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

Eighteenth-century French theater was a hotbed of theorization and experimentation. Following the critical success of the abbé Dubos’ 1719 Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture, which rehabilitated the role of feelings in the judgment of artistic expression, French writers were free to compose plays that focused on the experience of their audience rather than their adherence to the ancient principles of classical theater. Many authors ran toward these broad new horizons, eager to erect new myths for the freshly-anointed public taste. Original genres such as the comédie larmoyante of Destouches and La Chaussée and the drame bourgeois of Diderot took center stage as veritable schools of virtue for the public. Given the proximity between questions of morality and those of civil and criminal justice, it is little wonder that the playwrights of the eighteenth century soon began pillaging the court dockets for interesting new plots and characters with which to instruire en divertissant their audiences. The aesthetic mode of this theater, however, would not merely instruct and entertain its spectators as it travelled ever closer to the look and feel of the contemporary courtroom; it would transform its public into judges.

Yann Robert’s Dramatic Justice: Trial by Theater in the Age of the French Revolution provides a wonderful reading of this “judicial theater,” a term he coins to designate those plays that sought to reenact recent events taken from political life and that functioned to retry the matter before their spectators. The inherent instability and indeterminacy of such theatrical productions is traced in the first chapter to the experimental theater of Diderot, particularly his Fils naturel. This section is by far the strongest as it offers a new and compelling reading of this intentionally problematic play and especially the role of Lysimond as representative of the will to autocracy. My only contention with this chapter would be that Robert does not point out that while Lysimond seeks to immortalize himself through the play as the founder of family stability who neutralized the threat of incest, the play renders that role redundant in that Rosalie and Dorval had already decided to act according to virtue and marry Clarville and Constance, respectively. Thus, they had already won a much greater triumph in that they sacrificed their passion for the sake of friendship—not the fear of incest—before the arrival of Lysimond. However, far from negating anything argued by Robert, I believe this minor detail would only buttress the thesis of this very strong chapter.

The second chapter is beautiful in that, after so strongly establishing the philosophical basis for Le Fils naturel, Robert teases out the theatrical and political fallout of Diderot’s theorizations through the three faces of Aristophanes as figured in the dramatic works of Palissot, Mercier, Rétif and others. The appropriate relationship between statecraft and stagecraft was a fraught question, and with each answer came new sets of questions that would plague the legal reformers of the revolutionary period. This is a wonderful chapter in that it brings to the fore many interesting plays that, due to their revolutionary themes, did not see the light until the Revolution itself.

The second section moves away from the stage to describe the theatrics of the courtroom. While it remains interesting on the whole, the rich context that Robert so amply provided for his theater readings unfortunately falls away as he moves toward the role of the lawyer. This leads the author to misconstrue the judicial climate of the day, which must be understood, like the theater, on its own terms. The young lawyer Jacques Pierre Brissot receives special attention here, as his suggestions for the courtroom mimicked the reforms called for by Diderot in the theatrical space. The parallel is inviting, but I would argue superficial; Brissot, like Linguet, was a very marginal figure in the legal...