| Popis: |
As representatives of a family of actors and theatre managers in the early nineteenth-century Paris, Pierre-Jacques Seveste (1773-1825), his wife and his sons built a kind of small empire while launching, from 1817 on, several small theatres in the suburbs of Paris (théâtres de la banlieue), promoting new forms of popular entertainment quickly named théâtre de boulevard (boulevard theatre). The Seveste enterprise, a shareholder company with the name Société des théâtres de la banlieue, had its own ‘company library’, a working tool that appears nowadays as a testimony of a quite neglected genre, popular theatre under and just after the Napoleonic era. A part of this library could be maintained as a whole and purchased by the National and university library of Strasbourg in 2017. The collection could already be presented at a former conference (Sarospatak 2019). The ‘Theatrum Libri’ conference was focused on the goals of the ‘collectors’, and tried to make out their purposes while bringing together the collection: did the Seveste consciously build what appears nowadays as a ‘theatre of the theatre’, a kind of encyclopaedia of popular culture? |
