Revolutionary Acts: Theater, Democracy, and the French Revolution (review)

In a methodological shift described as a "cultural turn," during the 1980s scholarship in French history began to veer away from dominant socioeconomic analyses of the French Revolution and focus instead on the cultural practices, institutions, and discourses shaping revolutionary politics and its ideological underpinnings. In the process, theatre became an important subject for historians of the Revolution. Revolutionary Acts by Susan Maslan is compelling and impeccably argued. The book provides a deeply integrated analysis of theatre and revolutionary political culture; it is one of the most successful studies to emerge from this important historiographical trend.

Maslan makes a strong case that the theatre was central to the Revolution, not because (as others have argued) politics and theatre became indistinguishable as modes of public discourse—enmeshed in mutual support of revolutionary political ideals —but because theatre remained a distinct and alternative sphere in which revolutionary political inventions were tested and, most importantly, challenged. Analyzing how plays and performances responded to crucial issues in political culture, Maslan boldly argues for the significance of revolutionary theatre as revelatory of nothing less than the difficult birth of modern democracy: the "contested history of what is now the hegemonic organization of modern politics—political representation—at the very moment of its coming into being" (24).

The book is organized into four lengthy thematic chapters following an introduction. "Resisting Representation" examines revolutionary theatre in light of a defining problem for the invention of this new political regime, namely the struggle over whether the sovereignty of the people would be expressed through a direct or a representative democratic system. While government via a system of representatives has been naturalized as legitimate and viable in modern politics, Maslan effectively shows that such a system was deeply contested in its formative stages during the Revolution. The theatre was a locus for the practice and dramatic depiction of the alternative, direct democracy, and testimony to its power and efficacy. Historians of the revolutionary theatre have remarked upon the many colorful events involving raucous audiences, who frequently engaged in violence, stopped performances, and demanded particular plays or actors. Refusing to read these events as merely anecdotal illustrations of revolutionary theatre's chaotic character, Maslan gives such audience behavior far more meaning in the democratic context. Inside theatres, she argues, audiences seized the direct authority over representation that representative politics would deny them.

The second chapter "The Comic Revolution" explores revolutionary culture's "profound anxiety" (77) about theatricality, with its perceived threat to transparency and sincerity in all facets of social and political life. An enormously successful play from the era was a sequel to Molière's The Misanthrope written by playwright and prominent revolutionary figure Fabre d'Eglantine. By reworking Molière's masterpiece, the author followed Rousseau's famous critique (Lettre à M. d'Alembert sur les spectacles) in which the philosopher deplored the unapologetic theatricalism of Molière's play—its endorsement of appearance over honesty. Maslan argues that Fabre's Le Philinte de Molière modeled proper republican behavior through a dramaturgy of antitheatricalism evident in its reversed depiction of the characters Philinte and Alceste. The play exalts sincerity, self-reflection, and sympathy over the bankrupt social theatricality that permeated Old Regime France. Fabre imagined a regenerated theatre, a theatre "detheatricalized," that would "play a primary role in the creation of a fraternal, transparent society" (121).

The means to achieving transparency in public and domestic spheres naturally became a contested issue for revolutionaries. Robespierre and other politicians believed that the institutions and proceedings of democratic governance, to be truly representative of the general will, had to be regularly exposed to public scrutiny. Such publicity, however, threatened to become theatrical and risked "transforming the represented into spectators and their representatives into actors" (131). In her last two chapters, Maslan explores the tensions between theatricality and public scrutiny, or surveillance. Surveillance was disciplining, but Maslan argues that, as it was conceived during the...