In fact, the vast majority of philosophes condemn le ridicule not only as the wrong target (in the play) but also as the wrong response (in the pit), on the grounds that laughter is intrinsically immoral. Louis-François Nouel de Buzonnière, author of the revealingly titled Essai sur les moyens de rendre la comédie utile aux mœurs, deplores that while laughing at a comedy, “each says to himself: I do not resemble this man here, I am more excellent than he. It follows that comedy, whose aim it is to improve morals, makes them worse, since it helps spread and strengthen egotism.”16 Laughter inevitably divides and excludes, instilling in the spectators an undeserved sense of superiority. The debate about the proper tone and target of comedy thus takes part in a broader conflict about laughter. In the 1750s and ’60s, this war opposed the chevaliers du bel esprit, a small but prolific group of noblemen, self-appointed protectors of Gallic wit, raillery, and levity, and the philosophes, who favored a solemn, militant tone and worldview and condemned the culture of aristocratic laughter for its inequality, superficiality, cruelty, and conservatism.17 Palissot belonged to the former; Rousseau and Diderot to the latter. While Rousseau’s unease with laughter is legendary, Diderot’s rejection of it may come as more of a surprise, given his penchant for mystification and persiflage. Yet as Jean Goldzink has shown, Diderot builds his vision of the theater in Le Fils naturel on the deliberate and explicit exclusion of laughter.18
In lieu of classical comedies, the philosophes championed a new kind of theater, tasked with representing modern vices accurately and exposing their social costs on stage. Stripped of any comic hyperbole, such plays would elicit righteous indignation and popular condemnation, instead of laughter, thereby impressing on guilty souls in the parterre the true depravity of their vice.19 Even Rousseau, in spite of his general opposition to the theater, appears willing to make an exception for militant plays of the sort: “Certainly, plays based, like the Greeks’, on the past misfortunes of the fatherland or on the present-day flaws of the people could provide their spectators with useful lessons.”20 Indeed, the philosophes hoped that a more solemn tone and lifelike depiction of vices would return the theater to its social function in ancient Greece: a scathing denunciation of the most shameful and detrimental flaws among its spectators. It is of course ironic to find this hope realized in the writings of Palissot. As a chevalier du bel esprit, he had sworn to combat the evolution from wit to serious, solemn topics, yet he seems to have succumbed to it. One of his earliest plays, Le Cercle, had ridiculed the philosophes, but in the style of Molière, harmlessly mocking their vanity, eccentricities, and intellectual poppycock, without accusing them of odious crimes. His next work, Petites lettres sur de grands philosophes, had adopted a far more personal and denunciatory tone, with much of his indignation leveled specifically at the recently published Fils naturel. In fact, there may be no better indication of the influence of Diderot’s aesthetic treatise than the part it played in converting a man who had set out to disprove it. Three years later, Palissot would write Les Philosophes in the accusatory tone of his Petites lettres, rather than the more jocular one of Le Cercle (despite one scene in common, tellingly the most classically comedic of the play, showing a Rousseau-like figure crawling on all fours). Palissot was unlikely to admit it, but his career had followed the precise path that the philosophes had traced for the theater.
Of course, the aim here is not to reclaim Palissot as a closet philosophe (even if he was less ideologically rigid than his reputation today suggests).21 Nor is it to question the sincerity of his hatred for bourgeois drama and for one of its founding texts, Le Fils naturel. Yet although Palissot truly disdained the maudlin and verbose bourgeois drama that he saw (like many today) as Diderot’s principal contribution to French theater, he appears to have found other aspects of Le Fils naturel more to his liking—first, the notion that the theater could and should function as a tool of social activism, seeking to transform the here and now through the overt reenactment of contemporary issues and figures on stage; and second, the notion that the theater ought to target dangerous transgressions instead of harmless, ridiculous traits, in a solemn, indignant tone that Palissot ties explicitly, if sarcastically, to Le Fils naturel.22 When combined, these two notions transform the theater from a superficial divertissement (classical comedy, in Diderot’s eyes) or a moralistic sermon (bourgeois drama, in Palissot’s) into—in the words of Diderot, reprised by Palissot in defense of his play—a veritable “act of justice.” Indeed, in its denunciation of grievous crimes committed by real people (the philosophes stood accused of sedition and irreligion), Palissot’s play truly inaugurated a new “judicial theater,” the likes of which, the author of “Les Si et les mais” had reminded us, was not to be found in Molière.
To understand this new genre, the participants in the quarrel turned instead to the theater they deemed its closest equivalent—the satirical plays of Aristophanes. Both philosophes and anti-philosophes harked back almost obsessively to the Greek playwright and in particular to his most notorious play, The Clouds, in which he had publicly attacked his own philosopher-foe, Socrates. For Palissot’s victims to liken him to Aristophanes was anything but unexpected—and not just because such a comparison carried the added benefit of equating them with Socrates! “Aristophanes” was one of the epithets most commonly used to belittle authors suspected of personal attacks, reflecting the near universal contempt in which the Greek was held for most of the early modern period.23 To the vast majority of seventeenth-century thinkers, the plays of Aristophanes embodied not just one but three features of bad comedy. Their narrow topicality limited the universality of their moral and philosophical lessons and of their beauty.24 Their satirical barbs were inspired by base, personal passions, such as hatred and vengeance, transforming the arts into a toxic battlefield of egos.25 And last but not least, their brand of humor was crude and indecent, clearly intended for the Athenian rabble.26 As a result, nearly every seventeenth-century thinker traced the birth of true comedy, the moral and sophisticated plays of Menander, to the passage of a law forbidding the representation of actual people on stage. They believed their own century to be carrying out a similar refinement of the theater, even praising Molière as “the French Menander.” Not surprisingly, then, the philosophes seized on the opportunity to portray Palissot’s play as a regression to the barbaric origins of the dramatic arts: “Isn’t it shameful for France to have, in a way, ended up where Greece began?”27 Like many others, the anonymous author went on to note that Aristophanes, by accusing Socrates of odious crimes, had laid the ground for the subsequent trial and execution of a wise and innocent man—a fate that, Voltaire worried, might now befall the modern philosophes.28
If the accusation was all too predictable, the response was anything but. Unlike prior satirists, who had denied any resemblance to Aristophanes, Palissot welcomed the comparison, decreeing with his customary modesty that his play had singlehandedly brought the theater back to its first institution.29 Many of his allies followed suit. In a sign of the profound changes then taking place in the perception of the theater and of its social function, a large number of authors actually praised Les Philosophes for reviving the judicial theater of ancient Greece and, more specifically, Aristophanes’s The Clouds. There had been, it is true, a few earlier attempts by Aristophanes’s translators, chief among them Anne Dacier30 and Pierre Brumoy,31 to defend the subject of their labor. Yet while these attempts sketched the broad outline of a more flattering portrait of Aristophanes, which Palissot and his partisans would later appropriate, strip of all ambiguity, and disseminate, they remained as ambivalent as they were scarce. Certainly, no one before the anti-philosophes dared push Aristophanes’s rehabilitation so far as to wish for his rebirth, and all struggled, above all, to justify his writing of The Clouds (Dacier does not even attempt to do so, while Brumoy merely argues that Aristophanes’s play, while a vengeful, spiteful act, was not directly responsible for the death of Socrates more than two decades later). The anti-philosophes went much further: they argued that the play was the result of Socrates’s many flaws, not of Aristophanes’s. For instance, Ignace Hugary de Lamarche-Courmont asserted that Socrates had been “an agitator, an enemy of the State and of humanity, a false philosopher,” as well as a dangerous atheist.32 Of course, these accusations were precisely those