Chapter 4 - Total Theater for Total War: Military Dramas and Performances of the French Revolution

Summary

This chapter combines analysis of war dramas with military performance contexts to uncover strategies of totality, repetition, and reenactment in battle “event” plays from the French Revolution. The 1790s witnessed, according to some historians, the first “total war” and a deadly proliferation of both battles and casualties, especially after France raised a citizen army in 1793 of over 800,000 soldiers – one of the largest the world had ever seen. The Revolutionary (then Napoleonic) wars were not only massive in size but different in form and intensity. The Revolution was rife with military-themed drama, and this chapter highlights its war plays, performances, and their relations to the country’s evolving military goals and tensions. A corpus of approximately 110 dramatic and musical plays reveals stark differences between the Revolution’s war theater and its Old-Regime equivalent. Proposed here are new ways to describe and critically evaluate war theater, which often depicted recent military endeavors with documentary-inspired precision and an anxious totality of emotionally engaging performance strategies.