Claque: A group of people hired to applaud at a performance. Pronunced clack. Borrowed from French; from claquer, an onomatopoetic word meaning “to clap.”
The claque originally surfaced in ancient Rome and became an institution in 17th-century France. By 1820, according to a Wikipedia entry, an agency opened in Paris to manage and supply claqueurs. (They didn’t just applaud: pleureuses—they were mostly women—were paid to weep at appropriate moments, rieurs laughed uproariously, bisseurs shouted “Bis! Bis!—“Encore! Encore!”—and so on.)
The most famous claque took shape in the 1830s, when Louis Véron became director of the Paris Opera. As Jennifer Homans writes in her superb history of ballet, Apollo’s Angels, Véron, a medical doctor by profession, had a genius for marketing. He recruited Auguste Levasseur (“and paid him splendidly”) “to form and lead what became known as ‘the claque’.” Homans explains:
Levasseur consulted closely with Véron, attended rehearsals, and studied the score for a given production—but he also took bribes from artists and their supporters. On the night of a performance, he marked himself by sporting brightly colored clothing and strategically placed his men throughout the audience. (Véron and the artists provided the tickets, gratuit.) Levasseur carried a cane, which he tapped at the appropriate moment, unleashing a round of applause, bravos, and stomping by his men designed to carry the public in its enthusiasm. This was not resented; to the contrary, Véron’s claim that the claque was a moderating force that “put an end to all quarrels” and stopped “unjust coalitions” of fans from disrupting performances appears to have been widely accepted.
Claque is not to be confused with a similar and more widely used French word, clique: a small, exclusive group of friends.
Aside from the Homans book, I’ve encountered claque only rarely, so I was pleased to see it used effectively last week by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman in his blog, Conscience of a Liberal. The setup: Krugman told his readers that he’d been getting mail accusing him of “consorting with Nazis.” He traced the accusations to his public support of the Occupy Wall Street movement; the right wing, he wrote, “is mounting a full court press to portray Occupy Wall Street as an anti-Semitic movement, based, as far as I can tell, on one guy with a sign.”
At the same time, the claque is claiming that OWS is responsible for a crime wave. To believe this, you have to believe not only that a few thousand non-violent protestors are deeply straining a police force with 35,000 officers, but that all the rapists and murderers in the outer boroughs are saying, “Hey, the police are busy chasing hippies! Let’s party!” Oh, well.