On the 18th November 1755 there was a riot at David Garrick’s Theatre Royal in Drury Lane caused by a ballet. With cries of ‘No French dancers!’, a crowd smashed up the scenery of The Chinese Festival, a ballet created by the up-and-coming young French choreographer Jean-Georges Noverre. A mob even proceeded to Garrick’s home and smashed its windows.
This happened in London where enlightened ideas were being discussed at the Royal Society, in coffee houses, and at the salons of a network of intellectual women. It was the London of painters like William Hogarth and Joshua Reynolds, and writers like novelist Henry Fielding and historian Catharine Macaulay. In 1756, the year after the riot, Garrick’s old friend and mentor Samuel Johnson finally published his famous Dictionary, and Benjamin Franklin arrived from Philadelphia for his second, prolonged stay. It is easy to dismiss the events surrounding The Chinese Festival as a row about a superficial piece of decorative rococo entertainment. My argument in this video lecture is that the theatre riot has more to do with enlightened thinking than this suggests.
The Chinese Festival was presented as an ‘afterpiece’ – a lighter entertainment following a play which was the main focus of an evening’s programme. On the opening night, despite the presence of King George II in the Royal box, there had been shouts of ‘No French dancers!’. France and England had been at war four times since the end of the Seventeenth Century [1689-97; 1702-13; 1743-8], and the year after the riot saw the opening engagements of the Seven Years War (1756-63). Hostility against the French in general and French culture and fashion in particular was complicated by class allegiances. In this case, the gentry and nobility who were seated in the boxes and in the amphitheatre (dress circle) wanted to see the ballet. The prosperous tradesmen and members of the professional middle class seated in the Pit (the stalls) were against the ballet. (fn1) Hostility between those in different classes led to arguments and to more and more serious fights breaking out over the run of the ballet. The nobility believed they were entitled to have their tastes catered for and to impose these on everyone else, while the middle-class audience members became increasingly vocal about their patriotic objections to what they saw as the corrupting influence of French culture.
In retrospect, their anti-French feelings appear as an ancestor of the xenophobic national populist politics that, in the twenty-first century, led to Brexit.
Theatre Royal Drury Lane – from Nicoll 1980.
While the riot in 1755 was not the only theatre riot in eighteenth-century London, it was the worst, Garrick apparently loosing £4,000 because of it (Winter 1974, 114). So why did bringing Noverre’s ballet over from Paris have such catastrophic consequences? What lay behind the fighting? To begin to answer these questions we need to look into the ballet itself which began in France as Les Fêtes Chinoises. How did it come to be shown in London, and what do sources about the disturbances reveal about anti-French feelings and cross class antagonism?
The ballet production that Garrick imported had drawn ‘Le tout Paris’ to L’Opéra Comique in Paris in June 1754. In his book on Noverre, Deryck Lynham (1950) translates a description of the ballet from a 1769 book about L’Opéra Comique.
‘The stage represents in the first instance an avenue ending in terraces and steps leading to a palace on a height. This first scene – perhaps a drop curtain? – changes and uncovers a public square decorated for a festival with, in the background, an amphitheatre on which are seated sixteen Chinese. By a quick change of positions, instead of the sixteen Chinese thirty-two are seen on the gradins (stepped tiers) going through a pantomime. As the first group descends, sixteen further Chinese, both mandarins and slaves, come out of their habitations and make their way to the gradins. All these form eight rows of dancers who, rising and dipping in succession, imitate fairly well the billows of a stormy sea. – that’s 48 dancers all in new Chinese costumes creating clever, playful theatrical illusions. All the Chinese, having descended, begin a character march. There are a mandarin, borne in a rich palanquin by six white slaves, whilst two negros draw a chariot on which a young Chinese woman is seated. They are preceded and followed by a host of Chinese playing various musical instruments […]. This march concluded, the ballet begins and leaves nothing to be desired either in the diversity or in the neatness of the figures. It ends in a contredanse of thirty-two persons whose movements trace a prodigious number of new and perfectly designed attitudes, which form and dissolve with the greatest of ease. At the end of the contredanse, the Chinese return to their place on the amphitheatre, which is transformed into a china cabinet. Thirty-two vases, which rise up, conceal from the eyes of the spectators the thirty-two Chinese one saw before’. (Lynham 1950, 21: translating Desboulmiers 1769, 323-4)
The scene changes described here would have made use of eighteenth-century stage machinery with ropes and windlasses not unlike a sailing ship of the period. There are working examples of this from the miraculously surviving eighteenth-century theatre at Drottningholm Royal Palace outside Stockholm.
Les Fêtes Chinoises also drew on an emerging fashion for chinoiserie. As a result of 200 years of Jesuit missions to China, and visits by other Europeans, there was a lot of information about China available in Europe by the 1750s. Confucius’s writings had been translated into French, and there were drawings and paintings of Chinese architecture and authentic costumes worn at the Qing court in Beijing. As Peter Kitson notes, ‘China was both a symbol of imperial excess and of Confucian moderation, alternately a threat and an aspiration’ (2013, 211). While some theatre productions seriously engaged with Chinese philosophical ideas, Noverre’s ballet can only be described as offering audiences ‘the fantasy world of decorative rococo whimsy’ (ibid, 213). The fact that the roles included white and black slaves shows how little knowledge or interest Noverre and his collaborators had about the actual conditions of Chinese society. What the ballet’s chinoiserie offered was an exotic alternative to the strictures of a more conservative classical high culture.
David Garrick and his wife Eva Marie Veigel, by William Hogarth, Royal Collection.
What can we guess about why Garrick brought the ballet to London? He was probably interested in ballet through his wife Eva Marie Veigel who had trained as a ballet dancer at the court in Vienna under the ballet reformer Franz Anton Hilverding (Winter 1974, 114). Garrick knew Jean Monnet, the French theatre manager at L’Opéra Comique where Les Fêtes Chinoises had been produced. Monnet had unsuccessfully tried in 1748 to present French comedies on the London stage, losing money in the attempt. Garrick had helped him out by holding a ‘benefit’ performance for him which raised £100. Garrick perhaps saw a gap in the market for ballet performances because the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket, which had a license to present ballet and opera, was in financial difficulties and was presenting less performances than usual. Some sources suggest that performers from other theatres joined the middle class protestors (see anon 1755 and Ou 2007). Chinoiserie was becoming fashionable in London. Architect Sir William Chambers who had visited China published his ‘Designs of Chinese Buildings, Furniture, Dresses, Machines, and Utensils’ in 1757 and designed the Great Pagoda in Kew Gardens in 1761. Garrick produced and starred in The Orphan of China in 1759, based on a 12th century Chinese play. Unlike The Chinese Festival, the play was a success. This suggests that the Chinese setting of the ballet was not in itself a problem, although whimsical rococo Chinoiserie would have been no more attractive to middle class Londoners that more conventional French ballet. It was primarily its French origin that was bringing about increasing polarisation between the upper- and middle-class members of the audience.
Watercolour by William Marlow, from http://www.metmuseum.org
At the fifth performance on Saturday 15th, because the Lords went to see an opera, the rest of the audience rioted and began to smash up the theatre. They only stopped when the management announced that there would be no more performances of the ballet. On Monday 17th, the Lords and their followers were back and demanded that the ballet be presented again on the Tuesday. In response to shouts from people in the Pit, some Lords jumped down into it with drawn swords and threatened to kill a protestor whereupon Garrick himself jumped down from the stage to intervene claiming that their victim was his friend. He may actually have been a personal friend, but an actor manager in a venue like the Drury Lane Theatre needed to foster the idea that all the audience were his friends. The location of Drury Lane Theatre is significant here. It is to the west of the City of London where merchants and clerks lived and worked but to the east of the West End where the nobility and fashionable gentry stayed when in London. To be economically viable, the Drury Lane Theatre would have drawn on both and needed to keep them all happy. Divisive reactions to Noverre’s ballet threatened to undermine Garrick’s ability to foster common ground between different social groups in the audience.
The Imports of Great Britain from France. L-P Boitard. British Museum
Some members of the nobility were strongly Francophile. For example, Lady Mary Hervey was a key connection between salons in London and Paris, spending much of her time living in France. She was an old friend of Voltaire and knew D’Alembert, and was close to many French aristocrats. English nobles and gentry were avid consumers of luxury imports from France. A satirical print from 1757, the second year of the Seven Years War, shows the arrival from France of people and produce at Customs House Quay in the London docks. A street kid holds his nose at an open barrel of what look like Camembert cheeses, while there are crates of perfume, of ribbons, tippets, muffs and gloves, and barrels of French wine. A French ballet dancer is enthusiastically embraced by a fashionably dressed English woman to the amusement of her black page. An Abbé is introduced to two children he is going to tutor. The print is dedicated to the ‘Laudable Associations of Anti-Gallicans’. The Antigallican society was a middle class dining club who awarded annual prizes for examples of excellent British craftsmanship and needlework.
Antigallican society plate – Metropolitan Museum.
On 18th November during the final destructive riot at Drury Lane Theatre, people sang the patriotic ballad The Roast Beef of Old England. In this a lady’s maid complains that her mistress is adopting French tastes, including French dancing.
When mighty Roast Beef was the Englishman’s food,
It ennobled our veins and enriched our blood.
Our soldiers were brave and our courtiers were good
Oh! the Roast Beef of old England,
And old English Roast Beef!
.
But since we have learnt from all-vapouring France
To eat their ragouts as well as to dance,
We’re fed up with nothing but vain complaisance
Oh! the Roast Beef of Old England,
And old English Roast Beef!
The Sublime Society of Beef Steaks badge – note the gridiron for frying the steak. image from Wikipedia.
The roast beef of old England is the sub-title of an explicitly anti-French painting The Gates of Calais by Hogarth. Hogarth and Garrick were both members of an artists’ dining club The Sublime Society of Beef Steaks, at whose regular meetings members celebrated English beef and liberty. A member of both clubs was the populist anti-establishment pamphleteer and politician John Wilkes. Hogarth’s 1763 caricature of Wilkes includes a liberty bonnet.
One could easily imagine Wilkes in the Pit mischievously shouting No French dancers! British liberty here referred to the Magna Carta, Habeas Corpus, and trial by jury. In the Eighteenth Century liberty also meant calls for freedom of the press, and freedom of election. Catharine Macaulay argued that this was a continuation of an age old Saxon struggle against the Norman yoke. The Normans of course were French. Linda Colley has summarised anti-French feeling among middle class Londoners at the time:
As long as British patricians spoke French among themselves … as long as they favoured French clothes, employed French hairdressers and valets, and haunted Parisian salons on the Grand Tour, as long as the taste for French cultural and luxury imports was allowed to put native artists, traders and manufacturers out of business, national distinction would be eroded and national fibre relaxed. (Colley 1992: 88)
All of this shows that the objections to Noverre’s ballet were part of a much wider set of attitudes among middle class Londoners of patriotic disposition.
A letter from an anonymous Englishman in the January 1756 issue of Tobias Smollet’s The Critical Review took the side of the pro-ballet nobility. Denouncing ‘the headstrong mob’ who had shouted ‘No French dancers!’, the letter writer notes that ‘the fashionable people, who are not subject to those ridiculous national prejudices, espoused the cause of the dancers, resolved to patronise the excellent composer [Noverre] and to support the entertainment’ (Anon 1756: 184). A letter in French published in the December 1755 issue of Journal Étranger gives the most detailed account of events, also taking the side of the nobles. It calls the protestors a cabal and uses the English word Blaggards. It states that the nobles came on Wednesday 12th November for the second performance of the ballet prepared with swords and bludgeons, following the disturbances on the previous Saturday. When people in the Pit began to whistle at the ballet, nobles jumped down into it from their boxes and began beating people. Their female companions helped by pointing to protestors but, the writer says, many innocent people were hurt. When the ballet performance was resumed, there were raised hats and victorious cries from the nobles of ‘Huzza!’. On Thursday 13th during the ballet, whistling came this time from the upper circle so the nobles went up there and set about protestors, throwing one of them down the flight of stairs. On Monday 17th, the ballet having been cancelled in their absence, the nobles interrupted the fifth act of a tragedy to demand the ballet be performed. This led to a lengthy argument which concluded with a promise that it would be performed the following evening. The nobles, finding themselves outnumbered at the final performance retreated from the theatre allowing the protestors to invade the stage and smash the scenery.
The French account, which Deryck Lynham suggests may have been written by Noverre himself, actually reveals how provocative the nobles were. It was they who physically attacked the spectators. There’s no evidence of the protestors fighting back. The French account ends by saying that if the nobles and honest people had been less heated, all might have passed calmly – tranquillement – it is unclear whether this implies some people were dishonest. The anonymous Englishman in The Critical Review came to the hyperbolic conclusion that had it not it not been for the nobles’ ‘prudent retreat, we were upon the eve of a civil war, which indeed, was thought inevitable; and sure an affair so serious was never before produced from such a comical subject’ (Anon 1756: 185).
From a twenty-first century point of view it was class war rather than civil war, that was being acted out at the level of culture. At issue were questions about authentic British identity. This was being defined through confrontation. Though this confrontation would shortly become another major war with France, the confrontation in the theatre was between patriotic members of the middle class and, in their opinion, the unpatriotic upper classes. Conflict about who had the right to dictate what was or was not performed at the theatre was a conscious middle class challenge to aristocratic taste that can be seen as part of a wider political campaign aimed at transforming the social distribution of power. The anonymous Englishman in the Critical Review writes that ‘among a great number of English dancers [in The Chinese Festival] there happened to be a few French’ (Anon 1756, 184). Might the protestors have been disguising their disapproval of aristocratic behaviour with patriotic rhetoric? Were they, in Samuel Johnson’s terms using patriotism as the last refuge of the scoundrel? It is suggested that Johnson was thinking of John Wilkes when he said this. Many American colonists closely followed news of John Wilkes’s struggles with the British establishment. Catharine Macaulay found many readers in the American colonies and was warmly received there when she visited in 1784-85. The playful middle-class English call for beef and liberty became a serious political reality on that side of the Atlantic when the Declaration of Independence called for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
I have been arguing that the ballet created more than just, as Peter Kitson put it, a fantasy world of decorative rococo whimsy’ By accident rather than design it became a lightning rod for enlightened political aspirations.
Endnote
1). For more on the class makeup of Garrick’s audience, see Allardyce Nicoll 1980 especially Chapter 4.
References
Anon. (1756) ‘A letter from an Englishman to the authors of the Journal Encyclopedique, at Paris’ The Critical Review January: 184-5.
Anon. (1755) Journal Étranger December, II: 223-235. Genève Slatkine Reprints, 1970.
Colley, Linda. (1992) Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (Yale University Press, New Haven.
Desboulmiers, Jean Auguste Julien (1769) Histoire du théâtre de l’Opéra Comique. Paris : Chez Lacombe.
Kitson, Peter J. (2013) Forging Romantic China. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Lynham, Deryck. (1950) The Chevalier Noverre: Father of Modern Ballet London: Sylvan Press.
Nicoll, Allardyce. (1950) The Garrick Stage: Theatres and Audience in the Eighteenth Century. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Ou, Hsin-yun. (2007) ‘The Chinese Festival and the eighteenth-century London audience’. The Wensham Review of Literature and Culture, 2(1), 31-52
Winter, Marian Hannah. (1974) The Pre-Romantic Ballet London: Pitman Publishing
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