When Napoleon went to the theatre. A closer examination of stories and the history of the Milanese patriotic scene

‘No people at no place in no historical period is a monolith’, Laura Peja argues in her essay on the historiography of the Italian Jacobin triennium and its ‘Patriotic Theatre’. Peja’s reminder serves as a useful warning to theatre historians to look beyond, through and past dominant historical narratives to find the counter-narratives and alternative subject positions, as well as the discrepancies and absences that mark the official record, opening up a gap between the complexity of historical events and the narratives that we as historians shape from them. The essay provides an exemplary case study for such a critical approach that tests and interrogates established histories. At the heart of Peja’s essay is a microhistory, generated through close examination of an exchange of three letters, all contained within a single day, between Milanese citizens and Napoleon’s commander in Lombardy, in which a proposal to use a particular building to stage ‘only and continually democratic plays’ is approved with remarkable swiftness. From there, Peja offers the reader a rereading of the dominant historical narrative of the independent, revolutionary, patriotic impulse behind the founding of the Patriotic Theatre which suggests a much closer relationship between the protagonists and the French government – a rereading then supported by a critical interrogation of the repertoire performed in that theatre, which emphasizes law and justice over revolutionary impulse.