Ibsen in France from Breakthrough to Renewal

Georg Brandes said in 1902 that to the French, Ibsen is “a Protestant who protests too much” (Meyer 1971, 816; see Brandes 1902, 29–47). The critic Jules Lemaı̂tre complained of “les brûmes du nord” in Ibsen’s plays, while Sarah Bernhardt famously dismissed them as “de la norderie.” Michael Meyer surmised that for the French, Ibsen was too tied to Germany in the public’s mind, too Protestant, and too northern, with all the cultural stereotyping that involves – austere, humorless, full of mists and fog. But neither Brandes nor Meyer foresaw what Catherine Naugrette terms the “renewal” of Ibsen in France in recent years, beginning with Chéreau’s acclaimed 1981 production of Peer Gynt. Today, Ibsen is not only well established in France, he is seen as a “vector of modernity” (Naugrette 2011, 172, as cited in Fischer-Lichte, Gronau, and Christel Weiler 2011). But between Ibsen’s initial breakthrough in France in the 1890s and this recent “renewal” lies a century’s worth of French productions, translations, and other engagements with his work in that country. It is worth asking: why has there been so little analysis of these? And what story do they tell us about Ibsen’s fate at the hands of the French? Two main questions immediately arise in discussing Ibsen in France: first, what exactly do we mean by “Ibsen” in France? Is it the Ibsen of Peer Gynt, of A Doll’s House, or of When We Dead Awaken ? So diverse are his plays and of such varied appeal to the French, with some performed far oftener than others (The Wild Duck, An Enemy of the People, and Rosmersholm stand out as particular French favorites), that different Ibsens emerge in tracing out the production history and reception there. France is especially distinctive in its rigid divide between the naturalist and the symbolist Ibsens, and even then there is some interesting confusion that I’ll be discussing. Since such