Dramatic Justice. Yann Robert
the better the odds, they argued, that the litigants and witnesses would lose themselves in heated exchanges and speak with sincerity and emotion, instead of sticking to a prepared script and delivery—that is, instead of acting. In tribunals as in playhouses, therefore, the early Revolutionaries devised a new performance of justice grounded in the concept of reenactment, in the belief that only such a spectacle could be fair, adversarial, public—and yet untainted by theatricality.
This cultural faith in reenactment began to wane during the king’s trial and Ami des lois scandal, a turning point for both judicial theater and theatrical justice—and, for that reason, the perfect transition from Chapter 6 to 7. The success of L’Ami des lois and plays like it renewed the usual fears of slander, trial by media, and vigilantism. These plays even led the Jacobins to cast doubt on the usefulness of publicly denouncing suspected schemers, as they grew concerned that the drive to unmask only produced, paradoxically, more and more masks. This anxiety explains the popularity of a (hitherto unstudied) series of plays written against denunciation—a surprising corpus, since denunciation is normally held to be one of the Jacobins’ highest civic duties, and since it meant that the theater was here denouncing itself as a space of denunciation. Nor did the Jacobins find relief from their fears, as earlier Revolutionaries had done, in the fact that these denunciations took the form of reenactments. On the contrary, they argued that including reallife traitors and conspiracies on stage had the unintended consequence of keeping them and their anti-republican opinions alive. The same fears inspired them to question the value of reenactment in legal proceedings. In their eyes, trials that sought to resurrect past emotions and quarrels through lively, adversarial debates gave known conspirators a public stage and, thanks to the presumption of innocence, a legitimate voice with which to—quite literally—make their case against the Republic. Far from a source of certainty or catharsis, the spectacular reenactment of crimes and conflicts threatened the unity of the Republic by prolonging hatreds and ideologies best forgotten and by fueling a cycle of accusation and counteraccusation characteristic of a lawsuit culture. In response to these threats, the Jacobins established the infamous Revolutionary Tribunal and gradually restricted nearly every right introduced just years earlier: legal counsel, defense witnesses, a judgment based on free, adversarial debate rather than written dossiers, the presumption of innocence, and a trial by one’s peers (since judges and juries were no longer chosen by the people or by chance, but by the government). Each of these steps, I contend, grew out of the Jacobins’ fear of theatricality and resulted in an ironic twist: the proceedings at the Revolutionary Tribunal increasingly came to resemble the inquisitorial justice against which the Revolutionaries had once revolted. While the Jacobins’ reign proved short-lived, their critique of the fusion between justice and theater did not: Chapter 7 concludes by retracing the efforts during the Directory to draw the curtain on judicial theater and theatrical justice.
Together, these chapters offer a fuller understanding of the famously militant theater of the Revolution and of the rise of the Terror by situating them within a wider historical evolution in the performance of justice, instead of treating them as anomalies resulting from an extreme politicization of the arts and the law. The value of this approach is particularly evident with respect to Revolutionary drama. For centuries, the latter was either ignored by scholars, because they struggled to reconcile it with the standard history of French theater, or was reduced to a simple illustration of the vicissitudes and excesses of Revolutionary politics.37 Starting in the 1980s, studies on Revolutionary drama grew in both number and subtlety—giving rise to fascinating debates, notably between those who, like Susan Maslan, see the theater of the Revolution as a powerful site and symbol of direct democracy and those who, like Friedland, believe it illustrates a conception of representation that silences the people—yet even these studies largely retain a political lens.38 Having grown dull from repeated use, this lens risks blinding us to other aspects of Revolutionary drama, notably by reinforcing the traditional perception of it as the product of a unique political moment, disconnected from the dramatic theories and practices that preceded it. In response, some scholars have recently begun to examine its links to the ancien régime. For instance, Cecilia Feilla has shown the importance of bourgeois drama and sentimental tropes in the theater of the Revolution, thereby adding to the more quantitative studies that first revealed the continued popularity of ancien régime plays and genres.39 Yet what of the more topical plays, many of which were significant causes célèbres at the time, remain to this day the best (and often only) known dramatic works of the Revolution, and are therefore so central to our understanding of Revolutionary theater?40 For them, the old answer persists—that they arose ex nihilo, the accidental offspring of an obsession with politics that turned everything it touched into propaganda.41
By contrast, this book seeks to draw attention to the continuity in dramatic theory and praxis pre- and post-storming of the Bastille.42 Once inscribed in the broader history of judicial theater, the overt topicality of many of the Revolution’s most consequential plays no longer appears to be the sign of an aberrant politicization. The same holds true for some of the most striking anecdotes from the period, ranging from actors tried and even executed for words they said while in character, to spectators watching their own lives reenacted, such as Anne Calas, who, if she truly attended one of the five plays about her family’s trial staged in 1791, saw her father convicted and dragged to the scaffold twice. Indeed, while some of these consequential plays and dramatic anecdotes are clearly political in nature, many are not. What they all share, however, is a ritualistic vision of the theater as a mode of action on the present, made possible by its explicit reenactment of current events. By moving beyond the usual emphasis on politics, both as the supposed origin of Revolutionary drama’s topicality and as the best lens for understanding it, this book offers a new perspective on the theater of the Revolution, viewing it not as an anomaly but as the result of an artistic and intellectual evolution that set the stage for a new judicial practice of the theater.
Likewise, a political lens often colors accounts of the Terror. Studies of Revolutionary justice typically portray the legal system instituted in the first years of the Revolution as a direct implementation of the Enlightenment project for a more rational, textual, egalitarian justice and the Terror as a temporary setback in that evolution, a thankfully brief period when the Jacobins’ efforts to politicize the legal system prompted a return to autocratic, theatrical justice in the form of show trials. A closer attention to legal proceedings as performance, however, tells a different story: it was the early Revolutionaries who set out to turn trials into public performances (albeit ones whose theatricality they tried to curb), leading concerned Jacobins to attempt, through the creation of a Revolutionary Tribunal, to de-theatricalize justice. To their dismay, however, the Jacobins’ efforts to protect justice from the theatricality at the heart of the liberal vision and in the hearts of masked traitors were widely seen, then as now, as steps in the opposite direction. Reviving prior restrictions on lawyers, witnesses, judges, and oral debates came across, in a public trial, as a heavy-handed scheme by the government to stage-manage the performance of justice so as to ensure it followed a prewritten script with a fixed ending. In an ironic twist, the more the Jacobins tried to de-theatricalize justice, the more it appeared theatrical! This book thus offers fresh insights into the rise and fall of the Terror by resituating both within a wider history: the search, ongoing to this day, for a theater-proof performance of justice.
A Closing Argument: The Panacea of Reenactment
To be clear: while I challenge prevailing narratives to contend that the theater became increasingly judicial and justice increasingly theatrical in the eighteenth century, I do not wish to make reductive generalizations about the nature of justice or theater—for instance, that all justice is theatrical, or all theater judicial, or even that the two became identical during the Revolution. Rather than conflating justice and theater by means of a tired metaphor, I seek to chart a parallel evolution in both realms, one that reveals similar struggles with, and solutions to, the new kinds of challenges raised by the growing popularity of liberal principles in the eighteenth century. More specifically, this book constantly returns to a key anxiety, then as now, at the heart of liberal thought—namely,