to be duped by any such trick; and their determination to establish a true People's Theater at Paris is not in the least shaken.[1]
But meantime, while we wait, with fewer illusions perhaps and more experience, for them to take up the temporarily interrupted projects, the People's Theater slowly develops, here and there. Among the more or less happy experiments undertaken in this period of reaction, we may point to the Coopération des idées, the Théâtre populaire of Belleville, and the Théâtre du Peuple of M. Beaulieu.
On December 3, 1899, the People's Theater of the Coopération des idées opened its doors at number 157 Faubourg Saint-Antoine. Since that time there has been a series of almost continuous performances. Unfortunately the hall was too
- ↑ I need only to recall the press campaign carried on for many years by Camille de Sainte-Croix, Lucien Descaves, Gustave Geffroy, Jean Jullien, Octave Mirbeau, and the studies and questionnaire of Georges Bourdon in the Revue bleue. Ever since the stormy performances of Thermidor at the Comédie-Française in 1890, M. Camille de Sainte-Croix has not ceased his demands for a republican theater on behalf of the republican people of Paris. He saw that the people were excluded from the State theaters because of the reactionary spirit of the so-called upper classes. Since 1900 he has labored to secure a State appropriation for the establishment of four large people's theaters, devoted to dramatic and lyric, classic and modern productions, one for each of the outlying districts of the city. He submitted a report of his inquiries to the Chamber and Municipal Council. The State at once appeared interested—but this was merely in order to suppress it the more effectively.
