Impostors: Performance, Emotion, and Political Economics in the Lettre à d'Alembert

"Un spectacle [...] unique sur la terre."¹ To contemporary theatregoers, this phrase resembles marketing copy intended to attract an audience, which makes it all the more surprising that Jean-Jacques Rousseau uses it to describe an idealized community in his famously vehement anti-theatrical screed, the Lettre à d'Alembert sur les spectacles. At the midpoint of the Lettre, this description leads into his reminiscence about the Montagnons, an agrarian people inhabiting the sparsely populated countryside outside of Neuchâtel. However, Rousseau conjures this remembered spectacle of virtuous equilibrium and harmony only to destroy it subsequently, imagining the financial ruin and moral degradation that ineluctably follow upon the introduction of a public theatre. As the avowedly fictitious performances of the stage are constructed from the same emotional material that serves as the foundation for Rousseau's claims to moral authenticity, the spectacle of the Montagnon idyll serves as the central illustration of the existential threat to Rousseau's political and moral philosophy posed by theatrical acting.

The allegory of the Montagnons is the centerpiece of an energetic critique of theatre in the Lettre à d'Alembert sur les spectacles, penned in response to the suggestion (in d'Alembert's article "Genève" from volume seven of the Encyclopédie) that a permanent comédie be established within the Calvinist city of Rousseau's birth. The ferocity of the Lettre, in which Rousseau builds on the arguments that had earned him widespread notoriety in his two polemical Discours while simultaneously articulating central principles of the political theory that would be his most lasting legacy, points to the importance of the theatrical question for Rousseau in 1758, when he was himself at a crucial turning point in his career as a public intellectual.² Theatre was not only the most prestigious literary form in eighteenth-century France, but the public character of its performance also made it an esthetic practice with far-reaching political repercussions. The manipulation of sentiment and pitié inherent to stage acting, the intense atmosphere of comparison engendered by the theatrical event, and the drama's reliance on love-plots that place women in positions of power over men, are all intolerable affronts to Rousseau, and the arguments against such performances that he rehearses in the Lettre exercised a significant influence on the major works (La Nouvelle Héloïse, Émile, and Du contrat social) that he was composing at the time. This essay will propose that Rousseau's most original critique of theatre in the Lettre à d'Alembert combines his cultural and philosophical arguments with a uniquely political conception of affective economy, establishing the state and the stage as competitors for the limited resource of the public's emotions.

In the course of his diatribe against the portrait of human passions presented on the stage, Rousseau nevertheless reasserts the assumption of fundamental human morality that underpins his attack on Enlightenment progress in the Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes. The affirmation in the Lettre that "l'homme est né bon; je le pense et crois l'avoir prouvé" (OC 5:22) marks a radical break with the Christian tradition of antitheatricality, whose critique assumes the indelible taint of original sin behind all human passion.³ Rousseau's assertion of the already "proven" goodness of human instinct before the advent of societies refers to the speculative anthropology of an innocent primitive humanity in the second Discours. In this work, he imagines the foundational moments of human society as a performance ("On s'accoûtuma à s'assembler devant les Cabanes ou autour d'un grand Arbre: le chant et la danse, vrais enfans de l'amour et du loisir, devinrent [...] l'occupation des hommes et des femmes oisifs et attroupés,"⁴ before presenting the modern theatre as society's evolutionary culmination in the Lettre. Thus despite the physical proximity of the spectators when watching a play, Rousseau asserts they are unaware of each other: "L'on croit s'assembler au Spectacle, et c'est là que chacun s'isole; c'est là qu'on va oublier...