The anti-philosophes dismissed another standard critique of Aristophanes’s theater: that its primary ambition lay in amusing the rabble through lewd puns, burlesque caricatures, and farcical acts of shocking boorishness. Here, they could draw on Brumoy’s hugely influential anthology, Le Théâtre des Grecs, for decades if not centuries the foremost introduction to Greek drama for would-be Hellenists.33 In a lengthy preface, Brumoy admonishes his predecessors, Dacier and Jean Boivin, for their overly literal translations of Aristophanes’s plays, including the many instances of lowbrow humor.34 He prides himself on presenting his readers with a morally and aesthetically pleasing Aristophanes, a feat of whitewashing that he accomplishes by alternating between translations of acceptable verses and vague syntheses of the indecent episodes in the satirist’s oeuvre (as a result, The Clouds spans only forty-four pages in Brumoy’s collection). In so doing, Brumoy obliterates a good deal of the comic verve that had made Aristophanes such a popular playwright in his own time, but renders him more palatable to a period increasingly ill at ease with the idea that laughter was an acceptable end, in and of itself, for the theater. Brumoy thus rewrites The Clouds in a more solemn tone, transforming the play so that it read less like a grotesque caricature—but a relatively harmless one, precisely because of its comical excess—and more like a grave denunciation.
If Aristophanes was not motivated by personal vendetta or greed, nor by a longing for popular laughter and acclaim, why did he even write a satirical comedy? The anti-philosophes found an answer, and a justification, in an alternate depiction of Aristophanes as a protector of the common good. In this reading, already present in Dacier’s preface, Aristophanes was nothing like the cruel jester, casting ridicule on private citizens, that most believed him to be, but was rather a serious and courageous poet, who had earned the esteem of his contemporaries by using his dramatic talent to expose the threat that specific individuals posed to society and its laws. This view of Aristophanes remained, however, largely marginal and ambivalent (even within Dacier’s work), for two main reasons. First, it seemed impossible to reconcile with his most notorious play, The Clouds, so beloved and innocent was the victim, Socrates. And second, it offered no clear distinction between the comedies of Aristophanes and the satirical tracts so common, and so reviled, in early modern France. As Romain Piana notes, satire had little support in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries because it had no place in a society that understood justice as emanating from a sovereign being. However pure their intentions (to protect the state), the satires of Aristophanes, like those of lesser libelers, remained the works of private citizens, without official authority, and as such, illegitimate acts of justice. To quote Piana, “only through the transfer of an authority akin to the divine auctoritas can diabolical calumny be avoided.”35 This awareness of the razor-thin line between legitimate denunciation and slander inspired, according to Piana, Brumoy’s major contribution to a more positive portrayal of Aristophanes. In his preface, Brumoy argued that Aristophanes wrote for the state—not only in defense of it but also on its behalf. Rather than a mere private citizen, Aristophanes was a censor, an official employed by the state, and thus legitimized by it, for its protection. The anti-philosophes embraced and developed this vision of Aristophanes with unparalleled vigor and certainty. Unlike Dacier and Brumoy, they even extended it to The Clouds, arguing that, as in all his other plays, Aristophanes had been charged by the state with exposing and punishing the machinations of a seditious freethinker, Socrates.
Not only did this new performance history for The Clouds offer Palissot and his allies yet another opportunity to nettle the philosophes, for whom Socrates was a model and idol, it also enabled them to turn one of the most frequent criticisms of Palissot’s play—that it amounted to little more than a piece of government propaganda—into a positive. Indeed, many pamphlets responding to Les Philosophes made a special note of the government’s unusual involvement in promoting its performance. Stories abounded, claiming that the foreign minister, Étienne François, Duc de Choiseul, had coerced the royal censors and that Fréron had threatened the reluctant actors. In his Correspondance littéraire, Grimm emphasized for his foreign readers how unprecedented this state-endorsed performance truly was.36 While the monarchy had always kept a close watch on the theater, banning topical plays and encouraging allegorical depictions of its own grandeur, never before had it used its authority with such penal intent by ordering the performance of a play to punish individuals it considered a threat. To counter the philosophes’ outcry, Palissot could point to the example of The Clouds and assert that the state’s support, far from devaluing his act, actually gave it its legitimacy. He did so, notably, by inventing a fascinating dialogue between Aristophanes and Brumoy, in which the Greek playwright chastises his translator (unfairly, as we have seen) for not understanding the true nature of his state-sponsored denunciations: “My plays were not secret, obscure satires; they were performed on solemn days, before the assembled people and magistrates. They were intended to serve as punishment for those crimes against society upon which the Law had not imposed a penalty.”37 Palissot sees the presence and involvement of the magistrates—some anti-philosophes believed they had commissioned The Clouds; others, that they had examined it before the premiere—as evidence that Socrates had been tried and found guilty by the government, not by Aristophanes, whose play merely enacted the sentence.38 (In that sense, the execution of Socrates twenty-three years later can be read as a reenactment, made necessary by the failure of the first dramatic enactment to silence Socrates). As Palissot notes, this means that Aristophanes’s judicial theater was not intended to function as a trial, which allows for debate and the possibility of the accused’s innocence, but as a special “punishment” for crimes against society, a judicial shaming with the same legitimacy as the public execution of a criminal, because it too emanated from the government.
In fact, Palissot goes on to claim, judicial theater served as an alternative to the official justice system by allowing the state to combat transgressions that posed a threat to society but were not included in the legal code. For Palissot, the raison d’état is the raison d’être of judicial theater: extralegal actions are sometimes necessary for the good of society and are completely legitimate, so long as they are undertaken by the proper authority. Fascinatingly, in a footnote to the passage above, Palissot links this vision of the theater, once again, to his archrival Diderot. He cites a passage from De la Poésie dramatique, published two years before the premiere of Les Philosophes, in which Diderot calls for the government to revive the judicial theater of Aristophanes because it is a more humane and effective way to punish certain transgressors than legal recourse, which risks transforming them into martyrs: “What is Aristophanes? An original jester. An author of this sort must be precious to the government, if it knows how to use him. It is to him that the fanatics who occasionally disturb society must be abandoned. If we expose them on stage, they won’t fill our prisons.”39 Diderot champions here a new kind of theater, modeled on the satirical comedies of ancient Greece. He dreams of plays that are not superficial divertissements but state rituals, used by the government to punish real crimes (not ridiculous traits), especially those posing a threat to society, yet outside the purview of the legal system. Les Philosophes, Palissot slyly argues, had fulfilled Diderot’s wishes; like The Clouds, it had condemned a sect of fanatical freethinkers sapping the foundations of the state. In so doing, it had restored the theater to its former role as a punitive arm of the government, working in tandem with the justice system.
Mercier’s “Divine Weapon”: A Third Aristophanes Is Born
Diderot thus found himself in a challenging position, the victim of a play that, in another context, he might have praised as a realization of his own judicial vision of the theater. Bertrand de Latour hinted at this dilemma when he argued that eighteenth-century philosophes, whom he despised almost as much as the theater, had a harder time defending themselves against satirical plays than previous targets such as Socrates, because they had previously celebrated the very art form now turned against them.40 Indeed, after 1760, Diderot’s thoughts on judicial theater appear a jumble of contradictions. In all likelihood as a result of his onstage persecution, Diderot paints a far less eulogistic portrait of Aristophanes in his Mémoires pour Catherine II than he had in De la Poésie dramatique, calling