Project Gutenberg 2025-08-01 Public domain in the USA. 171 Maugras, Gaston 1850 1927 39001721 Les comédiens hors la loi $aParis :$bCalmann Lévy, $c1887. Laurent Vogel and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from scanned images of public domain material from the Google Books project.) "Les comédiens hors la loi" by Gaston Maugras is a historical account written in the late 19th century. It investigates why actors were long treated as socially and religiously suspect, tracing their status from sacred ritual origins through Roman infamy, Christian condemnation, medieval liturgy, and modern rehabilitation. Drawing on councils, laws, and vivid episodes, it clarifies how prejudice formed, persisted, and waned. This study will appeal to readers interested in theater history, church–state relations, and shifting cultural norms. The opening of the work frames the subject with the 1884 Saint‑Roch mass honoring Corneille, contrasted with the punishment of a Paris curé for a similar service in 1763, and cites a lively press debate to show how misunderstood the Church’s treatment of actors remains. The author sets out his plan to survey actors’ legal and religious status from Greece and Rome through the Middle Ages to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, listing key sources. He first shows the stage arising from religious rites—honored in Greece—then becoming infamous at Rome as performances passed to slaves and to mass entertainments of the circus, mimes, and pantomimes, despite their continuing pagan-sacral character and imperial favor. He then explains the early Church’s rationale for condemning spectacles and denying sacraments to performers unless they quit the stage, notes emperors’ mixed measures (including Justinian’s permission for converts to leave the profession), and describes the decline of theaters in the West under barbarian invasions while they endured in the East. Finally, the narrative sketches the medieval revival of drama within churches—liturgical plays for major feasts alongside the unruly Feast of Fools—before the excerpt breaks off. (This is an automatically generated summary.) https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044087837282 20230128055154maugras 1887 FR Reading ease score: 65.3 (8th & 9th grade). Neither easy nor difficult to read. fr Theater -- Moral and ethical aspects Theater -- France -- History Comédie-Française Actors -- Legal status, laws, etc. Actors -- France PN Text Category: History - European Category: History - Ancient Category: History - Medieval/Middle Ages Category: History - Early Modern (c. 1450-1750) Category: History - Modern (1750+) Category: History - Religious 951094 2025-09-30T08:27:08.417358 text/html 908398 2025-08-01T10:25:53 text/html 530708 2025-09-30T08:27:19.953317 application/epub+zip 535150 2025-09-30T08:27:10.195300 application/epub+zip 472870 2025-09-30T08:27:09.303317 application/epub+zip 892495 2025-09-30T08:27:26.818213 application/x-mobipocket-ebook 880693 2025-09-30T08:27:19.272268 application/x-mobipocket-ebook 789711 2025-09-30T08:27:06.387334 text/plain; charset=us-ascii 769812 2025-08-01T10:25:53 text/plain; charset=us-ascii 18564 2025-09-30T08:27:26.966215 application/rdf+xml 12567 2025-09-30T08:27:09.547288 image/jpeg 2641 2025-09-30T08:27:09.424288 image/jpeg 447412 2025-09-30T08:27:08.488341 application/octet-stream application/zip Archives containing the RDF files for *all* our books can be downloaded at https://book.klll.cc/wiki/Gutenberg:Feeds#The_Complete_Project_Gutenberg_Catalog fr.wikipedia