a rational, textual one (codes of law). The plays and trials of the Revolution hardly fit these two narratives, however. For that reason, they are typically discounted as a historical blip, an anomaly caused by the Jacobins’ penchant for injecting politics everywhere, which blurred the line between theater and justice by turning the former into propaganda and the latter into show trials like the king’s. Yet if, as their reaction to the king’s trial and to its theatrical reenactments suggests, the Jacobins opposed the profound intertwining of justice and theater during the Revolution, where did it actually come from?
This book provides an answer, one that turns upside down the standard histories both of French theater and of French justice. Its first section (“Theater as Justice”) uncovers, starting in the 1750s, numerous plans and attempts, including successful ones, to transform the theater into an instrument of justice, exposing criminals by name, recreating transgressions on stage, and reenacting contemporary trials. The next section (“Justice as Theater”) reveals that many of the illustrious eighteenth-century figures who campaigned to reform the justice system explicitly modeled trials on the theater, even recommending that judges imitate the emotional, instinctual judgments of dramatic spectators and that lawyers seek private lessons from actors. The last section (“The Revolution’s Performance of Justice”) studies the realization of these parallel projects in the early years of the Revolution and the ensuing backlash as the Jacobins grew concerned that this new performance of justice placed greater emphasis on performance than it did on justice. This alternative history of justice and theater in France explains why the Jacobins attempted to limit the theatricality of the king’s trial and not, as is commonly believed, to turn it into a show trial. They understood Louis XVI’s trial as I do, not as a historical blip, but as its opposite: a culmination. In this account, the king’s trial does not mark a beginning (the start of a momentary, aberrant mixing of justice and theater) but a peak, at once the apex of a fifty-year evolution that saw the theater grow ever-more judicial and justice ever-more theatrical and the start of its decline.
It is this half century of unparalleled experimentation, a time when thinkers set out to reinvent the very nature of a dramatic performance, of justice, and of the performance of justice, that this book seeks to revive, not only for what it can teach us about the past by challenging accepted narratives on French theater, law, and the Revolution, but also for the light it shines on contemporary issues and anxieties. To list only a few: this book traces the rise of such modern-day fears as celebrity lawyers, willing, like actors, to parrot any claim; illegitimate judges, easily misled, like dramatic spectators, by their vanity and sentimentality; a lawsuit culture, giving rise to never-ending trials; and a sensationalist mass media that transforms justice into gossip, entertainment, and revenge. These fears developed, in France, from the growing (con)fusion between theater and justice in the eighteenth century, giving rise to debates and innovations that survive to this day, on the stage as in the courtroom.
Theater as Justice
Few plays capture the intricate ties between Revolutionary drama and justice as fully as L’Ami des lois. Besides having interrupted the king’s trial, it illustrates several key strands of “judicial theater”—a neologism I use to refer to public spectacles that reenact contemporary events on stage so as to expose, judge, and punish a transgression. Through its overt, virulent denunciation of living public figures (Maximilien Robespierre and Jean-Paul Marat) and their secret crimes, L’Ami des lois transforms the theater into a tribunal, and the audience into a jury. Itself, therefore, a kind of trial, it further functions as the trial of a trial, reproducing key aspects of the proceedings against the king in an attempt to influence the verdict. Such a play would have been unthinkable only fifty years earlier. As unremarkable as it may seem today, the idea that the theater could be used to recreate current affairs on stage constitutes a significant (and yet understudied) turning point in the history of French drama. For most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, indeed, classical dogma and royal censorship worked together to ensure that official theaters would only stage historically distant, geographically remote, or entirely fictitious stories.1 The abbé d’Aubignac, for instance, urged playwrights to maintain a clear divide between the world on stage and the one outside the auditorium by seeking their plots in times or countries with which the spectators had nothing in common.2 Of course, seventeenth-century dramatic practice occasionally strayed from the wishes of early modern theorists and censors,3 but all agreed on the importance of refraining from explicit depictions of the here and now, to such an extent, in fact, that many saw French classical theater as a continuation and highpoint of the evolution, begun in ancient Greece, from satirical plays denouncing actual events and individuals by name (Old Comedy) to more general and, as a result, fruitfully edifying critiques of abstract moral flaws (New Comedy).4
Starting in the 1750s, however, many reformers expressed an unprecedented desire for performances that would reproduce, with documentary-like precision, contemporary events and figures. At the heart of this evolution lies Denis Diderot’s Fils naturel.5 In Chapter 1, I engage in a close reading of this grippingly complex work, not only because it constitutes the earliest and most insightful exploration of reenactment, a theory central to my claims in this book, but also because, in typically Diderotian fashion, it ceaselessly challenges its own theory, thereby establishing a broad set of questions to which later, more historical chapters constantly return. Through the story of a patriarch who reaches for immortality by forcing his family to reenact a past event with flawless accuracy, Diderot sets out to discover what remains when one strips or tries to strip all theatricality from the theater. He attempts to imagine the conditions that would allow, and the consequences that would follow, a performance in which actors do not act (they “are” the characters), authors do not author (they strictly record), and beholders do not behold (they join or judge an event they deem real). Diderot even foresees the judicial implications of this new theory of reenactment, achieving the impressive feat of highlighting in a single work the diverse forms that judicial theater could—and would—take. In its initial form, a ruler (here, the patriarch) orders the reenactment of a transgression (an incestuous attraction) so as to condemn it again publicly, thereby deterring its repetition and enshrining his law in the souls of participants and spectators alike. The patriarch’s death, however, by revealing the inherent mutability of the scenic arts, heralds a different kind of judicial theater, a fluid, egalitarian performance enabling a community to come together, relive and review a recent transgression, and achieve through its verdict a cathartic resolution, a reconciliation, or even a revision of the law. Le Fils naturel thus juxtaposes two competing notions of both theater and justice—fixed and autocratic vs. mutable and collective—thereby identifying the two poles that would shape all subsequent forms of judicial theater.
Ironically, Diderot would become one of the earliest victims of this new judicial vision of the theater when he was explicitly denounced as a criminal in Charles Palissot’s infamous satire, Les Philosophes.6 In fact, Palissot even cited Diderot’s theories to defend a play that friends and foes alike instantly perceived as inaugurating a new kind of theater—one that would elicit ample discussion and imitation, as I show in Chapter 2. To grasp the implications of using theater as a space for legal accusations, eighteenth-century writers turned to the nearest equivalent known to them: the Old Comedy of ancient Greece. The once despised Aristophanes became the lens through which thinkers expressed excitement as well as unease at the evolution of theater into a popular tribunal. Some, such as Palissot, pointed to one side of Aristophanes (his authorship of The Clouds) and portrayed judicial theater as an official instrument of state discipline, targeting the people’s hidden vices. Countering with a different Aristophanes (the intrepid author of The Knights), others presented judicial theater instead as a means of transparency, which would expose the crimes of the ruling class and enable ordinary people to pass judgment on contemporary affairs, figures, and trials—an increasingly common practice in eighteenth-century France, which actors encouraged by inviting famous litigants and lawyers as guests of honor to their performances. Yet another group, led by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, summoned a third Aristophanes (Socrates’s
