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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Dramatic Justice: Trial by Theater in the Age of the French Revolution by Yann Robert Kyle A. Thomas Dramatic Justice: Trial by Theater in the Age of the French Revolution. By Yann Robert. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. pp. 331. $79.95 cloth. The French Revolution brought with it numerous upheavals in the social, political, and judicial systems of late-eighteenth-century France—with each serving as an historical mise-en-scène from which scholars have sought to situate similar upheavals in French theatre and theatricality during the Revolutionary period. But in Dramatic Justice: Trial by Theater in the Age of the French Revolution, Yann Robert inverts such historiographical means of investigation by exploring—through the lenses of theatrical and dramaturgical criticism—arguments on judicial theory, practice, and procedure promoted by notable thinkers of the French Enlightenment and, later, debated among the factions of the National Assembly. Robert expertly weaves together a wide array of primary sources, including plays, treatises, and legislative and court records, into a cohesive narrative that "draw[s] attention to the continuity in dramatic theory and praxis preand post-storming of the Bastille" (18). In particular, his emphasis is on how the dramaturgical ideals of reenactment, championed in the pre-Revolutionary decades by Denis Diderot, later shaped Revolutionary sentiments on the performance of justice, and how the Jacobins, specifically, ultimately came to distrust this new theatrical justice during their Reign of Terror. The tripartite division of the book follows three dramaturgical conceptions of reenactment as the source of insightful and instructive performative conditions necessary for reforming institutions that carried out jurisprudence and political agency in the burgeoning public sphere of France during the latter half of the eighteenth century. In part I, Theater as Justice, Robert sets the stage in his first chapter for the ascendency of judicial theatre, whereby reenactment—as conceived and deployed by Diderot in his play, Le Fils naturel (1757)—served to depict current events and individuals as a means to shift the critical gaze of [End Page 203] an audience (i.e., the public) away from aesthetics, thereby allowing for "the expression of a tangible public opinion, a potent unified voice devoted to the cause of justice" (67). In chapter 2, Robert further explores how the satirical plays of Aristophanes were seen by some Enlightenment thinkers to frame Athenian statesmen with an eye toward a public and theatrical justice, while others found his works to divide and corrupt public opinion against the state. This publicity thus opened the door to debates about the efficacy of judicial transparency and the implications of performative justice (i.e., trial by theatre) among those who wished to reform French courtroom procedures. Part 2: Justice as Theater follows the theatricalization of courtroom procedures and the paradigm shifts in the performance of justice as carried out by lawyers (chapter 3), judges (chapter 4), and the community (chapter 5). Centering his analysis on the actio of courtroom procedures and practices, Robert examines debates between Revolutionary factions regarding the nature of a lawyer's representation of their client. The theatrical conception of an actor as separate from the character they portray onstage proved instructional for liberal reformers seeking to enact a right to legal representation and reform the source of authorial speech as emanating from one's social status. For judges, who, under the ancien régime, represented the legal infallibility of the king, reform meant assigning judgment according to a spectatorial assessment of innocence or guilt as perceived from the performance of speech, gesture, and body—much like that of an audience at the theatre. However, Robert also shows how many feared that justice would be supplanted wholly by theatre. Dissecting how playwright Louis-Sébastien Mercier "uses the theater to challenge the notion that justice ought to take the form of a public, agonistic trial" (162), Robert explains the rise of domestic tribunals in Revolutionary France as an antitheatrical implementation of jurisprudence: instilling social mores according to paternalistic (i.e., private, microcosmal) rather than institutional (i.e., public, popular) precepts. Lastly, Robert turns his attention to the history and historiography of a judicial theatre during this period in part 3: The Revolution's...