Tentations spectaculaires: quelques représentations théâtrales de l’alcoolisme ouvrier, de la monarchie de Juillet à la Troisième République

Abstract:The present article considers stage representations of alcohol issues in the French working class from the July Monarchy to the Third Republic, through four plays: a vaudeville (Plus de jeudi, by Victor Ducange and Anicet Bourgeois, 1838), two examples of “humanitarian theater”—Marie-Jeanne, ou la Femme du peuple (1845), by Adolphe Dennery and Julien de Mallian, and Le Chiffonnier de Paris (1847), by Félix Pyat—and a “social drama” (L’Assommoir, a theatrical adaptation of Zola’s novel by William Busnach and Octave Gastineau, 1879). According to its own genre, each play stages alcohol-related harms: disorders and troubled gestures, postures, or movements are either seen or heard. This aesthetics of excess exhibits, either in a comic or a (melo)dramatic manner, the consequences of alcoholism leading to denouements: abusive drinking leads characters to the brink of catastrophe, and it ceases once they are persuaded to proclaim their temperance. (In French.)