trial by media, and the replacement of the rule of law by the rule of actors. These fears would haunt partisans of the new genre throughout the second half of the eighteenth century, leading many to conclude that the risk derived from the “theater,” not the “judicial,” in “judicial theater.” In the hope of curbing such dangerous theatricality and, with it, the threat of fictitious accusations with little oversight and accountability, they sought to bring their judicial spectacles ever closer to the perfect reenactment—sans actor, author, and beholder—invented by Diderot. For instance, in a plan at once fantastical and entirely typical of the period, Nicolas-Edme Rétif de la Bretonne called for the monarchy to establish thousands of committees of elders, tasked with spying on their neighbors and forcing the guilty ones to reenact their own offenses, as their friends and family watched and jeered.7
Uniting these disparate visions of judicial theater is the conviction that theater should not simply seek to entertain, or even to impart abstract moral lessons, but should instead aim for a direct involvement in, and impact on, the real world. Such engagement may come as a surprise, challenging as it does the standard history of the theater. This dominant narrative is perfectly illustrated in a diagram by Richard Schechner (depicting the history of British theater, but the French tradition follows the same trajectory, according to Schechner).
Figure 1. Diagram by Richard Schechner depicting the history of Western theater. Source: Richard Schechner, Performance Theory (London: Routledge, 2003), 133.
This braid illustrates Schechner’s seminal insight that instead of labeling performances as ritual or theater, one should see them as lying on a continuum between the two. To determine where a performance will fall, Schechner identifies a series of attributes, splitting them along two poles: “entertainment” and “efficacy.” These attributes include the performance’s objectives (fun or results), performers (acting or incarnating), spectators (critical outlook or direct participation), and authors (individual or collective creation).8 Although all performances combine attributes from both poles, if most belong on the left (the “entertainment” pole), the performance lies on the theatrical end of the spectrum. If, as is the case with judicial reenactments, they mostly fall on the side of efficacy, the performance more closely resembles a ritual.
Looking at Schechner’s braid, one would therefore anticipate finding judicial theater in the Middle Ages, and indeed, medieval spectacles included reenactments of trials and crimes, as well as overt denunciations of living figures.9 Inversely, one would least expect judicial theater in the eighteenth century, which has the highest score on the entertainment scale while hitting near bottom in efficacy. In fact, Schechner considers the eighteenth century and its “development of bourgeois theater” to be the chief culprit in the disappearance of the “dominant efficacious mode of medieval performance.”10 This view is widely reflected in modern scholarship on eighteenth-century drama. In most histories of French theater, Diderot and the eighteenth century are credited primarily as the inventors of bourgeois drama and as precursors to the more realist, illusionist fare of the nineteenth century.11 Tellingly, these are precisely the two theatrical traditions most often condemned as mere entertainment12—not without cause, as their formal innovations further solidified the division between the world on stage and the one off it. Indeed, scholars from Michael Fried to Paul Friedland (a chronological spread, not an alphabetical one!) have shown that the eighteenth century devised a conceptual framework that would later enable the creation of a structural divide between theater and reality.13 Architectural and lighting reforms, new theories of realism and illusion, and Diderot’s invention of the fourth wall promoted a new conception of the world on stage as distinct from the spectators’, self-enclosed and complete, to be consumed silently rather than engaged directly. Friedland, in particular, presents this vision of the theater as evidence of a broader movement away from an older, ritualistic understanding of performance as embodiment: that is, as a presentation (not a representation) with the power to transform its participants and spectators.
Part of what makes judicial theater so fascinating, then, is that it turns on its head the standard account of eighteenth-century theatrical history as a progression away from ritual and toward pure entertainment. Naturally, some studies already offer a more nuanced picture of eighteenth-century theater. Scholars working on Diderot and Louis-Sébastien Mercier have not failed to notice the two playwrights’ desire to use the theater to denounce and redress the social wrongs of their day.14 Yet the passages they study concern broad social wrongs, not individual ones. As a result, they overlook the far more radical promotion of a theater that would go beyond general moral or social lessons to intervene directly in specific injustices, reenacting them and opening them up to popular judgment. Inversely, scholars have occasionally noted the period’s interest in staging current events, but never as the primary subject of their research, and never in terms of the judicial function so often assigned to it. For instance, studies on society theater have revealed that the private troupes sometimes reenacted events from the performers’ lives.15 We also know that fairground theaters included vaudevilles, a term that in eighteenth-century France referred to brief songs with themes taken from current events.16 Even official theaters did not always respect the classical stance against the representation of figures and events from France’s past, with historical drama gaining in popularity as early as the 1730s.17 It should be noted, however, that these plays resurrected distant events, and as such differed from the reenactments I study, which entertain the paradoxical aim of reviving something not yet dead—an ongoing event, or a past recent enough to still be experienced as the present.18 Moreover, the examples above lack a clearly denunciatory function; they do not seek to put on trial and thereby transform the events and figures they reproduce.19 Yet it is the combination of these two visions of the stage—as an instrument of justice and as a reenactment of current affairs—that for many eighteenth-century thinkers gave judicial theater its most appealing quality: the ability to produce concrete and immediate results. Despite its popularity, the very notion of judicial theater has been obscured by the longstanding account of eighteenth-century theatrical history as one of deritualization, and by the attendant emphasis on bourgeois drama and realist reforms. Bringing this unique conception of performance to light encourages us to refine our vision not just of eighteenth-century drama but of theater itself, by challenging divisions we sometimes take for granted: actor and character, stage and auditorium, representation and reality, and theater and ritual.
Justice as Theater
This book also inverts the standard narrative on the evolution of justice in France. Sarah Maza provides perhaps the best synopsis of this narrative when she argues that the legal system shifted from “a realm of display, of the visual, the iconic” to “the domain of the word, of textuality, of rationality.”20 Drawing from Michel Foucault, Jürgen Habermas, Joan Landes, and Marie-Hélène Huet—a list that leaves little doubt as to the narrative’s pedigree and influence—Maza contends that early modern justice rested on a traditional order of figuration centered on the spectacular display of the king’s body and authority, but that this order progressively gave way to a competing semiotic system, in which power resided in the written word of the law.21 In short, according to most modern scholars, justice was moving away from the theatrical and toward the textual.
However, as Katherine Taylor observes in the introduction to her study of nineteenth-century courtroom architecture, this narrative fits the evolution of justice as an abstract concept (a written code having replaced the king as the basis of justice), yet it is utterly inaccurate with respect to its actual practice.22 Trial proceedings, in fact, evolved in the opposite direction: not from theatrical to textual, but from textual to theatrical. Indeed, under the ancien régime, criminal proceedings were explicitly designed to be the least theatrical possible. They allowed neither spectators nor representation (i.e., lawyers acting for the litigants), thereby obviating two of the more obvious parallels between justice and theater. Nor was there, in any case, much of a spectacle to behold, given
