Mourir d’être classique : le théâtre de Voltaire sous le Consulat et l’Empire

Abstract

Before his disappearance from the scene, under the battering of the Romantics, Voltaire's theater had a paradoxical life under the Consulate and the Empire. It benefited from a topicality, that of the ideological struggles which opposed the liberals to the partisans of the Church, while being the victim of this same actualization. This theatre was stuck in the process of classicizing dramatic literature, centered on the great authors of the seventeenth century, "recreated" in the emerging nationalism and the new historical consciousness: the socio-political context of this first decade of the century seemed to tear Voltaire to History, in which he could not yet find his place. Often represented, the theater of Voltaire thus knew in this beginning of the XIX^th century its last years of glory.