In the tribunal as in the theater, then, one finds the same anxiety, born of the thin line between publicity and theatricality. Indeed, both realms struggled with the same underlying challenge: how to perform justice without having it seem just a performance. And not surprisingly, both settled on the same solution: reenactment—a new conception of performance free from the lies and artificiality of mimesis. This dream of a nontheatrical performance, able to resurrect, and not just represent, an event or conflict, took on different forms, but it is the similarities of their ambitions that speak the loudest. They speak of a desire for legitimizing rituals in a period usually known for undermining them. They speak, too, of the anxiety produced by a world governed by representation and public opinion, in which power depends not on the foliage of one’s genealogical tree but on the persuasiveness of one’s acting. They speak, lastly, of the longing to reduce, or at least disguise, the theatricality at the core of the liberal worldview, without sacrificing its greatest gift: publicity.
Impossible as a perfect reenactment—a truly nontheatrical performance—may be (something Diderot, its earliest theorist, acknowledges in Le Fils naturel), the dream of it contributed in ways previously unknown to the development of drama and justice in France. It inspired eighteenth-century thinkers to explore the limits of performance, resulting in some fascinating projects—imagine a theater without actors, spectators, or playwrights, or a legal system without lawyers, judges, or laws—that broadened the traditional conception of theater and justice and enabled lasting innovations. In fact, even the unattainability of a perfect reenactment should not be seen as a negative. By making it impossible to ignore the theatricality intrinsic to any performance—indeed, to any public, participative system—it encouraged the pursuit of a new equilibrium, one that acknowledged the necessity of theatricality, while at the same time seeking to control it. This delicate equilibrium is one that France continues to pursue today, as seen in recent debates, inspired by the influence of the far more theatrical American legal system, on whether and how to restrict the spread of a lawsuit culture, the playacting of celebrity-obsessed lawyers, and the impact on justice of mass media, notably of reality TV shows in the style of Judge Judy43—all phenomena, I argue, that find their roots in the eighteenth century.
PART I
Theater as Justice
Chapter 1
Fixing the Law
Reenactment in Diderot’s Fils naturel
A New Performance for a New Time
Theater is out of the question, explains Dorval’s father, Lysimond: “The point is not to erect a stage here, but to preserve the memory of an event that touches us, and to render it just as it first happened…. Every year we would recreate it ourselves, in this house, in this living room. What we once said, we would say again.”1 To satisfy this strange request, Dorval agrees to write Le Fils naturel, a dramatic work recounting the nascent love between Dorval and Rosalie, the wife-to-be of Clairville, Dorval’s closest friend, the two lovers’ decision to sacrifice their happiness in the name of friendship, and the startling revelation by Lysimond, returned propitiously after years abroad, that Dorval and Rosalie are actually his children and thus half-siblings. This unexpected disclosure dispels any lingering lust, jealousy, and distrust by retroactively convincing Dorval and Rosalie that their attraction for each other was little more than a sense of kinship and by binding the four main protagonists in perfectly symmetrical marital ties (Clairville is betrothed to Rosalie, Dorval’s sister, just as Dorval is to marry Constance, Clairville’s sister). The family now steadied by his presence, Lysimond demands that his children immortalize both the transgression (the incestuous love) that nearly tore them apart and his victory over it, synonymous with the restoration of the father’s law, by means of a yearly reenactment so accurate that the family members repeat the same gestures and speeches, in the same setting (Clair-ville’s living room) and in the same clothes as they had in reality. Yet Lysimond dies before the first performance, and his replacement, an old friend swaddled in his clothes, triggers such intense distress by reminding the other performers of their deceased father that they find themselves unable to continue. This incomplete performance is witnessed by a single beholder, hidden, unbeknownst to all but Dorval, behind a set of curtains. This state of concealment, together with the performance’s realism, prompts him to surrender to such a powerful illusion that, forgetting he is just a spectator, he experiences the need to interact directly with the people and events before him.
So inventive and provocative is the performance dreamed up by Diderot, the real author of Le Fils naturel, that even modern readers may be surprised at the boldness of its innovations. Several influential studies, on subjects extending from dramaturgy and scenography to acting and reception, have shown the novelty of the reforms illustrated by the fictitious performance of Le Fils naturel.2 Yet one of the performance’s most striking innovations—its reenactment of very recent events—has failed to generate comparable interest, despite constituting a deliberate violation of classical dogma.3 The notion that the theater could recreate as accurately as possible a contemporary incident has usually been portrayed, with good reason, as another one of Diderot’s famous thought experiments, designed to see how close to reality one could bring the stage and its conventions. As we will see, however, reenactment soon grew into much more than just an abstract case study on the limits of realism. Over the next fifty years, there would appear countless plays reproducing current events and people on stage, as well as multiple projects seeking to go further still by turning Lysimond’s dream (including his radical rejection of professional actors, aesthetically minded spectators, and artistic invention) into a national institution. The popularity of reenactment in the second half of the eighteenth century suggests that the unusual first performance of Le Fils naturel, so easily dismissed as fantastical or purely theoretical, ought to be taken seriously and regarded as the earliest illustration of a new kind of performance, closer to ritual than theater.
Before delving deeper into Diderot’s text, it may prove worthwhile to reflect on possible contributing factors to the rise of an increasingly keen attraction for the reenactment of recent events. Without wishing to assign a single cause to a complex evolution, I contend that the interest in staging current events reflects a broader transformation in the Western world’s relationship to the past, which also took place, according to Reinhart Koselleck, in the second half of the eighteenth century.4 Although the bulk of Koselleck’s evidence is drawn from early modern historiography, it highlights a shift in the perception of time that is equally pertinent to a new understanding of the evolution of eighteenth-century theater.5 From the classical metaphor of historia magistra vitae (history is the teacher of life), as well as from other, largely semantic phenomena, Koselleck concludes that the seventeenth century experienced time as a cyclical process, comparable to the natural succession of seasons and regal dynasties. The past was understood as a vast reservoir of reiterated and reiterable events drawn from a plurality of individual histories (rather than one History) from which readers were expected to draw lessons through the recognition of parallels with their own situations. Such a model of history rested on an implicit faith in a continuous space of potential experience, as well as in the constancy of human nature, insofar as it posited a relationship between the past and the present that was less one of causality than it was one of analogy.
Starting in the middle of the eighteenth century, however, under the influence of Diderot and other Encyclopédistes, a new philosophy of history emerged, one in which the immediate past and the present were