In the preface to his unperformed 1827 play Cromwell, the young Victor Hugo laid down a challenge to prevailing artistic orthodoxies: “There are no rules, or models,” he declared. In post-Napoleonic France, under the restored Bourbon monarchy, this was anathema. Just four years after the defeat of the Corsican tyrant, rules were everything – in the theatre and in society. In 1830, with the writing of Hernani, a melodrama set in 16th-century Spain, Hugo made good on his maxim.
The play received its premiere on 25 February at the Comédie-Française in Paris, the home of French classical theatre. The first-night audience, primed by pre-performance leaks of excerpts and in self-selecting claques, watched as Hugo broke with the verities of time and place, strayed from rhyming couplets, and employed puns and metaphors and an unseemly degree of naturalism. Within minutes there was uproar as traditionalists booed and hissed and modernists applauded and hurled abuse at their adversaries. The actors were drowned out and scuffles in the auditorium turned to fist fights. This thespian riot and the disturbances that followed subsequent performances quickly became known as the bataille d’Hernani – the battle of Hernani – and recognised as the moment that marked the ascendance of romanticism in French art.
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