Caroline Branchu: A Model of Nineteenth-Century Womanhood?

This chapter analyses the public persona of Caroline Branchu, a star singer at the Paris Opéra during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. After making her name in revivals of tragédies lyriques by Gluck, Piccinni and Sacchini, she triumphed premiering the leading role in Gaspare Spontini’s La Vestale (1807). Branchu’s career takes place against the highly turbulent background of early nineteenth-century France, when legal and cultural notions about the societal roles of women and of people of colour were continuously in flux. More progressive regulations concerning their rights dating from the 1790s were short-lived as the revolutionary decade made way for the Napoleonic era, and rights were even further curbed at the return of the Bourbon Monarchy.
Drawing on performance materials, press articles, and private correspondence, this chapter examines Branchu’s public images (as an individual, as a singer, as a performer of operatic roles) and their entwinement with changing legal and cultural imaginations. It analysing how a singer interacted with—and may even have directed—contemporary imaginations of what it meant to be a person of colour, a woman, and a singer in early nineteenth-century France. In doing so, it shows that these artists gave lived, embodied form to pseudo-scientific, cultural, and legal notions about individuals with these identities. Ultimately, I argue that singers, especially those with long careers like Branchu, could offer points of reference that connected older and newer roles for women, people of colour, and other artists that found themselves in unstable legal and cultural environments.