Patrie !
Signed presentation inscription: “À Édouard Philippe, président honoraire des sauveteurs de la Seine et Oise, hommage bien affectueux de son tout dévoué confrère, Victorien Sardou, Marly - le 23 juin 1904.”
Bound in at front: two autograph letters addressed to the same recipient, “Marly le Roi, Mercredi. Mon cher Président, je ne vous ai pas oublié […] la meilleure façon de vous témoigner ma reconnaissance pour le succès que vous avez fait à Patrie […] est de vous en adresser un exemplaire avec ma griffe en signe d'amitié (…).”
A mainstay of the fin-de-siècle dramatic repertoire, Victorien Sardou (1831–1908), elected to the Académie française in 1877, was a master of the “well-made play” and of spectacular stagecraft (Fédora, La Tosca — later sources for Puccini). With Patrie!, first performed in 1869 at the Porte-Saint-Martin, he produced a grand historical drama with patriotic overtones, set amid the insurgent Flanders of the sixteenth century (Rysoor, Karloo, Dolorès…). A play of spectacular effects, it was revived continually throughout the Third Republic.
Édouard Philippe, the recipient of the letters and the presentation copy, was an actor and successful playwright in the 1880s at the Théâtre du Château-d’Eau. He returned to his native Yvelines at the end of the century, where he presided over the Société de secours des Sauveteurs de la Seine-et-Oise, a figure within the associative life of that former département where authors, actors and notables mingled.
This copy belongs to the edition published when the play was staged at the Comédie-Française. This 1901 revival confirmed the play’s lasting place in the “national” repertoire of the Maison de Molière and revived its topical resonance, between civic fervor and grand spectacle.