Dramatic Justice: Trial by Theater in the Age of the French Revolution by Yann Robert (review)

Books about the French Revolution's theater often echo the period's faith in binaries. Theatricality vs. authenticity; novelty vs. tradition; neoclassical vs. preromantic; and good vs. bad are several of the hard choices that scholars tend to propose. Yann Robert refuses to fall into these traps in one of the last decade's most important books on eighteenth-century theater. He is firmly grounded in the Old Regime's theatrical practices and astute at parsing out precisely what changed and what stayed the same in the French theater world after 1789. Robert situates the most militant drama of the Terror—often treated by theater experts as an intellectual and aesthetic anomaly—inside the period's evolving and complex legal history. Readers should not be fooled by the title: this book is not just about trials or plays depicting trials. Dramatic Justice is a meticulously researched coup against the idea that transparency and progress were uncontroversial values among the Revolution's most vocal proponents of liberalism. Robert provides a comprehensive analysis of "judicial theater," a neologism he uses "to refer to public spectacles that reenact contemporary events on stage so as to expose, judge, and punish a transgression" (3). Also, he traces a series of debates on the merits of oral arguments and forms of "theatricality" in French trial procedures. Robert divides his study into three parts. Part one focuses on theater that treated spectators as active agents of judgement. Particularly important were theories of reenactment in Denis Diderot's landmark drame (or drame bourgeois) as well as caustic satires by lesser-known playwrights, such as Charles Palissot. The strategies of judicial theater advocates differed but always placed the audience in a reflective, even participatory role—a source of anxiety for some theater critics and government officials before and during the Revolution. Part two plunges the reader into eighteenth-century reforms of the judiciary where disagreements over orality and text, and openness and secrecy informed some of the great "liberalization" projects of the time. In part three, Robert combines his analysis of theatricality in the legal system with readings of the Terror's judicial theater to show the apogee and demise of both during Louis XVI's trial and the reign of Robespierre. Robert's "theatrical lens" (12) on the judiciary questions the notion that the French legal system's eventual liberalization followed a simple political trajectory from a gloomy, arbitrary, and secretive Old Regime to the Revolution's commitment to transparency and equality. His close readings of plays across regimes prove that legal reforms, trial practices, and the overall exercise of justice were of serious concern to theater audiences before and after 1789. Robert's theorization of reenactment should be studied by contemporary performance scholars and his lucid explanation of Robespierre's (self-described) Socratic death would help students of all levels and disciplines understand the Revolution's most startling paradoxes. Robert has written an excellent book on eighteenth-century theater that resonates with today's trial practices, where tensions between accuracy and openness, due process and "purely theatrical spectacles" (19) have not lost their vigor.