of Calas’s judicial murder88—except for the fact that, once again, none of these plays were performed until the Revolution. Royal censorship would not have allowed it—nor, for that matter, any other judicial plays. Surprisingly, Fabre d’Églantine did succeed in having one performed in 1787. His Augusta was, according to the Correspondance littéraire, a thinly veiled reenactment of the infamous trial of the Chevalier de la Barre. Jakob Heinrich Meister underlined the production’s uniqueness (its “interesting audacity”) by claiming that it showed significant progress in the “morals” and “tolerance” of the French, but the play, poorly written to the point of confusion, did not outlast its premiere.89 Not until the Revolution and the suspension of censorship would dramatists write plays denouncing corrupt officials in the expectation that they would be performed, with Jean-Louis Laya, in particular, often praised as a resurrection of the “true” Aristophanes (in an explicit contrast with Palissot, guilty of having revived the wrong Aristophanes).
If not the playwrights, however, what prompted the rise of a judicial theater in the final decades of the ancien régime? The answer: those features of the theater largely beyond the censors’ control, none more so than the vagaries of reception. The public, indeed, appears to have found quite enticing the opportunity offered by judicial theater to pass judgment on current affairs, figures, and trials. This interest likely arose from a confluence of factors. As Maza has shown, the remarkable popularity of trial briefs (formerly dry, legal documents meant for the judges’ eyes only, but increasingly mass-produced, highly melodramatic “memoirs” after 1760) led to a widespread obsession with legal matters, as well as a preference for creative works addressing current events directly.90 In the same period, dramatic spectators grew more and more convinced that they had both a right and a duty to intervene loudly and frequently during performances, a belief strengthened by the new notion that their judgments served to give voice to a “public opinion.”91 As we saw earlier, many theatrical reformers not only welcomed this active participation, they called for it to focus on the content of plays, especially as it related to current affairs, rather than on the theater’s formal, aesthetic qualities. Much suggests that their wish was coming true: for instance, Logan Connors has noted the rise in ideological judgments and a “language of denunciation” in and about the theater.92 A fascination with justice, heightened participation, and a focus on topical content: together, they produced spectators eager to transform the theater into a tribunal where they could judge the present, whether the plays lent themselves to it or not.
One such instance came during a performance at the Comédie-Française of Mustapha et Zéangir, to which Victoire Salmon, a servant unfairly accused of poisoning her masters, had been invited as a guest of honor, along with her lawyer. The incident that ensued during Salmon’s first ever outing to the theater is particularly interesting, because it reveals the many ways that the theater had grown to perform a judicial function. It began when Salmon lost herself in the fiction, reacting to the duplicity of the play’s villain by crying aloud “He’s lying, he’s lying!” before turning to her lawyer and exclaiming “Ah! my god, papa; he’s a false witness!”93 She thus assumed the role of a moral judge (rather than an art critic), expressing a grave indignation at a criminal act (perjury)—precisely the relationship to the stage favored by partisans of a judicial theater. Yet the intensity of her response, resulting, as every spectator knew, from the remembrance of her own torment at the hands of dishonest accusers, led the rest of the audience to cease watching the play entirely and focus instead on the lamentations of the spellbound Salmon. It is telling that the audience abandoned the artistic, general fiction on stage for the more authentic and topical reenactment by Salmon of her previous part as a persecuted defendant during her trial. Through its tears of compassion and cheers of support, the audience transformed her into a character in a new performance, part theater, part trial, in which it played the role of a judge, proclaiming her innocence and condemning her accusers in a unified voice (thereby supporting Mercier’s belief that one can judge a person’s virtue by observing his or her reactions to a theatrical performance, and that spectators may disagree about aesthetic questions but will all instinctually know signs of innocence when they see them).
Yet the story did not end there. In a further twist, during the evening’s second play, the actress Mademoiselle Contat paused mid-declamation, turned to face Salmon, and addressed to her three verses praising the unique beauty of triumphant truth. The entire audience greeted this initiative with thunderous cheer, and the other actors broke out of character to join in the applause.94 By expressing her belief in Salmon’s innocence, Contat not only transformed an unintentionally apropos performance into a deliberately topical one, she also reclaimed, in the process, the position of judge, restricting the spectators to the role of beholders assenting with another’s verdict. The night thus ended on a suggestion of the ease with which judicial theater could be used to influence, if not manipulate, the expression of a supposedly public judgment. (On that note, it is ironic that the verses chosen by Contat appear in a speech highly critical of public opinion, which is portrayed as fickle, gullible, and hasty to condemn without proof.)95 While there is no reason to think of Contat’s intervention as anything but earnest, it exemplifies a broader desire among the theatrical establishment to retain control over these judicial events by staging them.
Indeed, the Salmon episode was far from an isolated, impromptu incident. It was, rather, one of the earliest attempts by a theatrical company to carry out a plan, found in both legal and dramatic pamphlets, to use the theater as a means to inspire public opinion to validate and thus legitimize the verdicts of recent trials. Hence, in Du Théâtre, Mercier had championed the reenactment of recently ended trials, so as to “confirm through the people’s applause the triumph of the laws.”96 Similarly, Louis Philipon de La Madelaine had argued that a special area in public theaters ought to be reserved for those who had suffered the costs and indignities of a trial as the result of an unjust accusation, thereby allowing actors to parade them, and spectators to applaud them.97 The troupe of the Comédie-Française invited Salmon precisely for that purpose—to display her innocence to spectators with the expectation that they would assent. The same applies to Catherine Estinès, also accused of being a poisoner and also, upon being exonerated, invited by a company in Toulouse to attend a play for the first time. Upon seeing the scaffold awaiting the play’s female protagonist, Estinès began shuddering visibly. This reaction at a fate that could have been hers sent a chill throughout the audience, although the same spectators later broke out in wild acclamations at the appearance of Estinès’s lawyers and at the play’s happy ending.98 According to Armand Fouquier, the practice of inviting recently exonerated defendants became sufficiently common for their presence on a given night to be advertised on playbills—a telling inclusion, insofar as it suggests that the actors regarded these invitations as staged spectacles, comparable to the evening’s plays.99 Such scriptedness—the fact that they were planned in advance, were repeated and repetitive, and had predictable outcomes—highlights one of judicial theater’s most significant ambiguities, largely ignored by Mercier, but seized upon, as we will see, by Rousseau and others to condemn it. In staged ceremonies like the ones for Salmon and Estinès, one starts to wonder who actually does the judging. When innocence has already been attributed by the legal and theatrical establishments (the first through a trial and the second through its invitation), does the audience serve any real function, beyond validating the verdicts of more influential arbiters?
Yet although spectators gladly participated in these ritual displays of persecuted but victorious innocence, other incidents suggest that they saw themselves as independent judges, with the right and duty not only to praise correct verdicts but also to speak out against unjust ones, and against the government officials responsible. Meister thus observes in 1774 that the parterre’s longstanding practice of creating “applications” had recently assumed a new judicial dimension, as spectators repeatedly distorted innocuous verses and situations into commentaries on the decisions of the tribunals: “Of late, the parterre of the Comédie-Française has usurped the right to applaud or hiss the court’s sentences.”100 To praise (applaud) but also, and just as importantly, to condemn (hiss): Meister gives several examples of the latter, such as when a
