not intended to function as a trial, which allows for debate and the possibility of the accused’s innocence, but as a special “punishment” for crimes against society, a judicial shaming with the same legitimacy as the public execution of a criminal, because it too emanated from the government.
In fact, Palissot goes on to claim, judicial theater served as an alternative to the official justice system by allowing the state to combat transgressions that posed a threat to society but were not included in the legal code. For Palissot, the raison d’état is the raison d’être of judicial theater: extralegal actions are sometimes necessary for the good of society and are completely legitimate, so long as they are undertaken by the proper authority. Fascinatingly, in a footnote to the passage above, Palissot links this vision of the theater, once again, to his archrival Diderot. He cites a passage from De la Poésie dramatique, published two years before the premiere of Les Philosophes, in which Diderot calls for the government to revive the judicial theater of Aristophanes because it is a more humane and effective way to punish certain transgressors than legal recourse, which risks transforming them into martyrs: “What is Aristophanes? An original jester. An author of this sort must be precious to the government, if it knows how to use him. It is to him that the fanatics who occasionally disturb society must be abandoned. If we expose them on stage, they won’t fill our prisons.”39 Diderot champions here a new kind of theater, modeled on the satirical comedies of ancient Greece. He dreams of plays that are not superficial divertissements but state rituals, used by the government to punish real crimes (not ridiculous traits), especially those posing a threat to society, yet outside the purview of the legal system. Les Philosophes, Palissot slyly argues, had fulfilled Diderot’s wishes; like The Clouds, it had condemned a sect of fanatical freethinkers sapping the foundations of the state. In so doing, it had restored the theater to its former role as a punitive arm of the government, working in tandem with the justice system.
Mercier’s “Divine Weapon”: A Third Aristophanes Is Born
Diderot thus found himself in a challenging position, the victim of a play that, in another context, he might have praised as a realization of his own judicial vision of the theater. Bertrand de Latour hinted at this dilemma when he argued that eighteenth-century philosophes, whom he despised almost as much as the theater, had a harder time defending themselves against satirical plays than previous targets such as Socrates, because they had previously celebrated the very art form now turned against them.40 Indeed, after 1760, Diderot’s thoughts on judicial theater appear a jumble of contradictions. In all likelihood as a result of his onstage persecution, Diderot paints a far less eulogistic portrait of Aristophanes in his Mémoires pour Catherine II than he had in De la Poésie dramatique, calling him and his successor Palissot “perverse.”41 And yet, in the very same text, he tries to convince Catherine II never to use force against leaders of religious sects, a tactic which, Diderot claims, only gives them renewed resolve and a sense of righteousness, by arguing that fanatics should instead be portrayed with scorn and derision on public stages.42 So alluring was the dream of a state-run, satirical theater that even Diderot, the principal victim of the most egregious personal attack in pre-Revolutionary French theater, could still not bring himself to forget it completely. Or could he? In his Paradoxe sur le comédien, which he started writing in 1773, the same year as the Mémoires pour Catherine II, he abandons one of the key precepts from his own Fils naturel and praises “the protocol of the old Aeschylus”—as he calls the rule against putting real events and people on stage.43
Such inconsistencies echo the ambivalence that the philosophes felt, more broadly, toward satire. Hence, Voltaire wrote lengthy treatises condemning the maliciousness and ineffectiveness of satire, notably his Mémoire sur la satire and Épître sur la calomnie, and slammed Aristophanes in his Dictionnaire philosophique, even stating that the Athenians, for having esteemed his plays, deserved their subsequent enslavement!44 Yet he also relished the fame reaped from his own personal attacks on Rousseau and Fréron, including a satirical play, L’Écossaise, performed in response to Les Philosophes.45 What’s more, most philosophes, including Voltaire, were drawn to the English use of satirical tracts as a vital protection against corrupt political figures. They argued, like Louis de Jaucourt, that “it is less dangerous for a few honorable individuals to be unfairly defamed than for no one to dare enlighten the nation on the conduct of the powerful.”46 In fact, according to Volker Kapp, the term “satire” came to be understood in eighteenth-century France less and less in moral and personal terms and more and more as a means of civic involvement.47 Voltaire both illustrates and extends this important distinction between private and public satire in his praise for the English model: “In England, it seems that the law gives each private individual the right to attack any official in his public character, but protects the reputation and the private conduct of all citizens.”48 For Voltaire, the ideal form of satire is doubly public: it targets governmental figures, rather than private citizens such as rival authors, and it focuses exclusively on crimes that impact the common good, not on the purely private vices of those in power.49
Not surprisingly, the philosophes made a similar distinction between different types of judicial theater. As we saw, years before Palissot’s play, they had imagined a judicial theater overseen by the state and using satirical accusations to discredit private individuals and beliefs it deemed dangerous. The performance of Les Philosophes, however, made it impossible to ignore that such a theater could just as easily serve as a weapon against thinkers and artists promoting positive social change as it could against religious fanatics. This compelled the philosophes reluctant to abandon the dream of a judicial theater to seek an alternative portrait of Aristophanes. To find one, they needed to look no further than their own Encyclopédie, where Jean-François Marmontel had painted the many faces of Aristophanes, including the vile satirist who wrote obscene comedies for the rabble (the seventeenth century’s vision), the state-commissioned censor who targeted private citizens (Palissot’s vision), and a third Aristophanes, the author of “political satires,” who exposed on stage the corruption of magistrates, the failings of generals, and the ill-conduct of rulers.50 Written before Les Philosophes, Marmontel’s article shows the least aversion toward the second Aristophanes, recognizing, as Diderot once had, the benefits of a system in which state-appointed playwrights could punish dangerous vices beyond the reach of the law.51 Yet in the decades that followed Palissot’s play, and as the philosophes faced ever-growing scrutiny and hostility from the government, they increasingly turned their attention to the plays of the third Aristophanes, particularly The Knights, which had exposed the seditious machinations of the politician Cleon. Thanks to its specific focus on the criminal acts of the ruling class, this form of judicial theater more closely resembled the English satire praised by Jau-court and Voltaire and ensured that a play like Palissot’s would never again be performed.
For many philosophes, in fact, The Knights amounted to a near-perfect inversion of The Clouds (claimed as a model by Palissot). In the latter, a public official had used the theater to expose a dangerous private citizen, whereas in the former, a private citizen had used the theater to expose a dangerous public official. Unlike Palissot, who wished to add judicial theater to the monarchy’s disciplinary arsenal, the philosophes portrayed the early Athenian theater as a site of public engagement allowing enlightened authors to monitor and publicly denounce their rulers. So convinced, in fact, were many eighteenth-century thinkers of the essential link between civic participation and judicial theater that they argued that Athens’s transition from a democracy to an aristocracy after the Peloponnesian War, and the resulting decline in the citizenry’s political involvement, was the real reason behind the disappearance of Aristophanes’s “political satires.”52 Though the parallel was left unstated, all likely understood that, as in Athens, the centralization of power in seventeenth-century France (into an absolute monarchy) had led to conventions against the dramatization of current events and people. This does not mean, of course, that the philosophes—very few of whom believed in democracy—were opposed to this evolution. While some wrote
