| This dissertation studies the encounter between the royal court and an emerging commercial public in eighteenth-century France, through the experience of playwrights for the Comedie Francaise. It explores how self-declared "men of letters" sought to associate themselves with this theater to fashion identities based on two seemingly irreconcilable forms of social prominence, "honor" and "public" acclaim. In personal relations with the royal theater's actors, its aristocratic supervisors at court, and its most prominent spectators, playwrights sought to comport themselves "honorably" and thus gain entry into elite social networks. At the same time, in the press and in prefaced, printed editions, playwrights emphasized their commercial success to claim recognition as spokesmen to and for "the public." Across the eighteenth century, aspiring writers from Voltaire to Mercier to Beaumarchais employed different strategies to negotiate between these two ideals in different contexts--in direct relations with other writers, actors and protectors; in correspondence with the troupe's lawyers and supervisors at court; and in print, through prefaces, pamphlets and memoires judiciaires.;Drawing on such a varied source base, the dissertation argues that those who aspired to the status of "men of letters" in the Age of Enlightenment needed first to gain recognition within courtly and Parisian elite networks, only through which could they hope to establish themselves as legitimate voices in literary and public life. Part One explores playwrights' individual strategies for fashioning identities in light of the theater's changing regulations from the late seventeenth century to the 1770s; Part Two focuses on efforts to reform those regulations and to forge a collective status and identity for playwrights in the Societe des auteurs dramatiques, from 1775 to 1780. Both parts emphasize how writers described themselves in terms of their "honor," "honnetete," and service to "the public," to suggest both their autonomy and sociability, values which then became central to the identity of Enlightenment "men of letters" and modern intellectuals. However, the dissertation also resists the current tendency to liken eighteenth-century writers to modern intellectuals, seeking literary property, autonomy from protectors, and speaking truth to power on behalf of the public at large. Instead, it argues, eighteenth-century writers sought above all to demonstrate disinterest, self-restraint and suitability to interact in exclusive and hierarchical elite social networks, rather than participate in market relations or articulate the interests of civil society. |
