Fratricide: Tragic Brothers, Masculine Violence, and the Republic on the French Stage, 1799

Abstract

Gabriel Legouvé, the only son of a Parisian barrister, wrote often—even insistently—about fratricide and civil war. His first success was his 1792 The Death of Abel, a setting of the tale from Genesis.³ During the 1790s, Legouvé’s writings confronted the most momentous form of fraternal strife, civil war. He returned repeatedly to Lucan’s epic on the conflicts between Caesar and Pompey that destroyed the Roman Republic. While Legouvé never published a complete translation of Lucan’s Civil War, a work of staggering complexity and bloodshed, he struggled with it throughout the Revolution, presenting several public readings of his efforts.⁴ In 1799 Étéocle, an examination of the murderous brothers in ancient Thebes, and the focus of this chapter, appeared. It was an adaptation of Racine’s Thébaïde (1664) as well as tragedies by Aeschylus and Euripides.⁵ It traced the rivalry between Oedipus’ sons that left a brother’s dead body to dogs and birds of prey outside the walls of Thebes. Legouvé’s decision to extend the final scenes as the two brothers sank their swords into each other stunned the audience; some thought it a ‘monstrosity’.⁶ He justified the theme, explaining that ‘the hatred between two brothers is more furious than between other men’. Why be ‘surprised that [the hatred] of Eteocles and Polynices surpasses common horrors’.⁷

The title of brother is a bond so sacred that in daring to break it, one insults heaven, a brother is a friend given by nature.²

Fellowships from the Emory University Center for Humanistic Inquiry and the Newberry Library made this research possible. The article has benefited comments from T. J. A. Le Goff, the Newberry Library Fellows’ Seminar and the Emory Ancient Mediterranean Studies Seminar, especially Cynthia A. Bouton, Cynthia Burchell Patterson and Louis A. Ruprecht, Jr.