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This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ The Librettos of Étienne de Jouy (1807-1829) A Difficult Career During the Napoleonic and Restoration Eras Kubo, Ayumi Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). 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Oct. 2021 The Librettos of Étienne de Jouy (1807-1829): A Difficult Career During the Napoleonic and Restoration Eras Ayumi Kubo King’s College London School of Arts & Humanities A thesis submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2013 ABSTRACT During the reign of Napoleon, the Paris Opéra was placed under the State’s supervisory system wherein its productions were closely monitored by Napoleon through the intermediary of the Préfets du Palais, and later, through the office of Surintendant général des spectacles. During the period, Napoleon intended to capitalise on the institution’s potential for state propaganda. Étienne de Jouy’s Fernand Cortez was a case in point, as Napoleon hoped to gain support for his war in the Spanish peninsula. Apart from writing for musical theatre, Jouy worked as a journalist and as a critic of social themes throughout his literary career. A lifelong admirer of Voltaire, he inherited the Enlightenment’s claims to social justice, as he demonstrated in a lecture series of 1822 on socio-political topics. By focusing on Jouy’s librettos from the Napoleonic period, whose subjects had been the site of Enlightenment’s debates, and in particular on imperialism, colonialism and the status of women, I explore his narratives and dramaturgies in relation to the politics pursued by the Napoleonic state, as it embarked on a series of colonial wars and reintroduced a distinctive patriarchal order. My thesis also seeks to shed light on Jouy’s activities during the Romantic revolution of the 1820s. On the one hand, he defended some central conventions of eighteenth-century French opera in his Essai of 1826, such as the concept of the marvellous and a happy ending. On the other hand, his choice and treatment of the Tell legend itself reveals Jouy’s empathy with the new wave of liberalism, as it was in the process of sweeping away the Restoration. He also showed himself under the influence of Anglo-German literature, particularly propagated in Germaine de Staël’s De l’Allemagne (1814), and of the popularity of Rossini. iii CONTENTS Acknowledgements iv List of abbreviations v Introduction 1 1 Fernand Cortez: Imperialism versus the critique of Empire 19 2 The feminine themes in La Vestale, Les Bayadères, Les Amazones, and Velleda 67 3 Essai sur l’opéra français 106 4 Jouy’s libretto writing 132 5 Guillaume Tell: Jouy in the Restoration 150 Conclusion 185 Appendix: Librettos of Étienne de Jouy for the Paris Opéra 190 Bibliography 193 iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would first like to thank my supervisor, Dr. Michael Fend for an enormous amount of intellectual and practical contribution to this project, and for his generous support and patience. I have also benefited hugely from the suggestions and corrections of my external examiners, Professor David Charlton and Dr. Michel Noiray. I am also grateful to a travel award from the Lacey French Travel Bursaries of King’s College London which funded my research in Paris during summer 2011. I would also like to acknowledge my Parisian friends, Keiko Kurachi, Hiroko Nakatani, Sophie Qu, and Alessandro Sassu, who provided accommodation and friendly support during my research trips, and Laudine Cabourdin, who offered helpful advice on Greco- Roman mythology. I am also indebted to Caterina Calabrese and Ada Sofaer for their assistance in the reading of Anselm Gerhard’s ‘Incantesimo o specchio dei costumi’, and to Fiona Paul who kindly read the revised version of this manuscript. Finally I thank my parents for financing this PhD study, and my sister for sight-reading the piano-vocal score of Les Bayadères with me during Christmas 2011. v LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS GB-Lbl London, The British Library I-Mcavallari Milano, collezione privata Cavallari F-Pan Paris, Archives nationales F-Pa Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal F-Pn Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale F-Po Paris, Bibliothèque-Musée de l’Opéra OC Œuvres complètes MS manuscript vi 1 Introduction In the general preface to his Œuvres complètes published in 1823, Victor-Joseph Étienne de Jouy wrote that close observation of people and places, which he aimed for in his L’Hermite de la Chaussée-d’Antin and its sequels, was also the guiding principle of his dramatic literature and librettos,1 concluding that: It allows me to end with this one remark about an ensemble of my works: It contains the most direct reflection of the manners, customs, thoughts, feelings, and opinions that have stirred France during three great epochs when they were written.2 Jouy thus emphasised the connection between his journalist career and that of dramatist and librettist. This study aims to examine to what extent Jouy’s awareness of social reality is invested in his librettos. It follows, in particular, Diana Hallman’s approach in her book on La Juive to take biographical factors (Fromental Halévy’s and Scribe’s education, political position and alliances, etc.) as a decisive element of their work.3 And by similarly exploring the link between Jouy’s personal views on contemporary social problems and his works,4 it seeks to connect Jouy’s identity as a journalist with that of a librettist. In this introduction, I firstly offer a brief biography of Jouy, before proposing two main research questions. I will then provide an outline of my thesis, and review the state of research on Jouy. Jouy (b 19 October 1764; d 4 September 1846) was born Victor-Joseph Étienne to a cloth merchant in Versailles.5 He attended the college directed by Antoine-Joseph Gorsas, an 1 Étienne de Jouy, Œuvres complètes d'Étienne Jouy, de l’Académie française: avec des éclaircissement et des notes, 27 vols., Paris: Jules Didot, 1823-1828, vol.1 [1823], 24-26. 2 Il m'est permis de terminer par cette seule remarque sur l'ensemble de mes œuvres: On y trouvera le reflet le plus direct des mœurs, des habitudes, des pensées, des sentiments, et des opinions qui ont agité la France pendant les trois grandes époques où elles ont été écrites.’ Ibid., 27. 3 Diana Hallman, Opera, liberalism, and antisemitism in nineteenth-century France: the politics of Halévy's La Juive, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 4 Unlike the case of Eugène Scribe, who mostly chose not to make explicit political comments (cf. Hallman, 69-71), Jouy’s views on various socio-political issues are available. 5 See the Jouy entries in Biographie universelle ancienne et moderne, ed. Louis-Gabriel Michaud, second edition, Paris: C. Desplaces, n.d., vol.21, 267-270; Biographie nouvelle des contemporains, ed. Arnauld, Bazot, Jay, Jouy and Norvins, Paris: Librairie historique, 1823, vol.10, 12-18; Louis Louvet, ‘Jouy’, in Nouvelle biographie générale, ed. Ferdinand Hoefer, Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1858, vol.27, 90-99, and various other biographies: Marie-Louise Pailleron, ‘Les Aventure de M. de Jouy de l’Académie française’, La Revue hebdomadaire, 1919/02, 440-469; Claude Pichois, ‘Pour une biographie d’Étienne 2 anti-monarchist journalist and politician, who became a Girondist and a vocal opponent of the Jacobin politics during the Revolution, for which he was executed during the Terror. Jouy’s admiration of Voltaire is said to have developed during this period. At the age of sixteen, he joined the army and served in French Guiana between 1781 and 1785, and in India between 1787 and 1790. Sent back to France soon after the outbreak of the Revolution, Jouy briefly turned to writing, but he enlisted again in 1791, presumably in sympathy with the Revolutionary cause, and served in the Revolutionary war against Austria on the northern frontier of France as aide-de-camp to the Irish Lieutenant General Jacques O’Moran. In 1793, the promotion to the adjudant-général was followed by his marriage to Isabelle Walker, who was living in Lille, with a Scottish aristocrat mother Lady Mary Leslie Hamilton and a wealthy Scottish merchant stepfather George Hamilton, also a confidant of O’Moran.6 Immediately after the marriage, the local representative on mission Ernest-Dominique-François-Joseph Duquesnoy issued Jouy’s arrest warrant on suspicion of counterrevolutionary intent, but his bold move to appeal directly at the Ministry of War in Paris won him an order of the Committee of Public Safety to organise the relief column for Valenciennes.