French Tragedy and the Civil Wars Andrea Frisch Les moeurs d’une nation forment d’abord l’esprit de ses ouvrages drama- tiques. Bientôt ses ouvrages dramatiques forment son esprit. [At irst a nation’s mores shape the spirit of its dramatic works. Soon enough its dramatic works shape its spirit.] — Marie-Joseph Chénier, De la liberté du théâtre en France I n his 1823 pamphlet Racine et Shakspeare Stendhal famously com- plained that French theater had become hopelessly stylized, bound by the rules of an outdated classicism. In fact, Stendhal called Racine himself “romantic” because he appealed to the tastes of his time; the blame, as Stendhal saw it, lay with Racine’s successors, who continued to write “Racinian theater” in a post-Racinian age. But neoclassical theater was by design “out of time” or “untimely” — “unzeitgemäss,” as Friedrich Nietzsche would put it — and was already in the seventeenth century. Of course, French neoclassical tragedy did relect the tastes of its times, but those tastes leaned toward a distancing between specta- tor and play that inhibited the romantic and bloody theatrical illusion Stendhal claimed to seek. Much recent criticism of French neoclassical theater has cast doubt on the practical inluence of the rules put forth in theoretical treatises of the period. 1 Nevertheless, the twin principles of distancing and audi- Modern Language Quarterly 67:3 (September 2006) DOI 10.1215/00267929-2006-001 © 2006 by University of Washington I gratefully acknowledge the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Humanities Center for their support during the writing of this essay. I would like to thank Marshall Brown and David Quint for their helpful comments on earlier versions. 1 See esp. John D. Lyons, Kingdom of Disorder: The Theory of Tragedy in Classical France (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1999); and Giovanni Dotoli, Temps de préfaces: Le débat théâtral en France de Hardy à la Querelle du “Cid” (Paris: Klincksieck, 1996).