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

Abstract

 Reviews and careful close readings, strategies which all require reliably edited and accurately contextualized sources. is new edition provides these to an impeccable standard. Whereas the accuracy and richness of its historical apparatus certainly owe a lot to the recent rediscovery of the Du Châtelet family archives, the profound historical indexing of each letter could not have been achieved without the evaluation of a vast array of contemporary literary sources. e editors’ work results in a lively and multifaceted picture of the colliding political, social, and intellectual realities in early eighteenth-century France, against which Du Châtelet’s œuvre can be contextualized and judged. is allows readers to assess her intellectual achievements as well as their socio-historical limitations. e edition is completed by a historical introduction, concordances, a timeline, brief biographies of all correspondents, alphabetical and chronological lists, and a name index. e editors’ choice to provide both texts and tools in a user-friendly way will certainly be welcomed by readers. However, unlike Besterman, the editors of these volumes have made the questionable decision to exclude all uncatalogued letters, even in cases where, as in the inferred letters of the Besterman edition (all of them from or to Voltaire), their existence was testified by mentions or even quotations from Du Châtelet herself. However, notional sources are a problem in any historical discipline. Perhaps a more appropriate place for them would be a digital catalogue. As the digitization of cultural archives progresses rapidly, we hope that Du Châtelet’s work may soon benefit from such a project, as a companion piece to these two fine volumes. B S E Dramatic Justice: Trial by eater in the Age of the French Revolution. By Y R. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. . viii+ pp. $.; £. ISBN ––––. Yann Robert offers original perspectives on French revolutionary justice and the significant transformation in the relation between representations of justice in the theatre and actual legal proceedings that occurred in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Current scholarship’s interpretations regarding theatre and law, as Robert summarizes them, take the view that theatre of the period moved increasingly towards an illusionism that vacated its efficacious and interventionist relationship to current events. Judicial processes, on the other hand, rejected the appearance of theatricality by moving away from the spectacularized royal figure and towards disembodied legal text. rough his incisive history of the intellectual, symbolic, and practical exercise of justice in the years before and during the Revolution, Robert offers an alternative to the political lens that informs these prevailing narratives. rough the clarity of a tripartite structure, he illuminates (a) the dramatization of justice or ‘judicial theater’; (b) the theatricalization of justice or ‘justice as theater’; and (c) the Revolution’s fraught position regarding the need for transparency in justice and the fear of theatricality. Diderot’s Le Fils naturel () demonstrates a mode of judicial theatre in which MLR, .,   genuine and spontaneous re-enactment prevails over the rehearsed fabrication of representation. In Robert’s analysis, Diderot models the proper conduct of legal proceedings as a process that is ‘unpredictable, collective, more cathartic than punitive ’ (p. ). Le Fils naturel, Robert writes, ‘allows its participants to interact with a transgression, judge and even revise it according to present values and beliefs (not eternal laws), and in doing so move beyond it’ (p. ). Tracing the argument for judicial theatre, Robert draws on Aristophanes, Palissot, Mercier, Rousseau, and Rétif de La Bretonne to explore how the era grappled with the troubling implications of theatre as tribunal, showing that the idea ‘proved to be highly malleable and prone to reflect the ideological worldviews of its advocates’ (p. ). Turning from judicial theatre to theatricalized justice, Robert explores how changes in judicial practices provoked fears that ‘crystalized around, challenged, and transformed three central characters in legal proceedings: lawyers, judges, and spectators’ (p. ). Reforms in legal counsel and hearings revived the classical figure of the ‘lawyer-actor’ and recast judges as spectators. From the anxiety provoked by such theatricalizations was reborn the nostalgic notion of a private, domestic form of justice, one that could be presided over by fathers and rendered without public...