ABSTRACT
This chapter presents paradigmatic plays that illustrate, in sometimes surprising and unexpected ways, the pervasive sentimentality of the Revolutionary stage as well as the productive contamination among genres. It discusses the four dramatic works of La Mère coupable-1792, Le Déserteur-1769/1786, Fénelon-1793, and Les Deux petits savoyards-1789 representing some of the most popular plays and playwrights of the Revolution in four different genres. The four genres are: bourgeois drama, comic opera, tragedy, and comedy respectively. The French word 'drame' can mean a particular genre or can refer more generally to any dramatic work. The chapter aims to reconstruct through select examples what the majority of the theater was for the majority of theater goers during the Revolution, and thereby to understand the popular sentimental theater's meaning and function in Revolutionary culture more generally. The plays discussed in the chapter remind us that the Revolution was as ideological as it was political.
