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

Reviews 211 Connors, Logan J. Dramatic Battles in Eighteenth-Century France: Philosophes, Antiphilosophes , and Polemical Theater. Oxford:Voltaire Foundation, 2012. ISBN 9780 -7294-1047-2. Pp. 275. £65. The clash between philosophes and anti-philosophes at the end of the 1750s was a defining moment in the French Enlightenment. On the side of the philosophes we find Voltaire, D’Alembert, and Diderot, along with Grimm, Rousseau, Helvétius, and others. On the anti-philosophe side, to name a few, Fréron, Chaumeix, Lefranc de Pompignan, and Palissot. From 1751 onward D’Alembert and Diderot published the Encyclopédie, which, more than any other work, raised hackles in Church circles, at court, and in segments of Parisian literary society. Hostile to Voltaire and to Enlightenment ideals, the anti-philosophes were not, however, necessarily the Grub Street journalists we encounter in Voltaire’s less dignified works (54). Fréron, in particular , was a powerful and well-regarded critic.Against this backdrop, Dramatic battles looks at the impact of the philosophe/anti-philosophe crisis on the French stage. What the author proposes is a reading of two plays, Palissot’s Les philosophes, which attacks Diderot under the name of Dortidus, as well as Grimm, and Voltaire’s Le caffé, ou l’Écossaise, a sentimental comedy in which the character Frelon, or Wasp, mimics Fréron. Both plays were performed at the Comédie-Française in 1760, and both enjoyed a considerable succès de scandale. The incidents surrounding these two largely forgotten works, their interplay, and the publicity they generated might have furnished material for a scholarly paper. Connors goes further, maintaining that this particular case gave rise to a new “spectator-based” criticism (198–99): “If we follow the debate between philosophes and anti-philosophes into the world of eighteenth-century dramatic criticism, it becomes clear that critics reinterpreted traditional critical paradigms inherited from antiquity by way of the seventeenth century to establish new definitions of drama and dramatic criticism” (161). A clearer prose style might help, and this, regrettably, is true of the entire monograph. The author continues: “What emerges then is not only the specificity of the Palissot/Voltaire affair in the critical domain but also a re-evaluation of the relationship between the playwright and the polemicist, play and pamphlet, and thus performance and text” (161). A more urgent problem is the fundamental inaccuracy of Connors’s hypothesis. Like pamphlets, the comic stage has always been a choice vehicle for social satire and personal règlements de compte. Voltaire’s claque was nothing new; nor can it be said that French critics before 1760 eschewed commenting on interpretation of familiar repertoire in the way Connors suggests (177). The French theater did undergo significant changes in the eighteenth century, due, arguably, to the increasing influence of the middle class. Indeed, as early as 1730, middle-class taste gave rise to both le drame bourgeois and the comédie larmoyante, hence L’Écossaise. Still, it remains far from clear how the intellectual debates and skirmishes of 1760 played the seminal role Connors believes they did, thus“spark[ing] rhetorical and functional changes in theater criticism”(179). Dramatic battles draws attention to a turbulent period in French intellectual life. Long on theory, short on pertinent analysis, Connors skims the surface of troubled waters. St. Francis Xavier University (N.S., Canada) Edward M. Langille Cormann, Enzo. Ce que seul le théâtre peut dire: considérations poélitiques. Besançon: Solitaires Intempestifs, 2012. ISBN 978-2-84681-349-5. Pp. 190. 15 a. Because it is comprised of articles and talks published or given between 2004 and 2011 for and in various venues, this freewheeling collection is, the author admits, marked by a certain “disparité formelle” (6). The two parts into which the work is divided contain five sections each and consider the modernity, origins, crisis, and pertinence in and of the theatrical and the dramatic enterprises respectively. It is less an attempt to provide a definitive, coherent answer to the question of what modern theater is than “un axe de réflexion,” “une façon d’envisager la pratique [théâtrale]” (8). The “réflexion vagabonde” (14) by which Cormann aptly...