ABSTRACT
The underprivileged urban population of pre-revolutionary France was not by any means deprived of sources of more or less innocent entertainment, both at the fairgrounds and at the various commercial theatres that were started up on the northern boulevards of Paris of the ancien regime. The audience on those days of ‘no charge for admission’, by the very fact that it can seldom afford to go to the theatre, brings to bear on the performance a concentration of attention that nothing can disturb, a keenness of judgement that nothing can blunt. Another feature common to the small local theatres and the extinct working-class theatres on the Boulevard du Temple was that the audiences habitually combined the pleasures of the table with those of the spectacle, instead of eating their evening meal first and seeing the show afterwards as happened elsewhere. The movement for a ‘people’s theatre’ eventually foundered over the difficult question of finance.
