From Servant to Savant: Musical Privilege, Property, and the French Revolution

At the heart of Rebecca Dowd Geoffroy-Schwinden’s From Servant to Savant is the radical, tantalizing proposition that the rise of musical romanticism constituted not merely an aesthetic shift, but also a political one, precipitated by cataclysmic changes in social and economic relations in the wake of the French Revolution. She argues that musicians and composers were among the most vocal proponents of socio-economic overhaul during this period, advocating such liberal reforms as the protection of private property, copyright law, state artistic subsidy and democratic nationhood. With this assertion, Geoffroy-Schwinden boldly wades into a number of overlapping, contentious debates in French Revolutionary historiography concerning the degree of continuity and change wrought by this unprecedented event. While Marxist historians of the early twentieth century viewed the French Revolution as the catalyst for the rise of industrial capitalism (see, for example, Georges Lefebvre, Quatre-vingt-neuf (Paris: Éditions sociales, 1970)), revisionist scholars have noted that the economic changes established by the Revolution were limited, and that many of the Revolution’s most radical reforms were almost immediately reversed – first by Napoleon and then under the Bourbon Restoration (see François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981)). Similarly, many musicologists believed that the rise of an increasingly chromatic genre of so-called ‘rescue opera’ in the 1790s was evidence that the events of the Revolution had prompted the rise of musical romanticism (see Winton Dean, ‘Opera under the French Revolution’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association 94/1 (1967– 1968), 77–96). However, others have since pointed to the persistence of more conservative musical trends (such as the revival of opéras-comiques from the 1750s and 1760s) as nuancing the idea that the French Revolution also ushered in a concurrent ‘revolution’ in musical taste (see Julia Doe, ‘Two Hunters, a Milkmaid, and the French “Revolutionary” Canon’, Eighteenth-Century Music 15/2 (2018), 177–205, and Mark Darlow, Staging the French Revolution: Cultural Politics and the Paris Opéra, 1789–1794 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012)). Geoffroy-Schwinden’s primary contribution to these debates is to suggest that the French Revolution, in abruptly ending the system of royal patronage and privilège that governed musical production under the ancien régime, oversaw shifts in the means of musical production based on three central principles: ‘the composer’s sovereignty, the work’s inviolability, and the nation’s supremacy’ (3). Public musical performance in ancien-régime France was kept under tight monarchical control in order to protect crown-funded monopolies. Following the mercantilist logic of Louis XIV’s finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, musicians or musical establishments required a special privilège in order to engage in public musical production. As the author notes, these privilèges flowed down from the King like a ‘fountain’ (23), via guilds, ministries, the nobility