Dramatic Justice
Dramatic Justice
Trial by Theater in the Age of the French Revolution
Yann Robert
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
PHILADELPHIA
Copyright © 2019 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Robert, Yann, author.
Title: Dramatic justice: trial by theater in the age of the French Revolution / Yann Robert.
Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018018632 | ISBN 9780812250756 (hardcopy: alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Theater—Political aspects—France—History—18th century. | Justice, Administration of—France—History—18th century. | France—History—Revolution, 1789–1799.
Classification: LCC PN2633.R63 2019 | DDC 792.094409033—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018018632
For Lori, Claire, and Nicolas, with love
Contents
Chapter 1. Fixing the Law: Reenactment in Diderot’s Fils naturel
Chapter 2. The Many Faces of Aristophanes: The Rise of a Judicial Theater
Chapter 3. Players at the Bar: The Birth of the Modern Lawyer
Chapter 4. Judges, Spectators, and Theatrocracy
Chapter 5. From Parterre to Pater: Dreaming of Domestic Tribunals
PART III. THE REVOLUTION’S PERFORMANCE OF JUSTICE
Chapter 6. Performing Justice in the Early Years of the Revolution
Chapter 7. The Curtain Falls on Judicial Theater and Theatrical Justice
Introduction
The year is 1793, and the king stands on trial. Gathered by the hundreds in a profoundly theatrical space—the salle du manège, formerly used for equestrian shows—spectators feasting on oranges and liqueurs observe the judges below, loudly jeering, applauding, and debating their every word. But what are they really watching? Are the men below actually judges? For months now, the deputies of the National Convention have tried, many reluctantly, to perform this role, to act as judges, despite lacking the training or credentials for it. They cannot even claim to be impartial: most have already publicly affirmed Louis XVI’s guilt, giving the trial a seemingly scripted denouement (only the punishment remains unknown). Spectators, actors, and a script—it is easy to see why the proceedings against the king have traditionally been portrayed as a show trial, an early example of the political parodies of justice that the Jacobins would stage during the Terror to eliminate rival factions.
And yet … if the purpose of a show trial is to publicize the guilt of an accused, why, then, did the Jacobins fight so hard to have no trial at all, just a summary execution? Why did they repeatedly claim that the king had been found guilty during the 10 August insurrection—that he was, in fact, already dead—and that any trial would therefore amount to mere theater, an artificial repetition of the king’s condemnation at the hands of the people? Once the trial of the century had nevertheless begun, why did they interrupt it to forbid the performance of a play, L’Ami des lois, that made it possible for a broader audience to participate in the king’s judgment by reenacting key aspects of the case against him? It is true that L’Ami des lois and at least three other plays like it sided with the king, but if this was the sole reason behind the Jacobins’ anger, why did they extend their refusal to dramatize the king’s trial to performances aligned with their views, as when they rejected several proposals to commemorate the anniversary of the king’s beheading with theatrical reenactments of his trial and execution? Lastly and, perhaps, most tellingly, why was it the Jacobins, not the Girondins, who most frequently accused their enemies of practicing a theatrical mode of justice?
These questions, to which I return in Chapter 7, reveal the need to rethink the standard narratives on the evolution of both theater and justice in eighteenth-century France. As we will see, the first narrative holds that theater, under the influence of bourgeois drama, began to drift toward pure entertainment and illusionism in the decades preceding the Revolution—further and further away, therefore, from any direct, judicial involvement in current affairs. The second narrative, a mirror image of the first, maintains that the justice system moved away from theatricality, as it shifted from an iconic, visual foundation (royal displays) to 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