Clare Siviter’s Theatre and Censorship in France from Revolution to Restoration is a methodologically innovative study of theatrical culture between 1788 and 1818. Combining an extraordinary archival base of almost 2,000 censorship reports and 150,000 pages of documents drawn from 131 archives, the book redefines how scholars understand censorship during a tumultuous period in European history. Siviter’s starting point is the belief that ‘investigating theatre censorship offers a privileged insight into how contemporaries used–and were meant to use–culture to express their political and social allegiances’. This insight aligns her work with broader scholarship on the theatrical public sphere, including a wave of studies on French revolutionary theatre since the 1989 bicentennial. Chapter 1 reconstructs the increasingly bureaucratic machinery of censorship. Siviter shows that this system was inconsistent, locally variable and often marked by confusion, especially during the 1790s. Revolutionary reforms did not abolish earlier practices but reworked them. Then, the Napoleonic system ‘consolidated its inherited practices’ into a more durable framework. Of course, after 1789, censorship became more politically fraught in that it was transformed into a visible and contested exercise of a supposedly democratic regime. Siviter also shows that the Revolution’s leaders ramped up efforts to guide theatrical production and public opinion through ‘positive censorship’—a practice that continued well into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Logan J. Connors (Tue,) studied this question.