Courting Celebrity: Creating the Courtesan on the Popular Parisian Stage and Beyond, 1831–1859

Abstract

Courting Celebrity excavates the careers of celebrity women actors on the Parisian popular stage c.1831–1859. Historically, these performers have been neglected by scholarship, which has largely focused on stars from the capital’s few privileged stages, or explored later nineteenth-century popular artists, instead of the boulevard performers from the post-restoration decades 1830–1860 when the popular stage became established. I argue that these boulevard performers created fantasies that enabled a new kind of women’s celebrity and challenged the binary between the primary and secondary stages. Specifically, their example nuances celebrity theory which considers the most esteemed women actors to evade historical associations with courtesans. While this is true for performers on Paris’s primary stages, women actors at the secondary theatres established an alternative model that reappropriated the association with courtesans, which was more prominent on the popular stage.
This thesis draws on contemporary and modern theory, bringing them into conversation with archival sources, and is formed of five chapters. The first contrasts how the rivals Mlle Mars (1779–1847) and Marie Dorval (1798–1849) created historically remote courtesan characters in the battle between Classicism and Romanticism in the 1830s. The second and third chapters explore how subsequent rivals, Adèle Page (1822–1882) and Eugénie Doche (1821–1900), premiered real, contemporary courtesan characters at the dawn of the Second Empire. Chapter 4 studies how Anaïs Fargueil (1819–1896) positioned herself against Doche, through her creation of the heartless, anti-heroine fille de marbre type; chapter 5 studies how Rose Chéri (1824–1861), contrasted her courtesan characters with her Christian celebrity image. I conclude by establishing how these actors mobilised their courtesan creations to gain celebrity and rehabilitate the figure of the boulevard star. I argue for the significant influence of Parisian popular theatre women on French cultural history and Western celebrity more broadly.