This book constitutes a bold and detailed look at the relationship between theatre and justice in ‘the Age of the French Revolution’ (the second half of the eighteenth century; the French Revolution appears in the third part of the book only). In a quite familiar critical move, the first two parts trace convergent evolutions in the respective fields: just as ‘eighteenth-century Frenchmen were drawn to a vision of the theater as a site of justice’, ‘turning trials into dramatic spectacle […] tugged at them with an even more forceful pull’ (p. 89). Beginning with reforms by Diderot in Le Fils naturel, Yann Robert argues that re-enactment in Diderot’s intriguing drame bestows authority on paterfamilias, Lysimond, and resurrects the past in the present of performance. This, he claims, establishes the framework for ‘judicial theater’ for ‘the rest of the century’ (p. 48): his first example, Les Philosophes, Palissot’s comedy of 1760 satirizing major figures of the French Enlightenment, is inspired by Aristophanes’s comedies. Whereas Diderot is the enemy of Palissot, his dramas serve as the model. Yet the place of Aristophanic theatre in the Enlightenment is contested since, for many, the authority arrogated by such a satire belongs properly to the king; for others, it is recuperated as marshalling public opinion. Louis-Sébastien Mercier becomes a key part of Robert’s narrative at this point, since he argued for satirical theatre as an integral part of the justice system, which mobilized the active judgement of an audience. The first part concludes with projects from the years immediately preceding the Revolution for theatres of re-enactment. Part Two then traces, within the justice system, debates concerning ‘liberal’ ideas of publicity and popular participation and concerns about its ‘theatricality’, between proceedings held in camera and ‘agonistic’ conflicts between two competing narratives of an event before an audience. A paradoxical defence by Mercier of the reviled lettre de cachet system opens up an alternative conception of justice, in which a figure of paternal authority adjudicates between parties and produces private reconciliation between the two: a model well illustrated by his own drames such as Le Juge. The convergence of justice and theatre is then illustrated by study of the period taken as the culmination of ‘judicial theater’: the Revolution prior to the fall of the Girondins in summer 1793. Plays representing the infamous Affaire Calas replay the ‘cultural trauma’ of Jean Calas’s trial and execution and allow catharsis; L’Ami des lois accuses the Jacobins Robespierre and Marat under thinly veiled pseudonyms, thereby engaging the spectators in contemporary debates over terror, the treatment of suspects, even the king’s trial. In a final chapter, the dropping-off of judicial theatre paradoxically demonstrates the anti-theatricalism of the Jacobins. This book contributes significantly to critical discussion of the form of judicial proceedings (Shoshana Felman), theatricality (Marie-Hélène Huet, Paul Friedland, Susan Maslan), publicity (Sarah Maza), and opinion and theatre (Jeffrey Ravel). It will be for legal historians to judge the first of these, but Robert offers genuinely new readings of many plays and a sophisticated model for further analysis.
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Mar 1, 2021
María Luisa Villamarín López 
Open Access