Dramatic Justice. Yann Robert

judicial theater seeks to inspire its spectators to participate directly and personally in the events on stage. In an insightful article, Pierre Frantz has shown that Mercier aspired to write historical dramas able to compete with the dominant narrative structure of classical tragedies, which he accused of suppressing the part played in French history by the common people, first by deifying sovereigns and aristocrats, and second by promoting a fatalistic understanding of history designed to accustom its plebeian audience to assume a passive stance toward political events.⁸³ Likewise, judicial theater challenges (even more effectively, in my view) this classical vision of theater and history by desacralizing present-day leaders, not just historical ones, and by rendering manifest, through the judgments of its spectators, the people’s right and duty to participate directly in the unfolding history of the nation. According to Frantz, Mercier was also drawn to new dramatic genres like historical drama because of their narrative openness, which, unlike the formulaic, teleological structure of tragedies, freed the playwright to reenact a more authentic history, consisting of chaotic and random acts, performed by ordinary citizens as often as by monarchs. Judicial theater shares this conception of history, but goes even further by putting it into action, insofar as it gives everyday people the opportunity to write the history of their own time.

      Lastly, judicial theater best unites its sundry spectators. Such a claim may seem odd, given the quarrel surrounding Palissot’s play, but Mercier and other partisans of judicial theater truly believed that unlike critical debates on aesthetic issues, which invariably divided audiences, emotional judgments on current affairs were far likelier to foster unanimity: “This tribunal often issues sentences of great accuracy and sometimes of a subtlety beyond all expectations. Above all, it discerns, by a sort of instinct, the friends as well as the enemies of the common good. It is courteous, but it performs justice when necessary.”⁸⁴ Spectators will argue over a clunky alexandrine but never over the guilt of a public enemy. That they listen to this “instinct” toward goodness has much to do with the electrical contagion described earlier, which amplifies their indignation and sorrow until it becomes impossible to ignore the voice of nature. In a deeply affected parterre, according to Mercier, “each spectator judges as a public individual, not as a private one: he forgets his personal interests and prejudices alike; he is just against himself.”⁸⁵ A spectator moved by public emotions and focused on public matters and figures will best be able to overcome the private interests and prejudices (such as the desire to be seen as a connoisseur, or to show off one’s membership in a particular cabal) that prevent the isolated, analytical spectator from listening to his instinct. Judicial theater thus enables the expression of a tangible public opinion, a potent, unified voice devoted to the cause of justice.

      This vision of judicial theater mirrors Dorval’s by the end of Le Fils naturel. From a fixed, autocratic ritual used by the powerful (Lysimond, the crown, etc.) to impose their law and punish transgressors, judicial theater develops into an open-ended trial, a free forum enabling a community to come together and discover, debate, and decide current affairs. Just as Dorval ultimately rejects his father’s vision of reenactment as an instrument of permanence in favor of a more collaborative, evolutive model, Mercier criticizes the dramatic representation, notably in classical tragedies, of complete and inalterable events (since well known, historically distant, and portrayed as fate), preferring instead the reenactment of contemporary issues and figures, whose meaning and impact remain to be determined. Like Dorval, he welcomes this incompleteness because it encourages the spectators to intervene in the performance and transform it. Indeed, the play is only half of the judicial ritual imagined by Mercier; it levels an accusation but requires a verdict to complete it, lest it fail in its function. This verdict is no superficial aesthetic judgment, as with other plays; it is an integral part of the performance, serving as the play’s ending and determining its social impact and meaning, as either a courageous censure or a contemptible slander. Mercier is confident that the theater can grow to be strictly the former, so long as it is placed within the hands of enlightened, moral playwrights, tasked with the role of government watchdogs.

      Judicial Theater: In Practice

      Mercier’s vision of a judicial theater may seem fantastical, especially under an absolutist regime, yet there is much evidence, even beyond Palissot’s Philosophes, that the use of the theater as a tribunal became increasingly common in the final decades of the ancien régime.⁸⁶ Against Mercier’s expectations, however, the credit for this development does not really belong to enlightened men of letters. In fact, until the Revolution, no plays were performed, at least on a public stage, to denounce a government official. This was certainly not due to a lack of interest among eighteenth-century playwrights in assuming the role of intrepid “righters of wrongs.” Mercier, for instance, tried to practice what he preached by writing Charles II, a play that dramatized, quite transparently, a recent transgression by the notoriously debauched Comte d’Artois, but it was never staged.⁸⁷ Several others wrote plays reenacting recent trials, notably the famous Calas affair, both to retry and exonerate the wrongly condemned and to denounce the perverse or corrupt magistrates responsible. In so doing, they realized Mercier’s dream, in L’An 2440, of a dramatic recreation of Calas’s judicial murder⁸⁸—except for the fact that, once again, none of these plays were performed until the Revolution. Royal censorship would not have allowed it—nor, for that matter, any other judicial plays. Surprisingly, Fabre d’Églantine did succeed in having one performed in 1787. His Augusta was, according to the Correspondance littéraire, a thinly veiled reenactment of the infamous trial of the Chevalier de la Barre. Jakob Heinrich Meister underlined the production’s uniqueness (its “interesting audacity”) by claiming that it showed significant progress in the “morals” and “tolerance” of the French, but the play, poorly written to the point of confusion, did not outlast its premiere.⁸⁹ Not until the Revolution and the suspension of censorship would dramatists write plays denouncing corrupt officials in the expectation that they would be performed, with Jean-Louis Laya, in particular, often praised as a resurrection of the “true” Aristophanes (in an explicit contrast with Palissot, guilty of having revived the wrong Aristophanes).

      If not the playwrights, however, what prompted the rise of a judicial theater in the final decades of the ancien régime? The answer: those features of the theater largely beyond the censors’ control, none more so than the vagaries of reception. The public, indeed, appears to have found quite enticing the opportunity offered by judicial theater to pass judgment on current affairs, figures, and trials. This interest likely arose from a confluence of factors. As Maza has shown, the remarkable popularity of trial briefs (formerly dry, legal documents meant for the judges’ eyes only, but increasingly mass-produced, highly melodramatic “memoirs” after 1760) led to a widespread obsession with legal matters, as well as a preference for creative works addressing current events directly.⁹⁰ In the same period, dramatic spectators grew more and more convinced that they had both a right and a duty to intervene loudly and frequently during performances, a belief strengthened by the new notion that their judgments served to give voice to a “public opinion.”⁹¹ As we saw earlier, many theatrical reformers not only welcomed this active participation, they called for it to focus on the content of plays, especially as it related to current affairs, rather than on the theater’s formal, aesthetic qualities. Much suggests that their wish was coming true: for instance, Logan Connors has noted the rise in ideological judgments and a “language of denunciation” in and about the theater.⁹² A fascination with justice, heightened participation, and a focus on topical content: together, they produced spectators eager to transform the theater into a tribunal where they could judge the present, whether the plays lent themselves to it or not.

      One such instance came during a performance at the Comédie-Française of Mustapha et Zéangir, to which Victoire Salmon, a servant unfairly accused of poisoning her masters, had been invited as a guest of honor, along with her lawyer. The incident that ensued during Salmon’s first ever outing to the theater is particularly interesting, because it reveals the many ways that the theater had grown to perform a judicial function. It began when Salmon lost herself in the fiction, reacting to the duplicity of the play’s villain by crying aloud “He’s lying, he’s lying!” before turning to her lawyer and exclaiming “Ah! my god, papa; he’s a false