Jennifer Walker

This project reevaluates music’s role in the relationship between the French state and the Catholic church at the end of the nineteenth century by offering an alternative to the prevailing epistemological emphasis on divisions between the church and the secular Third Republic. Case studies ranging from opera and puppet theater to Parisian parish churches and Montmartre’s famed cabarets demonstrate how composers and critics from opposing ideological factions dismantled this binary. They instead used musical composition and performance to craft a brand of Frenchness that was founded on secular Republican ideology alongside the heritage of the Catholic church. Such constructions of French identity reveal a newly configured middle ground, with the state apparatus absorbing seemingly opposing subject positions into reconciliatory visions of an inclusive French republic.