Dramatic Battles in Eighteenth-Century France: Philosophes, Anti-Philosophes and Polemical Theatre by Logan J. Connors (review)

The summer of 1760 witnessed a sensational episode in the history of the Comédie-Française. In quick succession, the King’s company of actors staged two polemical plays that framed contrasting views of the philosophes, a faction of thinkers who advanced ideas that threatened the established order in politics, religion, philosophy, and the arts. Charles Palissot’s satire Les Philosophes (The Philosophers), which opened in early May, portrayed this cohort as ambitious, dishonest, and more concerned with their own gain and cosmopolitan image than with the good of the nation. Less than two months later, Voltaire’s comedy Le Café ou Ecossaise (The Cafe, or The Scotswoman) aimed a withering attack from the same stage at Elie-Cathérine Fréron, the critic and associate of Palissot’s who had made his name by attacking philosophes in his journal L’Année littéraire.

Logan Connors’s book provides a richly detailed, extensively researched, and lively account of this understudied moment in French theatre history. When historians address Palissot and Les Philosophes, they rarely mention more than the actor Préville’s notorious pantomime in which his Rousseau-inspired character walked around on all fours. But Connors argues convincingly that the writing, staging, and reception of these two plays made a significant impact on the way that theatrical representation functioned in Enlightenment intellectual history and cultural politics. In ten short, packed chapters, Connors explains the furor over Les Philosophes and Le Café ou Ecossaise as a product of several forces: the pitched rivalry between the philosophes and their more conservative opponents, the mixed-media strategies that mid-century thinkers used to communicate with readers and spectators, and evolving conventions of dramatic criticism. The episode demonstrates that “spectators, critics and cronies—not just playwrights—emerged as important agents inside the world of pre-Revolutionary theatre production” (247).

Connors begins with chapters that examine the “toxic cultural war” that divided many intellectuals into philosophe and anti-philosophe factions, and that argue that “drama emerged as the chief means” for engaging in this battle, alongside printed instruments of persuasion like essays and pamphlets (35, 49). He contends both that dramaturgy and performance practice shaped the ways that partisans in this conflict pursued their agendas, and that “polemical comedies” drew attention to the role that theatre audiences played in adjudicating intellectual conflicts (32). The middle chapters constitute a deep dive into the plays themselves, with sustained attention to the way the playwrights took spectators into account in the process of making theatre. Connors combines close readings of the plays and associated texts with a fine-grain historicist approach to their situation and reception vis-à-vis contemporaneous debates. Central to his approach are the textual strategies that playwrights used to “precondition” spectators before they arrived at the theatre, and the way that critics who reacted to these plays deviated from patterns established by seventeenth-century academic theorists (14, 73). Connors shows in later chapters that while the reactions to these plays helped found new modes of critical response in the following decades, Les Philosophes and Le Café ou Ecossaise also prompted some to lament the corruption of dramatic poetry and criticism by personal satire and factionalism. The episode anticipated the way that figures like Beaumarchais would use theatre as a tool of political persuasion (231–32), but it also led the critic Claude-Joseph Dorat to chastise Palissot and Voltaire for debasing the art form, and in Connors’s view prompted a return to a more elitist “’textual’ turn in theatre criticism” (215).

Connors’s study focuses on a specific set of events, but it does much more than contribute to the history of these two plays. Along the way, he makes use of a broad range of historical studies of eighteenth-century spectatorship, surveys recent Francophone and Anglophone theories of theatre reception, and covers numerous cultural and historical developments that preoccupied...