Such inconsistencies echo the ambivalence that the philosophes felt, more broadly, toward satire. Hence, Voltaire wrote lengthy treatises condemning the maliciousness and ineffectiveness of satire, notably his Mémoire sur la satire and Épître sur la calomnie, and slammed Aristophanes in his Dictionnaire philosophique, even stating that the Athenians, for having esteemed his plays, deserved their subsequent enslavement!44 Yet he also relished the fame reaped from his own personal attacks on Rousseau and Fréron, including a satirical play, L’Écossaise, performed in response to Les Philosophes.45 What’s more, most philosophes, including Voltaire, were drawn to the English use of satirical tracts as a vital protection against corrupt political figures. They argued, like Louis de Jaucourt, that “it is less dangerous for a few honorable individuals to be unfairly defamed than for no one to dare enlighten the nation on the conduct of the powerful.”46 In fact, according to Volker Kapp, the term “satire” came to be understood in eighteenth-century France less and less in moral and personal terms and more and more as a means of civic involvement.47 Voltaire both illustrates and extends this important distinction between private and public satire in his praise for the English model: “In England, it seems that the law gives each private individual the right to attack any official in his public character, but protects the reputation and the private conduct of all citizens.”48 For Voltaire, the ideal form of satire is doubly public: it targets governmental figures, rather than private citizens such as rival authors, and it focuses exclusively on crimes that impact the common good, not on the purely private vices of those in power.49
Not surprisingly, the philosophes made a similar distinction between different types of judicial theater. As we saw, years before Palissot’s play, they had imagined a judicial theater overseen by the state and using satirical accusations to discredit private individuals and beliefs it deemed dangerous. The performance of Les Philosophes, however, made it impossible to ignore that such a theater could just as easily serve as a weapon against thinkers and artists promoting positive social change as it could against religious fanatics. This compelled the philosophes reluctant to abandon the dream of a judicial theater to seek an alternative portrait of Aristophanes. To find one, they needed to look no further than their own Encyclopédie, where Jean-François Marmontel had painted the many faces of Aristophanes, including the vile satirist who wrote obscene comedies for the rabble (the seventeenth century’s vision), the state-commissioned censor who targeted private citizens (Palissot’s vision), and a third Aristophanes, the author of “political satires,” who exposed on stage the corruption of magistrates, the failings of generals, and the ill-conduct of rulers.50 Written before Les Philosophes, Marmontel’s article shows the least aversion toward the second Aristophanes, recognizing, as Diderot once had, the benefits of a system in which state-appointed playwrights could punish dangerous vices beyond the reach of the law.51 Yet in the decades that followed Palissot’s play, and as the philosophes faced ever-growing scrutiny and hostility from the government, they increasingly turned their attention to the plays of the third Aristophanes, particularly The Knights, which had exposed the seditious machinations of the politician Cleon. Thanks to its specific focus on the criminal acts of the ruling class, this form of judicial theater more closely resembled the English satire praised by Jau-court and Voltaire and ensured that a play like Palissot’s would never again be performed.
For many philosophes, in fact, The Knights amounted to a near-perfect inversion of The Clouds (claimed as a model by Palissot). In the latter, a public official had used the theater to expose a dangerous private citizen, whereas in the former, a private citizen had used the theater to expose a dangerous public official. Unlike Palissot, who wished to add judicial theater to the monarchy’s disciplinary arsenal, the philosophes portrayed the early Athenian theater as a site of public engagement allowing enlightened authors to monitor and publicly denounce their rulers. So convinced, in fact, were many eighteenth-century thinkers of the essential link between civic participation and judicial theater that they argued that Athens’s transition from a democracy to an aristocracy after the Peloponnesian War, and the resulting decline in the citizenry’s political involvement, was the real reason behind the disappearance of Aristophanes’s “political satires.”52 Though the parallel was left unstated, all likely understood that, as in Athens, the centralization of power in seventeenth-century France (into an absolute monarchy) had led to conventions against the dramatization of current events and people. This does not mean, of course, that the philosophes—very few of whom believed in democracy—were opposed to this evolution. While some wrote glowingly of the verve, freedom, and tangible impact of plays like The Knights, lamenting that the shift away from targeting public officials had culminated in the timid theater of the seventeenth century, filled with “languid moral tirades” and “tedious aphorisms,”53 others stuck to the classical view that the disappearance of political satires had purified the theater, turning it into a more aesthetically pleasing and morally edifying art form.54 Nevertheless, the very fact that they centered their debates on Aristophanes as a private censor of the government, rather than as the government censor favored by Palissot, is quite telling, especially when read side by side with their praise for the British vision of satire. Together, they reveal a desire to open the government to greater supervision and control by the wisest of citizens—men of letters.
Even as they remained mostly torn about Aristophanes, the philosophes thus called attention to a more liberal function for judicial theater. This inspired some of the more politically progressive among them, notably Mercier, to formulate in explicit terms a proposal for the revival of satirical plays modeled on those of the third Aristophanes. At first glance, Mercier may appear just as ambivalent as the others. Scattered in his voluminous oeuvre, one finds frequent attacks against satire, most quite typical: it irritates instead of amends,55 it transforms the republic of letters into a factious arena, bursting with inflated egos and petty vendettas,56 and it distracts authors from addressing serious matters by engaging them in superficial squabbles.57 Yet for Mercier, these flaws are not inherent in satire but are the result of its cooption and corruption by the government. Indeed, he believes, not without reason,58 that the shallow, divisive satire common in his time received covert protection and financial support from the state, which feared that a united republic of letters might otherwise have the time and freedom to examine the conduct and expose the crimes of public officials.59 Rather than prohibit satire and risk becoming its prey, the government neutralized it by turning it against its own authors, ensuring that they tore each other apart, like Palissot and the philosophes, instead of investigating and exposing their rulers’ transgressions. In response, Mercier reaches the bold and perhaps unprecedented conclusion that “the government must not concern itself with poetics.”60 Men of letters must be entirely free from governmental meddling, whether through censorship or patronage, for satire to attain its purest, most disinterested form, of genuine benefit to society.
To this condition, Mercier adds another: “It is only permissible to wield the stylus of satire against those the laws cannot reach, that is, against those public figures who, having everything, honors, wealth, authority, power, would be too dangerous if they did not at least fear the mirror of truth. But to target a private individual, who has no influence on public affairs, is to avenge one’s vanity, to only see oneself, and to divert from its function a divine weapon.”61 Satire must not only be free of interference from the rich and powerful, it must choose them as its sole target. A