Concert et propagande politique en France au début du XXe siècle

Résumé En

The concert as political propagande in France and the control of "performative context". (J.F. Fulcher). This article is about the endeavor of both nationalist leagues and other political groups to control the "performative context" of concerts for propagandistic purposes between the Dreyfus Affair and the First World War. As it shows, they already understood basic concepts concerning "performance " that would be articulated only much later by anthropologists and poststructuralist theorists. Primary among these is that performance is a cultural presentation rendered meaningful through context, or that it is "situated" socially, which determines the connotations of what is presented. To aid in the perception of such resonances, a specific performance can be consciously "keyed" to place it within a particular schema of comprehension or "interpretive frame". Thus political groups, on both Right and Left, in order to communicate their conceptions of French culture, brought politically significant texts, as well as varieties of communal experience, to bear on the artistic statement.