The Battle of Hernani is the name given to the controversy and heckling that surrounded the 1830 performances of Victor Hugo's Romantic drama Hernani.
Heir to a long series of conflicts over theatrical aesthetics, the Battle of Hernani, which was at least as politically motivated by political as aesthetic beliefs, remains famous for having been the battleground between the "classics", partisans of a strict hierarchy of theatrical genres, and the new generation of "romantics" aspiring to a revolution in the dramatic art and grouped around Victor Hugo. The form in which it is generally known today, however, depends on the accounts given by witnesses of the time (Théophile Gautier in particular, who wore a provocative red vest to the Première on 25 February 1830), blending truth and legend in an epic reconstruction intended to make it the founding act of Romanticism in France.
Context Criticism of classicism in theater under the Ancien Régime The battle against the aesthetic dogmas of classicism, with its strict rules and rigid hierarchy of theatrical genres, began as early as the 17th century, when Corneille's prefaces attacked the restrictive codifications established by the doctrines of Aristotle, or with the "great comedy" invented by Molière with his plays in five acts and in verse (i.e., in the usual form of tragedy), which added moral criticism to the comic dimension (Tartuffe, The Misanthrope, The School for Wives...).
In the following century, Marivaux accentuated this strong subversion of genres by grafting a sentimental dimension onto the farcical structure of his plays. But it was with Diderot that the idea of a fusion of genres in a new type of play emerged, an idea he was to develop in his Entretiens sur "le Fils naturel" (1757) and his Discours sur la poésie dramatique (1758): considering that classical tragedy and comedy no longer had anything essential to offer contemporary audiences, the philosopher called for the creation of an intermediate genre: drama, which would submit contemporary subjects of reflection to the public. As for Beaumarchais, he explained in his Essai sur le genre dramatique sérieux (1767) that bourgeois tragedy offered contemporary audiences a morality both more direct and more profound than the old tragedy.
A new level was reached by Louis-Sébastien Mercier in two essays: Du théâtre ou Nouvel essai sur l'art dramatique (1773) and Nouvel examen de la tragédie française (1778). For Mercier, drama had to choose its subjects from contemporary history, do away with unities of time and place, and above all not confine itself to the private sphere: the usefulness of drama shifted from the realm of individual morality to that of political morality.
Criticism also existed on the other side of the Rhine, notably in Lessing's essay Dramaturgie de Hambourg (1767–1769, translated into French in 1785). For the German theorist, who had translated and adapted Diderot's play Le père de famille, French dramaturgy, with its famous three-unit rule, although it claimed to be inspired by the ancient code, only succeeded in rendering artificial and ill-adapted to contemporary reality rules that flowed naturally from the theatrical practice of their time, and in particular from the presence of the chorus, which, representing the people, "could neither depart from its dwellings, nor be absent from them as much as one can usually do by simple curiosity".
Romantic theorists After the French Revolution, criticism again came from Germany, with Madame de Staël's book titled De l'Allemagne (1810). In it, she established the existence of two theatrical systems in Europe: the French system, dominated by classical tragedy, and the German system (in which she included Shakespeare), dominated by historical tragedy. The French system, she explained, with its choice of subjects drawn from foreign history and mythology, could not fulfill the role of "German" historical tragedy, which strengthened national unity by depicting subjects drawn precisely from national history. What's more, French classical tragedy, which had no interest in the people and in which the people had no interest, was by its very nature an aristocratic art form, which further reinforced the social division by doubling it with a division of theater audiences. But if this social division of theatrical audiences was the logical consequence of the structural social division of monarchical society, the great democratic thrust induced by the Revolution condemned this division to disappear, and at the same time rendered obsolete the aesthetic system that had emanated from it.
Guizot's 1821 essay on Shakespeare and, above all, Stendhal's two-part Racine et Shakespeare (1823 and 1825) defended similar ideas, the latter taking the logic of a national dramaturgy even further: If, for Madame de Staël, the alexandrine should disappear from the new dramatic genre, it's because verse banished from the theater "a host of sentiments" and prohibited "saying that one enters or leaves, sleeps or watches, without having to look for a poetic turn of phrase for it", Stendhal rejected it for its inability to capture the French character: "there is nothing less emphatic and more naïve" than this, he explained. Also, "the emphatic alexandrine suits Protestants, Englishmen, even Romans to a certain extent, but not, certainly, the companions of Henri IV and François I". Moreover, Stendhal protested against the fact that the aesthetics of theater in the nineteenth century remained what they had been in the previous two centuries: "In the memory of any historian, never have people experienced, in their morals and pleasures, a more rapid and total change than that from 1770 to 1823; and they still want to give us the same literature!" He continued.
Moreover, Alexandre Dumas, who prided himself on having won "the Valmy of the literary revolution" with his play Henri III, points out that French actors, caught up in their habits, were incapable of moving from the tragic to the comic, as the new writing of Romantic drama demanded. Their inadequacy was obvious when it came to performing the theater of Hugo, in whom, Dumas explains, "the comic and the tragic touch each other without intermediate nuances, which makes the interpretation of his thought more difficult than if he [...] took the trouble to establish an ascending or descending scale".
The preface to Cromwell In December 1827, Victor Hugo published a major theoretical text in Paris in support of his play Cromwell, which had been published just a few weeks earlier and would be remembered in literary history as the "Preface to Cromwell". Written at least in part to respond to Stendhal's theses, it proposed a new vision of Romantic drama. Admittedly, Shakespeare was still glorified as the synthesis of the three great geniuses Corneille, Molière and Beaumarchais, while the unity of time and place were seen as incidental (the usefulness of the unity of action, on the other hand, was reaffirmed), Hugo echoing Lessing's argument that the vestibules, peristyles and antechambers in which the action of tragedy took place, paradoxically in the name of verisimilitude, were absurd. As for the theory of the three ages of literature (primitive, antique and modern), it was so unoriginal that it has been described as "a veritable 'cream pie' of the literati of the time". What did make the essay original, however, was the centrality of the aesthetics of the grotesque: its alliance with the sublime made it the distinctive trait of "modern genius, so complex, so varied in its forms, so inexhaustible in its creations", and, since this alliance was not permitted by the strict separation of theatrical genres in the classical hierarchy, which reserved the sublime for tragedy and the grotesque for comedy, this hierarchy, unfit to produce works in keeping with the genius of the age, had to give way to drama, capable of evoking in the same play the sublime of an Ariel and the grotesque of a Caliban. The alliance between the grotesque and the sublime should not, however, be seen as an artificial one, imposed on artists as a new dramatic code: on the contrary, it stemmed from the very nature of things, since Man carries both dimensions within himself. Thus, Cromwell was both a Tiberius and a Dandin.
In contrast to Stendhal, Hugo advocated the use of versification rather than prose for Romantic drama: the latter was seen as the preserve of a militant, didactic historical theater that was undoubtedly intended to be popular, and which reduced art to the purely utilitarian. In other words, bourgeois theatre. Verse, on the contrary, seemed to him the ideal language for a drama envisaged not so much as a mirror of nature as a "mirror of concentration" that amplifies the effect of the objects it reflects, making "a glimmer a light, a light a flame". But this verse, which "communicates its relief to things which, without it, would pass for insignificant and vulgar" was not classical verse: it claimed for itself all the resources and flexibility of prose, "capable of traversing the whole poetic range, going from top to bottom, from the most elevated to the most vulgar ideas, from the most buffoonish to the most serious, from the most exterior to the most abstract". He was not afraid to use "the enjambment that lengthens it", which he preferred to "the inversion that confuses it".
This manifesto of Romantic drama was received differently, depending on the age of its readers: "it irritated his elders, his contemporaries loved it, his younger contemporaries adored it", explains Hugo's biographer Jean-Marc Hovasse. For the latter, the play and its preface were almost like a Bible. In 1872, Théophile Gautier recalled that, for those of his generation, the preface to Cromwell "shone in [their] eyes like the tables of the Law on Sinai, and [that] its arguments [seemed to them] without reply". On the other hand, the aesthetics it advocated "definitively distanced Romanticism from the Société royale des Bonnes-Lettres and, consequently, from the government of Charles X".
Disrupted performances
The heckles surrounding theatrical performances—the most famous incarnation of which would be Hernani—began in 1789, with Marie-Joseph Chénier's Charles IX ou la Saint-Barthélémy. There was talk of banning the play, which provoked virulent exchanges between its supporters and detractors. Initially an internal quarrel among French actors, it soon pitted "the patriots against the 'Court Party', the assembly against the king, the Revolution against the counter-revolution". Already in this conflict, the positions of all parties were over-determined by their political convictions. Chénier himself was aware of the ideological significance of the conflict, and of the strategic place of theater, writing in the "epitre dédicatoire" of his play that, "if the morals of a nation first form the spirit of its dramatic works, soon its dramatic works will form its spirit". The play was finally performed in November 1789, with tragedian François-Joseph Talma in the title role. Attending the premiere, Danton was quoted as saying: "If Figaro killed the nobility, Charles IX will kill royalty". Three years later, in January 1793, the performance of Jean-Louis Laya's L'Ami des lois caused an even greater stir: it was the guns of the Commune that forbade performances. Already at this time, heckling was observed to be the work of groups of spectators who had sometimes organized their demonstration beforehand.