Thanks to the incomplete reenactment of its birth, the family is actually able to expand, to redefine itself, with the departed father losing his place to a newcomer, the hidden spectator. Indeed, whereas Lysimond praises reenactments as the best example of the hardening and preserving faculties of the theater, the family’s first performance shows the inverse attribute—the fragility of life—to be just as significant. In a single text, therefore, Diderot identifies the two principal kinds of reenactment, each associated with a different conception of theater and justice. The first holds performances and laws to be fixed, permanent, and single-authored; the second, to be fluid, evolving, and collaborative. The first—Lysimond’s ideal reenactment—seeks to immortalize the laws of a patriarch as the foundation for a stable, legitimate, and autocratic order. It sets out to create a performance without actors, playwrights, and spectators, because they, as agents outside of the father’s control, risk introducing individual creativity and artistic innovations, resulting in the very change and difference that the patriarch fears. The second—the reenactment as it actually transpires—includes actors, playwrights, and spectators, but blurs the distinction between them, insofar as they all become participants. Unpredictable, collective, more cathartic than punitive, this kind of reenactment allows its participants to interact with a transgression, judge and even revise it according to present values and beliefs (not eternal laws), and in so doing move beyond it. Diderot’s brilliant work thus establishes the framework that for the rest of the century would shape the many attempts at creating a judicial theater, reenacting, like Le Fils naturel, real-life transgressions—but on a much larger scale.
Chapter 2
The Many Faces of Aristophanes
The Rise of a Judicial Theater
Diderot: Pioneer, Model, Victim?
Be careful what you wish for. Just three years after imagining a more topical, judicial brand of theater in Le Fils naturel, Diderot became one of its first victims. On May 2, 1760, Palissot’s Les Philosophes had one of the best attended premieres in the history of the Comédie-Française.1 As its critics stressed again and again, this prodigious success had less to do with its artistic merit (consisting as it did of an unimaginative rewriting of Molière’s Les Femmes savantes) than with its overt caricature of Diderot and Rousseau, among others. To this day, Palissot’s play is largely remembered as a particularly effective salvo in the then raging battle between the philosophes and their adversaries.2 Certainly, it was perceived as such at the time, as shown by the fact that the dozens of pamphlets that greeted its premiere split, almost without exception, along expected ideological lines (with anti-philosophes loving the plays and Encyclopédistes hating it).3 This is, in fact, what makes Louis Coste d’Arnobat’s response to it so fascinating. In his pamphlet, he imagines Diderot reconciling with Palissot with these words: “I showed you the very genres you could select. Is it not to my genius that you owe the sublime idea of this drama, which I place between comedy and tragedy? Who other than I could have discovered the fallow space that separated the old comedy from the comédie larmoyante?”4 A self-dubbed “friend of everyone,” Coste d’Arnobat is better able to look past the animosity and partisanship of the rival factions and to notice, as a result, the similarities between Palissot’s play and Diderot’s theories. Against every interpretation—old and new—of Les Philosophes, Coste d’Arnobat thus presents Palissot less as a rival of Diderot than as his disciple, the pioneer of a new theater built on insights garnered from reading Le Fils naturel.
Neither Diderot nor Palissot would have been likely to agree with this filiation, of course, yet Coste d’Arnobat is right, in my view, not only to portray Les Philosophes as a new kind of theater, falling somewhere between classical comedy, tragedy, and the tearjerkers of Nivelle de la Chaussée, but also to seek its roots in Diderot’s thought. In fact, I contend that Palissot’s play, by denouncing the transgressions of real-life individuals explicitly named on stage, was the first to bring to life the judicial theater that Diderot had only begun to envision in Le Fils naturel. As is often the case with pioneering works, Palissot’s play proved to be especially controversial and influential, revealing dilemmas and pitfalls intrinsic to judicial theater and forcing its proponents to confront many vital questions. Among these: Who commissions a judicial play? Who legitimizes it and, by extension, its accusations? Can it expose any crime? Target any individual? What role should the audience play? And how will such a theater interact with justice, understood both as an abstract ideal and as an existing institution? These questions inspired a wide array of plays and projects for a judicial theater, with vastly divergent functions, including as an instrument of absolutist rule, a government watchdog, a sovereign court in which to appeal recent trials, and an intrusive system of moral policing.
“An Act of Justice”: Palissot or the New Aristophanes
What could possibly connect Palissot’s play to the dramatic vision of his favorite bête noire, Diderot? One response seems obvious: as in Le Fils naturel, Palissot includes real, living people as characters, in violation of the classical convention of setting plays in a historical or geographical elsewhere. Indeed, most participants in the quarrel noted the novelty (and, for many, the scandal) of seeing, on an official stage, such a transparently satirical play,5 which left little doubt as to the real-life identity of the character Dortidius by attributing to him Diderot’s published works (including Le Fils naturel). Palissot and his partisans were quick to mention, however, that Molière had done the very same thing, notably in Les Femmes savantes (the model for Les Philosophes), with the fictitious Trissotin a clear caricature of Charles Cotin. In response, the philosophes repeatedly drew attention to a key distinction between Molière and Palissot: “If the faults that Palissot attacks are merely ridiculous, he has the right to translate them to the stage; Molière, after all, placed well-known marquis and writers on it. But if he imputes dishonorable vices to his characters, if he identifies them personally, calls them, so to speak, by their name, it isn’t in Molière that one should seek past examples.”6 What made Palissot’s play so unique, they argued, so different from the satires of Molière, was not just the transparency of its attacks but also their target: odious vices punishable by law—crimes such as stealing and blasphemy—rather than harmless ridiculous traits, such as Cotin’s (alleged) vanity and poetic ineptitude.
Even Élie-Catherine Fréron, a known accomplice of Palissot, condemned the playwright, somewhat disingenuously perhaps, for straying from the moderation shown by Molière: “It seemed, especially at the premiere, as if Palissot had set out to render odious the individuals he wanted to portray in his play, instead of only rendering them ridiculous. It would have been easy to do the latter, for it would have earned him unanimous plaudits. Indeed, it isn’t for having put our philosophers on stage that he has been condemned; it is for having presented them in a guise more revolting than comical.”7 To be fair, Palissot’s play was not entirely lacking in comic antics (Crispin’s quadrupedalism comes to mind), but friends and foes alike were struck by its acerbic, denunciatory tone, as well as by Palissot’s transformation of the stock character of the philosophe, a traditional object of ridicule in eighteenth-century comedies, into a seditious criminal.8 In fact, the play was frequently condemned for the virulence and gravity of its attacks on the philosophes, which were submitted as evidence that the author’s “intent to harm” had supplanted the classical aim of comedy: to improve morals.9 As a result, critics engaged in a telling debate on Les Philosophes’s genre, in an attempt to determine whether a play which so clearly lacked “that playful tone that rebukes without causticity, / and strikes a ridiculous trait while preserving honor” could still be labeled a comedy.10 Most concluded that it could not and that it heralded a new kind of theater in France.
Palissot could have contested the validity of this criticism, as some of his supporters did, but he opted instead for a surprising apologia of his play’s indignant tone: “To the accusations of maliciousness leveled against me, I will respond
