Etudes Epistémè (Nov 2024)
De 1972 à 1994, du théâtre au cinéma : la Saint-Barthélemy « de » Patrice Chéreau
Abstract
The Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre was “staged” twice by Patrice Chéreau: once in 1972, when he directed Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris at the Théâtre National Populaire in Villeurbanne; and again in 1994, when, after a five-year production process, his film adaptation of Dumas’ novel Queen Margot was presented at the Cannes Festival. Beyond the differences in genre (theatre vs. film), source material (Marlowe vs. Dumas) and period (the early 1970s, still rife with the hopes of 1968 vs. the mid-1990s, a world of religious fanaticism and genocide, and of the return of war to Europe), these two stagings of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre show a very similar approach to representing the event: distrust of the historical genre, a desire to express, through the massacre of Protestants, the universality of human violence, a focus on the political confrontation of clans for whom religious violence is only a pretext devoid of any sacred dimension, and an aesthetic fascination with death and corpses. By analyzing the creative intentions and tracing the modes of reception of these two representations, this paper examines the way in which Patrice Chéreau divests the historical and religious context of Saint Bartholomew’s Day and uses the event to express an “atheistic” and contemporary denunciation of political violence.
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