Relations between theater and state were seldom more fraught in France than in the latter part of the eighteenth and during the nineteenth centuries. In his illuminating study, F.W.J. Hemmings traces the vicissitudes of this perennial conflict, which began with the rise of the small independent boulevard theaters in the 1760s and eventually ended in 1905 with the abandonment of censorship by the state. There are separate chapters on the provincial theater, while the French Revolution is given particularly detailed attention. This work, complementing his earlier book The Theatre Industry in Nineteenth-Century France (CUP 1993), will be of interest to students of theater history, French studies, and European culture in general.