ABSTRACT
Setting Georges Danton, together with Romain Rolland's reflections on popular theatre, within their wider historical context and with particular reference to the performance of 1936 ultimately offers an insight into the French imagination of political leadership. Rolland's earnest engagement with national politics and international affairs would earn him rejection and resentment as well as admiration. In short, Rolland's Theatre de la Revolution is not what might be imagined from its best-known example — or indeed from his own highly influential theoretical articles on popular theatre, in which he was engaged while composing Danton and which would later appear collectively as Le Theatre du peuple in 1903. Rather, throughout the period in which Rolland was composing his Theatre de la Revolution and most particularly in the 1930s, the relationship between leaders and masses was crucial to political debate and experience in France, as elsewhere in Europe.
