Resumen de Un aztèque de vaudeville: “Le Prix Martin”, d’Eugène Labiche
The aim of this paper is to analyse the rastaquouère character in Eugène Labiche’s vaudeville play Le Prix Martin (1876) in the light of late nineteenth-century ethnological exhibitions. Through the parallelism between Hernandez Martinez and the Aztecs exhibited both in the Universal Exposition of Paris and in the renowned “Jardin des plantes”, the author will show how Labiche’s character incorporates the main linguistic, gestural and cultural traits of colonial otherness. The author will conclude by stating that the playwright’s comic stance intends to denounce the bourgeois prejudice of his time concerning Amerindian societies, which were considered primitive, decadent and regressive in comparison with Eurocentric colonial empires.
