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

The subject of Susan Maslan's ambitious, insightful and engaging study is the problem of representation during the French Revolution. Maslan rejects the print-focused account of public formation, and argues instead that the theatre as a critical site of popular participation must figure centrally as both institution and practice in the elaboration of a new political subjectivity. By examining 'representation' firstly as a mediated performance on stage, and secondly as the exercising of the public will in a direct democracy, she proposes that Revolutionary drama and politics were bent on replacing the mendacious theatricality of the ancien régime with the transparent publicity appropriate to popular sovereignty. The book is in four parts; the first challenges the notion proposed by Jürgen Habermas and Roger Chartier (here somewhat easily dovetailed) that the public sphere derives from a disparate community of readers, and posits with reference to Chénier's Charles IX that the participation of physically present spectators underpins the audience's claim to express judgement and to exert control. This chapter certainly convinces, although clarification as to exactly how the Revolutionary public differed from that of the ancien régime would help; indeed, as Jeff Ravel has shown in The Contested Parterre (1999), spectatorship across the eighteenth century is less schematic than Maslan's history implies. The second part develops the observation that Revolutionary culture witnesses a profound anxiety about theatricality; a close reading of Le Philinte de Molière shows how Fabre d'Eglantine follows Rousseau to propose that theatre's regeneration depends precisely upon detheatrica-lization, for only thereby might the estranged spectator be united with the beheld object. Maslan is no doubt correct, but again, her argument needs to account for the dramatic reforms of the previous few decades that similarly decried artifice. The third section, perhaps the strongest of the study, develops Foucault's analysis of late-eighteenth-century vision, and depicts mass Revolutionary surveillance (in its extragovernmental, interpersonal and interior forms) as fundamentally democratic and empowering. Although it is problematic to suggest that 'purging theatricality from politics was Robespierre's central preoccupation' (p. 132), Maslan's intervention in the debate of power, publicity and vision is valuable, particularly in her use of Judith Butler to define Revolutionary subjectivity. The book's final part explores how surveillance was staged in a number of now forgotten domestic dramas, including La Veuve du républicain and Plus de bâtards en France. Maslan's subtle reading of La Chaste Suzanne, which examines how potential resistance to normalizing surveillance was quashed, raises the otherwise unanswered question as to how monolithic this model of Revolutionary surveillance in fact was. This strong and compelling work is a welcome and useful contribution to our understanding of late-eighteenth-century political culture, visuality and subjectivity, and with the original French quotations also translated into English, it can reach the wide readership it deserves.