Adina Lopatin                                                                                               March 2000

Mr. Meyers                                                                                       Birth of Modern Europe

The Influence of the Redefinition of Parisian Social Values on the Development of Music

            France was among the first European states to struggle with the end of absolutism, the introduction of some form of democracy, and the social upheaval of revolution.  During the years of revolution and reaction in Paris, 1789-1848, the development and innovation of music reflected the constant redefinition of social values.  The increased involvement of the bourgeoisie during the French Revolution and the subsequent mingling of social classes under the July Monarchy widened the popular appeal and relevance of music by drastic proportions.  Changing from an aristocratic form of entertainment under l’ancien regime to a widely accessible means of self-expression under the July Monarchy, music grew in response to the widespread upheaval that occupied Paris during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. 

            Before the French Revolution, music was reserved for the upper classes.  Kings hired chamber musicians to play in their courts, as did aristocrats in their homes.  Concerts were exclusive and there was no medium for sharing art with the common people.  The working classes were just subsisting, and had neither the time nor the energy for such frivolities.  The bourgeoisie, however, was quickly rising and demanding attention.  The rising middle class, made up of merchants, traders, industrialists, lawyers, and other professionals, was subject to the degrading obligation to pay taxes, from which the aristocracy and the clergy were exempt.  Barred from prominent positions in the church, government, and army, the bourgeoisie became frustrated.  The bourgeoisie exasperation at being excluded from political and economic life was compounded by their anger at being excluded from cultural life, as in music.  These frustrations led to the bourgeoisie leadership of the 1789 overthrow of the Bourbon dynasty. 

            The bourgeois stage of the revolution, from the creation of the National Assembly until the fall of the Bastille, epitomized the new attitude of the middle class.  The declaration of the National Assembly demonstrated the new mentality, revealing to the other echelons of French society that the bourgeoisie was to be a central force in French political life and implying that the bourgeoisie would join the aristocracy not only in government, but in culture too.  “What is the third estate?” asked Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès in January 1789.  “It is the whole.”[1]  The bourgeoisie announced its arrival into French culture with a bang.  Not only did the bourgeoisie wish to attend aristocratic musical and cultural functions, it planned to have its own.  The entrepreneur class aimed to educate its children, giving them a basis in the arts.  Talented bourgeois children were supposed to have the opportunity to study at the elite Sorbonne or the Paris Conservatoire de Musique.  For the brief period that the revolution was confined to the bourgeoisie (Declaration of the National Assembly, May 1789, to the fall of the Bastille, July 1789) it appeared that the new France would be a bourgeois France: politically a constitutional monarchy with a legislative branch controlled by the middle class, and socially a society in which the arts were accessible beyond the aristocracy.  Soon, however, the chaos of a bloody revolution dominated by the working class forced traditional cultural life into hibernation. 

            From the fall of the Bastille (July 1789) through the Reign of Terror (July 1794), the chaotic state of Paris prevented musical progress.  During the summer of 1789, when approximately 20,000 nobles fled Paris, the core of the concert-going population disappeared.  The Paris they left behind was in shambles: the poor were starving, the bourgeoisie were trying to draft a constitution amidst disorder and upheaval, and the king was trying to abdicate.  The state of emergency left no time for entertainment such as music.  When the Jacobin faction took over and Robespierre began his guillotine crusade, Parisians were too busy frantically avoiding decapitation to compose or listen to music.  Without the nobles, who had comprised much of the concert-going population, there was little audience for musical entertainment.  Where under l’ancien regime people gathered to hear symphonies, under the Reign of Terror, they gathered to watch the guillotine. 

            When Robespierre was killed in July 1794, the Reign of Terror was replaced by the Directory (1794-1799), the Consulate (1799-1804) and then the empire (1800-1815), which were characterized by a limited return to the luxury and frivolity reminiscent of the entertainment of l’ancien regime.  Exhausted by the pandemonium of the Revolution, Paris embraced the relative quiet that accompanied the Directory.  Historian Johannes Willms writes:

With the gradual reintroduction of prerevolutionary etiquette, the Consulate found itself in agreement with the wishes and ideas of bourgeoisie Paris.  People everywhere addressed each other as Monsieur and Madame, though the official form of address was still Citoyen and Citoyenne.  The familiar tu was replaced by the seigneurial vous.  And the many balls that took place during the directory and remained in fashion into the Consulate awakened a desire for the more frivolous pleasures of the Carnival‑ forbidden since the beginning of the Revolution.[2] 

Afraid of the revolution that they had at first encouraged, the bourgeoisie welcomed many of the luxurious prerevolutionary standards of entertainment.  While a cadet at the Ecole Militaire, Napoleon observed the return of luxury.  He wrote:

Luxury, entertainment, and the arts have made an astonishing comeback.  Yesterday there was a benefit performance of Phèdre at the Opera; from two o’clock in the afternoon onward, an enormous crowd arrived, even though the ticket prices were more than three times normal.  Elegant people in their carriages have reappeared, or, to put it better, people can no longer remember‑as if they had been having a long dream‑that they had ever disappeared.² 

After the Reign of Terror, there was a resurgence of prerevolutionary musical entertainment, with one important difference.  Now, the bourgeoisie comprised much of the Opera and Symphony population.  The removal of tax favors to the clergy and nobility lifted a heavy economic burden from the bourgeoisie, allowing them more freedom for spending on entertainment. Napoleon, who constantly advertised how he worked his way up through the army, embodied the new focus on the individual who uplifted himself.  The country celebrated not the aristocracy, as it had before the revolution, but the self-made man.  The new musical audience reflected the modern emphasis on the bourgeoisie. 

            The Restoration of the Bourbon dynasty in 1815 was marked by a generational clash that produced a relative indifference to culture.  Johannes Willms writes: “A general apathy overtook public, political, and cultural life and created [a] strangely empty atmosphere” in Paris.  The oldest generation reminisced about l’ancien regime and longed to revive the classical spirit.  A middle generation recalled Napoleon’s defeat with sorrow, and saw Paris as at its best as an empire.  The youngest generation remembered only Napoleon’s defeat, and the opportunities denied as a result of the return of the Bourbons.  This generation, which would later champion the Romantic cause, was prepared to question and reject traditional theories and notions.  The clash of the three generations in terms of both production and consumption of culture produced a period of stagnation in musical development. 

The French constitutional monarchy combined liberty and order, which fostered continued development of culture, including music, for the older, more proper generation.  Francois Guizot, minister of public instruction under Louis Philippe from 1832-1837 and main power of France from 1840-1848, said:

It is on us, the Revolution of July, that this job has been imposed; it is our duty and responsibility to establish definitively, not order alone, not liberty alone, but order and liberty at the same time.  The general thought, the hope of France, has been order and liberty reuniting under the constitutional monarchy.  There is the true promise of the Revolution of July.[3] 

Guizot’s synthesis of liberty and order allowed the Romantic spirit, which governed cultural life in the rest of Europe, to take hold in Paris.  Leonard Bernstein wrote on the “Romantic Revolution” in music: 

…The Romantic Revolution had…begun, bringing with it the new Artist, the artist as Priest and Prophet.  This new creator had a new self-image: he felt himself possessed of divine rights, of almost Napoleonic powers and liberties‑especially the liberty to break rules and make new ones, to invent new forms and concepts, all in the name of great expressivity.  His mission was to lead the way into a new aesthetic world, confident that history would follow his inspirational leadership….  Where music was concerned, the new freedoms affected formal structures, harmonic procedures, instrumental color, melody, rhythm‑ all of these were part of an expanding universe, at the center of which lay the artist’s personal passions.[4] 

Bernstein defines the Romantic composer as a revolutionary rejecting music as simple entertainment and embracing music as self-expression.  The harmony of liberty and order in Paris allowed for the development of such expression. 

            The coexistence of liberty and order that fostered Romanticism allowed for the experimentation of composers like Hector Berlioz.  For Berlioz, music was a means of self-expression, not a frivolous pleasure.  Berlioz told stories through music, setting up in each of his pieces a scène idéale.  His famous Symphonie fantastique (1830) was based on Berlioz’ fiery love affair with Harriet Smithson, an English actress.  The symphony tells of an artist, who, unhappy in love, overdoses on opium and dreams of his own passions and desires, his love, her murder, and his own death.  Through what his critics called “orchestral extravagance,” Berlioz demonstrated passion.  Berlioz also used a revolutionary musical technique called melodic discontinuity, which broke up musical melodic phrases and introduced an element of surprise and unpredictability that conveys the artist’s mood changes and his obsession with his beloved.  Berlioz’ idée fixe, repetition of specific phrases, demonstrated the lover’s obsession with his beloved.  Berlioz wrote:

By some strange mechanism of his mind, the image of the beloved always enters his thoughts joined to a musical idea whose character, passionate but noble and reticent, he finds comparable to the character which he believes to be hers.  This melodic reflection and the original image pursue him incessantly as a double idée fixe.  This is the reason for the repeated appearances, in every movement of the symphony, of the melody which begins the first allegro.  This passage from this state of melancholic reverie, interrupted by bursts of irrational joy, to that of delirious passion, is the material of the first movement, with its accents of rage and jealousy, its recurrent tenderness, its tears, its religious consolations.[5] 

Berlioz was conscious of his decision to weave emotion into his music.  His technical devices, such as the idée fixe, marked his groundbreaking individuality in the musical sphere.  Julian Rushton, musical historian, wrote:

Berlioz was that rarity, a genuine lone wolf….  His importance…lies primarily and rather obviously in that singularity of his works which is itself a product of his artistic isolation.  His music is not, however, to be cherished just because it is different, but because of the qualities of feeling that it embodies, and the forms that embody those feelings, are of unique value; their very unconventionality, the risks the music takes with the listener’s expectations and fulfillment, as their strength, for they can communicate where no other music can.⁵ 

Berlioz’ individuality both separates him from and unites him with his contemporaries.  Though Berlioz’s music was remarkably different from that of his contemporaries, it is similar in that difference.  In its emphasis on individual self-expression, Romantic music proclaims that all music will be different, just as all individuals are different.  The communion of liberty and order under the July Monarchy allowed such differences to bloom. 

            The July Revolution liberated the young generation from the restraints of the Bourbon period.  The fifteen years of the Restoration and the subsequent cholera epidemic produced in Paris a craving for entertainment.  Auguste Luchet wrote:

The strange balls of 1833 were the extension of this unique Carnival time: hunger and wild thirst, which increased through wild entertainment, because part of the seemingly unappeasable craving for movement and noise for which the people longed in order to become numb and forget.² 

The Paris youth needed to forget the violence of the July Days.  In 1832, Jules Janin wrote, “Revolutions turn into entertainment, a ball is the antithesis of an uprising.”  During the July monarchy, Paris needed an outlet for tension and frustration.  Balls that crossed class divisions provided that opportunity.  Willms writes:

These balls were more like public brawls, athletic games for which one turned up in festive clothes.  What made them especially attractive was that the social classes were equalized through common enjoyment.  They formed a colorfully anonymous crowd in which everyone‑a milliner in the arms of a colorful attaché, young and old, rich and poor‑sought oblivion in music and dance.² 

The relaxed atmosphere of lower class entertainment provided an outlet for fear and tension.  So popular were the lower bourgeoisie balls that young members of the nobility attended them as well.  In February 1839, Delphine de Girardin wrote:

Young people from the best circles of society, who bear the most famous names, display feverish activity heightened still further by their inner emigration and political aversions.  They dance, they gallop, they waltz, the way they would fight if we had a war, the way they would love if people today still had poetry in their hearts.  They do not attend the parties as court, ugh!  There they would meet their lawyer or their banker; instead they prefer to go to the Musard, there they might at least meet their valet or their groom; wonderful!  It is possible to dance in front of such people without compromising oneself.² 

This cross-class intermingling demonstrates the Romantic attitude of Parisian youth under the July Monarchy.  Romanticism celebrated the individual and praised self-expression. Willms writes:

Philippe Musard was undoubtedly the uncrowned king of the fête bourgeoisie during the July monarchy.  The great secret of his magic was music‑the melodies his baton beat out of his orchestra….  The melodies overwhelmed the dense mass of dance enthusiasts and stirred them into an exhibitionist frenzy, an orgiastic madness.² 

In contrast with the restrictive upper class parties, the cross class balls allowed all guests to forego proper aristocratic etiquette and to dance to fiery music with passion.  For the younger generation, music under the July monarchy served not only as upper class entertainment, but also as a medium of passion that stretched across class boundaries. 

            Throughout the years of social upheaval in Paris, music grew and developed at a faster pace than ever before.  The reinterpretation of class and art allowed for the redefinition of music.  Evolving from a mode of exclusively aristocratic entertainment to a more widely accessible form of self-expression, the change in music reflected the change in Parisian social values.  The social upheaval that guided Paris in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries fostered the cultural development that justifies Paris’ reputation as a cultural center. 

Bibliography

1.      Leonard Bernstein, The Delights and Dangers of Ambiguity, 1973. 

2.      William Fleming, Arts and Ideas. 

3.      Francois Guizot, Speech of February 20,1831. 

4.      Julian Rushton, Hector Berlioz.  From: Michael Raburn, Alan Kendall, Heritage of Music: The Romantic Era, Oxford University Press, New York, 1989. 

5.      Johannes Willms, Paris, Capital of Europe: From the Revolution to the Belle Époque, Holmes and Meier, New York, 1997. 

6.      Dennis Sherman, Western Civilization: Sources, Images, and Interpretations, Volume II: Since 1660, McGraw Hill, New York, 1995. 

7.      www.britannica.com

8.      www.ipl.org/exhibit/mushist/

9.      www.standrews.u-net.com/BerliozSociety.html

10.  www.classical.net/music