This chapter analyses issues relating to ageing, beginning with the professional effect of physical changes to the actress’s body. Statistics demonstrating the availability and limited nature of the repertoire of dramatic roles deemed suitable for older women support a wider examination of how age impacted working prospects and are presented in the context of contemporary gerontological discourse. Examination of the consequences of retiring from the stage, either voluntarily or through ill health, reveals a wide income disparity. Some women were able to assume a comfortable retirement, but the less fortunate were forced to adopt alternative income-generating activity, such as teaching, or to access the profession’s various charitable funds to offset poverty. The chapter concludes with an assessment of the legacy of the Victorian actress and the relevance of her experience to her twenty-first century counterparts.

This chapter sets out the ‘lateral censorship process’ that shaped plays’ paths from composition to reception. It is grounded in archival evidence from the Ancien Régime to the Restoration and builds on modern theoretical approaches, including ‘New Censorship Theory’. In this model, lateral censorship occurs in four main ‘sites’: the composition process, theatres (including staff on and off the stage), audiences, and critics. Each of these sites is home to a variety of agents; the sites are related; and more than one site could exert lateral censorship on a play. However, whilst such actions could halt a play in its steps, the focus here is not wholly negative: lateral censorship recognizes that censorship can be a positive force in production too (for example, critical feedback to improve a play), echoing the dual definition of ‘censure’ at the time.

The final three chapters are dedicated to the censors’ third major concern: the representation of government. Chapter 5 focuses on representing monarchies, at home and abroad, through periods when kings were in power in France (until 1792 and from 1814 and 1815) and when they were declared enemies of the state. It examines not only monarchies in major new tragedies, high comedies, or drames for the principal Parisian theatres like the Comédie-Française or the Odéon, but also the afterlives of pre-existing plays like Tartuffe and the opéra-comique Richard, Cœur de Lion, and new propagandistic productions to celebrate the restored monarchy. Such plays encountered bureaucratic censorship, certainly, but also performances despite their bans in places like Caen, Bordeaux, and the Roer and Cantal departments. Additionally, thanks to dynamic lateral censorship from audiences and theatres alike, royal figures could become a thorn in the sides of monarchical and republican or imperial governments alike.

This study of theatre censorship has laid bare the boundaries of the permissible; the messages that people – from bureaucrats to artists, playwrights, and spectators – promoted to advance their view of the world; and the limits of these worldviews. Whilst wanting to recognize the continuities and ruptures across regimes, the book repeatedly shows how the bureaucratic and lateral censorship processes worked together as well as against each other during the period 1788–1818. Taken as a whole, this book rejects the argument advanced by many scholars that censorship was purely repressive and negative; the positive, even propagandistic potential of censorship for plays and their effects on the public sphere must also be taken into account. In doing so, this study also emphasizes the importance of the individual, and how archival material has helped bring these forgotten histories back to life.

The Revolution is often remembered in the public consciousness for doing away with censorship, yet the reality was somewhat different, especially when it came to remembering the decade of 1789–99. This chapter analyses how such representations across genres from ballet to fait historique were censored both laterally and bureaucratically from the calling of the Estates General in 1788 through to the coup of 18 Brumaire in November 1799, passing through cities like Nîmes, Brussels, Dijon, Tours, and Bordeaux, alongside Paris. After the initial relaxation of censorship in the early 1790s, it soon returned and there was a stark rise in bureaucratic censorship during the Directory. However, audiences, playwrights, and theatres throughout the Revolution were prepared to use the stage to reject the official view of political progress, at times leading to an overt rejection of the regime in place and bringing major cities to the brink of rebellion.

Mœurs, the second major censorship topic, were cornerstones of how contemporaries shaped their world, especially as regimes changed. This chapter is organized thematically around the topics of love and relationships, titles (especially ‘citoyen’ or the lack thereof), brigands, justice, and false appearances, before concluding with new material on the fate of Le Mariage de Figaro – a play that touches on many of these themes. These examples, which include major comedies as well as works at the Porte Saint Martin, the Gaité, or the Ambigu-Comique, and secondary theatres in the provinces, demonstrate how the state and contemporaries used censorship around the depiction of mœurs to advance their specific view of the world. Interestingly, when it comes to mœurs, the limit of the tolerable where lateral censorship kicks in is often within the legally permissible, revealing a gap between what people wanted and the reality of a new political regime.

Napoleon Bonaparte was never going to be an easy character to put onstage, from the initial fears under the Directory about staging a living general to the Restoration’s horror at divisive memories of the Empire. Yet theatrical versions of Bonaparte or allusions to him were no stranger to the boards and tell us much about the construction of Napoleon’s image, indeed, the Napoleonic legend itself. Although there were certainly productions we would qualify as ‘propaganda’ promoting Napoleon, not all theatrical appearances or allusions were positive, and the bureaucratic censorship system often lagged behind audience interpretations, leaving room for derision via lateral censorship at any theatre, from the Opéra and the Variétés in Paris to Lyon’s Théâtre des Célestins. In this sense, censorship offered contemporaries a space for political subversion to advance another model of France, even at the height of imperial rule or under the restored monarchy.

A little over a month after the storming of the Bastille, the royal theatre censor was keen to highlight that the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen may have seemingly abolished censorship, but like a phoenix from the ashes, it would rise again at the hands of his fellow citizens. He was proved right. This study explores why that was the case, opening with an examination of contemporaneous definitions of censorship, an overview of the theatrical world at the time in France, and an analysis, using archival material from the regimes from 1788 to 1818, of how theatre could shape the public consciousness. The central argument here is that theatre censorship allowed contemporaries to influence what thousands of people saw (or not), and thus the internalized effects of these plays to shape the world around them.

For most of the period from the end of the Ancien Régime to 1818, there was a form of state censorship of the stage: a bureaucratic censorship process. This chapter stretches as far back as 1402 to understand the culminative measures that shaped a play’s path on the eve of the Revolution – in both Paris and the provinces – before analysing the numerous and, at times, conflicting Revolutionary orders relating theatre surveillance. It argues that the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (August 1789) transformed such censorship from a necessary part of the creative process to a coercive force. It also demonstrates that although the Revolution is remembered for the ‘freedom of the theatres’ with the law of 13 January 1791, bureaucratic censorship was swiftly reintroduced, and the process was expanded during the Revolutionary decade and solidified further under Napoleon and the Restoration.