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Prévert's Political Theatre: Two Versions of La Bataille de Fontenoy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2009

Susan Spitzer
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Extract

A relatively unknown period of Jacques Prévert's career, from 1932 to 1936, constitutes, as is now becoming apparent, more than a footnote in twentieth-century literary history: it marks the existence of the most successful French workers theatre company to be spawned by the agitprop movement. Born on Russian soil after the Revolution, the agitation-and-propaganda skit genre that brought news to soldiers on the front during the civil war there later traveled east to Germany, where leftist forces made political use of it until the Nazis, its primary target (along with police repression, the Church, the military and capitalism in general), banned it in the early thirties. By that time, however, the agitprop movement had firmly taken root in England and America as well as in France, where La Scène Ouvrière, the organ of the Fédération du Théâtre Ouvrier de France (FTOF), could boast of coordinating hundreds of amateur theatre troupes with a left-wing vocation. Every Parisian arrondissement, as did the majority of French provincial cities, came forth with a Phalange or a Porte-voix rouge or a Blouse bleue company composed of workers and, in most cases, middle-class amateurs, with an occasional theatre professional contributing his or her know-how to the productions. One such group, Prémices, the basic tendency of which was toward rather polished, dramatic work, underwent a scission in 1932 that resulted in the formation of a new, more militantly leftist company which came to be known as the Groupe Octobre, in commemoration of the Russian Revolution. Paul Vaillant-Couturier, the Communist leader and editor of the Party's daily, L'Humanité, was responsible for suggesting to the young troupe Jacques Prévert – ‘un gars très marrant qui a l'air très bien’ – as a potential source of material.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 3 , Issue 1 , October 1977 , pp. 54 - 65
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 1977

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References

Notes

1. Two articles on the Groupe Octobre have appeared in France: Gauthier, Guy, ‘Il y a trente ans, Octobre’, Image et Son, 189, 12 1965Google Scholar, and Chardère, Bernard, ‘Jacques Prévert et le Groupe Octobre’, Premier Plan, 14, 11 1960.Google ScholarGuillot's, GérardLes Prévert (Paris: Seghers, 1966)Google Scholar contains passim references to the troupe as do, more recently, Jean-Pierre Chabrol's novel L'Embellie (Paris: Plon, 1968); Copfermann's, EmileLe Théâtre populaire, pourquoi? (Paris: Maspero, 1969)Google Scholar; de Beauvoir's, SimoneLa Force de l'Age (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1969)Google Scholar; Bergens, AndréePrévert (Paris: Editions Universitaires, 1969)Google Scholar and Barrault's, Jean-LouisSouvenirs pour demain (Paris: Le Seuil, 1972).Google Scholar A master's thesis exists: Michèle Venard's ‘Le Groupe Octobre’ (Faculté des Lettres et des Sciences humaines, Lyon, 1970). My doctoral dissertation ‘Jacques Prévert and the Groupe Octobre (1932–1936)’ (Brown University 1975) is, to my knowledge, the only full-length study of the company in English, But the Groupe Octobre has begun to be noted here by students of popular theatre. Theatre Quarterly, for example, has in its December 1976 issue on popular theatre in France since 1870, a note on the company.

2. Louis Benin, or Lou Tchimoukov as he preferred to be known, has been called by Roger Blin ‘a remarkable director’ whose talent for bringing ‘an element of surprise, of the unusual’ to many of the Groupe Octobre's productions enhanced the poetry of Prévert's texts.

3. The prize was never awarded, however, According to Marcel Duhamel, editor of Gallimard's well-known detective novel branch, ‘La Série Noire’ and former Groupe Octobre member, the play was adored by the audiences and the judges at the Olympiad, as the festival was called, but at the last moment Stalin's more rigid officials intervened to prevent the presentation of the award to the company, which had apparently displeased them. Duhamel feels certain that the Groupe Octobre's work had a distinct Trotskyist flavor, that it was, from the official communist point of view, full of ‘deviations’. Indeed, the French CP's representative to the selection committee of the FTOF, prior to the Moscow festival, was strongly opposed to the Groupe Octobre and its play La Bataille de Fontenoy, in particular.

4. Prévert, Jacques, Spectacle (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1971), p. 113.Google Scholar Subsequent references will be to this edition; page numbers will appear parenthetically in the text.

5. Eugène Ionesco notes in his Journal that Raymond Queneau had fun with this old adage, too:‘C'est en forgeant qu'on devient forgeron, c'est en écrivant gu'on devient écriveron.’

6. Vitrac, Roger, ‘La Bataille de Fontenoy’, La Flèche (07 11, 1936).Google Scholar

7. Artaud, Antonin, Le Théâtre et son Double (Paris: Gallimard, Idées, 1964), p. 210.Google Scholar