For all the lip-service French culture pays to reason and logic, it undergoes periodic eruptions of déraison or unreason. In the wake of Napoleon’s defeat, ballroom dancing began to be infiltrated by such unbridled popular dances as the cancan and the chahut. Exuberant, even bacchanalian physical display served as a safety-valve in a heavily censored society. In the Second Empire, four working-class amateurs introduced the high-kicking, parodic Clodoche quadrille at the Paris Opéra. A non-verbal equivalent of the Marx Brothers, they became bywords through the Western hemisphere of zany, comic demonstrations of the hysteric convulsions described by the medical establishment. Laurence Senelick is Fletcher Professor Emeritus of Drama and Oratory at Tufts University, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a contributor to the International Encyclopedia of Dance. His many books include British Music Hall: A Bibliography (1981), The Age and Stage of George L. Fox (1999), and Cabaret Performance 1890–1940 (2001–2005).
Music, Theatre, and Diplomacy: The Paris Opéra during the Second Empire