ABSTRACT
It would be tempting to see the repertoires of the popular theatres as a barometer of the tastes of audiences and, above all, of their political awareness. Much of the theatrical fare of the 1790s reflected the tumultuous times, and the reactions of the new audiences suggest that many of them had not yet learned to distinguish between real life and what was happening on the stage. The melodrama expressed populist sentiments but its ethos right through the nineteenth century was usually conservative (one of the commonest themes was the upward social mobility of the hero or heroine, or the restoration of a previous status quo). Some have gone so far as to claim that the revolution of 1848 was caused by the theatre, though this claim has also been disputed. In real terms, it is probably more true to say that in the course of the nineteenth century the major conditioning factor on theatre was an economic one. The revolution of 1789 had been against a background of famine, the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 had backgrounds of financial crisis, poor harvests and general scarcity, and the Commune of 1871 occurred in a city demoralised by a recent and unnecessary war. For most of the century, censorship prevented the theatres from examining political or social matters in any depth, and the majority were pushed more towards distraction and entertainment than social questioning.
