Moscow decree on the Comédie-Française — 15 octobre 1812

From the Kremlin, on the eve of the retreat, the Emperor signed the regulation organising the Comédie-Française: membership, pensions, distribution of roles and of receipts. The contrast between the place and the subject became famous as the mark of a power that legislated on everything. The text still governs, in essence, the working of the company.

A statute signed in the Kremlin

On 15 October 1812, four days before ordering the retreat, the Emperor signed in the Kremlin the regulations of the Comédie-Française. The text had been prepared in Paris and forwarded to the army; Napoleon corrected it and dated it from Moscow.

The contrast made the document's fame: a capital in ashes, an army about to fall back two thousand kilometres, and the head of state adjudicating the distribution of parts and shares in a theatre company.

What the text organises

The decree fixed the organisation of the company: the sociétariat, with shares in the takings, the salaried pensionnaires, the rules of admission and departure, retirement pensions, the authority of the committee and the oversight of an imperial commissioner.

It consolidated the structure inherited from 1680, battered by the Revolution — the company had split and then re-formed in 1799 — and gave it for the first time a written and complete statute, backed by a state subsidy.

Two centuries of application

Amended many times, the Moscow decree has remained the charter of the Comédie-Française. The sociétariat, the pensionnaires, the administrative committee, state oversight: the architecture is that of 1812.

The text's claim to fame is also what is held against it. It illustrates a power that legislates on everything, from lycées to theatre, and treats cultural institutions as public services — a durable French conception, of which the Comédie-Française remains the monument.