The French Drama Revolution: Political Economy and Literary Production, 1700-1900

Technical Summary: The French Drama Revolution: Political Economy and Literary Production, 1700-1900

Problem Statement
This paper investigates the evolution of French drama from 1700 to 1900, specifically examining the relationship between literary production and the broader political-economic transformations of the era. The study operates on the epistemological premise that literature is embedded in political-economic relations ("societal facts") but is not wholly reducible to material conditions, viewing the interaction between drama and the socio-economic world as a dynamic interplay between agency and structure. The central research question asks how the topical distribution of French drama shifted in response to the French Revolution and the subsequent industrialization of the country, moving from an absolutist, aristocratic framework to a bourgeois, capitalist one.

Methodology
The study employs a "distant reading" approach using a corpus of 1,215 French plays published between 1700 and 1900, sourced from the DraCor project. The technical workflow involves:

1. Preprocessing: Texts were processed using spaCy's French language model. Normalization was achieved through lemmatization to handle French inflection. A part-of-speech filter retained only nouns, proper nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Stopwords, high-frequency light verbs (e.g., être, avoir), and address terms (e.g., monsieur) were removed.
2. Topic Modeling (LDA): Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) was used to identify the latent semantic structure of the texts. The author selected a 10-topic model based on interpretability and coherence, a decision informed by historical analysis rather than purely algorithmic metrics like perplexity. A 10-topic model was deemed sufficient to capture economic discourse, bourgeois everyday life, and aristocratic themes. As a robustness check, Non-Negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) was also applied, yielding similar results.
3. Change Detection (JSD): Jensen-Shannon Divergence (JSD) was utilized to measure the magnitude of change in topic distribution between consecutive years, identifying periods of rapid textual transformation.
4. Visualization: Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) was applied to the cosine distance between documents' topic vectors to generate a semantic map, highlighting clusters of 18th-century versus 19th-century plays.
5. Economic Correlation: The prevalence of specific topics was plotted against French Real GDP per capita (sourced from the Maddison Project) to assess the coevolution of literary themes and economic growth.

Key Results
The analysis identifies a profound shift in the topical distribution of French drama, particularly between 1789 and 1850:

• Topic Evolution: The study isolates three critical topics: "Aristocratic Life" (Topic 8), "Bourgeois Life" (Topic 4), and "Household Economics" (Topic 9).
  • Aristocratic Life: Characterized by words like king, virtue, law, crime, this topic reflects absolutist state concerns. Its prevalence declined steadily from the mid-18th century, falling from a dominant position to near insignificance by the late 19th century.
  • Bourgeois Life & Household Economics: These topics, containing words related to money, poor, pay, house, franc, and domestic relations, grew significantly in importance. "Household Economics" shows a striking correlation with French GDP, with both series experiencing a sharp acceleration between 1825 and 1850, coinciding with France's industrialization. "Bourgeois Life" grew significantly during the French Revolution and the "Age of Revolution" (1789–1848) before stabilizing.
• Temporal Shifts: The aggregate prevalence of Topics 5 and 8 (aristocratic/tragic themes) fell from 0.5 in the early 18th century to 0.07 in the late 19th century. Conversely, the aggregate weight of Topics 4 and 9 (bourgeois/economic themes) rose from 0.11 to 0.51 over the same period.
• JSD Analysis: The Jensen-Shannon Divergence series peaks in the first half of the 19th century, indicating a rapid reconfiguration of the textual profile of French drama. This peak corresponds to the simultaneous decline of aristocratic themes and the rise of bourgeois themes.
• Semantic Mapping: The MDS map reveals a clear clustering of 19th-century plays in the lower-left region, distinct from 18th-century works, confirming a fundamental shift in the textual profile from discussions of sovereignty and virtue to mundane economic and domestic concerns.

Significance and Claims
The paper claims to demonstrate that the nature of French drama changed drastically as the absolutist state weakened and capitalist social relations developed. The study posits that the thematic profile of French drama shifted from tragedies reflecting political authority and aristocratic values to comedies centered on everyday life, domestic relations, and economic concerns.

The author argues that this research contributes to the field of computational literary studies by integrating economic history and GDP data with topic modeling to trace large-scale changes in literary discourse. The findings suggest a coevolution between literary production and economic development, particularly the alignment of "Household Economics" themes with the rise of French capitalism. The paper concludes that topic modeling serves as a quantitative complement to traditional historical and theoretical approaches, effectively mapping the transition from a society defined by the "Age of Revolution" to one defined by the "Age of Capital."