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Y. Robert, Dramatic Justice: Trial by Theater in the Age of the French Revolution

Y. Robert, Dramatic Justice: Trial by Theater in the Age of the French Revolution

Publié le par Université de Lausanne (Source : Yann Robert)

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

Yann Robert

University of Pennsylvania Press, 

344 pages | 6 x 9 | 1 illus. — EAN 9780812250756

Cloth Nov 2018 | ISBN 9780812250756 | $79.95s | Outside the Americas £61.00

Ebook editions are available from selected online vendors

 

For most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, classical dogma and royal censorship worked together to prevent French plays from commenting on, or even worse, reenacting current political and judicial affairs. Criminal trials, meanwhile, were designed to be as untheatrical as possible, excluding from the courtroom live debates, trained orators, and spectators. According to Yann Robert, circumstances changed between 1750 and 1800 as parallel evolutions in theater and justice brought them closer together, causing lasting transformations in both.

Robert contends that the gradual merging of theatrical and legal modes in eighteenth-century France has been largely overlooked because it challenges two widely accepted narratives: first, that French theater drifted toward entertainment and illusionism during this period and, second, that the French justice system abandoned any performative foundation it previously had in favor of a textual one. In Dramatic Justice, he demonstrates that the inverse of each was true. Robert traces the rise of a "judicial theater" in which plays denounced criminals by name, even forcing them, in some cases, to perform their transgressions anew before a jeering public. Likewise, he shows how legal reformers intentionally modeled trial proceedings on dramatic representations and went so far as to recommend that judges mimic the sentimental judgment of spectators and that lawyers seek private lessons from actors. This conflation of theatrical and legal performances provoked debates and anxieties in the eighteenth century that, according to Robert, continue to resonate with present concerns over lawsuit culture and judicial entertainment.

Dramatic Justice offers an alternate history of French theater and judicial practice, one that advances new explanations for several pivotal moments in the French Revolution, including the trial of Louis XVI and the Terror, by showing the extent to which they were shaped by the period's conflicted relationship to theatrical justice.

Yann Robert teaches French and Francophone studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

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"No one has pursued the arguments for and against theatricalizing justice across the Enlightenment and Revolutionary periods as thoroughly as Yann Robert does in this excellent book."—Jeffrey S. Ravel, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

"In Dramatic Justice, Yann Robert offers an original, nuanced, and convincing analysis of the interplay between justice, legitimacy, and representation in France in the second half of the eighteenth century."—Thomas Wynn, Durham University