lessons and of their beauty.24 Their satirical barbs were inspired by base, personal passions, such as hatred and vengeance, transforming the arts into a toxic battlefield of egos.25 And last but not least, their brand of humor was crude and indecent, clearly intended for the Athenian rabble.26 As a result, nearly every seventeenth-century thinker traced the birth of true comedy, the moral and sophisticated plays of Menander, to the passage of a law forbidding the representation of actual people on stage. They believed their own century to be carrying out a similar refinement of the theater, even praising Molière as “the French Menander.” Not surprisingly, then, the philosophes seized on the opportunity to portray Palissot’s play as a regression to the barbaric origins of the dramatic arts: “Isn’t it shameful for France to have, in a way, ended up where Greece began?”27 Like many others, the anonymous author went on to note that Aristophanes, by accusing Socrates of odious crimes, had laid the ground for the subsequent trial and execution of a wise and innocent man—a fate that, Voltaire worried, might now befall the modern philosophes.28
If the accusation was all too predictable, the response was anything but. Unlike prior satirists, who had denied any resemblance to Aristophanes, Palissot welcomed the comparison, decreeing with his customary modesty that his play had singlehandedly brought the theater back to its first institution.29 Many of his allies followed suit. In a sign of the profound changes then taking place in the perception of the theater and of its social function, a large number of authors actually praised Les Philosophes for reviving the judicial theater of ancient Greece and, more specifically, Aristophanes’s The Clouds. There had been, it is true, a few earlier attempts by Aristophanes’s translators, chief among them Anne Dacier30 and Pierre Brumoy,31 to defend the subject of their labor. Yet while these attempts sketched the broad outline of a more flattering portrait of Aristophanes, which Palissot and his partisans would later appropriate, strip of all ambiguity, and disseminate, they remained as ambivalent as they were scarce. Certainly, no one before the anti-philosophes dared push Aristophanes’s rehabilitation so far as to wish for his rebirth, and all struggled, above all, to justify his writing of The Clouds (Dacier does not even attempt to do so, while Brumoy merely argues that Aristophanes’s play, while a vengeful, spiteful act, was not directly responsible for the death of Socrates more than two decades later). The anti-philosophes went much further: they argued that the play was the result of Socrates’s many flaws, not of Aristophanes’s. For instance, Ignace Hugary de Lamarche-Courmont asserted that Socrates had been “an agitator, an enemy of the State and of humanity, a false philosopher,” as well as a dangerous atheist.32 Of course, these accusations were precisely those leveled against the philosophes, so that, in defending Aristophanes, Lamarche-Courmont also vindicated Palissot.
The anti-philosophes dismissed another standard critique of Aristophanes’s theater: that its primary ambition lay in amusing the rabble through lewd puns, burlesque caricatures, and farcical acts of shocking boorishness. Here, they could draw on Brumoy’s hugely influential anthology, Le Théâtre des Grecs, for decades if not centuries the foremost introduction to Greek drama for would-be Hellenists.33 In a lengthy preface, Brumoy admonishes his predecessors, Dacier and Jean Boivin, for their overly literal translations of Aristophanes’s plays, including the many instances of lowbrow humor.34 He prides himself on presenting his readers with a morally and aesthetically pleasing Aristophanes, a feat of whitewashing that he accomplishes by alternating between translations of acceptable verses and vague syntheses of the indecent episodes in the satirist’s oeuvre (as a result, The Clouds spans only forty-four pages in Brumoy’s collection). In so doing, Brumoy obliterates a good deal of the comic verve that had made Aristophanes such a popular playwright in his own time, but renders him more palatable to a period increasingly ill at ease with the idea that laughter was an acceptable end, in and of itself, for the theater. Brumoy thus rewrites The Clouds in a more solemn tone, transforming the play so that it read less like a grotesque caricature—but a relatively harmless one, precisely because of its comical excess—and more like a grave denunciation.
If Aristophanes was not motivated by personal vendetta or greed, nor by a longing for popular laughter and acclaim, why did he even write a satirical comedy? The anti-philosophes found an answer, and a justification, in an alternate depiction of Aristophanes as a protector of the common good. In this reading, already present in Dacier’s preface, Aristophanes was nothing like the cruel jester, casting ridicule on private citizens, that most believed him to be, but was rather a serious and courageous poet, who had earned the esteem of his contemporaries by using his dramatic talent to expose the threat that specific individuals posed to society and its laws. This view of Aristophanes remained, however, largely marginal and ambivalent (even within Dacier’s work), for two main reasons. First, it seemed impossible to reconcile with his most notorious play, The Clouds, so beloved and innocent was the victim, Socrates. And second, it offered no clear distinction between the comedies of Aristophanes and the satirical tracts so common, and so reviled, in early modern France. As Romain Piana notes, satire had little support in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries because it had no place in a society that understood justice as emanating from a sovereign being. However pure their intentions (to protect the state), the satires of Aristophanes, like those of lesser libelers, remained the works of private citizens, without official authority, and as such, illegitimate acts of justice. To quote Piana, “only through the transfer of an authority akin to the divine auctoritas can diabolical calumny be avoided.”35 This awareness of the razor-thin line between legitimate denunciation and slander inspired, according to Piana, Brumoy’s major contribution to a more positive portrayal of Aristophanes. In his preface, Brumoy argued that Aristophanes wrote for the state—not only in defense of it but also on its behalf. Rather than a mere private citizen, Aristophanes was a censor, an official employed by the state, and thus legitimized by it, for its protection. The anti-philosophes embraced and developed this vision of Aristophanes with unparalleled vigor and certainty. Unlike Dacier and Brumoy, they even extended it to The Clouds, arguing that, as in all his other plays, Aristophanes had been charged by the state with exposing and punishing the machinations of a seditious freethinker, Socrates.
Not only did this new performance history for The Clouds offer Palissot and his allies yet another opportunity to nettle the philosophes, for whom Socrates was a model and idol, it also enabled them to turn one of the most frequent criticisms of Palissot’s play—that it amounted to little more than a piece of government propaganda—into a positive. Indeed, many pamphlets responding to Les Philosophes made a special note of the government’s unusual involvement in promoting its performance. Stories abounded, claiming that the foreign minister, Étienne François, Duc de Choiseul, had coerced the royal censors and that Fréron had threatened the reluctant actors. In his Correspondance littéraire, Grimm emphasized for his foreign readers how unprecedented this state-endorsed performance truly was.36 While the monarchy had always kept a close watch on the theater, banning topical plays and encouraging allegorical depictions of its own grandeur, never before had it used its authority with such penal intent by ordering the performance of a play to punish individuals it considered a threat. To counter the philosophes’ outcry, Palissot could point to the example of The Clouds and assert that the state’s support, far from devaluing his act, actually gave it its legitimacy. He did so, notably, by inventing a fascinating dialogue between Aristophanes and Brumoy, in which the Greek playwright chastises his translator (unfairly, as we have seen) for not understanding the true nature of his state-sponsored denunciations: “My plays were not secret, obscure satires; they were performed on solemn days, before the assembled people and magistrates. They were intended to serve as punishment for those crimes against society upon which the Law had not imposed a penalty.”37 Palissot sees the presence and involvement of the magistrates—some anti-philosophes believed they had commissioned The Clouds; others, that they had examined it before the premiere—as evidence that Socrates had been tried and found guilty by the government, not by Aristophanes, whose play merely enacted the sentence.38 (In that sense, the execution of Socrates twenty-three years later can be read as a reenactment, made necessary by the failure of the first dramatic enactment
