“When Solon saw public theaters in Athens, he exclaimed: these diversions will soon speak louder than the laws.”128 Indeed, Suard goes on to repeatedly draw attention to the age-old rivalry between the arts and the laws: “An Englishman once said: make a people’s laws, and let me make its songs; we will see which one of us will govern it … the ancient Greeks likely agreed, since they gave songs and laws the same name (nomos).”129 Predictably for a man best known today for his part in censoring Le Mariage de Figaro, Suard endorses censorship as the sole practical response to the threat that judicial plays might come to wield an influence equal to or greater than the tribunals’.
Although Rousseau differs from Suard in the solution that he proposes (the interdiction of theater, rather than its censorship), he shares with him a profound distrust of judicial theater. In Rousseau’s eyes, a truly satirical theater cannot lastingly operate as a parallel institution to the legal system without infringing upon it, gradually at first, but inexorably, until, to quote Suard (mis)quoting Solon, comedies speak louder than the laws themselves. His contemporaries’ longing for a judicial theater betrays their blindness to the logic of the supplement, which means in this instance that a theater seeking to extend the reach of the tribunals will eventually come to supplant them. As evidence of this, Rousseau could point (as he does) to Socrates’s execution, often cited in the period as proof of the ease with which theatrical accusations could not only instigate a trial but also infiltrate and distort it through their influence on public opinion—an early example of what is known today as trial by media.130 To most eighteenth-century thinkers, in fact, Socrates symbolized the twin values of reason and law, and his death, the defeat of these values by the forces of theatricality. After all, had he not courageously refused during his trial to resort to the melodramatic appeals of the stage: “I respected you too much to try to touch you with my tears or with those of my children and my friends gathered about me. It is at the theater that one must arouse compassion through poignant images; here, only truth must make itself heard”?131 To antitheatricalists like Rousseau, there was no better illustration of the frailty of truth, reason, and a formal legal system when faced with a satirical, denunciatory play of the kind written by Aristophanes.
Judicial theater infringes upon and eventually supplants the justice system, instead of working in tandem with it, as Mercier envisions, because it gives undue power to individuals (playwrights and actors) without holding them accountable for it. Mercier defends their legitimacy because they are more enlightened than regular magistrates (a subjective claim) and more transparent in their accusations, since the latter are made publicly (unlike in eighteenth-century trials). Throughout La Lettre à d’Alembert, however, Rousseau reminds us that the theater is the very antithesis of transparency. In particular, he condemns actors for uttering words that are not their own (but the author’s) under an identity that is not their own (the character’s), leading them to lose their individualities, to literally “self-destruct.” This lack of transparency is especially troubling in judicial theater. Not only does it make it possible for actors to reenact slanderous accusations with impunity, by claiming their roles were assigned to them and do not necessarily reflect their own beliefs and values, but the true initiators of these accusations, the playwrights, are also offered the opportunity to conceal their identities, in name (under the cover of anonymity) and in body (under the cover of fenced boxes). This, in Rousseau’s eyes, is what differentiates judicial theater from a Roman-like system of formal, public accusations, which he often praises and which rests entirely on the sincerity and personal involvement of the accuser—that is, on his or her answerability in cases of false allegations.132 In the absence of such accountability, it is inevitable that actors and playwrights will come to speak louder than the laws, for who would choose the lengthy, unpredictable, and personally taxing and risky option of a formal trial, when one could gain a swift, easy, and certain vengeance by using another to put forth a dramatic accusation? This is precisely what had happened in ancient Greece, according to Rousseau and the abbé Gros de Besplas, who claimed that “poets, musicians, actors, dancers, and set designers having risen to the highest ranks in Athens, the laws lost all power.”133 Guilt and innocence were no longer determined in a courtroom, according to fixed laws and procedures, but by playwrights, actors, and other scenic artists.
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