Introduction

Summary

SHORTLY before the French Revolution, Michel-Paul-Guy de Chabanon, a man of letters, poet and musician, wrote a play that warned of the dangers of excessive partisan zeal. L’Esprit de Parti concerned a wealthy man, Dorville, who could not resist fanatical involvement with every popular fad – ballooning, mesmerism and, most particularly, the cliques and cabals of the opera house. This made him impossible to live with, his wife complained – dogmatic, distracted, choleric, incapable of treating anything with equanimity. He was risking his health, and the play showed him willing also to endanger his family fortune, the virtue of his daughter and the honour of his son in pursuit of his operatic obsessions. A coalition of well-wishers helped Dorville to avoid the worst consequences, but he ended the play in no way persuaded of his folly. ‘I will rush back to the Opéra to rally my troops,’ he concluded. ‘I will bombard the public with defamatory pamphlets; I will sow discord from the boxes to the pit.’

Chabanon published L’Esprit de Parti in 1788, bound together with other dramatic works and poems of a moralistic and minatory character. He could have picked any aspect of esprit de parti to dramatise, he argued in his preliminary reflections to the volume, but had chosen opera because it seemed so particularly trivial that it laid bare the absurdity of Dorville's position; partisan zeal in relation to, for example, religion or medicine would at least have some existential purpose. Music, he wrote, was especially dangerous from a moral point of view: it ‘speaks to the senses, and inflames the imagination, but has nothing at all to say to reason’. In a poem on the subject in the same volume, he argued that partisanship over artistic matters was of a piece with rivalries in the arena of politics and power:

The mad error once took hold in cloisters,

It stirred up the faithful, and split the church,

And sometimes seized control of the court itself;

Today it reigns supreme in the opera house.