ABSTRACT
As we have seen in previous chapters, Beaumarchais and his allies in 1777-1780 had gone to great lengths to limit the membership of the SAD to prominent writers, while claiming to speak for “all men of letters.” Now, we will turn to the Revolution, when La Harpe took the lead in re-establishing the SAD. La Harpe, like Beaumarchais before him, sought to represent all men of letters, but was unconstrained by any perceived need to distinguish his group from aspiring but unrecognized writers. He thus represented the association not as had Beaumarchais – an elite salon – but as a community naturally arising from gens de lettres’ inherent affinity for each other. His rhetoric implied a distance from such royally privileged institutions of the Old Regime as the Académie, the Comédie Française and (as it had been represented by critics) the previous SAD. By contrast, critics of the new association of playwrights in 1790, including the troupe and its supporters, would seek to tie La Harpe and his fellow writers directly to the original SAD and thereby represent the authors’ group as an Old Regime corporation.
