Urban societies of the Ancien Régime were governed by the requirement of ceremonials. The exercise of power necessitated performances, rituals, and complex staging, from royal entrances to court celebrations. Aristocratic culture, still hegemonic, implied that the value of an individual was indistinguishable from his or her public standing: both the courtier and the average law-abiding person were aware that they were playing roles, that they incarnated a certain status, and no one would think of comparing their public appearance with an interior reality, a truer, more authentic one. The idea of this social game was summed up in the metaphor of the theatrum mundi, the world stage: life is a performance, a permanent spectacle where each person plays the role that he or she has been given. Urban growth in the eighteenth century, the emergence of densely populated cities like Paris and London, as well as Naples and Vienna, where inhabitants had to continually interact with unknown people, served in the beginning to reinforce this development: the theory that a social being was an actor, preoccupied above all by the effect produced on an audience, and the repetition of this effect. The theatrum mundi was no longer a play performed for a God watching from afar, but a spectacle that men and women performed for each other.1
If everyone was acting, however, some were acting more than others: they made it their career. Theatrical productions were no longer passion plays performed by devout Christians on the steps of churches at the time of religious celebrations, or plays reserved for elite courtesans who circled around the prince; they had become urban entertainment par excellence. Starting in the middle of the seventeenth century, in all the large European capitals and more and more in big provincial cities, permanent theaters multiplied. Operas, comedies, comic operas, and also carnival shows attracted enormous audiences in Paris that were sometimes a mix of nobles, bourgeoisie, and even common people, all together in the stalls at the Comédie-Française. In eighteenth-century Europe, spectacles had become an essential mark of urban culture.
Two criticisms were heard in reaction to this generalized spread of theater: the first questioned the artificial and inauthentic nature of a social life in which everyone was role playing; the second denounced the corruption provoked by the success of the theaters. Although the criticisms dealt with specific issues, they converged around the idea of the deleterious effect of big cities. The new ideal of personal authenticity, based on feelings and sincerity, permitted an attack on the emotional separation caused by professional actors in urban settings, paid to act feelings they weren't experiencing, and passive spectators who were fascinated by these imitations. The most eloquent critic of these spectacles was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who contrasted urban theater with that of village celebrations, where everyone participated in a collective outpouring of feeling.2
As it turns out, this criticism of theatricality and spectacle in the name of an ideal of authenticity has lasted a long time. It was seen in the Romantic period. Then the development of audiovisual media in the twentieth century lent renewed vigor to the criticism of theatricality because of the separation created between the spectator and the images that were shown to him or her. The most radical formulation of this criticism was provided by the work of Guy Debord, a striking mix of neo-Marxism and dark romanticism. In classical prose, which often seems a parody of the seventeenth-century moralists, at times taking on Rousseau-like accents, his critique of the “society of the spectacle” recycles Marxist denunciations of fetishistic merchandising which uses media images. Celebrity, the heart of the modern system of spectacle, is a characteristic trait. Stars are the “spectacular representation of a living human being,” even a negation of the individual; stars embody lifestyles, personality types, forms of human fulfillment, that have become inaccessible to the alienated spectator reduced to a poor and fragmented life.3
Today, given the magnitude of celebrity culture, criticism of the society of the spectacle, often separated from its anti-capitalist substratum and reduced to a slogan, has become pretty much a cliché. However, the formula works as far as it is a reminder that media economy, which invests the public sphere with celebrity figures, had its origins in the eighteenth-century world of urban spectacle which produced the first stars. Actors, singers, dancers, were created by performing in public and owed their social existence to these performances. Those with the highest exposure became veritable public figures, even outside the theater hall: their names became known, their faces reproduced, their private lives the object of curiosity. To understand the social and cultural transformations which allowed stars to emerge is the aim of this chapter.
The term “star,” though slightly later in theatrical usage, indicates the development of an economics of spectacle. The French word vedette designates, in military language, a sentinel in an elevated position, as well as, in the eighteenth century, the words written in large fonts on a poster. Then, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the word “star” was used metonymically to mean the most important artist in a spectacle, and thus the phrase “star billing.” This development happened gradually, and contrasted with the traditional habit of referring to the entire troupe as a collective entity. This apparent minor modification in fact revealed a major transformation: starting in eighteenth-century London, and then in Paris, Naples, Vienna, and Berlin, and in other large European cities, the economics of the theater were profoundly changed because of the urban public that emerged along with new commercial practices. Theater, but also music and dance, freed itself from the model of court audiences and privileged theater performances entirely controlled by the governing powers. Spectacles, frequented by a more diversified public, from worldly elites to the new middle class, became associated with the city. Culture was no longer solely shared by courtly elites grouped around the prince or the king, but became an object of consumption. London's Drury Lane theater could seat 2,360 spectators and more than 3,000 after it was enlarged in 1792. That was almost the same as its rival, Covent Garden. New urban spectacles mobilized the energy and the capital of private investors, who did not hesitate to use varying publicity techniques in order to recoup their investments.4
Theater directors had every reason to headline actors who were successful. Besides financial strategies, the entirely new system associated with the commercialization of leisure encouraged the culture of celebrity, and in particular the rapid growth of a specialized press for theater productions and cultural advertisements, the sale of celebrity portraits, the existence of mixed space used for theater, entertainment, and business, on the model of Vauxhall Gardens in London, created in the 1730s, where visitors could dance, eat, go to concerts and plays, and stroll about. A few years later, the Ranelagh Gardens in the Chelsea quarter of the same city, inaugurated in 1742, immediately became a very “in” place.5 In Paris, the role of privileged theaters, institutionally tied to the court (the Comédie-Française, the Opera), was still important, but private theaters, notably along the boulevards, new areas for strolling and entertainment, developed in the 1750s. Marionette shows and animal trainers were seen there, as well as the theater of Jean-Baptiste Nicolet, a gymnastics group which came from the Saint Laurent Fair and whose success did not diminish until the Revolution. It was along the boulevard that Nicolas Audinot set up his Ambigu-Comique (Theater of Comic-Ambiguity) in 1769, Louis Lécluse founded the Variétés-Amusantes (vaudeville shows), and Volange triumphed with his Janot series.6
The economic transformation of spectacles accentuated the hierarchy that existed within the acting troupes themselves. An enormous gap grew between the money earned by ordinary actors and those the public and the theater directors considered irreplaceable. Not only did the latter receive higher salaries, but they were also given advantageous benefits. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the practice of “benefit nights” was inaugurated, and the gross ticket sales were given to an actor or actress whose name was well known enough to attract the public. The first actress to benefit was Elizabeth Barry in 1708. At the end of the century, Sarah Siddons' contract guaranteed two benefit nights per season, which meant a considerable income. David Garrick, certainly the biggest star on the English stage in the middle of the century, managed to amass a fortune estimated at his death to be £100,000.7 In France, the commercial success of boulevard theater rested on the talent of name actors who attracted audiences thanks to some recurrent character they played. This was the case with Toussaint Gaspard Taconet, in the middle of the century, at the Nicolet Theater, and also Volange. After his success in the role of Janot, well-known writers (Dorvigny, Beaunoir) wrote plays specifically for him, not simply a series of Janot pieces (Janot chez le dégraisseur, Ça n'en est pas, Le Mariage de Janot), but also as the Pointu series (Jérôme Pointu, Boniface Pointu, Les Bonnes Gens), shows about a middle-class family that allowed Volange to give free rein to his talent for cross-dressing. He often played different characters, much to the delight of audiences, enraptured by the performance of this star actor.8
At the Comédie-Française, the acting company was organized in a more collective way and theoretically more egalitarian. Nonetheless, the new star-system emphasized the differences. Lekain, one of the biggest male actors, maintained his celebrity by touring in the provinces and gaining a financial advantage.9 As for tragic actors, Hippolyte Clairon was so popular that her mere presence could fill a theater. “Mlle Clairon is always the heroine. She just has to be announced and the house is full. As soon as she comes on stage, applause interrupts everything. Her admirers have never seen her like before and they will never see it again.”10 Throughout the eighteenth century, a veritable European actors' market was put in place, as well as a market for singers and dancers. Circulation of the most famous actors resulted from stringent competition in the courts and European aristocracies, where the best actors were sought. Italian musicians were wanted all over Europe, while the finest French actors, to the dismay of the monarchy, were greatly solicited by foreign countries.11 Then, more and more, London theaters, no longer under the patronage of the crown but always trying to draw bigger and bigger audiences, sent agents around Europe and offered advantageous contracts to those actors they wanted to attract.
Augustin Vestris was among those actors widely sought out. His father, Gaétan, one of the most famous dancers of his time, the self-proclaimed “god of dance,” exercised his talent in the different European courts. With his son's generation, the performance conditions for professional dancers began to change and London theaters offered an alternative to court spectacles, and even alternatives to the Parisian stage. After being recruited by the Paris Opera when he was only twenty, in 1779, Vestris immediately signed for a six-month engagement at the King's Theatre in London, where he was an enormous success. London was submerged in a wave of “Vestris-mania,” in the words of historian Judith Milhous, who saw in this the beginning of Britain's enthusiasm for dance, which up until then had been overshadowed by theater and opera.12 This enthusiasm owed less to new ballet techniques, of which Vestris and his father were ambassadors, than to the person of the dancer himself, who was young, talented, and handsome, and thus enthusiastically received by London audiences.13 The newspapers, usually laconic when writing about the ballet, were tireless in recounting anecdotes about Vestris' visit and didn't hesitate to spread rumors about his feminine conquests. As soon as he arrived, his salary was revealed in the press and a controversy arose: Was it fair that an actor should be paid such a sum? How could a circus performer earn more in one night than an honest laborer his whole life?14 This did not, however, stop the public from rushing to his benefit night, which, according to Horace Walpole, brought in £1,600, but which also ended in a riot, the theater taken by storm because the crowd was too numerous, forcing authorities to close its Haymarket entrance.
The controversy surrounding the income of Vestris was obviously only the beginning of a long series of debates about the economics of celebrity, about the enormous salaries that were authorized, about the sometimes impressive income gap between those the star-system favored and those it did not. In our day, the trading of soccer players and the income of film actors regularly feed the polemic about “star salaries.” Economists and sociologists search for reasons to explain why varying talent, sometimes uncertain and often difficult to measure objectively, can produce such income gaps, a result of the cumulative effects of fame and recognition, but also due to the logic attached to the commercialization of show business.15 These debates originated in the eighteenth century when start-up newspapers specialized in news about spectacles and began to compare box office receipts among different performances, weighing the prestige of actors and their capacity to make money for the theater, at the same time criticizing earnings that appeared to them excessive.
The response to this was the development of charity nights, when the most famous actors performed not for personal profit but for the Theatrical Fund, charged with aiding actors in need, the poor, and the elderly. In this way, a star as well known as Garrick could polish his popularity with the public, appear as a protector of the English stage, and show how selfless he was. Thanks to this philanthropic posture, he made up for the growing inequalities at the heart of the spectacle world and at the same time reaffirmed his superiority, because it was his celebrity, in fact, which guaranteed the success of these performances. Rather ironically, in a few years this philanthropy became a sort of moral obligation which stars could not avoid without consequences. Sarah Siddons gained a reputation for avarice after her early success because she missed a few of these benefit performances, and the notoriety followed her tenaciously, almost bringing down her career.16
The new celebrity of actors, singers, and dancers also included a discrepancy. Although they were offered advantages, notably financial, this in no way guaranteed them an honorable social position in the Ancien Régime. Even more so than with writers, one saw to what extent celebrity could be at odds with the social order. The tension was particularly strong in France, where actors were theoretically relegated to a dishonorable social status, even though some among them were extremely popular. Even in England, where actors did not suffer the same indignities, the celebrity of female actors remained ambivalent. If celebrity was a tribute to their talent, it also transformed them into an object of desire for the public. Comparison with courtesans was inevitable, and the fame of certain actresses as early as the seventeenth century rested on the troublesome curiosity of the public for their supposed escapades. Celebrity, very far from the admiration that underscores glory, came in part from the erotic fascination for libertine actresses whose private lives aroused rumors and gossip. The actress, as a public woman, seemed mixed up in the mind of the male public with the courtesan or prostitute. It was the same in France, with dancers from the Opera who had the reputation of being kept by rich lovers and leading a dissolute life. Marie-Madeleine Guimard, inevitably referred to in the press as the “celebrated Guimard,” is the perfect incarnation: the litany of her lovers and protectors was commented on much more than her exploits on stage. If her initial success was due to her qualities as a dancer, her striking rise in society was due above all to her talents as a courtesan, to the generosity of the tax collector Laborde and the Prince of Soubise, as well as to the libertine parties she organized, which fed the gossip columns with hearsay, probably exaggerated and perhaps invented.17
Recent historiography has insisted on this point, sometimes to an excessive degree.18 In reality, a celebrated actress was not merely the projection of desire on the part of the spectator. The new culture of celebrity also offered actors and actresses enormous leeway to manage their careers, excite the curiosity of the public, and make the most of their notoriety. This was particularly the case with actresses who practiced “puffing” or “puff pieces,” which consisted of asking newspapers to insert laudatory articles about them. This equivocal situation permitted spectacular social climbing. In England, the model of the actress turned courtesan was incarnated in exemplary fashion at the beginning of the Restoration by Nell Gwyn, mistress of King Charles II, to whom she gave two children.19 Less spectacularly, the role was played by several different actresses in the following century. Frances Abington, having started as a flower seller and street singer, became a great success on the stage, notably after her visit to Dublin between 1759 and 1765, where she was a star in the local community. On her return to London, she acted in a series of successful roles at Drury Lane. Joshua Reynolds painted her portrait numerous times, the most famous representing her in the role of Miss Prue, in which she scandalized the public with her latent eroticism. Famous for perfectly pulling all the strings of “puffing,” she was also known for her many affairs, in particular the one she had with Lord Shelburne, the future prime minister.
A successful career in the theater did not only lead to the bedroom of aristocratic elites. Other trajectories were possible, such as that of Kitty Clive, considered among the best comic actresses of her time, who triumphed as a singer in the role of Polly in John Gay's Beggar's Opera, one of the great successes of the English stage throughout the eighteenth century. She progressively diversified her repertoire (she sang popular ballads as well as arias by Handel), but also her activities: she partnered with Garrick to create the Drury Lane theater, wrote comedies, joined with Samuel Johnson and Walpole, and, at the end of her life, seemed very well integrated into polite London society. Other paths were even more complex, such as that of Mary Robinson. Following her great success at the end of the 1770s in the role of Perdita, which stuck to her like glue, she became the mistress of the Prince of Wales, the future George IV, who lived the high life and whose dissolution fed the newspapers.20 After paying off the show chroniclers and the gossip columnists with her success on stage and her numerous lovers, and having gained a pension by agreeing never to publish the letters she received from the heir to the throne, Robinson retired and started a second career dedicated to literature, publishing novels and poetry. Several of her biographers wanted to see in her an ambitious woman starved for fame, seeking out notoriety in every possible way.21 In fact, having been plunged very early into the heart of the success system and public recognition, Robinson had a very ambivalent attitude toward it, conscious of the desirable effects and the risks.22 In her Memoirs she acknowledged that the success of her first novel, Vancenza “owed its popularity to the celebrity of the author's name.”23 But in other texts she assumed a more complex position, criticizing the uncivilized pursuit of celebrities. She was one of the first to complain explicitly about being recognized in the street and the embarrassment she felt being gawked at by the curious. When she went out shopping, she could not enter a shop without being surrounded by a crowd trying to get a look at her and block access to her coach.24 Her Memoirs nevertheless testify to the excessive attention she never ceased to give to her public appearances: dozens of years later, she could still remember the outfits she wore on each occasion.
The celebrity of actors and actresses rests on the interweaving of their person and the characters they play on stage. They are often represented by their iconic roles, and indeed Mary Robinson kept the nickname “Perdita” all her life.25 In polite society, the fame of certain actors, which makes them sought after, does not necessarily mean personal recognition. This has to do with a phenomenon often experienced by film actors today, who note with a mixture of satisfaction and resentment that spectators confuse them with the characters they incarnate. It was a situation not unknown in the eighteenth century, and Volange had a bitter experience with it. While the success of his character Janot had opened many doors of polite society to him, and he had regaled those in attendance at social evenings with his famous burlesque retorts, he had the idea that he would like to diversify his repertoire and liberate himself from the role to which he owed his celebrity. When he was invited to the home of the Marquis de Brancas, he was announced as “Janot” and felt he had the right to correct the introduction: “I am now M. Volange,” which drew a scathing reply: “All right, but since we are only interested in Jeannot [sic], M. Volange will be seen to the door.” The Mémoires secrets pour servir à l'histoire de la République des lettres, which reported this anecdote, did not refer to the insolence of Brancas' rude remark, but to the arrogance of Volange, this presumptuous actor who thought he could be received into polite society like a gentleman.26
That was an extreme case, one in which the fame of the actor was completely engulfed by the character he played, at least in the eyes of polite society, which delighted in slumming at the circus but was not willing to embrace a circus actor as one of its own. Generally, the relation between an actor and the character he or she plays is more complex. When the public image of actors is confused with the characters they play, the curiosity of the public for the actors' private life grows. The split between a public character who stands apart from the real person and the private person whose personal life is difficult to hide is at the heart of the celebrity system. This is exacerbated with actors, because theater audiences delight in the possible differences between a character and the person who is playing that character. Thus, at the beginning of Mlle Raucourt's career, she aroused public curiosity even more because she rejected all love affairs in her personal life while playing a character who was carried away by her passion. This excited the fascinated admiration of the audience. Later, after becoming famous for her role playing great tragic characters, she kept the gossip columns busy in the capital recounting her debts, her high life, and her sexual preferences. Her taste for women, called at the time tribadisme, referring to the excitement aroused by lesbian sex, created so much satire that Marie-Antoinette, who held her in great esteem, had to publicly stand up for her. This mediation was not, however, anodyne for an actress, since their social distance from the queens they played on stage was an important and ambiguous element surrounding their public image. What was the nature exactly of an actress's prestige whose talent drew audiences to the theater to watch her publicly play the greatest characters and yet who herself only came from a lowly social status?
Three examples will make it easier to understand the system of celebrity which transformed the world of spectacle throughout eighteenth-century Europe. These concern three different trajectories: an Italian castrato making his career and causing scandal in London; an English tragedian who gained a veritable cult following; and a French actor whose celebrity took on a highly political tone, in a revolutionary context.
The international success of castrati in the eighteenth century rested on their exceptional vocal performances as well as their fascinating physical appearance, especially since castration was practiced clandestinely in Italy and was officially condemned throughout Europe.27 The best Italian castrati were sought out by the European courts and by London producers, who did not hesitate to send agents to Italy to recruit promising talent. The spectacular rise of Farinelli is well known: how he immediately became the talk of the town from his first concerts in Naples at the beginning of the 1720s and afterwards in Bologna, Milan, and Venice, where he was enthusiastically applauded by English tourists.28 When they returned to England, they clamored to have the prodigy brought to London, where he had a huge success in 1734 and over the next three seasons. His “benefit nights,” which were advertised in the press (in the Daily Advertiser, the London Daily Post, and the General Advertiser), attracted polite London society and earned him thousands of pounds.
Nevertheless, Farinelli's London success was accompanied by a whiff of scandal that fanned the curiosity of the public, producing outrage along with high praise. Public infatuation with his unusual voice, the result of a practice often deemed “barbaric,” seemed to a number of critics excessive and dangerous, threatening the social, moral, and sexual order. The contestation began initially at the opera and then with Italian singers performing in England, a country where the break with the papacy was an important point of cultural identity. But the scandal was above all fueled by sexual ambiguity. In the eyes of moralists and satirists, the castrati were corrupting English taste, confusing sexual identities, and causing bizarre audience reactions with strong erotic overtones in both women and men. Hostage as Farinelli was to the public, pamphlets multiplied railing against him, charging him with affairs with some of the most famous London courtesans, insisting on the unnatural seduction he exercised, and accusing him of corrupting the young. A satirical poem castigated him for “ruining whole families” and “cuckolding half the Nation.”29
At this price, the sweet charm of celebrity seemed less appealing. No doubt tired of the incessant criticism which rained down on him, and perhaps conscious that the public infatuation wouldn't last forever, Farinelli quit London at the end of three years, and after a summer in Paris he left to pursue his career with the court in Madrid. There he became a court performer, the favorite of Philip V, who monopolized his talents and bestowed on him the privilege of direct access to his private rooms.30 In this way, Farinelli knew how to use his fame to assure himself a position at court, both more stable and more peaceful, far from attacks by the London public and from the demands of public life.31 He had opted for a classic form of honor in the personal service to the king, preferring this to the more ambivalent prestige of a public figure. After the death of the king in 1759, he returned to Italy and settled down in Bologna. His reputation among lovers of music remained considerable – Charles Burney was witness to this when he made an emotional visit to see the singer in 1770 – but Farinelli had stayed away from the public scene for too long.32 His celebrity would only have lasted a few years.
The following generation was won over by the seductions of the marketplace rather than the comforts at court. A number of castrati began to build their careers around the flexibility and the dangers of celebrity. One of the most famous, Giusto Fernandino Tenducci, arrived in London in 1758 and rapidly knew resounding success. In just a few years he became one of the most popular singers on the London concert scene and one of the best paid. He sang regularly in the principal theaters (Haymarket, Covent Garden, Drury Lane, King's Theatre), but also in Ranelagh Gardens, where he had immense success giving recitals of popular English songs. The songs were then sold as little books and reproduced in the London Magazine. Tenducci played different roles: he was a great Italian opera singer, beloved by the sophisticated upper classes, but thanks to the English folksongs he became very popular with a new and emerging public, more socially mixed, who often came to the Ranelagh Gardens. The cosmopolitan musician doubled as someone who was also associated with English national culture, which had sprung up everywhere. And at the height of his celebrity, he made an appearance in contemporary novels, for instance in The Expedition of Humphry Clinker by Tobias Smollett, whose heroine supposedly falls in love with Tenducci after hearing him sing in Ranelagh Gardens.33
Like Farinelli before him, Tenducci aroused both fiery praise and biting satire. Success as a celebrity did not result in a unanimous judgment but rather in a simultaneous expression of both enthusiasm and reprobation. The singer excited passionate responses from his public, which were in no way limited to the admiration that enthusiasts felt for him. The seduction, both musical and erotic, raised intriguing questions and worries. Tenducci's career was dotted with polemic, which reinforced his public personality. From the beginning he was accused of corrupting morals and English taste when it was learned that a woman from the upper classes had sent him a series of love letters. A few years later he fled with a young Irish woman and married her, to the great dismay of her family. It was a complete scandal. On the one hand, it was an unauthorized marriage, which damaged the family, and, on the other, it was unnatural, raising questions about the kind of relationship a castrato could have with his wife. It also focused attention on the ambiguous fascination the singer exercised over his public, causing social and moral disorder. Tenducci was arrested, judged, and freed. He and his wife finally returned to London, where they lived openly as a married couple, causing snide commentaries in all the European newspapers.34 The birth of a child excited curiosity and caused a wave of jokes and parodies, in polite society as well as in the lower classes in London, and even among seasoned travelers.35 When Casanova, who himself was no stranger to hocus-pocus, met Tenducci, the singer told him a bizarre story about a third testicle that had been spared castration. The spellbound Venetian hastened to add this story to his memoirs.36 The mysteries and questions about Tenducci's virility became a public matter, openly debated during the annulment of his marriage, which was finally asked for by his wife.
There could be no more fitting image to show the workings of celebrity and how it ends by making the private life of famous people, including the most intimate details, the object of public curiosity. In this case the judicial proceedings were only an additional detail. They accelerated the publicizing of the controversy surrounding Tenducci's sexual nature by giving it the characteristic form of a court case.37 There certainly have been famous cases in which the married life of a couple, up until then unknown, is debated in public because of a lawsuit that excites public opinion. But the difference here is that Tenducci's intimate life had already for some years been the object of public discussion and debate, an essential aspect of any public figure. Such fascination for the sexuality of celebrities in show business was not reserved only for castrati, as has been shown, but it was more intense in their case since their sexuality seemed so mysterious and thus troubling. Was their singularity a weakness or an advantage, an infirmity or a blessing, a handicap or a strength? This ambivalence, which makes a strength out of weakness, is a characteristic trait of the curiosity aroused by celebrities, where admiration is never pure and unequivocal, as it is for heroes and great men; it is often mixed with compassion or, to the contrary, with disdain or repulsion. It is why celebrity is often linked to scandal, an extremely efficient tool for becoming famous or staying famous, but an almost inherent consequence of such a status. In the eighteenth century, as in our day, certain artists made use of provocation and scandal to promote themselves publicly, but the link between fame and scandal is not simply a strategy, it is something more substantial.
For some time, anthropologists have shown that scandal has an important function in more or less homogeneous societies in the sense that it reaffirms the status quo and shared values of the group, drawing the community together by often excluding the troublemaker.38 In the case of scandals concerning public figures in modern society, the effects are more complex. There is little doubt that the increase in debates about Tenducci's sexuality was a sign of conservative tension at a time when mores were changing in London society, in the second half of the eighteenth century, concerning a redefinition of masculinity. But essentially what concerns us here is something else. Scandal is by nature a public event, its dynamic is linked to the configuration of the public. One of the first researchers to be interested in the sociology of scandal put it this way: “There is no scandal without an audience, without public diffusion of the scandalous event which contributes to its nature, without mass communication.”39 This means that scandal does not simply depend on the public dimension; the public participates in its formation. It is through debates around fascinating and scandalous people that the public becomes aware of itself, not as a tribe, according to the old metaphor, but as a group of curious spectators, excited or shocked, enthusiastic or reproving, adherents or skeptics, yet all interested in learning more about their contemporaries. But although local scandals generally end with the guilty party being punished, sometimes even excluded, media scandals amplify the subject's celebrity to such an extent that the person can come out of them both dishonored and greater than ever.40 As with the case of Tenducci, this type of scandal tends to be focused on the link that the public has with the star. This therefore explains the paradoxical nature of media storms, which stir up and maintain unhealthy curiosity and then denounce the effects which are produced. In reality, what is scandalous in the castrato is less his sexual life than his celebrity.
It is hard to know to what extent Tenducci voluntarily encouraged the scandalous dimension of his sexual and family life, or if he simply accepted the publicity as an inevitable price to be paid for celebrity. It is certain, in any case, that his career hardly suffered. It is even possible that the public exposure was actually beneficial, stirring up curiosity and mass interest. After the court case and annulment of his marriage, the end of his career was extremely brilliant. Considered one of the greatest living singers, he continued to give concerts in London but traveled more and more, spending time in Paris, for example, where Mozart composed music for him. His celebrity was such that he did not hesitate to publish corrections in newspapers when he was displeased by an article about himself. In the 1780s, when his voice started to weaken and he did not have the same prowess, he cleverly used his celebrity to give music lessons to members of polite society in London. He thus used his name and the publicity as tools to maintain his career, notably by publishing announcements in the Public Advertiser.41
During these same years, in the 1780s, when Tenducci's star was beginning to fade, a young actress was just having her first stage success in London. Sarah Siddons, after a number of years spent playing secondary roles with acting troupes in the provinces, won immense fame for her role as Isabella in The Fatal Marriage, by Garrick, which played at Drury Lane. Three years later she won great acclaim as Lady Macbeth, a role that she would play over and over again throughout her career and one which seemed to fascinate the public, in particular the famous sleepwalking scene where Lady Macbeth desperately tries to wash the blood off her hands.42 Siddons was then thirty and would reign on the English stage for another three decades.
Whereas Tenducci, in spite of his talent, appeared to be a strange and foreign star, wicked and scandalous, Sarah Siddons incarnated a highly legitimate figure in British culture. She soon specialized in tragic roles, notably the great Shakespearean ones, and often played queens – in particular Queen Katherine in Henry VIII. She led a peaceful family life, marked by a number of pregnancies, and acceded rapidly to the status of a cultural icon, not only because of her success but also because of the multitude of portraits of her that the English could admire. With her first great role, when she played Isabella, she posed for William Hamilton and carriages formed a line in front of the artist's studio to see the painting.43 Between 1780 and 1797, eighteen portraits of her were shown at the Royal Academy, the most famous of which was painted by Reynolds in 1783 and represents her as the muse of tragedy. Reynolds' painting was enormously successful and he decided to keep it and make copies instead of selling the original. When Siddons gave lectures, she often struck the melancholy pose of the painting, as though Reynolds had painted a real image and she was just imitating it. These multiple portrait sessions led to a frequent, although implicit, association between Sarah Siddons and the wife of George III. At the beginning of 1789, Thomas Lawrence was inspired by Reynolds' portrait of Siddons to paint a portrait of Queen Charlotte. With age, the parallel between the two women would nurture Siddons' celebrity, making her a sort of substitute queen at the moment the English royal family was choosing to withdraw into domestic life, making few public appearances. Like a queen, Siddons' celebrity cut through the various social categories: she was immensely popular with London commoners, who mobbed her after each performance, but she was also beloved by social elites. Siddons was a friend of Garrick, of Burke, of Johnson and Reynolds, and thus perfectly integrated into the little world that controlled cultural life in the capital.
Thoughtful reflection about the passion she aroused appeared in newspapers. One of her most fervent admirers, the renowned literary critic William Hazlitt, dedicated a long article to her in 1816 in which he compared the Siddons cult to a form of idolatry. This passage which is often cited merits further investigation.
The homage she has received is greater than that which is paid to Queens. The enthusiasm she excited had something idolatrous about it; she was regarded less with admiration than with wonder, as if a being of a superior order had dropped from another sphere to awe the world with the majesty of her appearance. She raised tragedy to the skies, or brought it down from thence. It was something above nature. We can conceive of nothing grander. She embodied to our imagination the fables of mythologies; of the heroic and deified mortals of elder time. She was not less than a goddess, or than a prophetess inspired by the gods.44
This grandiose text, often misunderstood, should be read in light of its publication date. At the time Hazlitt wrote it, Sarah Siddons, who bid farewell to the theater four years earlier, had just decided to return to the stage at the official request of the royal princess. Hazlitt challenged her decision, which seemed unreasonable to him, and he criticized it again a few months later in a criticism he wrote of her performance when she once again played Lady Macbeth, her iconic role.45 He reproached Siddons for not holding to her original decision, since she was no longer capable of the full plenitude of her talent. He preferred that the mind's eye of her public be fixed forever on her great performances. He remembered seeing her play Lady Macbeth twenty years earlier; not only did the new performance seem less impressive, it weakened his memory of the first one, threatening to destroy the ideal image he had of it. It should be noted that Hazlitt in these two articles invoked the “reputation” of Siddons and her “glory,” but never used the words “fame” or “celebrity.” He hardly valued the system of celebrity, too much tied as it was to the public mood, preferring instead the classical conventions of glory. He reproached Siddons for not being content with her past glory, by virtue of which she now belonged to her public. Not her contemporary public, the “enormous crowds” who came to cheer her at Covent Garden when she returned to the stage and only half the crowd could get into the theater; rather, she belonged to the public of the years of her perfection, when she was “tragedy personified.” This then explains the use of the past tense in his text when Hazlitt invokes the idolatry which accompanied her triumphs. It was a way to better explain that the Siddons cult wasn't a personality cult built around the private person of Siddons, now only a great actress in retirement, but rather the way her appearances in the past indelibly marked the spirit of the spectators. “To have seen Mrs Siddons was an event in every one's life; and does she think we have forgot her?”46 Even more specifically, Hazlitt writes that Siddons was not only the idol of spectator crowds but also the “solitary worker” whose interior life was nourished by the memory of this exquisite emotion.
In the end, Hazlitt saw very clearly the nature of the star's celebrity, and in particular the prodigious attachment of the English public to Siddons: an emotion both collective and individual that was felt by all those who were lucky enough to be present in person at one of her performances. Siddons was not a mythic hero whose legendary exploits were recounted, nor even an illustrious woman from the past whose exemplary life could inspire virtue: she was a contemporary presence who changed the life of all those who saw her on the stage. But Hazlitt wanted this relationship to remain pure, almost abstract, wrapped in the memory of the original feeling directed not at Siddons as an individual but Siddons as the incarnation of the actor's art. For this he would have preferred that she be immortal, not subject to the passage of time, always capable of repeating the same performances, or that she would have agreed to let her posthumous glory spread over her while still alive, and in that way hide from the eyes of the world that she was only the shadow of the actress that she had been. “Players should be immortal […] but they are not. They not only die like other people, but like other people they cease to be young and are no longer themselves, even while living.”47
Nevertheless, this argument, with every mark of the melancholy aesthete, is blind to what really makes up celebrity: admiration for the talent of the actress, to the point of intense curiosity about her person, both her public life as an actress and her private life. After Siddons, the history of spectacle, theater and then films, but also sports, will be marked by innumerable attempts by former stars at “come-backs.” It is easy to see how impossible it is for those who have known public success to be satisfied with a life in retirement, always feeling a need to prove that they are still alive and in demand. But if these come-backs are willingly orchestrated by the cultural industry, it is because the public is so fond of them, and one can hypothesize that the pleasure in such a phenomenon comes more from curiosity than from a sense of loss. In contrast with Hazlitt, the public was less interested in finding Siddons unchanged and more interested in what she had become. The personal and artistic (or athletic) challenge implied in every tentative come-back is the fascinating and sometimes morbid attraction that they arouse. What appeared almost sacrilegious to Hazlitt about Siddons' return, the weight of years, the combining of the public and private, the confusion between the actress that Siddons was and the private person she had become but which she was no longer content to be – all of this was just what attracted crowds to Covent Garden for her return to the stage.
Hazlitt knew this confusedly, even if he didn't have, as we do now, the advantage of two centuries of celebrity culture to understand it. In comparing Siddons' long and triumphal past with the cult of idols and goddesses, he did not seek, as other essayists did after him, to interpret the star cult as a form of modern and secular religion. Instead, he contrasted the grandeur reserved for heroes and goddesses, which arose from the wondrous and the glorious, with the celebrity reserved for exceptional artists: passionate interest in their risqué lives, where all grandeur faded in the glare of the footlights, publicity, and spectacle.
The career of François Joseph Talma offers an interesting parallel to that of Siddons. His first big success took place in the autumn of 1789, in Charles IX by Marie-Joseph Chénier, just after the young Talma, twenty-six, had joined the Comédie-Française. The play, which had been accepted before the Revolution but had not yet been staged, became both a theatrical and a political event, appearing to be a denunciation of both absolute monarchy and religious intolerance. After this striking success, Talma came to symbolize revolutionary theater.
His popularity immediately came into conflict with the collective logic of the acting troupe. As early as 1790, the actors suspended him for his individualistic attitude, his refusal of collective discipline. He responded by insisting on his revolutionary zeal and his concern for the audience, but also playing on his closeness to high-ranking political figures such as Mirabeau, and at the same time accusing the actors of reacting like an administrative body of the Ancien Régime, demanding that he obey the king. Consequently, and no doubt as Talma expected, the quarrel quickly became public, with a series of publications and then a petition in favor of him.48 From then on, he was one of the most famous actors in Europe, conscious of both the political and commercial link he had with the public: “When my name is announced on a poster, I am the one the public wants to see, it is my voice it wants to hear.”49
Talma's celebrity reached its zenith under the Consulate and the French Empire, owing, as the public saw it, to his very special relationship with Bonaparte. On stage the heroes whom the actor played seemed to evoke the consul and then the emperor. Once, under the Consulate, during a performance of Iphigénie en Aulide, the announcement of a victory for Bonaparte was made and Talma entered the scene proclaiming, to great enthusiasm, the lines: “Achille va combattre et triomphe en courant” (“Achilles goes to fight and triumphs at once”).50 Napoleon never missed a chance to let his esteem for Talma be known. The relationship the two men had, besides common popularity, was mysterious; it fascinated contemporary society as well as historians, certain people imagining that Talma gave the emperor lessons in diction and bearing. But Napoleon himself, from Saint Helena, tried to nullify this less than flattering interpretation.
Talma's celebrity was not simply political, however, and it survived Napoleon's fall. In 1822, the announcement of his retirement excited great controversy; the government was accused of not doing everything possible to see that Talma continued acting. The Courrier des spectacles did all it could to keep him from retirement, no matter what the cost might be. An early article mentioned his international reputation: “To arrive at this degree of celebrity where his name is known all over Europe, as well as at such an eminence that it is impossible for anyone to be compared to him, Talma can go on doing the great job he has done up until now.” The next day a second article dwelt on the economic aspects: the celebrity of a great actor draws tourists from all over Europe, and this alone can swell box office receipts at the Comédie-Française. No matter what one thinks of his last performances or his political engagements, there is no doubting the “utility of such a famous actor.”51
His celebrity was both national and international. A major figure at the Comédie-Française, a tragic actor of great classical roles from Racine and Corneille to Voltaire, associated in the mind of the public with Napoleon, Talma belonged profoundly to French culture and political life. Given that the zenith of his career came at a moment when French theater was being seen all over Europe, he could not help but be noticed in foreign countries. Having grown up in England, he admired English theater and shared this admiration with his friend and accomplice the writer Ducis, the pre-eminent importer of Shakespeare into France. Ducis adapted several plays in which Talma was the principal actor; this worked so well that in the first years of the nineteenth century the actor appeared to embody a French theater open to European influences, Talma having distanced himself from the frozen aspect of the classical tradition. This image was one of the basic reasons for his renown in Germany and England. An enthusiastic letter from Humboldt to Goethe contributed ultimately to the international reputation of the actor. Mme de Staël give him a powerful write-up in De l'Allemagne, describing Talma as the archetype of acting genius, but also the renovator of the European stage, capable, by his way of declaiming lines, of combining both Racine and Shakespeare.52 Stendhal, who did not like Talma, commented perfidiously: “This eloquent woman took it upon herself to teach fools the terms in which they had to speak of Talma. Needless to say, Talma's name became European.”53
In England, his celebrity arrived early and did not seem to have suffered from the English hostility to the French Revolution. Talma's father, who lived in London, often complained in letters to his son that he learned more about him in the English newspapers than from his letters: even the announcement of his marriage came by way of the press. In 1796, he wrote that in spite of the war, “our English newspapers” continued to speak about Talma and to sing his praises. In this way he experienced the public scrutiny of his son and the immense distance between an ordinary person and a famous one. “I am often asked if I have a relative who is an actor. They are very surprised when I say that Talma is my son.”54 After the fall of Napoleon, Talma undertook several tours across the Channel, notably in the first years of the Restoration, and then again in 1824. His English success showed the tensions between the international aspect of his celebrity and cultural patriotism. In 1817, on his return to London, Talma was obliged to defend himself in the newspapers for reproaches “made against him publicy.”55 The controversy had to do with a celebration in honor of the great English actor John Kemble, who was retiring from the stage. Talma gave a speech at the time praising the English theater. The newspapers wrote about the speech and gave it a political dimension; Talma felt forced to declare his patriotism. He justified himself by saying that he was simply responding to a toast in honor of “Talma and the French theater.”
Another line was crossed, on the English side, during Talma's second tour in 1824. An article published in the English newspapers, recalling the personal relationship between Talma and Bonaparte, forced the affirmation of his nationality by wrongly stating that he was born in London and praising his perfect English pronunciation: “One generally forgets that this great tragedian, who was hired by Mr Kemble to play in Covent Garden for twelve nights, is English.”56 The ambiguity from that point on was total. Talma, whose career had been so strongly associated with the French Revolution, to the point of embodying a kind of theatrical Bonapartean alter ego, found himself, in a way, without a nationality. This capacity for famous people, in spite of their strong national ties, to be denationalized and to see their image circulate largely in a transnational sphere is the consequence of the incredible extent of the bonds of notoriety and media intervention that separate the famous person from his or her celebrity. Posthumous glory often took on the work of renationalizing celebrities.
Talma's death on October 19, 1826 was of course an important event, both culturally and politically, especially since the actor had wanted to be buried with no religious ceremony, in spite of the efforts of the Archbishop of Paris, who came to visit him just before he died. While friends of Voltaire, a half-century earlier, had to give up trying to have him buried in Paris, the burial of Talma caused a veritable public event, with eighty thousand people walking behind the funeral procession from his house to the cemetery. Of course this response must be placed in the context of the intense politicization of funeral ceremonies which marked the Restoration,57 but it is certainly the celebrity of Talma that provoked such an emotional outpouring. The Mercure de Londres declared itself to be “in mourning” and put a black border around the edge of the paper for three months. Newspapers specializing in literary or theater news dedicated their headlines, and sometimes an entire issue, to the death of the actor. One issue of La Pandore, Journal des spectacles, des letters, des arts, des moeurs et des modes was completely reserved for the event with a black border around the front page and the title all in capitals: “THE DEATH OF TALMA.”58 The general press did not ignore the story either. The Courrier de Paris devoted long articles, issue after issue, to the illness and then death of the tragedian. As early as October 18 the newspaper claimed that “the public” was caught up “in the painful news about the illness of the great actor they might lose.”59 Two days later, October 20: “Talma is gone!!! Death which cannot be disarmed by the most virtuous people, or the most gifted, has struck down the great actor in his sixtieth year of life, who, before our very eyes, made live again the wonders with which Roscius long ago astounded the Romans.”60 Then on October 22, a very long article filled almost half the newspaper relating the funeral service in great detail. By focusing on the dignity of the speeches, the event was given an obvious political dimension and the secular funeral procession offered “a great example of the extent to which public reason and tolerance had grown.” But the newspaper also described a veritable apotheosis, the passage from celebrity to glory as seen in Talma's death and the mass funeral procession. “Talma, whose life was marked by so much glorious success, has achieved the greatest triumph that a people can award a renowned individual.”61
The Journal des débats and the Journal de Paris announced in unison the death of Talma. As for the serious and liberal Constitutionnel, the most important French daily, it dedicated a long obituary to him, categorically affirming his European and almost universal celebrity: “Talma's renown spread throughout Europe; it crossed the seas; his name was that of one of the greatest celebrities of his time.”62
What goaded thousands of Parisians to follow Talma's funeral procession and readers from all over Europe to read in the newspapers the accounts of his last days and all the details of his career? Most of them had never seen him on stage, but they knew his name and bits of his biography, and they knew, mostly from the press, that his death was an event. Although it is difficult to know to what extent his death affected them, it made news: they were interested in it, and by following the procession or by simply being spectators they affirmed that they belonged to a collective, to a public. Celebrity is indissoluble from the existence of the mass of readers and spectators who learn the same news at the same time in the same newspapers, taking an interest in the same events and feeling the same emotions when they read the same books. But celebrity is distinct from simple success in that it goes beyond the work or the performance to focus directly on the author or the artist, in this case the actor. The public was not content just to appreciate the voice of Tenducci, or the acting of Siddons or Talma; they were interested in the details, the particularities of their lives, including the most intimate aspects of their existence. This interest took various forms, from the rather superficial curiosity of newspaper readers up to the enthusiasm of admirers who wanted to catch a glimpse of the stars, own their portraits, perhaps meet them. Public interest in the life of celebrities was often ambiguous: one part a sort of game and assumed futility, the other a profound desire for intimacy and imitation.
The sometimes superficial character of affective demonstrations toward a celebrity, which was already perceived and denounced in the eighteenth century, should not hide the fact that a part of the public had a relationship with the famous person that was based on a desire for intimacy with him or her from a distance, and sometimes the conviction that they had it.63 This desire in which the unknown person made an imaginary friend of the celebrity, even a family member, can evolve into a fictive love affair, the extreme form of this fantasy. But generally it remains virtual, fantastic, or shared only with a few intimate friends, although it sometimes leads to writing directly to the famous individual or paying a visit. There is also a dark side that is seen when an extreme form of curiosity arises, a desire to know everything about the famous man or woman. At that point it is sometimes difficult to say how the alienation works: is the fan a victim of a celebrity media mirage, mesmerized by an artificial image, hostage of an illusory relationship which can become a mania, or, to the contrary, is the celebrity a victim of harassment by indiscreet fans, reduced to an object of desire created by the media?
This desire for closeness exposes a paradox at the heart of the modern system of celebrity: the most massive media events do the best job of creating this illusion of long-distance intimacy. This paradox, well known by specialists of contemporary mass culture, rests on two factors. The first is the capacity of the media to fictitiously erase the distance between individuals who are geographically and socially apart from each other. This power is particularly evident with modern media such as television, which allows the image and voice of stars to enter the private space of ordinary individuals. This was already the case to some degree when the newspapers of the eighteenth century wrote articles about the private lives of writers, actors, or socially prominent celebrities whose pictures could be bought for a few sous. In fact, the essence of media communication is to allow what is sometimes called “mediated quasi-interaction,” which is often intense, between individuals who do not meet directly.64 A second factor involves a rather astounding mass cultural phenomenon: certain widely distributed cultural products can cause very personal reactions, feeding a singular kind of subjectivity, even if these reactions are shared by thousands of readers or spectators. Again, this is a phenomenon that is well known to cultural sociologists, but which could already be observed in the eighteenth century. It is only necessary to mention the two bestselling novels of the century which provoked in many readers a highly subjective emotional experience: La Nouvelle Héloïse and The Sorrows of Young Werther.65
The conjunction of these two mechanisms makes it possible to understand that celebrity is expressly different from mere reputation; it is not only a matter of recognition. The more an actor, a writer, or a musician is known by a lot of people, the more he or she excites powerful emotional reactions among the curious and the admirers. Unknown individuals are convinced they have a special relationship with the celebrity, and they become fans. The term is obviously anachronistic. It did not appear until the second half of the twentieth century in order to designate sports enthusiasts (fanatics). And if the eighteenth century did not have the numerous and sometimes spectacular developments concerning fan culture, its institutions and its legends,66 there were numerous instances of readers and spectators who did not just admire stars or show their curiosity; they actually developed an emotional attachment to a celebrity which helped them orient and define themselves.
One long-lasting practice which has characterized the reaction of fans is letter writing. Fan mail is a well-known celebrity phenomenon in the present day. Historians often see the origins of fan mail as beginning with letters sent to Rousseau by readers, with further development of the practice in the first half of the nineteenth century. Historians see it as characteristic of Romanticism and also a specific response to the power of fiction, to the “promise of literature” that incited readers to create images of the social world through an exchange with authors.67 This analysis perhaps focuses too much on literature in particular, and not enough on the mechanisms of celebrity. Starting in the middle of the eighteenth century, not only authors like Rousseau and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, but also actors and actresses like Garrick and Siddons, received a lot of mail: anonymous individuals felt authorized and even encouraged to pick up a pen and write to celebrities, either to comment on their work or their life, to solicit a friendly and ongoing relationship, to ask for financial subsidies or advice, or even to declare their love. An anonymous woman admirer of Garrick's who came to London to see him in the role of Lear wrote and asked him to get her a ticket.68
For a fan, writing to a famous person, feeling authorized to get in contact with the celebrity, is a way of establishing reciprocity. Fundamental to celebrity is the fact that media communication is unilateral, as opposed to the real-time communication one has in face-to-face conversations. It is aimed at an indeterminate public and does not call for a response. Even so, the public is not passive; each reader works hard to appropriate and interpret texts and images, thus creating a private image of the artist and an imaginary relationship with him or her. This work is not necessarily done alone; it is often social, done in discussion with friends, other fans. To pick up a pen and write to a star is to cross a line, establishing reciprocity, an attempt to enter into direct communication.
Let us look again at the case of Talma. The archives at the Comédie-Française include a set of letters received by the tragedian. In certain of them one finds occasional verse and praise, often pompous, addressed to Talma by his admirers. The actor kept the letters and sometimes copied them, indicating the level of interest they held for him. A young English girl of fourteen sent him a “hesitant tribute and proof of her admiration” and begged his indulgence.69 Another made a poem out of the list of roles that Talma had played.70 For certain letter writers, expressing their admiration was not enough. They constructed little narratives aimed at attracting the attention of Talma, but also giving the writer an active role in the relationship. One admirer from the provinces took a friend of his, prejudiced against Talma from having read articles by the critic Geoffroy, to see the actor in Britannicus. The narrative, very detailed, became the story of a conversion, where admiration, once again, turned into “ardor,” a stupefied fascination and almost love at first sight: “ ‘What features! What talent! What a voice!’ the friend cried out at every instant, animated with admiration. His mouth hung open, his eyes were fixed on Talma with a sort of cupidity, and he was afraid that words would fly out of his mouth.” These are the words of a convert and they describe the passionate character that defines the relationship of the public with a celebrated actor: “I feel that once one has seen Talma, one immediately wishes to see him again, to always see him because one never tires of admiring him.”71
One admirer who wrote to the famous actor presented himself as a fan who was sharing his enthusiasm with everyone around him. Other writers wanted to start a dialogue with the famous person. Between 1799 and 1802, Talma received a great deal of correspondence from an individual who called himself “Anonymous from the Stalls,” whom he never met and who only much later revealed his identity (M. de Charmois). M. Charmois critiqued Talma's performances in long letters where praise was the rule but where criticisms also appeared. “Anonymous from the Stalls” was a very knowledgeable amateur whose passion for the theater centered on Talma; he was a spokesman for the public, noting, for example, in June 1800, “the unanimous and universal enthusiasm with which the Public welcomes your entrance on stage.”72
If “Anonymous from the Stalls” liked to discuss and critique the performances of Talma, others wrote above all to express their admiration and their attachment. One correspondent used a discussion he had had with some friends as a pretext to write a laudatory letter concerning the pronunciation of the word “respect” used by Talma in Athalie, full of dithyrambic sentences about the actor's performance and the passion it aroused. The letter cleverly noted the constraints the anonymous writer was under and his desire to have a personal relationship: although he said that he preferred to remain anonymous in “the crowd of your admirers,” he brought up his “strong desire not to be anonymous” and pleaded for a response (he gave the address of a friend, which was perhaps his own). The letter's form of address itself, “Monsieur, or Talma,” played with the idea set down by social convention of the objective distance which separates two individuals who have never met and the personal tie which unites the public with the celebrity, addressing him by his first name, the line between respect and familiarity. The rest of the letter ranged between admiration for the actor expressed by the theater buff and a more affective register that placed the admirer's feelings above everything else: “I feel a need to tell you about even the tiniest bit of deep emotion that you have so often stirred up in my soul.” This deeply felt emotion surpassed the evaluation of the actor's talent; even the area of hyperbolic admiration created an emotional bond between the author of the letter and Talma. The function of the letter was to express and, if possible, transform this bond into an affective relationship.73
Other writers did not so much address themselves to the great actor as to a famous man from whom one could solicit favors, usually subsidies. Some of the requests had a connection with the theater. A certain Beauval, from Limoges, recommended his nephew, author of a tragedy, and sent the letter to “Monsieur Talma, celebrated artist and resident at S.M., in Paris.” Another, Beurtez-Delancourt, calling himself “a Man of Letters,” printed and sent to Talma “Thoughts on the urgent necessity in which I find myself and my need to ask for help.” A man named Delhorme from Grenoble said that he was writing to Talma to explain about a somber legal proceeding and asking for his assistance. He pressured him in letter after letter to keep his promise. And someone else, a certain Lagache, wrote from Clermont in the department of Oise, introducing Talma to a certain “method of playing roulette” based on mathematical calculations and said he was ready to “fly” to Paris if he got a favorable response from him.74 Talma's fame in this case was not the basis for an affective and personal relationship, but the status of a public figure one imagined to be rich and powerful and who attracted numerous people soliciting favors from every part of France. Most of the time the two elements came together, at least in the writer's rhetoric. Ouvrard, a professor of writing at Bordeaux, asked Talma to help him find an apartment in Paris, where he could focus on his passion for the arts without sacrificing the presence of his four children: “How fortunate these children are that they can still reach out to the God of Drama, whom France honors even in his lifetime and of whom it is said no one has ever been refused when they asked him for help.”75
To write to a famous man is one thing; to meet him is still more fascinating. We have little evidence of this in regard to Talma, but one letter offers a very significant expression of a desire to see the famous man, a necessity both touristic and ritualistic. A writer from Rouen told Talma that she and some friends were coming to Paris and dreamed of meeting the famous actor. Her pompous request began this way: “You understand, Monsieur, that to go to Paris without seeing Talma is worse than going to Rome without seeing the pope.”76
It's regrettable, of course, that there is no trace of this visit. We do not even know if Talma was flattered by this desire to see him or embarrassed by the prospect of an importunate visit. On the other hand, Sarah Siddons did leave a record of her intrusive admirers. In her Reminiscences, written when she knew she was dying, she openly admits to having sought celebrity. But celebrity is presented in a rather somber light, because of the social obligations implied, the continual requests made of her, which left little time for her work as an actress or for family life. Her ambition as an actress as well as her personal well-being were threatened by the “ardor” with which every new celebrity was solicited in order to be put on show. One evening when she had accepted an social invitation, having been promised that there would only be a dozen people present, she found herself caught in a real “trap,” surrounded until dawn by dozens of guests ready to climb up on chairs in order to see over the shoulders of their neighbors.77 The hostess had even encouraged her to come with her baby in order to make the whole event more interesting, “more for effect than for her beautiful eyes,” Siddons commented bitterly.
This image of the young actress surrounded by a crowd of unknown people climbing on chairs to get a glimpse of her and her baby is striking. Siddons gives another example, even more amazing. Although she had gotten in the habit of locking her door to keep out unknown people attracted to her solely out of curiosity, some did not hesitate to force an entrance. One day she had a visit from a woman of very high standing whom she did not know and who showed up uninvited.
She was a person of very high rank. Her curiosity had been, however, too powerful for her good breeding. “You must think it strange” said she “to see a person entirely unknown to you intrude in this manner upon your privacy; but you must know I am in a very delicate state of health, and my physician won't let me go to the Theatre to see you, so I am come to look at you here.” So she sat down to look, and I to be looked at, for a few painful moments, when she arose and apologised.78
Whether this anecdote is true or partially fiction, it functions as a metaphor about how aggressive the public can be in their desire to see a celebrity, even to the point of depriving them of their privacy. The unknown person was seized by a sort of voyeuristic impulse which pushed her to observe the famous actress. But how is this to be interpreted? One may see celebrity as a new form of social prestige. The upper-class person has forgotten the exterior signs which govern her social place, notably her manners, and she is reduced to a mere silent admirer, mesmerized to the point of watching the silent tragedian without saying a word. But Siddons focuses on the uncomfortable, almost violent, aspect of this intrusion. She herself is reduced to an object of desire by this female spectator, who is incapable of distinguishing between the time and place where the actress publicly plays a role in the theater and the rest of her social life where she has a family and children. As in the previous scene, Siddons, outside of the theater, is obliged to submit to the gaze of others. That a great aristocrat personifies the public is not insignificant. Anonymous and unknown to Siddons, she is simply an indiscreet admirer, without a personal story. But her social standing suggests that the social and symbolic domination that aristocrats exercised over actors, even when they admired and protected them, was transmitted to the public, without losing much in the translation. Far from socially liberating actors, celebrity subjugated them to other constraints, no less demanding.
The fan can be distinguished from the admirer or the disciple, two figures considered more classic in the traditional spectator–celebrity relationship. The fan has two sides which illustrate the ambivalence of celebrity. The passionate interest that the fan has for a certain public figure can come from a sincere desire for intimacy, aroused initially by artistic or intellectual admiration, or even empathy with the unhappiness of individuals (writers as well as criminals), as has been reported in the press. But it can also darken into an excessive curiosity, almost obsessive, a type of voyeurism, a desire to possess the celebrity by denying him or her any autonomous existence outside of a public life. The fan, an exaggerated incarnation of the relationship that the public maintains with celebrities, is not part of a cult, nor is he or she a simple spectator; the fan is a more worrisome person whose motives are intriguing. This individual only makes sense when one considers the new configurations of publicity, which profoundly transformed the very constitution and reputation of public figures, whether actors, artists, or writers.