This is horrible! One should not treat people so harshly! … [Yet] posterity only sees folly, vice, and malice covered with ignominy, and it rejoices at this act of justice…. Only a reprehensible weakness keeps us from showing the intense and profound hatred for baseness, envy, and duplicity that all honest men must feel.’”11 Palissot’s homage is undoubtedly lacking in sincerity, seeking, as it does, to expose Diderot’s hypocrisy, but it reveals more than Palissot likely intended, in that it hints at a basic homology between his play and the artistic vision of the men it lampooned. Indeed, the vast majority of philosophes agreed that the theater ought to condemn vices with the full force of indignation, instead of cheerfully mocking ridiculous traits—precisely the tone and target that now saw Palissot’s play facing widespread criticism.
In rejecting classical comedy’s embrace of ridicule, the philosophes challenged its raison d’être. In his Lettre à d’Alembert, Rousseau explains that comic playwrights, such as Molière, chose to portray vices in exaggerated forms—as ridiculous traits—because they aimed above all to elicit laughter. They justified this pursuit of laughter as vital to comedy’s moral purpose—the oft-invoked “castigat ridendo mores”—since laughter proved that the spectators had correctly identified the ridiculous character’s vice, distanced themselves from it, and begun as a result to preserve themselves from it. In his famous critique of Molière’s Misanthrope, Rousseau dismantles this moral program by contesting its premise that ridiculous traits and vices are essentially linked, the former a direct symptom of the latter. On the contrary, he contends that they often exist in opposition to one another.12 In the words of Mercier, “the virtuous man … is sometimes made to look ridiculous, while the vicious man, more adept, avoids this fate by concealing his every act.”13 Comedies teach spectators to become that skilled man who fears and eschews external behaviors perceived as ridiculous, the better to indulge in his inner vices: “comic hyperbole does not render objects detestable, it only makes them ridiculous, and from this results a great harm: we come to fear ridicule so much that vice no longer scares us.”14 Comedies thus provide a lesson in duplicity, transforming one vice into two. Nowhere is this more evident than in Diderot’s Neveu de Rameau, when the titular character explains his love of classical comedy: “When I read Tartuffe, I tell myself: be a hypocrite, if you wish, but do not speak like a hypocrite. Keep the vices that are useful to you, but avoid a tone or an appearance that would make you look ridiculous.”15 Molière’s Tartuffe, French theater’s most illustrious condemnation of hypocrisy, therefore results, paradoxically, in even greater hypocrisy on the part of its spectators.
In fact, the vast majority of philosophes condemn le ridicule not only as the wrong target (in the play) but also as the wrong response (in the pit), on the grounds that laughter is intrinsically immoral. Louis-François Nouel de Buzonnière, author of the revealingly titled Essai sur les moyens de rendre la comédie utile aux mœurs, deplores that while laughing at a comedy, “each says to himself: I do not resemble this man here, I am more excellent than he. It follows that comedy, whose aim it is to improve morals, makes them worse, since it helps spread and strengthen egotism.”16 Laughter inevitably divides and excludes, instilling in the spectators an undeserved sense of superiority. The debate about the proper tone and target of comedy thus takes part in a broader conflict about laughter. In the 1750s and ’60s, this war opposed the chevaliers du bel esprit, a small but prolific group of noblemen, self-appointed protectors of Gallic wit, raillery, and levity, and the philosophes, who favored a solemn, militant tone and worldview and condemned the culture of aristocratic laughter for its inequality, superficiality, cruelty, and conservatism.17 Palissot belonged to the former; Rousseau and Diderot to the latter. While Rousseau’s unease with laughter is legendary, Diderot’s rejection of it may come as more of a surprise, given his penchant for mystification and persiflage. Yet as Jean Goldzink has shown, Diderot builds his vision of the theater in Le Fils naturel on the deliberate and explicit exclusion of laughter.18
In lieu of classical comedies, the philosophes championed a new kind of theater, tasked with representing modern vices accurately and exposing their social costs on stage. Stripped of any comic hyperbole, such plays would elicit righteous indignation and popular condemnation, instead of laughter, thereby impressing on guilty souls in the parterre the true depravity of their vice.19 Even Rousseau, in spite of his general opposition to the theater, appears willing to make an exception for militant plays of the sort: “Certainly, plays based, like the Greeks’, on the past misfortunes of the fatherland or on the present-day flaws of the people could provide their spectators with useful lessons.”20 Indeed, the philosophes hoped that a more solemn tone and lifelike depiction of vices would return the theater to its social function in ancient Greece: a scathing denunciation of the most shameful and detrimental flaws among its spectators. It is of course ironic to find this hope realized in the writings of Palissot. As a chevalier du bel esprit, he had sworn to combat the evolution from wit to serious, solemn topics, yet he seems to have succumbed to it. One of his earliest plays, Le Cercle, had ridiculed the philosophes, but in the style of Molière, harmlessly mocking their vanity, eccentricities, and intellectual poppycock, without accusing them of odious crimes. His next work, Petites lettres sur de grands philosophes, had adopted a far more personal and denunciatory tone, with much of his indignation leveled specifically at the recently published Fils naturel. In fact, there may be no better indication of the influence of Diderot’s aesthetic treatise than the part it played in converting a man who had set out to disprove it. Three years later, Palissot would write Les Philosophes in the accusatory tone of his Petites lettres, rather than the more jocular one of Le Cercle (despite one scene in common, tellingly the most classically comedic of the play, showing a Rousseau-like figure crawling on all fours). Palissot was unlikely to admit it, but his career had followed the precise path that the philosophes had traced for the theater.
Of course, the aim here is not to reclaim Palissot as a closet philosophe (even if he was less ideologically rigid than his reputation today suggests).21 Nor is it to question the sincerity of his hatred for bourgeois drama and for one of its founding texts, Le Fils naturel. Yet although Palissot truly disdained the maudlin and verbose bourgeois drama that he saw (like many today) as Diderot’s principal contribution to French theater, he appears to have found other aspects of Le Fils naturel more to his liking—first, the notion that the theater could and should function as a tool of social activism, seeking to transform the here and now through the overt reenactment of contemporary issues and figures on stage; and second, the notion that the theater ought to target dangerous transgressions instead of harmless, ridiculous traits, in a solemn, indignant tone that Palissot ties explicitly, if sarcastically, to Le Fils naturel.22 When combined, these two notions transform the theater from a superficial divertissement (classical comedy, in Diderot’s eyes) or a moralistic sermon (bourgeois drama, in Palissot’s) into—in the words of Diderot, reprised by Palissot in defense of his play—a veritable “act of justice.” Indeed, in its denunciation of grievous crimes committed by real people (the philosophes stood accused of sedition and irreligion), Palissot’s play truly inaugurated a new “judicial theater,” the likes of which, the author of “Les Si et les mais” had reminded us, was not to be found in Molière.
To understand this new genre, the participants in the quarrel turned instead to the theater they deemed its closest equivalent—the satirical plays of Aristophanes. Both philosophes and anti-philosophes harked back almost obsessively to the Greek playwright and in particular to his most notorious play, The Clouds, in which he had publicly attacked his own philosopher-foe, Socrates. For Palissot’s victims to liken him to Aristophanes was anything but unexpected—and not just because such a comparison carried the added benefit of equating them with Socrates! “Aristophanes” was one of the epithets most commonly used to belittle authors suspected of personal attacks, reflecting the near universal contempt in which the Greek was held for most of the early modern period.23 To the vast majority of seventeenth-century thinkers, the plays of Aristophanes embodied not just one but three features of bad comedy.
