ABSTRACT
This apotheosis contrasted sharply with the treatment of younger, aspiring playwrights during the 1770s, who had been inspired by Voltaire to enter literary life and seek their fame in the theater. Yet they had found that while the official royal stage, the Comédie Française, offered an opportunity to reach the highest levels of literary life, it provided no juridical, institutional or financial framework to support young playwrights in their efforts. Moreover, for those whose works were accepted and staged, it offered no guarantees of a sustainable career in literature. Unlike the Académie Française, which offered writers recognition and a role as arbiters of French language and literary style, the Comédie – administered by the troupe, under the supervision of four courtiers known as the First Gentlemen of the Royal Bedchamber – provided no position, no guarantee of revenue, and no clear public identity to its writers. Only a very few of those young aspirants, therefore, achieved either commercial or critical success in the second half of the eighteenth century. Yet this did not diminish the appeal to aspiring writers of the royal theater as the most evident possibility for a spectacular rise to fame, fortune and, above all, personal legitimacy in literary life.
