• 1 “Le Couronnement de la Muse du Peuple,” Programme officiel de la fête du travail, Roubaix, Imprimer (...)

“What is the Muse doing on this stage,
Where she seems so elevated, and so simple too,
In her graceful costume?1”

• 2 Léon Bourgeois, L’éducation de la démocratie, Paris, Édouard Cornély, 1897.

1In a passage of his Principles of Political Economy on luxury and expense, the economist Charles Gide (1911 [1984]: 677) contends that “art is characterized by the production of great effects through very simple means.” This affirmation of the social usefulness of investing in art was used by some late nineteenth century social reformers as an authoritative argument in support of art for all. Inspired by the Arts and Crafts movement led in England by William Morris and John Ruskin, many thinkers defended a vision of art as a universal treasure. Being socially, if not politically useful as well as economically useful, art played a central role in any plans for a new society. In a famous December 1896 speech, Léon Bourgeois2 called for an aesthetic revolution wherein beauty would be shared by humanity.

• 3 Gustave Charpentier, “L’art populaire,” Annales des fêtes et cérémonies civiles : organisation, art (...)
• 4 Letter from Gustave Charpentier to his parents, Paris, 14 April 1897, BHVP, Fonds Charpentier, doss (...)

2As if to heed this call, in 1897 Gustave Charpentier created a monumental, hybrid work, Le Couronnement de la Muse du Peuple (The Crowning of the People’s Muse), which was performed for over half of a century in provincial cities often helmed by socialist mayors (Noël 2023). With the Couronnement, Charpentier wanted “half of the city to entertain, educate and glorify the other half.”3 This monster show, as the composer himself called it,4 neither a genuine opera nor a work of Republican propaganda, was unique among the theatrical genres of its time. Defined by Katharine Ellis (2022: 219) as a “community music spectacle,” Le Couronnement de la Muse du Peuple, which was inspired by revolutionary festivals and the monumental works of Berlioz and Augusta Holmès, is characterized by multiple intriguing specificities that led us to examine its ecosystem: its monumental proportions, involving the participation of hundreds of local amateurs flanked by a few Parisian professional artists; an original use of the city in which it was shown, since performances all took place outdoors; and its longevity, even though it was meant to be ephemeral.

• 5 Le Couronnement de la Muse du Peuple has only been discussed in a few studies. David Pomfret (2004) (...)

3The study of the production of Le Couronnement de la Muse du Peuple is an original angle for research on the show,5 in line with recent publications investigating the links between art and economics (Demonet 2021; Herlin 2021; Jardin 2022). Books on nineteenth-century outdoor festivals are scarce and mainly devoted to the official celebrations of the Third Republic or outdoor opera performances. Their authors often neglect the economic dimension of these festivities (Corbin, Gérôme & Tartakowsky 1994; Dalisson 2009; Ellis 2022; Ihl 1996; Sanson 1976), which is more readily broached by historians specializing in the Ancien Régime or international fairs (Jardin 2022; Valade 2021).

• 6 Many thanks to Luis Goncalves at the Roubaix’s municipal (AmR) archives for his precious help.
• 7 According to Charles Gide—borrowing a definition proposed by Jean-Baptiste Say—political economics (...)

4I picked the 1924 production of Le Couronnement de la Muse du Peuple for a detailed study for two reasons. First, many budget documents on Roubaix’s labour festival can be found in the city’s municipal archives (AmR).6 Second, the Charpentier collection at the French National Library (BnF) and the City of Paris’s Historical Library (BHVP) contains many unreleased sources on the “practical writing” of the Couronnement and on the intellectual consequences of these material practices of writing (Coquery, Menant & Weber 2006). By looking at Le Couronnement de la Muse du Peuple through the lens of political economics, I sketch out the structure of the organization surrounding the performance, involving different economic actors who were all keeping close tabs on expenses and eager to optimize their budgets.7 The writings intended to improve exchanges of goods and services reflect uses that can be gathered under the umbrella term of practical rationality (ibid.). The study of this show’s practical rationality provides answers to a variety of questions: what was the division of labour between the Couronnement’s organizers? What role did Gustave Charpentier play? Why did a provincial city put on this show? What were the motives of the respective economic actors involved and the great effects, to borrow Charles Gide’s turn of phrase, they were hoping for?

• 8 Fêtes du travail [Labour Festival], 15, 16 et 17 August. Merci !, poster, 89 x 128 cm, AmR, 1l26/13

“The Committee of the Unforgettable Festivities
that will carry the name of our city
to the ends of the world and convey
our power to achieve artistic feats
shouts out a cordial thank you to all.”8

• 9 Website of the Cassini research project (last accessed on 24 June 2024).
• 10 The socialists remained in office continuously until 1983, when the centrist mayor André Diligent w (...)
• 11 Programme d’action du Parti Socialiste, Librairies du Parti Socialiste et de l’Humanité réunies, 19 (...)

6A small town of 8,000 in 1800, Roubaix had by the late nineteenth century grown into a city of over 120,000 inhabitants and the world’s textile capital following mass industrialization.9 The victory of the French Workers’ Party (POF) in the 1892 municipal election and, most notably, Jules Guesde’s ascent to the post of deputy in 1893 were two feats for the French socialists, which turned Roubaix into one of their strongholds. A Republican journalist under the Empire, convicted for defending the Commune and founder of the POF, Guesde had returned to Roubaix despite an initial defeat in 1881, hoping to convince the local working classes of the benefits of the political doctrine that would soon bear his name (Ducange 2017). His accession to the Assembly put Roubaix in the national if not international spotlight—the city was often nicknamed the “radiant city” of socialism (Lefebvre 2004a: 250). While the first stint of the Roubaix socialists at the municipal helm revealed a mismatch between the function and the personality of the mayor, former innkeeper Henri Carrette, and ended with a defeat in 1902 (Lefebvre 2001:112), Jean-Baptiste Lebas’s 1912 victory heralded a long era of municipal power for the local socialists.10 A local and a fervent socialist activist since childhood, Lebas was noticed by Jules Guesde, who appointed him deputy secretary of the Nord’s socialist federation. Elected mayor of a large industrial city at the age of 33, he demonstrated his courage during Roubaix’s occupation by the Germans in October 1914, and became a national figure in the French Section of the Workers’ International (SFIO party), in which he embodied an orthodox approach, closely aligned with Guesde’s precepts. Lebas applied to Roubaix the socialist ideas defended in the socialist party’s action programme, adopted during the 1919 congress. While speaking of a socialist cultural policy in the interwar period would be something of an anachronism (Chamouard 2013: 143), the 1919 programme did mention the “public organization of leisure through sports, performance, art, and the dissemination, under all forms and at all ages, of general and professional culture.”11

• 12 Projet de Budget de l’Exercice 1924, Lille, Imprimerie Ouvrière Administrative et Commerciale, Maxi (...)

7During a period of economic resurgence, as Roubaix, which had been devastated by World War One and the German occupation, rebuilt itself (Hilaire 1984: 220), and as the 1925 election loomed, Lebas and his municipal council decided to stage a lavish labour festival in August 1924, earmarking for that purpose a sum of 350,000 francs in the sixth section of the ordinary budget, devoted to “miscellaneous expenses”12—public festivities and ceremonies, public winter concerts and receptions at city hall—rather than in the fifth section, which was dedicated to public instruction, endowments, the Fine Arts, music societies, and theatre.

• 13 Various budgets and administrative accounts for the years 1922 to 1927, AmR, 1L20.

8The socialist municipality categorized the festival as part of its ordinary expenses, defined per Article 135 of the Law of 5 Avril 1884 as “yearly and permanent expenses for the municipal interest”. Yet the amounts committed for 1924 exceeded by far those of previous and later budgets, as can be seen on the graph below, which presents a synthesis of the municipality’s expenses under the sixth section of the ordinary budget between 1922 and 1926:13

• 14 Fêtes musicales de 1924, minutes of the 20 September 1923 meeting, typescript, p 1, AmR, 1I170.

9At the 20 September 1923 meeting convened specifically to discuss the festival, Mayor Lebas cited the need to “crown the efforts of the neighbourhood committees,” which had organized many festivities since the armistice.14 These committees indeed appear to have played an important role in many cities that had experienced strong urban growth in the early twentieth century, in Roubaix and in the suburbs of Paris. They punctuated neighbourhood life by staging parties and artistic events (Fourcault 1986: 158).

• 15 Projet de Budget de l’Exercice 1924.
• 16 Note that this amount does not include remuneration for the mayor in his deputies; these were unpai (...)

10Considering the hefty sum allocated to the project, it is doubtful that the single purpose of these festivities was to reward neighbourhood committees. Compared to other ordinary expenses in the 1924 budget,15 it is a high amount that exceeds the combined remunerations of all municipal employees (301,235 F),16 and by an even wider margin the yearly subsidies granted to the musical conservatory (102,160 F), the theatrical season (60,000 F), the city’s music societies (18,500 F), and the Bastille Day celebrations (50,000 F). The socialist municipality spent all this money to organize a grand festival whose memory would reverberate among generations of residents. This was indeed a monumental undertaking: 300 music societies were gathered on the opening day, featuring over 15,000 musicians and singers spread out among fifty pavilions custom-made for the event. A procession of marching bands and cycling groups opened the festival’s second day, which featured a large-scale contest between carnival groups and societies. On the next day, a grand historical procession preceded the first performance of Le Couronnement de la Muse du Peuple, followed by a night session.

• 17 “Magnificence,” Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française, 1878.

11The city strived to exude magnificence, a sense of grandeur manifesting extraordinary wealth,17 in an attempt to shine across borders, against the backdrop of an intense competition between regional cities that was stoked by the expansion of the Northern Railway Company’s network.

• 18 Pierre Briffaut, La fête communale de Cambrai, Cambrai, Danquigny, 1962.
• 19 Mairie de Roubaix, Bulletin communal 1924, Roubaix, Imprimerie typographique et lithographique, 192 (...)

12Around 15 August, the city of Calais traditionally hosted a large sea festival (Fêtes de la mer) during which beauty queens were elected. On the same day, Cambrai offered a wide variety of activities as part of its municipal festival (Fête communale), which dates back to the seventeenth century,18 and Ghent, the city where most Belgians living in Roubaix came from (Petillon 2006), held its provincial exhibition for the vulgarization of electricity. The festivities in Roubaix matched the definition of such events given by Michel Hastings (1987: 23) in his research on the communist municipality of Halluin, a grandiose celebration that “suspends reason, [in which] counting becomes petty.” This quest for splendour appears to contradict the image of sound financial managers conveyed by the socialists at the time (Chamouard 2013: 81). It is not a far cry from the shows put up by families from the upper-crust aristocracy in the Ancient Régime, in which places were transformed lavishly in a bid to make a lasting impression on the population (Goulet 2024). In Roubaix, at any rate, the massive mobilization of municipal financial resources supports the thesis advanced by Patrizia Dogliani in her authoritative book on municipal socialism (2018: 66): if funds were available, “they were used to organize popular festivals, which were often the only opportunity for distraction from everyday survival concerns.” Unlike in Halluin, where it is almost impossible to ascertain the expenses (Hastings 1987), Roubaix’s municipal archives give us an almost comprehensive picture of the costs incurred by the three days of festivities. The 350,000 francs initially earmarked in the draft budget were outspent by far: according to the municipal council of 17 October 1924, the festival cost a total of 492,000 francs, and generated a little under 60,000 francs in revenue.19 For space reasons, this article focuses on two main economic dimensions of Roubaix’s festive policy: the funding of ephemera and of a new urban sociability.

• 20 Gabriel Chevallier, Clochemerle, Paris, Éditions Rieder, 1934.
• 21 Typescript of a letter from Jean Lebas to the Nord prefect, 8 July 1924, AmR, 1I170.
• 22 Typescript of a letter from Jean Lebas to Georges Motte, 7 August 1924, AmR, 1I170.
• 23 Letter from Gustave Charpentier to Jean-Baptiste Lebas, 15 July 1924, AmR, 1I170.

15The Labour festival archives in Roubaix’s municipal archives suggest that this idea of a division of local society into two adamantly opposed camps, conveyed most famously in Gabriel Chevallier’s novel Clochemerle,20 deserves nuancing. Although Jean-Baptiste Lebas is sometimes described as a disciplined official operating under the surveillance of the Party, which urged him to avoid contacts with state representatives (Chamouard 2013: 195; Lefebvre 2004a: 245–246), he did write to the Nord prefect to ask for camp beds21 and to Georges Motte—the president of Roubaix’s Chamber of Commerce, heir of the prominent Motte-Bossut family of industrialists and cousin of former deputy-mayor Eugène Motte—to request his intercession “with the City’s industrial and commercial organizations to arrange for all workers to have Saturday 16 August off, thus ensuring that the entire population can participate in these festivities and give its guests a proper welcome.”22 Lebas, who was known for his Guesdist rigour in the early days of his term, appears to have adopted a more pragmatic approach of his role as a local elected official in the early 1920s. He did however continue to keep the state and its representatives at an arm’s length, which is visible in comparisons of photographs of the Couronnement in Roubaix and elsewhere. Indeed, the outdoor stage was stripped of all the usual Republican pageantry, there was no flag (as in Riom) and the performance did not take place in front of the city hall building (as in Saint-Etienne). While the show usually ended with a rendition of the national anthem, the Marseillaise, this did not happen in Roubaix.23

• 24 Léon Morgand, La loi municipale. Commentaire de la Loi du 5 avril 1884 sur l’organisation et les at (...)

16The municipal law of 1884 stipulated that the mayor was the sole organizer of the local festival, whereas he was only tasked with implementing the government’s decisions for the national holiday. This gave him some leeway, although he remained under the supervision of the prefect.24

• 25 “Art. 148. Subsidized music societies shall participate in public festivals. During the summer, ins (...)

18It is also worth noting that the local music societies that received annual municipal subsidies did not get any additional funds for participating in the festival, since the annual subsidies were conditional on their participation in all public ceremonies, as is stated in the draft budget for 1924.25 The high amount redistributed to Roubaisians—not to mention payments to companies from other friendly cities—reflects the municipality’s effort to maintain a client base, which in the long run allowed it to reinforce its roots in the community and its electoral footing. The festival contributed to the formation of a municipal audience (Payre 2007: 245) and aimed at cementing the socialist vote, which at the time was “less a matter of opting and supporting a discourse or worldview than a sign and a manifestation of integration and recognition,” as Rémi Lefebvre reminds us (2004a: 254). While Lefebvre has only documented the institutionalization of working-class sociability by Roubaix since the 1950s, the case of the 1924 festival shows that the municipality already largely acted as a “provider for the associative system” (ibid.: 257), a “welfare municipality” with a ubiquitous role in the everyday lives of its citizens.

• 26 AmR, box 1I132.

19The Roubaix municipal council was indeed the true organizer of the August 1924 Labour Festival, indulging in lavish expenses to celebrate Roubaix magnificently, while redistributing much of the incurred expense to friendly social groups and in turn extending its influence. For the municipality, the organization of these monumental festivities was probably facilitated by the experience accrued over the course of multiple 14 July celebrations, as evidenced in Roubaix’s municipal archives.26 Every year, the national holiday was an opportunity for the city to subsidize a variety of local societies, to organize running races, pigeon races, parades, velocipede races and public concerts for an amount equalling the municipal theatre’s yearly subsidy. These annually repeated tasks allowed the city to develop a genuine expertise in the field of festive policy.

• 27 Letter from Marie, Gustave Charpentier’s sister, to her parents, 28 July 1988, BHVP, Fonds Charpent (...)

“Gustave is finishing his accounts today
and he will be dealing with me shortly.
He has been struggling terribly
to balance his budget.
I do not know if he has succeeded.”27

• 28 Letter from Jean-Baptiste Lebas to Gustave Charpentier, 25 September 1923, BnF, Fonds Charpentier, (...)

21On 20 September 1923, a Bureau of the Labour Festival Commission was formed; the following week, Gustave Charpentier was received in Roubaix by Jean-Baptiste Lebas.28 The socialist mayor was dead set on convincing the composer to come and perform Le Couronnement de la Muse du Peuple in Roubaix, which would be the musical apex of the three planned days of festivities. Charpentier was at the time a much-celebrated composer, who had gained widespread recognition thanks to the success of his opera Louise, which had premiered at the Opéra-Comique in 1900, providing him with a steady income and allowing him to succeed his professor, Massenet, at the Academy of Fine Arts in 1912.

• 29 After Roubaix, the show was again performed in Dunkerque and Valenciennes (1937) as well as Lille ( (...)

22Charpentier—who grew up in Tourcoing after his family left German-occupied Moselle in 1871—seems to have been the object of a special kind of worship in the Nord since 1887, when he received a triumphant welcome in his adoptive city after winning the Prix de Rome. Before Roubaix, Le Couronnement de la Muse du Peuple was performed multiple times locally, in Lille (1898, 1900), Lens (1901, 1907, 1913) and Cambrai (1911).29 The joint examination of the BnF’s Fonds Charpentier on the staging of the Couronnement in Roubaix and of Roubaix’s municipal archives gives us insights into the behaviours of the economic actors involved. For the municipality and Charpentier alike, the first round of negotiation was essential, as it established the value of the Roubaix edition of the Couronnement.

• 30 Pierrot is a stock character in French theatre, typically dressed in a loose white tunic and trouse (...)

23The Couronnement was an inherently hybrid and adaptable show. Its main plot was as follows: the People’s Muse, the main character, was played by a young female worker from the city where the show was performed. Elected by her fellow working women, the Muse embodied the courage of the working-class woman and the virtues of labour. She was celebrated by a tenor-poet and crowned by Beauty, an allegorical figure played by a prima ballerina from the Opéra de Paris. After the crowning, a Pierrot30 mime walks onto the stage, symbolizing human suffering. In a climactic closing scene, the Muse stretches her arms out to Pierrot and brings him close to Beauty, thereby initiating a reconciliation between Beauty and the people through Art.

• 31 Marc Delmas, Gustave Charpentier et le lyrisme français, Paris, Librairie Delagrave, 1931, p. 147.

24While a reduction of the Couronnement for piano and voice had been published in 1898, no comprehensive materials or printed orchestral scores existed. Charpentier retained the rights over the composition, giving him a key advantage: without him, the material at his disposal and the skills he had acquired over the years, no performance of the Couronnement could be possible. Also, the composer never considered his work to be finished (Niccolai 2011: 114)—by the late 1920s he was still describing Le Couronnement as “a mere sketch.”31 Some of the roles in the show, like the public criers or the Sphinx, were gradually introduced but not always cast, and while the proceedings usually ended with the Marseillaise or the Chant d’Apothéose, this was not an obligation. This permanent flexibility influenced the number of professional participants hired by Charpentier and partly explains why the composer kept a great many financial documents pertaining to the show, as it allowed him to more readily propose a price and to optimize the organization of upcoming performances. The budget requested by Gustave Charpentier was detailed in a descriptive booklet that included the main relevant instructions and listed all expenses related to the artistic organization of the performance: the fees for the main actors, the ballerinas, the solo trumpeters, the répétiteurs, and the dressers.

• 32 “I urged them to respond to you straight away and to accept without hesitation,” letter from Abel E (...)

25Roubaix ended up being one of the most expensive performances of the Couronnement, with the 20,000 francs budget granted by the municipality exceeding those of most other editions by far. A document I found in the BnF collection shows that the amount requested for two performances of the Couronnement in one day, in Marseille (1922) and Salon de Provence (1923) was 10,000 francs (figure 8). Yet the pricing of the show does not appear to have elicited protracted negotiations, even though Committee members thought it was excessive. Gustave Charpentier had a local champion in Abel Estyle, the director of the musical conservatory, who even took it upon himself to pay a visit at city hall to convince the socialist officials that this was a sound expense.32 In a draft version of a letter, Charpentier justified the requested sum as follows:

• 34 Letter from Gustave Charpentier to Jean Lebas, 15 July 1924, AmR, 1I170.

26This passage was eventually struck out of the final letter stored in Roubaix’s municipal archives.34 While the justification of Charpentier’s required sum remains vague, this removed snippet shows that the composer was unaware of the specifics of the municipality’s other expenses in relation to the performance: he ventures a sum of 20,000 francs for the construction of the stage when 50,000 francs were in fact allocated; likewise, the electricity bill actually came to 20,000 francs, not 12,000. Still, it also tells us that Charpentier was mindful of the fact that the budget for his show was part of a broader urban festival economy.

• 36 Letter from Gustave Charpentier to Jean Lebas, 15 July 1924, AmR, 1I170.
• 37 See Appendix.
• 38 Mairie de Roubaix, Bulletin communal 1924, op.cit., p. 589–590.

28Gustave Charpentier promised the sum of 20,000 francs would not be exceeded twice, and insisted that the total amount be paid to his right-arm man Henri Radiguer “after the afternoon performance, so that he can hand out payments to all involved before the evening performance, since it is likely that many will leave that same evening, and I want to make sure that these fine folks do not run into any trouble or issues.”36 The municipality eventually gave up on its plan to check each fee, and drafted a lump-sum contract,37 which listed all the roles required for the performance without specifying their individual costs. The musician was now free to use his budget as he saw fit and the municipality had not walked all of its demands back. The contract’s wording is interesting, stating that should the tenor Rimbaud be indisposed, an artist of equivalent value was to be hired. The lump-sum contract was put to a vote and validated during the Municipal Council session of 8 August 1924.38 The contract reconciled the economic models of the Couronnement’s two main organizers: the municipality, which was concerned by budgetary exemplarity, reflecting the party line on good socialist municipal management (Chamouard 2013: 81—82), and Charpentier, who was looking for freedom to use his budget as he wished. Although in his New Dictionary of Political Economics, Fernand Faure claims that artists are unable to wield a monopoly on the grounds that they can only themselves in a situation in which competition is limited, as opposed to one where it is absent, the case of Gustave Charpentier and of Le Couronnement de la Muse du Peuple does appear to meet all the criteria for a monopoly such as Faure defines it: “What is essential, is that those who wish to acquire an object or receive a service of any kind find themselves dealing with a single seller, a single interest, a single will, whose conditions they have to bend to, failing which they would have to renounce the object or service they need”(Faure 1900: 319). Charpentier’s monopoly was reinforced by three key factors: he was the show’s author, he had retained the rights over his work, and he also provided the dancers and singers needed for the show—the students of Mimi Pinson’s conservatory, which he had opened in Paris in 1902 to offer an education in the arts to young local workingwomen. These specificities allowed Charpentier to accumulate considerable skills and experience in staging outdoor Republican shows. Over the years, the Couronnement, which had started in 1897 as a diversion written on the occasion of Montmartre festivities that poked fun at the official Parisian parade of the Bœuf gras, as Charpentier awaited an opportunity to have his opera Louise on a Parisian stage, became a means for the composer to stand out from his peers. Many outdoor shows were staged across Third Republic France, but none of them became nationally renowned as the years went by. Charpentier’s unique position allowed him to set his own prices and distribute his expenses, thereby earning the loyalty of some performers by adjusting their fees from one performance to the next. He was also able to redistribute some of the budget of to his students from Mimi Pinson’s conservatory. While he hinted at these budgetary arrangements in his 15 July letter to the Roubaix municipality, he swore he would not exceed the allocated funds:

• 40 Undated fragment from a draft letter by Gustave Charpentier, BnF, Fonds Charpentier, box 57. I coul (...)

31With the Couronnement, Gustave Charpentier had found an artistic and economic market in which he could thrive. He acted as the “musical opportunist” described by William Weber (2004): a professional who sets out to mine a specific untapped musical terrain and manages to benefit from it. While the contract signed with the municipality states that Charpentier was the organizer of the Couronnement ceremony, he performed so many tasks that his role is hard to define. All the letters sent to him begin with the address “Dear Master.” Regardless what his function could be more precisely characterized as (coordinator? CEO? creator? author? artistic director?), Charpentier was aware of his status as the star of the show: in a draft letter to Florimond Fray, he noted: “this is the first time a poster for Le Couronnement de la Muse du Peuple does not mention the author’s name. I gather you felt that announcing my presence would not constitute an advertisement.”40 As I stressed earlier, the range of skills acquired by Charpentier in the process of organizing multiple performances of the Couronnement made him indispensable at every step.

• 41 BnF, Fonds Charpentier, boxes 50, 51 and 57.

32The Roubaix dossier in the BnF’s Fonds Charpentier gives us an account of the interactions between a variety of economic and artistic actors on the occasion of the Couronnement’s performance. As usual, Charpentier maintained an abundant correspondence with the municipality’s festival committee and its local representatives and drew up lists of tasks he had yet to complete. In other cases, such as the ceremonies for Jean Jaurès’s induction into the Pantheon, for which he was in charge of the music, planners dedicated to the event can be found in the Charpentier papers.41

• 42 Indications for the Couronnement’s Roubaix performance, typescript, BnF, Fonds Charpentier, box 57.
• 43 The versatility of Charpentier’s organizational duties is reminiscent of those of Walther Straram r (...)

33Charpentier’s central position was primarily due to his being both the author and the performer of Le Couronnement de la Muse du Peuple, since he directed each performance from a podium raised in the middle of the orchestras that had gathered for the show. He also acted as troupe director, instigator and artistic creator, following the definition proposed by Hélène Boisbeau (2008: 13). Indeed, he picked the soloists, verifying their availability with theatre directors, set their fees and drew up the rehearsal schedule. He also managed the tour and wrote a travel booklet for the Mimi Pinson students, which included rehearsal times as well as instructions on good conduct throughout the trip, in order “not to give off an impression of people who have never travelled to the population.42” He delivered the musical material needed for the performance and an explanatory note to all the directors of the local music societies involved. These actions were facilitated by his functions as director of the Mimi Pinson charity and music publisher and by the practical knowledge he had accumulated in the course of supervising so many performances. He also took it upon himself to secure train tickets from the Northern Railway Company’s network, as he was experienced in negotiating group discounts.43

• 44 Fêtes du Travail des 15, 16, et 17 août, poster, Merci!, 89x128 cm, AmR, 1I26/13.
• 45 “Échos des Fêtes du Travail,” Journal de Roubaix, 22 August 1924, p. 3.

35Despite the pouring rain, the Couronnement’s two performances, involving nearly 1,000 individuals, did proceed as planned on 17 August 1924 on Boulevard Gambetta in front of an audience of 10,000. Mayor Lebas thanked the population in a citywide poster campaign a few days later: “These three days sing out Roubaix’s glory loud and clear. Art has triumphed and evidence has been given that our city, through the collaboration of its artistic genius and of its organizational mastery, can achieve incomparable things.”44 Lebas’s words echoed Charpentier’s post-show enthusiasm: he told the press this had been “to date, the most perfect scenic and musical realization of Le Couronnement de la Muse du Peuple.”45

• 46 Letter from Jean-Baptiste Lebas to Mr. Glineur, departmental director for indirect contributions, 2 (...)

36This study of the staging of Le Couronnement de la Muse du Peuple in Roubaix has retraced the history of an encounter between the economic rationale of a socialist municipality, which used the arts for the purposes of its political programme, and that of an artist who was extremely well-versed in the requirements of grandiose outdoor productions and used to adapting to the host city’s economic constraints. The economy devised by the municipality’s festive policy was not primarily geared towards monetary profit, but more symbolic profit-oriented, as Lebas admitted in a letter to the departmental director for indirect contributions: “In this matter the Festival Committee has not been moved by the pursuit of gain. Its intention was to have the crowd participate in a grandiose spectacle, in no way concerning itself with lowering the resulting expense through revenue that it knew in advance would amount to a total far inferior to the outlay”.46 The mayor’s avowed motives here are quite different from those of a standard entertainment entrepreneur. This festive economy echoes Anne-Madeleine Goulet’s description (2024) of Ancien Régime aristocrats’ reliance on credit as a means to fund extraordinary expenses intended to boost their symbolic capital. It also allowed for building a broad customer base. This aspect can be observed in Charpentier’s operation: the composer occasionally rewarded a group of loyal artists by raising their fees to ensure their participation in future performances. While Charpentier was in a position of strength when it came to organizing outdoor shows, he did remain dependent on the goodwill of municipalities, who would invite him and set the budget. These two economic systems contributed to the organization of a local festival that differed from official national festivities, being mainly intended to celebrate the idealized socialist vision of the city of Roubaix, pointing to tensions between regional and national identities under the Third Republic (Ford 1993). Through the study of the material traces that can still be consulted today, I was able to grasp the concrete economic reasonings of both the socialist municipality and Charpentier, shedding light on a number of negotiations and arrangements, far from preconceived theories.