between stage and auditorium. In fact, for Mercier and other theatrical reformers, the practice of clapping became a sign of an immoral distance, born of a refusal to invest emotionally and personally in the content of the play. That anyone confronted with the reenactment of genuine injustices could choose to engage in aesthetic contemplations struck these reformers as evidence of the superficiality and heartlessness of their time.76
Third, applause fragments the audience. Charpentier condemns it, and more broadly the analytical mindset that inspires it, for splintering the audience into cabals.77 The enemies of applause often note that it is far less contagious than sincere displays of emotion such as tears and laughter. This is because a heartfelt emotional response to a play becomes itself a spectacle that generates emotions in neighboring spectators. To quote Marmontel, one cries first “from the direct impression of the touching object,” but soon also “from seeing others cry.”78 Marmontel goes on to describe this sentimental contagion as “a kind of electricity,”79 a popular metaphor that beautifully conveys the circulation of emotion from one spectator to the next, until all feel as one. By contrast, insofar as applause is perceived to express a subjective, analytical judgment, the sight or hearing of it appeals to the reason, not the emotion, of other spectators, and thereby invites disagreement. This claim stems from the belief, increasingly popular in the eighteenth century, that while all can sense beauty, none can fully define it or establish fixed rules to assess it. Consequently, judgments based on artistic conventions and models are likelier to breed conflict than ones based on sensation.80 For this reason, Mercier and Marmontel, among others, proclaim the people gathered in the parterre a better judge than the elites in the galleries. The more popular, passionate parterre does not rely on rules or erudition but on “a superior instinct,” a spontaneous, emotional reaction to beauty that ensures the spectators feel and judge in unison. Applause has the opposite effect; it cultivates the analytical mindset of the elites, spreading the division and endless pedantic squabbles all too common in the galleries.81
Eighteenth-century theatrical reformers dreamt of a different mode of reception, free of the fragmentation revealed and fostered by applause. Nowhere was this ambition more evident than in their support for a judicial theater. Immediately after endorsing the theater as a “sovereign court,” Mercier states that it would bring the nation together in vocal denunciation of the political crimes and inequities of the day, its judgments so clear, direct and unanimous that they would resonate like the “thunder of posterity.”82 Indeed, more than any other genre, judicial theater presupposes an audience that is focused on content (not fixated on formal elements), participatory (not excluded from the stage), and united (not divided into cabals). Reenactments naturally encourage their spectators to pass judgment on the real figures and incidents depicted, rather than on how they are depicted. The audience’s task is not to evaluate a work of art, but to exonerate or condemn an actual human being. This negation of a critical, aesthetic relationship to the theater echoes the one in Le Fils naturel: it too entails the erasure of the dramatic audience as such and its replacement by participants in a ritual ceremony.
Indeed, judicial theater seeks to inspire its spectators to participate directly and personally in the events on stage. In an insightful article, Pierre Frantz has shown that Mercier aspired to write historical dramas able to compete with the dominant narrative structure of classical tragedies, which he accused of suppressing the part played in French history by the common people, first by deifying sovereigns and aristocrats, and second by promoting a fatalistic understanding of history designed to accustom its plebeian audience to assume a passive stance toward political events.83 Likewise, judicial theater challenges (even more effectively, in my view) this classical vision of theater and history by desacralizing present-day leaders, not just historical ones, and by rendering manifest, through the judgments of its spectators, the people’s right and duty to participate directly in the unfolding history of the nation. According to Frantz, Mercier was also drawn to new dramatic genres like historical drama because of their narrative openness, which, unlike the formulaic, teleological structure of tragedies, freed the playwright to reenact a more authentic history, consisting of chaotic and random acts, performed by ordinary citizens as often as by monarchs. Judicial theater shares this conception of history, but goes even further by putting it into action, insofar as it gives everyday people the opportunity to write the history of their own time.
Lastly, judicial theater best unites its sundry spectators. Such a claim may seem odd, given the quarrel surrounding Palissot’s play, but Mercier and other partisans of judicial theater truly believed that unlike critical debates on aesthetic issues, which invariably divided audiences, emotional judgments on current affairs were far likelier to foster unanimity: “This tribunal often issues sentences of great accuracy and sometimes of a subtlety beyond all expectations. Above all, it discerns, by a sort of instinct, the friends as well as the enemies of the common good. It is courteous, but it performs justice when necessary.”84 Spectators will argue over a clunky alexandrine but never over the guilt of a public enemy. That they listen to this “instinct” toward goodness has much to do with the electrical contagion described earlier, which amplifies their indignation and sorrow until it becomes impossible to ignore the voice of nature. In a deeply affected parterre, according to Mercier, “each spectator judges as a public individual, not as a private one: he forgets his personal interests and prejudices alike; he is just against himself.”85 A spectator moved by public emotions and focused on public matters and figures will best be able to overcome the private interests and prejudices (such as the desire to be seen as a connoisseur, or to show off one’s membership in a particular cabal) that prevent the isolated, analytical spectator from listening to his instinct. Judicial theater thus enables the expression of a tangible public opinion, a potent, unified voice devoted to the cause of justice.
This vision of judicial theater mirrors Dorval’s by the end of Le Fils naturel. From a fixed, autocratic ritual used by the powerful (Lysimond, the crown, etc.) to impose their law and punish transgressors, judicial theater develops into an open-ended trial, a free forum enabling a community to come together and discover, debate, and decide current affairs. Just as Dorval ultimately rejects his father’s vision of reenactment as an instrument of permanence in favor of a more collaborative, evolutive model, Mercier criticizes the dramatic representation, notably in classical tragedies, of complete and inalterable events (since well known, historically distant, and portrayed as fate), preferring instead the reenactment of contemporary issues and figures, whose meaning and impact remain to be determined. Like Dorval, he welcomes this incompleteness because it encourages the spectators to intervene in the performance and transform it. Indeed, the play is only half of the judicial ritual imagined by Mercier; it levels an accusation but requires a verdict to complete it, lest it fail in its function. This verdict is no superficial aesthetic judgment, as with other plays; it is an integral part of the performance, serving as the play’s ending and determining its social impact and meaning, as either a courageous censure or a contemptible slander. Mercier is confident that the theater can grow to be strictly the former, so long as it is placed within the hands of enlightened, moral playwrights, tasked with the role of government watchdogs.
Judicial Theater: In Practice
Mercier’s vision of a judicial theater may seem fantastical, especially under an absolutist regime, yet there is much evidence, even beyond Palissot’s Philosophes, that the use of the theater as a tribunal became increasingly common in the final decades of the ancien régime.86 Against Mercier’s expectations, however, the credit for this development does not really belong to enlightened men of letters. In fact, until the Revolution, no plays were performed, at least on a public stage, to denounce a government official. This was certainly not due to a lack of interest among eighteenth-century playwrights in assuming the role of intrepid “righters of wrongs.” Mercier, for instance, tried to practice what he preached by writing Charles II, a play that dramatized, quite transparently, a recent transgression by the notoriously debauched Comte d’Artois, but it was never staged.87 Several others wrote plays reenacting recent trials, notably the famous Calas affair, both to retry and exonerate the wrongly condemned and to denounce the
