| Students of organizations have long assumed a relationship between founding conditions and long-term organizational trajectories, but none has yet undertaken to study this relationship as it operates in the history of a particular organization. My dissertation examines this relationship for the case of the Paris Opera from its founding in 1669 to its experience in the early French Revolution. Drawing on the literatures of three sociological subfields—art, historical, and organizational sociology—as well as on the disciplines of history, musicology, and literature, I ask how the artistic and political conditions surrounding the creation of the Paris Opera structured its organizational trajectory through the eighteenth century and helped this royal institution survive the turbulent years of the French Revolution. The Opera was not, of course, the only privileged Old Regime institution to survive the reforming zeal of the early Revolutionaries, but the Opera's treatment in the first years of the French Revolution ran directly counter to the egalitarian, free-market legislation that triggered a sweeping transformation of the theatrical field beginning in 1791. Drawing on private correspondence, opera house account books, legislative minutes, and many other primary sources, I show that the Opera owed its survival of the Revolution to a firmly institutionalized link between opera and luxury, a link established in the Opera's founding phase and perpetuated throughout the eighteenth century. |
