Church, State and an Operatic Outlaw: Jules Massenet's Hérodiade

When Jules Massenet began work on Hérodiade in the late 1870s, he likely expected to see his work premiered at the Paris Opéra. But the coveted Parisian premiere was not to be. Based on a liberal reworking of the infamous tale of Herod, Salome and John the Baptist, Hérodiade undoubtedly challenges traditional Catholic doctrine. Yet Massenet's opera was not as ‘secular’ as it may seem. I argue here that it draws instead on a Republican-friendly brand of Catholicism that encouraged individual religiosity as an anticlerical strategy. Herein, I argue, lay the reasons why Hérodiade was outlawed. It was not so much the libretto's liberal transformations of biblical characters as what those transformations represented both to the Catholic Church and to the French state: in the end the representation of a simultaneously Republican and Catholic Christ presented a dangerous analogue to the country's strained political situation.