Both their first collaboration, Fédora (1882), and their second, Théodora (1884), had been highly successful. It was the third play Sardou had written specifically for her. In 1883, she had also taken over the lease on the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin, where La Tosca was to premiere. She was in her mid-40s by then and France's leading actress. Sardou wrote La Tosca specifically for Sarah Bernhardt. He was known for the historical research which he used to inform his plays and had a private research library of over 80,000 books including Piranesi's etchings of late 18th century Rome, where La Tosca is set. In addition to La Tosca, six of his other plays were set against the events of those times: Monsieur Garat (1860), Les Merveilleuses (1873), Thermidor (1891), Madame Sans-Gêne (1893), Robespierre (1899), and Pamela (1898).
Victorien Sardou's grandfather had served as a surgeon with Napoleon's army in Italy, and Sardou retained a lifelong interest in the French Revolution and the French Revolutionary Wars. Sardou in an 1882 caricature from Le Trombinoscope On discovering that Cavaradossi's execution had in fact been a real one, Tosca commits suicide by throwing herself from the castle's parapets. She appears to acquiesce, but as soon as Scarpia gives the order for the firing squad to use blanks, she stabs him to death. He then offers to spare her lover if Tosca will yield to his sexual advances. Scarpia arrests Cavaradossi and sentences him to death in the Castel Sant'Angelo. By the end of the play, all three are dead. Its melodramatic plot centers on Floria Tosca, a celebrated opera singer her lover, Mario Cavaradossi, an artist and Napoleon sympathiser and Baron Scarpia, Rome's ruthless Regent of Police. The action takes place over an eighteen-hour period, ending at dawn on 18 June 1800.
La Tosca is set in Rome on 17 June 1800 following the French victory in the Battle of Marengo. There have been several other adaptations of the play including two for the Japanese theatre and an English burlesque, Tra-La-La Tosca (all of which premiered in the 1890s) as well as several film versions. The play itself had dropped from the standard theatrical repertoire by the mid-1920s, but its operatic adaptation, Giacomo Puccini's Tosca, has achieved enduring popularity. Despite negative reviews from the Paris critics at the opening night, it became one of Sardou's most successful plays and was toured by Bernhardt throughout the world in the years following its premiere. It was first performed on 24 November 1887 at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin in Paris, with Sarah Bernhardt in the title role. La Tosca is a five- act drama by the 19th-century French playwright Victorien Sardou.
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