Les spectateurs dans la lorgnette des anecdotiers: fait divers ou fait théâtral?

This article examines the relationship between audiences and actors during performances in eighteenth‐century France, and analyses different forms of social behaviours and attitudes that manifested themselves in the auditorium (e.g. unanticipated responses to onstage events, jokes made by audience members, physical interventions in the performances and so on). It examines such questions as: How did members of the audience ‘play a part’ in the performance? Can one speak of a rivalry between the stage and the auditorium? Was more than one performance being played out? Prompted by Ervin Goffman's The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life , the article aims to define the sociology of early modern performances and identify various ways in which the audience ‘staged themselves’. Based on a close reading of a number of eighteenth‐century theatrical anecdotes, it demonstrates that the various and unexpected events which occurred, not infrequently, created what we might call a hybrid spectacle, that is to say a very particular form of theatricality.