Crucially, it also guarantees that Mercier’s judicial theater operates within the rule of law, in contrast with Palissot’s extralegal vision. For Mercier, satirical plays serve as an extension to the justice system, not as an alternative to it. As a result, he assigns an innovative and remarkably ambitious mission to playwrights, whose role is no longer to entertain but rather to ensure that the laws apply to everyone, even those who, due to their social status, have long been able to commit crimes with impunity: “The poet will feel the need for all individuals to become once more equal before the laws.”63 This is why Mercier tends to depict satirical plays as trials and not, like Palissot, as punishments ordered by a supreme authority above the law. For instance, he calls judicial theater “a sovereign court”—a tribunal with jurisdiction over everyone, regardless of rank.64 This sovereign court, Mercier explains, would open up a space where private citizens could come together, reveal and discuss purported abuses of power, and reach a verdict for or against their rulers.65 It is not surprising that Mercier would locate this space in the theater. A unique site of assembly and direct participation—to quote Mercier, “a playhouse is our only meeting point where men can assemble and their voices rise together”66—the theater was particularly well suited to endowing the people with the task of a sovereign judge, accepting or rejecting accusations leveled against the rich and powerful.
Judicial theater thus entailed a new mode of audience involvement. That the eighteenth century’s vision of dramatic judgment was changing, and how, can be seen in a fascinating campaign against applause. While it is possible to find a few condemnations of clapping in the first half of the eighteenth century, Diderot started an unprecedented movement against applause when he wrote in 1758: “the true applause you should seek to obtain is not the clapping that can suddenly be heard after a resounding verse, but the profound sigh that comes from the soul.”67 The exact same argument was subsequently reprised by Mercier, Rétif, the celebrated actor Jean Mauduit-Larive, and countless others,68 becoming so ordinary, in fact, that by 1785, Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Suard could state: “The question has often been raised whether it would be useful to eliminate applause and ovations from our spectacles.”69 The reasons behind this aversion to applause (an unusual sentiment among actors and playwrights!) are diverse, but fall, I contend, under three categories, each associated with a different fear of fragmentation.
First, applause fragments the play. Hasty and loud, it interrupts poignant moments and speeches, breaking them into pieces before they have reached their full impact.70 What’s more, clapping often highlights a single aspect of the performance, such as the acting of a given performer or a particularly witty line. In so doing, Louis Charpentier argues, applause divides the theatrical experience into a series of discrete reactions to isolated, formal elements.71 This fragmentation not only reveals an overly analytical relationship to the stage, it also cultivates it. Understanding a performance as a succession of elements to be applauded or hissed according to preexisting notions and rules inspires the spectators to engage in puerile debates about “the art of moving a spectator,” with the ironic result that none is actually moved.72 The same reasoning even leads Grimm to conclude that praise or applause for specific verses in a play constitutes in reality an involuntary critique of its overall emotional impact, since it shows that the performance failed to move the audience enough for it to abandon its fragmented and fragmenting vision of the theater.73
Second, applause fragments the theatrical space, separating the audience from the stage. As Mercier explains, “it is when a deep and somber silence reigns in the auditorium, when the spectator, broken-hearted and teary-eyed, has neither the idea nor the strength to applaud that, immersed in a victorious illusion, he forgets the actor and the art.”74 Applause is incompatible with the mode of reception praised in Le Fils naturel, in which the spectator forgets the theater and experiences the fiction on stage as a real, spontaneous event, for two reasons—first, as we saw earlier, because it directs the audience’s attention to the formal, artistic qualities of the performance, and second, because it is an arbitrary expression of a purely aesthetic response, which reminds neighboring spectators that they too are watching a dramatic production. By making it difficult, if not impossible, to forget the theater, applause prevents Diderot’s self-projection into the fiction: “The spectator, having given himself fully to the illusion, sees with displeasure that an unexpected sound pulls him out of Athens or Rome and coldly puts him back in his place.”75 The poor neighbor of the serial clapper is expelled from the world of the fiction, thereby deepening the divide between stage and auditorium. In fact, for Mercier and other theatrical reformers, the practice of clapping became a sign of an immoral distance, born of a refusal to invest emotionally and personally in the content of the play. That anyone confronted with the reenactment of genuine injustices could choose to engage in aesthetic contemplations struck these reformers as evidence of the superficiality and heartlessness of their time.76
Third, applause fragments the audience. Charpentier condemns it, and more broadly the analytical mindset that inspires it, for splintering the audience into cabals.77 The enemies of applause often note that it is far less contagious than sincere displays of emotion such as tears and laughter. This is because a heartfelt emotional response to a play becomes itself a spectacle that generates emotions in neighboring spectators. To quote Marmontel, one cries first “from the direct impression of the touching object,” but soon also “from seeing others cry.”78 Marmontel goes on to describe this sentimental contagion as “a kind of electricity,”79 a popular metaphor that beautifully conveys the circulation of emotion from one spectator to the next, until all feel as one. By contrast, insofar as applause is perceived to express a subjective, analytical judgment, the sight or hearing of it appeals to the reason, not the emotion, of other spectators, and thereby invites disagreement. This claim stems from the belief, increasingly popular in the eighteenth century, that while all can sense beauty, none can fully define it or establish fixed rules to assess it. Consequently, judgments based on artistic conventions and models are likelier to breed conflict than ones based on sensation.80 For this reason, Mercier and Marmontel, among others, proclaim the people gathered in the parterre a better judge than the elites in the galleries. The more popular, passionate parterre does not rely on rules or erudition but on “a superior instinct,” a spontaneous, emotional reaction to beauty that ensures the spectators feel and judge in unison. Applause has the opposite effect; it cultivates the analytical mindset of the elites, spreading the division and endless pedantic squabbles all too common in the galleries.81
Eighteenth-century theatrical reformers dreamt of a different mode of reception, free of the fragmentation revealed and fostered by applause. Nowhere was this ambition more evident than in their support for a judicial theater. Immediately after endorsing the theater as a “sovereign court,” Mercier states that it would bring the nation together in vocal denunciation of the political crimes and inequities of the day, its judgments so clear, direct and unanimous that they would resonate like the “thunder of posterity.”82 Indeed, more than any other genre, judicial theater presupposes an audience that is focused on content (not fixated on formal elements), participatory (not excluded from the stage), and united (not divided into cabals). Reenactments naturally encourage their spectators to pass judgment on the real figures and incidents depicted, rather than on how they are depicted. The audience’s task is not to evaluate a work of art, but to exonerate or condemn an actual human being. This negation of a critical, aesthetic relationship to the theater echoes the one in Le Fils naturel: it too entails the erasure