsupported stories about Attucks’s life, experiences, and family. Much of what is assumed about Attucks today is drawn from a fictionalized juvenile biography from 1965, which was based largely on research in nineteenth-century sources. Attucks’s characterization as an unsavory outsider and a threat to the social order emerged during the soldiers’ trial. Subsequently, American Revolutionaries in Boston began the construction of a heroic Attucks as they used the memory of the massacre and all its victims to serve their own political agendas during the Revolution by portraying the victims as respectable, innocent citizens struck down by a tyrannical military power.

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