Dramatic Justice. Yann Robert

battle between the philosophes and their adversaries.² Certainly, it was perceived as such at the time, as shown by the fact that the dozens of pamphlets that greeted its premiere split, almost without exception, along expected ideological lines (with anti-philosophes loving the plays and Encyclopédistes hating it).³ This is, in fact, what makes Louis Coste d’Arnobat’s response to it so fascinating. In his pamphlet, he imagines Diderot reconciling with Palissot with these words: “I showed you the very genres you could select. Is it not to my genius that you owe the sublime idea of this drama, which I place between comedy and tragedy? Who other than I could have discovered the fallow space that separated the old comedy from the comédie larmoyante?”⁴ A self-dubbed “friend of everyone,” Coste d’Arnobat is better able to look past the animosity and partisanship of the rival factions and to notice, as a result, the similarities between Palissot’s play and Diderot’s theories. Against every interpretation—old and new—of Les Philosophes, Coste d’Arnobat thus presents Palissot less as a rival of Diderot than as his disciple, the pioneer of a new theater built on insights garnered from reading Le Fils naturel.

      Neither Diderot nor Palissot would have been likely to agree with this filiation, of course, yet Coste d’Arnobat is right, in my view, not only to portray Les Philosophes as a new kind of theater, falling somewhere between classical comedy, tragedy, and the tearjerkers of Nivelle de la Chaussée, but also to seek its roots in Diderot’s thought. In fact, I contend that Palissot’s play, by denouncing the transgressions of real-life individuals explicitly named on stage, was the first to bring to life the judicial theater that Diderot had only begun to envision in Le Fils naturel. As is often the case with pioneering works, Palissot’s play proved to be especially controversial and influential, revealing dilemmas and pitfalls intrinsic to judicial theater and forcing its proponents to confront many vital questions. Among these: Who commissions a judicial play? Who legitimizes it and, by extension, its accusations? Can it expose any crime? Target any individual? What role should the audience play? And how will such a theater interact with justice, understood both as an abstract ideal and as an existing institution? These questions inspired a wide array of plays and projects for a judicial theater, with vastly divergent functions, including as an instrument of absolutist rule, a government watchdog, a sovereign court in which to appeal recent trials, and an intrusive system of moral policing.

      “An Act of Justice”: Palissot or the New Aristophanes

      What could possibly connect Palissot’s play to the dramatic vision of his favorite bête noire, Diderot? One response seems obvious: as in Le Fils naturel, Palissot includes real, living people as characters, in violation of the classical convention of setting plays in a historical or geographical elsewhere. Indeed, most participants in the quarrel noted the novelty (and, for many, the scandal) of seeing, on an official stage, such a transparently satirical play,⁵ which left little doubt as to the real-life identity of the character Dortidius by attributing to him Diderot’s published works (including Le Fils naturel). Palissot and his partisans were quick to mention, however, that Molière had done the very same thing, notably in Les Femmes savantes (the model for Les Philosophes), with the fictitious Trissotin a clear caricature of Charles Cotin. In response, the philosophes repeatedly drew attention to a key distinction between Molière and Palissot: “If the faults that Palissot attacks are merely ridiculous, he has the right to translate them to the stage; Molière, after all, placed well-known marquis and writers on it. But if he imputes dishonorable vices to his characters, if he identifies them personally, calls them, so to speak, by their name, it isn’t in Molière that one should seek past examples.”⁶ What made Palissot’s play so unique, they argued, so different from the satires of Molière, was not just the transparency of its attacks but also their target: odious vices punishable by law—crimes such as stealing and blasphemy—rather than harmless ridiculous traits, such as Cotin’s (alleged) vanity and poetic ineptitude.

      Even Élie-Catherine Fréron, a known accomplice of Palissot, condemned the playwright, somewhat disingenuously perhaps, for straying from the moderation shown by Molière: “It seemed, especially at the premiere, as if Palissot had set out to render odious the individuals he wanted to portray in his play, instead of only rendering them ridiculous. It would have been easy to do the latter, for it would have earned him unanimous plaudits. Indeed, it isn’t for having put our philosophers on stage that he has been condemned; it is for having presented them in a guise more revolting than comical.”⁷ To be fair, Palissot’s play was not entirely lacking in comic antics (Crispin’s quadrupedalism comes to mind), but friends and foes alike were struck by its acerbic, denunciatory tone, as well as by Palissot’s transformation of the stock character of the philosophe, a traditional object of ridicule in eighteenth-century comedies, into a seditious criminal.⁸ In fact, the play was frequently condemned for the virulence and gravity of its attacks on the philosophes, which were submitted as evidence that the author’s “intent to harm” had supplanted the classical aim of comedy: to improve morals.⁹ As a result, critics engaged in a telling debate on Les Philosophes’s genre, in an attempt to determine whether a play which so clearly lacked “that playful tone that rebukes without causticity, / and strikes a ridiculous trait while preserving honor” could still be labeled a comedy.¹⁰ Most concluded that it could not and that it heralded a new kind of theater in France.

      Palissot could have contested the validity of this criticism, as some of his supporters did, but he opted instead for a surprising apologia of his play’s indignant tone: “To the accusations of maliciousness leveled against me, I will respond only with Mr. Diderot’s wise and remarkable words: ‘I know it is often said of works where the authors gave in to their indignation: This is horrible! One should not treat people so harshly! … [Yet] posterity only sees folly, vice, and malice covered with ignominy, and it rejoices at this act of justice…. Only a reprehensible weakness keeps us from showing the intense and profound hatred for baseness, envy, and duplicity that all honest men must feel.’”¹¹ Palissot’s homage is undoubtedly lacking in sincerity, seeking, as it does, to expose Diderot’s hypocrisy, but it reveals more than Palissot likely intended, in that it hints at a basic homology between his play and the artistic vision of the men it lampooned. Indeed, the vast majority of philosophes agreed that the theater ought to condemn vices with the full force of indignation, instead of cheerfully mocking ridiculous traits—precisely the tone and target that now saw Palissot’s play facing widespread criticism.

      In rejecting classical comedy’s embrace of ridicule, the philosophes challenged its raison d’être. In his Lettre à d’Alembert, Rousseau explains that comic playwrights, such as Molière, chose to portray vices in exaggerated forms—as ridiculous traits—because they aimed above all to elicit laughter. They justified this pursuit of laughter as vital to comedy’s moral purpose—the oft-invoked “castigat ridendo mores”—since laughter proved that the spectators had correctly identified the ridiculous character’s vice, distanced themselves from it, and begun as a result to preserve themselves from it. In his famous critique of Molière’s Misanthrope, Rousseau dismantles this moral program by contesting its premise that ridiculous traits and vices are essentially linked, the former a direct symptom of the latter. On the contrary, he contends that they often exist in opposition to one another.¹² In the words of Mercier, “the virtuous man … is sometimes made to look ridiculous, while the vicious man, more adept, avoids this fate by concealing his every act.”¹³ Comedies teach spectators to become that skilled man who fears and eschews external behaviors perceived as ridiculous, the better to indulge in his inner vices: “comic hyperbole does not render objects detestable, it only makes them ridiculous, and from this results a great harm: we come to fear ridicule so much that vice no longer scares us.”¹⁴ Comedies thus provide a lesson in duplicity, transforming one vice into two. Nowhere is this more evident than in Diderot’s Neveu de Rameau, when the titular character explains his love of classical comedy: “When I read Tartuffe, I tell myself: be a hypocrite, if you wish, but do not speak like a hypocrite. Keep the vices that are useful to you, but avoid a tone or an appearance that would make you look ridiculous.”¹⁵ Molière’s Tartuffe, French theater’s most illustrious condemnation of hypocrisy, therefore