The French Drama Revolution: Political Economy and Literary Production, 1700-1900

TL;DR

The paper investigates how French drama (1700–1900) tracks the political-economic transformation surrounding the French Revolution and industrialization. It adopts a distant-reading approach, applying Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to a corpus of 1215 plays from the DraCor database and using Jensen-Shannon Divergence (JSD) to quantify year-to-year changes in topic distributions, with $M=\frac{1}{2}(P+Q)$ and $D(P||Q)=\sum_i P_i \log_2 (P_i/Q_i)$. The findings show a shift from Aristocratic Life toward Bourgeois Life and Household Economics after 1800, with the $JSD$ peak around 1800–1850 indicating rapid reorientation, and the patterns mirroring GDP growth during industrialization. The work demonstrates how quantitative topic models can illuminate the coevolution of literature and political economy, offering a scalable lens for cultural-history analysis and potential extensions to other corpora.

Abstract

This paper investigates the changing nature of French drama between 1700-1900 using Latent Dirichlet Allocation and Jensen-Shannon Divergence. Results indicate that the topical distribution of French drama changed profoundly after the French Revolution, particularly between 1789 and 1850. Bourgeois themes emerged among the most prevalent topics since the late 18th century. To assess the coevolution of drama and economic growth, I plot the yearly prevalence of topics alongside French GDP between 1700-1900, and discuss these changes in light of the political and economic changes prompted by the French Revolution and the industrialization of the country.

Figures (6)

• Figure 1: Temporal evolution of the topics
• Figure 2: Topic Prevalence vs Real GDP per capita in 2011 US$
• Figure 3: Jensen-Shannon Divergence
• Figure 4: Semantic Map, MDS of cosine distance between LDA topic distributions. The labels are at the centroid of the 5 representative documents.
• Figure :