Commemorating Mirabeau: 'Mirabeau aux Champs-Elysées' and other texts

by Jessica Goodman (Editor), Olympe de Gouges, Jean-Elie Bïdïno Dejaure

Overview

The death of Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, Comte de Mirabeau, on 2 April 1791, was a key moment in the early years of the French Revolution. The renowned orator, who had played a major role in drafting the Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen, succumbed to heart disease aged forty-two. His death prompted the establishment of the Panthéon, that secular temple intended to honour the great men of a new, free France. It was also the impetus for a whole range of artistic commemorative creations, including a number of plays, performed or published in the days following his death.

This edition presents three such plays, all of which stage Mirabeau in conversation with other great men and women in the afterlife. It situates these texts in the memorial culture of the period, examining how they relate to other forms of commemoration, how they construct the figures of their protagonist and his companions, why their authors performed this commemorative act, and how the same genre could also subvert the celebratory tone. With an appendix containing a further two previously unpublished plays and a dossier on another lost text, this volume is an important study of the role and value of literary - and especially theatrical - commemoration in the early 1790s.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781781882184
Publisher:	Modern Humanities Research Association
Publication date:	08/01/2017
Series:	Mhra Critical Texts , #58
Pages:	214
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.45(d)

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements vii

Introduction 1

1 Mirabeau aux Champs-Elysées 53

2 L’Ombre de Mirabeau 101

3 Mirabeau aux enfers, ou La Contre-révolution du Tartare 137

Appendix:

A. Le Démosthène français, ou L’Arrivée de Mirabeau aux

Champs-Elysées 162

B. Le Panthéon français, ou La Désertion des Champs-Elysées 174

C. Dossier: Jean-Baptiste Pujoulx, Mirabeau à son lit de mort 186

Bibliography 193

Editorial Reviews

‘In this fine book, Jessica Goodman provides the full corrected and modernized texts of five plays from the era of the French Revolution, three of them published in 1791 and two available only in manuscript... Goodman has done wonderful detective work, providing us with the performance history of the plays, the number of people likely to have seen them, and the amount the authors made on the productions... I hope that Goodman will continue to haunt the archives and bring more gems like these plays back into circulation, and I am confident that readers of her introduction and notes will find them useful and instructive.’ — Robert H. Blackman, H-France February 2018, 18.30

'In this intriguing volume, Jessica Goodman unites five texts dating from the weeks follow- ing the death of Mirabeau on 2 April 1791... Particularly interesting is her analysis of Mirabeau aux Champs-Élysées and Gouges’s authorial strategies. This volume is an important contribution to scholarship on the Revolutionary period and, more generally, to our understanding of the commemorative practices of the late eighteenth century.' – John R. Iverson, French Studies, 72 (2018), 601–02

From the Publisher